Amid a profusion of appeals for the “lying-down(tang ping) lifestyle”, campus upheavals that had not been seen for ages reemerged in Nanjing. The students protested against universities’ independent colleges merged with vocational universities to make tens of thousands of undergraduate students downgraded. After the students’ protest, the education departments of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Northeast China took in turn to announce withdrawal of the amalgamation of colleges.

The Ministry of Education proclaimed on June 4(Ministry of Education and June 4 again, which is cut from the same cloth as the incident in that very year) that it planned to turn the independent colleges affiliated to 13 universities into vocational-technical universities, among which 5 independent colleges in Jiangsu would bear the brunt of it. In China, the score cut-off for admission to university undergraduate programs is about 100 points higher than to “vocational-technical colleges”, and the undergraduate students affected would be downgraded to students of vocational-technical colleges de facto after the coalescence. In light of the fact that the recognition for the degrees obtained by, salary starting points and social statuses of the former are substantially different from the latter and quite a large number of job vacancies are only open to university graduates, some students filed a petition to the education department of Jiangsu as soon as the solution was forced through. But they were dragged away by riot police.

Meanwhile, several thousand students at the Xinglin College of Nantong University, Zhijiang College of Zhejiang University of Technology and Zhongbei College of Nanjing Normal University also carried banners to protest against it in campuses, and the students of “Zhongbei College” and their families held in custody for 30 hours the vice-president of the university who came to “expound on” the plan. The authorities dispatched armored vehicles and several hundred police officers to besiege the campus, and fierce confrontations between both sides took place. Some of the students said they were menaced by counsellors who said if they did not give in, they should worry that they would in the end encounter what happened to that bunch of students decades ago (they referred to the June 4 incident). Do students of nowadays know what happened to the students in the June 4 incident? Why did they not intimidate the students by saying that if they did not give in, they would suffer from what happened to Hong Kong’s young people?

In fact, in recent years, quite a number of protests had something to do with education. That the Ministry of Education ordered schools in Inner Mongolia by force to replace Mongolian with Chinese language as a medium of instruction gave rise to a large-scale protest staged by students, parents and teachers, which even drew worldwide attention; Beijing Youwin Education that had around a thousand branch schools in China went out of business all of a sudden, and several hundred parents lodged a protest at the headquarters demanding a refund of fee for instruction; cases of child abuse in a great number of RYB kindergartens in Jilin and Beijing where kids were jabbed by teachers with needles were reported, which caused parents to surround the schools, requesting an inquiry into the truth.

Every society carries injustice. In view of the fact that the privileged bully around, bigwigs predominate all lines of businesses and even the entire society, and the Chinese people are already accustomed to lying down (tang ping), why did they come forward for various education issues? Nowadays in China, the offspring of average plebeians can hardly succeed in earning a decent living, and the only way to climb up the social ladder is via education. It is perfect if one can gain admission to one of the top state or province universities (top public universities) after getting through the National College Entrance Examination. It is not bad at all if one can enter one of the profit-making universities. Only by obtaining a university degree is one eligible for applying for a government vacancy or finding a decent job in a major city. The National College Entrance Examination and university education have then become a glimpse of hope of tens of millions of families who aspire to break away from poverty so that their next generation can enjoy city life. That is also the reason why a lot of people have been putting up with the injustice in silence. As any reform by the Ministry of Education could deprive them of the hope, how would students and their parents resign themselves to death?

(Poon Siu-to, veteran journalist)

This article is translated from Chinese by Apple Daily.

Click here for Chinese version

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