Experts have introduced a new version of eye exercises for Chinese students that are said to combine Traditional Chinese Medicine techniques with massage and application of pressure to eye-related acu-points. If the old eye exercises were not able to combat the high incidence of myopia among Chinese students as this CCTV report seems to suggest, then we think the new exercises will just be as useless as the old ones. For those of you interested......

Following the death of four female students at the Shanghai Business School in Xuhui District, the Shanghai Education Commission has launched an emergency fire safety campaign to be conducted throughout all schools. Students from the dormitory told reporters from the Xinhua News Agency that the fire extinguishers they tried to use were all way past their expiry date and the griefstricken parents are now blaming the college for the death of their daughters. According to......

The world's biggest children's entertainment company now also wants to play a part in educating your children too — and to be more specific, to teach them how to speak proper English. When we found an ad in the taxi we were in yesterday drawing our attention to DisneyEnglish.com, we thought this was some fake school that had ripped off Disney's name, but when we got home to check it we realised that not only......

The Peoples Daily reports the Ministry of Education has added new rules for primary school teachers to "take care of their students' safety" and "teachers should pay more attention to the health of students", spurred on by the public condemnation of secondary school teacher Fan Meizhong who ran for his life, leaving behind his students during the May 12 Sichuan quake. No word on what they'll do with errant teachers next. Will all teachers be......

At this point, this is only an unsubstantiated rumour but a highly plausible one given what we've seen and heard in the last few months. Here is an email sent to us by one teacher at an international school in Shanghai, and we quote verbatim: "I don't know anymore specifics, but I received an Email from my principal warning us about our online behaviour after an international school teacher was deported from China. I don't......

Scene of devastation at Juyuan Middle School (聚源中学) in Dujiangyan (都江堰) The government has announced the start of a massive probe to find out why close to 7,000 schools classrooms have been destroyed and promised that anyone found responsible for shoddy construction will be severely punished. A great many of the casualties we've seen so far are students and teachers who were still in class when the quake struck. From AFP:"If quality problems do......

Interesting piece by France24 on Shanghai student, Qiu Gonghao, who appears to be having the time of his life studying at the Ecole Polytechnic in Paris, one of the top engineering schools in France. Will this chap ever choose to come back to Shanghai, we wonder?......

Business and Economy WSJ: China Takes Additional Step To Cool Economy AFP: Underground money traders flourish on Hong Kong border Religion Xinhua: China-based Christian group prints 50 mln Bibles Reuters: Dalai Lama says sorry he can't meet Pope SCMP: Student leader finds meaning in life with God's will on campus [Subscription] AP: Dallas evangelical Christian seminary offers online courses in Chinese Miscellaneous AP: China Detains 33 in Deadly Mine Blast CNSNews: For China, Even......

If you, like us, are already cursing the arrival of winter, watch this. There is a little 5 year old girl in Jiangxi who is still prancing around in her birthday suit, and revelling in the cold waters as if its still summer. Her parents say that since she turned one, the girl started showing her great dislike for clothes. She goes to bed nightly without even a blanket on, and if someone actually tried......

Yes, that was our reaction when we saw these pictures, but sorry to disappoint all you Facebook whores (that includes ourselves!) out there, the image on the right is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com (校内网). It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to......

Who is Yacht ? Yacht, a musician you will love like a rainbow after the rain, or a lollipop after visiting the dentist. Any one remember the Blow? Well, the Blow’s last 2 albums was 90% Yacht and Yacht is made up of one man….the multi – talented Jona Bochtolt. Happy, positive rainbow music on speed, Yacht might currently be best known as that guy who used to be in the Blow or for......

Left: The Shanghai Show is back with a great new segment that shows you the 3pm rush hour everyday, when parents and grandparents rush to public schools all around the city to pick up their little emperors and empresses. Amazing how much there is to see in a simple short clip like this. Middle: 100 people get into their element for a Rueda show as part of the Shanghai Salsa Festival at Xintiandi. Kinda......

This cute little video is from an English teacher in Taiwan who came up with a way to teach his kids English... the MC Hammer way. We wish school was this fun for us, and hopefully the clip will inspire all TEFL teachers out there. From Daryl Caesar:The final performance is here! The kids were totally petrified, and performed way worse than the rehersals, but what can I expect from 5 year olds dancing and......

About 100 Chinese teachers are expected to arrive at state schools in the United Kingdom (yes, that haven of foreign language education) by next year, but schools which have already employed some of those teachers in their classrooms (which they described as "lovely") have already found problems, such as the following:"Their lack of familiarity with the English system of discipline, target setting etc is a problem.""They also tend to have different, perhaps unrealistic, expectations of......

We've just spent an entertaining and enlightening weekend at the Learning2cn education technology conference at Concordia International School in Jinqiao. The topics covered included podcasts, wikis, cyberbullying and making exciting lessons within a technology setting. Issues related to laptop schools may seem irrelevant to most of us, but the event is groundbreaking inasmuch as it is probably one of the largest and most significant English language technology conferences that has ever been held in China.......

Many moons ago, we had a conversation with a Chinese colleague that went something along the lines of the following:同事：你是基督徒吗？ 我：不是很好的基督徒，不是很虔诚的基督徒，不过应该还算基督徒吧。 同事：哈哈，明白了。我不是很好的共产党员，也不是很坏，但是也许已经不能算共产党员了。我有三年没有交党费了，而且一直不去参加会议，应该已经被除名了。 Colleague: Are you a Christian? Me: Uhhhhmmmm.... Not a very good one, not a very devout one, but yes I guess you could still say I'm one? Colleague: Haha, I understand. I'm not a very good CCP member, and not a very bad one either, but you probably can't say I'm a member......

