Results tagged “students”

Obama's short time in our city might be cut a little shorter. The American President has been hoping to make a town hall styled forum with Chinese students a focal point of the trip. However, the government's desire to censor the event has caused problems: the event has been cut from 1,000-1,500 students to a mere 600, media may be banned (excluding CCTV, of course), and the event may not be broadcast live. The event seems close to cancellation: depriving the American President the chance to directly speak with the Chinese people, and making Beijing seem like it wants to keep him under wraps, would make a poor start to Obama's first trip to China.

Singletons rejoice! Crack out the champagne and chocolate because today is the anti-Valentines day - it's singles day in China. As you know, one is the loneliest number and today is 11/11: four singles smack together, representing all the single folk out there. We think this day calls for a celebration, so we're going to treat ourselves to dinner!

In January, Zhan Shaoyun, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, proposed a questionnaire about campus violence. The result shows that of the approximately 900 students who responded, 67 percent say there is violence around them on campus, and 26 percent have personally faced it.

Continue reading "Sister Bear wasn't a fluke, school violence IS increasing"

If there's one thing we've learned from Chinasmack, it's that Chinese schoolgirls sure can be violent. But to our surprise and dismay, the most recent shocking teenage beat down video to hit internet forums didn't come from Guangdong. Rather, it takes place in our very own city - Shanghai.

Beijing University, the bastion of academic excellence, has the cutest proctor we've ever seen: Academia Cat! A student on Beida's forums posted a topic on "Beida's most respectable cat," who apparently enrolled in 2004, and has been sleeping on student's desks and catwalking on teacher's podiums ever since. Apparently, Academia cat enjoys staring for long periods at people, and listening to lectures on Thoreau's Transcendentalism. Adorable! Source: Sina

This latest ad has managed to shake ever our most jaded "This is China" hearts. A hospital in Chongqing is offering half price abortions if you show your student ID.

According to ESWN, the "obtained employment" internet meme sprung from a July 12 post by a netizen on a Tianya Forum which said "I have just obtained employment. I have obtained employment. I am ecstatic. I have obtained employment without knowing the facts!" The netizen, who had just graduated, was having his file transferred to a HR center when he took a peek and found a "Employment agreement document" already red stamped. After reading the contents, "I was immediately stunned... The agreement documented stated the name of my employer in black and white, next to a big red stamp of that employer." An employer he had never heard of. Why would the university do this to him? To meet a quota by the Ministry of Education that forces them to be responsible for finding employment for their students. Since institutes with low employment-on-graduation rates need to accept fewer students, some have taken the shortcut of just stamping "obtained employment" on their wards' forms.

In May, two sisters who were attending an elementary school in Kunming, Yunnan, were suddenly arrested by the police. Their charge: prostitution. The girls' parents were also caught and beaten for allegedly attacking police officers.

You may have noticed two otherwise inconspicuous high school students recently featured on the front page of the Xin Jing Bao (The Beijing News), and if not, you probably noticed that something strange was going on earlier this month. In both instances, the gaokao (高考) is to blame.

The national university entrance examination: a rite of passage for many Chinese students, and all important, some might say, in determining much of what happens in your life afterwards. It's a lot of pressure for 17 and 18 year-old kids. This video was taken in Hankou, supposedly before the test. One might be more inclined to celebrate afterwards, though of course those that might not have done so well would perhaps seek solace in Johnny Walker, as one does in times of need.

A Shanghainese woman who's lived abroad in the U.S. recently posted a blog entry on the stereotype of "Chinese Mothers" in the West that garnered a lot of attention from netizens.

The Chinese government announced that they are going to be making some changes to the simplified character system （简体字） currently used throughout mainland China. According to the Shanghai Daily, the short list of revised characters is already completed and will be released sometime in the near future.

A 16 year old Sichuan schoolgirl has been invited to attend the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama on January 20. The girl, Li Zizi (李紫子) was actually born and raised in Japan but returned to her family home in Sichuan to attend the Chengdu Experimental Foreign Language School, close to some of the areas hit hardest by the great Sichuan earthquake in May.

The Shanghai Daily reports yesterday that a senior at the Shanghai University of Engineering Science who was accused by his teacher of cheating in an English proficiency test was so distraught he jumped from the fifth floor of his school building. As a result:

The student, Zhang Meng, is now lying in an intensive care unit at No. 1 People's Hospital in Songjiang District, the news Website, eastday.com, reported today.

Continue reading "Student accused of cheating in English test jumps from 5th floor to prove his innocence"

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.

ChinaSmack translates a post found on Tianya (now deleted) on a violent fight between Japanese and Chinese students at the Shanghai International Studies University that's said to have taken place on Monday:

At present, the police, including the special police present, have already dispatched 10 police vehicles to maintain order, and the gathered crowd has just dispersed.

Continue reading "Overheard: Fight between Japanese and Chinese students at the Shanghai International Studies University"

ChinaSmack points us to this shocking and sad story of 11 year old student Zhang Yaoyin in Hunan Province who had her had smashed against the desk by her teacher numerous times, then hit savagely with a metal bar before going thrown out of the window of the fourth storey classroom to her death.

As we mentioned earlier, the start of school term has been followed by suicide attempts among the city's middle and high school students. Only yesterday, another two high school students attempted to end their lives but were saved.

Shanghai Daily reports a man killed 3 members of his family in a grocery store on Tongzhan Road, in Jiading's Fengbang Town. It appears he killed his wife and in-laws as a result of a domestic dispute and has since turned himself in. Meanwhile, ChinaSmack informs us that within a few days of the start of the new semester, four middle school students in Shanghai have committed suicide.

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 expected to give up their lives for students when the next earthquake strikes?

According to China Daily, more and more middle and high school students are taking advantage of the summer holidays to make the kind of changes that will impress their peers come fall. But it isn’t a summer class or even a new workout routine they are adopting — it’s cosmetic surgery.

From aujourdhuilachine.com:

"Nearly 150 Indian medical students are stranded in airports and other places in China after discovering that the air tickets they bought were fake. A group of students are stuck at the Pudong airport in Shanghai. The alleged fraud came to light after two air carriers -- Emirates and Malaysia Airlines -- refused to accept the e-tickets issued to the students when they went to board the flights between June 29 and July 11. The affected students belong to various universities like Nanjing, Suzhou and Chong Qing, which are hundreds of kilometres away from each other." [Source]

Way back in 1925, during the heyday of foreign imperialism in Shanghai, discontent was fomenting among the local populace over what were generally considered to be unfair privileges granted to foreigners and Chinese exclusion from the governing Shanghai Municipal Council. The deals the foreign powers had struck up with Manchu officials in the 19th century, suspect from the beginning, had little official legitimacy after the fall of the Qing more than ten years earlier. Tensions reached a boiling point when labor protests at a Japanese factory resulted in an assault and the death of a Chinese employee on May 15th.

Via a new blog called Speak4China which comes with the hearty recommendation of the China Law Blog: On the day the Wenchuan earthquake struck, these students from a Sichuan high school were evacuated from their building and to while away their time, they took this video of themselves pretending to do an earthquake interview on live television. One girl said she didn't care about her parents and only for the pop duo Twins, another said she hoped there was an earthquake everyday and a third said she hoped the school building would collapse soon so they didn't have to go to school ever again. This soon unleashed yet another powerful "human flesh search engine" (not unsimilar to the one experienced by Duke university student Grace Wang) in which enraged netizens tracked down the students and harrassed them in every way possible (no details on how they were harrassed though).

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.

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