The principal of the 150-student Henan Child Prodigy School (河南神童学校), Zhang Xuexin (张学新) says he has devised a revolutionary method of training the right brain of children to make them child prodigies. His students can not only memorise their textbooks and ancient poetry, they can actually recite them backwards. Throughout the school and around classrooms, one sees banners such as “China's first school that teaches education of the total brain" (中国第一所全脑教育学校), “Today's child prodigy, tomorrow's......

Shanghai Normal University's Geography vice-dean drowns after saving student's life [Shanghai Daily] He Baogen, 45-year-old vice dean of Shanghai Normal University's geography department, has been found dead in a tidal creek at Dongtan wetland on Chongming Island on Friday morning. He was swept away by the rising waters while trying to save a student's life. Olympics `like a spiritual event' for Beijing residents [Mercury News] "Perhaps the greatest attribute the Chinese are revealing to the......

China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries. Behind the headlines of double digit growth and urban prosperity, two thirds of Chinese still live in the countryside and two hundred million people earn less than a dollar a day. Still, the Chinese government has not signed up to this project. The OLPC XO-1 laptops are......

But here's the hard part — the families can't live in Shanghai, Beijing or Guangzhou. If you think you can help these guys out, please contact them directly. From the filmmakers: Bright Shadow Films and ImagiX Productions are making a documentary on foreign children growing up in China. We are currently looking for expat families who have lived in China at least a few years and who reside outside of the major cities (SH, BJ,......

This is a tale that could be told a thousand times, according to Shanghai Daily. Fourteen years ago, Shanghai resident Shi Jianlin opened her front door to find it bedecked by an abandoned baby girl. The story should have ended happily: the girl, later named Zhao, was received warmly by Shi. But Shi's own status complicated issues: as an impoverished mother of one (Shi already had a boy), Zhao could not be adopted under Shanghai......

China's schools overcharged 1.7 billion yuan in past five years "A massive 1.7 billion yuan (about 217 million U.S. dollars) of unwarranted school fees have been charged to unlucky parents since 2002, the top corruption watchdog said here on Thursday." How long can Great Firewall of China last? "Where Manchester’s worker dissidents of the early 1800s had the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley to urge them to 'rise like lions after slumber', China’s modern......

Yep. At least that is what Newsweek would have us believe. They attended the 2007 World Cheerleading Championships in Orlando, Florida, last month and noted that 38 teams from 15 foreign countries participated in the international events. Two years ago, when the international events were launched, three teams showed up. Why now? Globalization, of course. ESPN International has been broadcasting American spirit competitions around the world since 1997. Add movies that feature cheerleaders—like "Bring It......

We never thought we would ever see The Slits appear on a poster promoting a Shanghai event, but that day has arrived thanks to 88 New Wave who have been quietly putting on offbeat punk parties at Cs Bar. We like their eclectic and open take on punk, enjoying everything from Gang of Four to Salt 'n Pepa. Tomorrow night is themed around feminine punk grrrl power so it's time to get out your favourite......

Several Chinese reports have come out about Shanghai's new policy for dealing with its supposed "dog problem": using retired military dogs to police the other dogs. If you have no idea what the hell that means, join the club. It is some idea that came out of various political meetings in Shanghai, where officials discussed the dog issue. It seems that there are still lots of unregistered dogs, enough to outnumber the number of registered......

Shanghai Sunrise, a local non-profit charity established in 1995, is looking for board members and volunteers. Shanghai Sunrise aims to help remove Shanghai families from the poverty cycle by providing education scholarships for disadvantaged students. Despite China’s compulsory education law stating that no tuition fees will be charged for nine years of education, the reality facing many families in Shanghai and throughout China that this does not cover tuition fees for high school. Often, the......

Honestly, we didn't even know Shanghia has school buses. But the city does, and they want them all to look the same. Go here to exercise your right to vote (on logos and color-schemes)! Voting ends on February 7. From the Shanghai Daily we learn: While the commission hopes to rid the city of school buses by building more schools over the next two years, it currently wants the buses to have a set color......

Shanghai plaintiff files wrongful death claim against Eastman in Madison County "Clevenger claims from the first moment his boss mentioned an international assignment, he responded that he and his family would go anywhere in the world except China." Interesting story. Ax In China TV Ads, In Nod to Muslims Porcine Prohibition "'China is a multiethnic country,' the network's ad department said in a notice sent to ad agencies late Tuesday. 'To show respect to......

Mozilla coming to China, seeking talent "The Chinese government has been enthusiastic about open source software systems such as Linux, and it seems likely that the Chinese market will be receptive to a greater adoption of Firefox, where currently IE is the default browser." Google partner in China is accused of abetting piracy "We have been watching [Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies] for some time and we have observed that like many file-sharing networks/enablers in......

We told you a few days ago about a migrants school that was closed down. The AP has a report on it now, which covers most of the basic facts. However, earlier today we came across this Chinese article which has information not included in the English reports thus far: On December 19, six or seven unidentified people entered the school and passed out flyers indicating that the school had to be closed down. Arguments......