Well, it’s reassuring to see that China has its priorities straight.

Dave, I put in some arbitrary spaces because the long unbroken lines of hanzi were messing up the margins – feel free to go back in and adjust…

January 20, 2007 @ 10:55 pm | Comment

Oiwan Lam has it translated wrong.

???Z is not high school, it is college.

-ts

January 21, 2007 @ 3:25 am | Comment

Burn, baby, burn!

Everyone should click in and read about the girl’s brutal murder and subsequent protest at the ESWN link.

January 21, 2007 @ 8:52 am | Comment

sorry, sonagi, I wouldn’t trust an ESWN translation if you paid me.

January 21, 2007 @ 9:04 am | Comment

And in case you’re curious, see here for the update and here for my original post on the latest time I’ve found one of Roland’s translations to be completely wrong in an effort to smear a pan-democrat.

Life is simply too short for me to follow-up on all of his translations, when I’ve found errors in most of the ones that I have chased.

January 21, 2007 @ 9:10 am | Comment

Hmmm… this may end up as a double post as the first time seemed to hang up in the cgi processing.

And in case you’re curious, see here for the update and here for my original post on the latest time I’ve found one of Roland’s translations to be completely wrong in an effort to smear a pan-democrat.

Life is simply too short for me to follow-up on all of his translations, when I’ve found errors in most of the ones that I have chased.

January 21, 2007 @ 9:18 am | Comment

Just a note: I can’t read any of the hanzi from here. Not sure why. It’s all squiggles and symbols.

January 21, 2007 @ 9:44 am | Comment

Pha – make sure your browser’s encoding is UTF-8. I can read it fine.

Though my follow-up comment with links to the latest ESWN translation debacle that I’ve bothered with seems to have disappeared to the ether. I know I’m p*ssing in to the wind on this here, but it’s at my homepage for those curious.

January 21, 2007 @ 9:48 am | Comment

One of the main issues about differential test scores is the regional bias. Beijing universities have huge quotas for Beijing residents, with comparatively fewer graduates competing for those spots, and the cut off score is much lower. The provinces get a miniscule number of slots in comparison to the number of people who want to fill them, so the cutoff score for admission is always incredibly high. In recent years I believe the cutoff score for Beida has been in the 500s for Beijing residents, but in the high 600s for many of the provinces. In many places, a high proportion of the few spots available go to those hard-working rural kids for whom a trip to Beida or Qinghua is the ticket to a better life. It would be interesting to see if the analysis mentioned in your post paid any attention to regional issues, aside from class background.

There is outcry in the media (especially the regional media) about the unfair nature of the gaokao system every year, but nothing really changes.

I’m getting a blog started that will focus on education issues in china. Still just getting started, and not quite ready to take it public yet, but hope you and your readers will find it useful and interesting reading once it is up and running.

lhamo

January 21, 2007 @ 10:58 am | Comment

Tom,

I clicked on the link to the Chinese BBS whose comments were translated at EWSN. The link is to the entire thread, so I cannot verify each message unless I take the time to scroll down and find them. I did read the first few messages and verified the basic facts that appeared in the translation regarding the girl’s identity and circumstances surrounding her death and the fire at the hotel. TPD readers literate in Chinese can click and read for themselves.

January 21, 2007 @ 11:56 am | Comment

I don’t quite understand the figures quoted in the article. I’d like to get a better understanding and to get it straight. I have been teaching in China for almost five years, much of the time at university, and knew that there was discrimination between the provinces and Beijing etc. This is the first I’ve heard of discrimination based on class.
Would appreciate clarification. I wouldn’t want to quote incorrectly. Thank you.

January 21, 2007 @ 1:12 pm | Comment

@Richard: go right ahead, it’s your blog!

@ts: yeah, I noticed that. I guess I should fix it. But I’m lazy.

@Sonagi: ESWN made clear that there were conflicting reports online and they should be taken with a grain of salt. Roland followed up more recently pointing out that a Chinese MSM interview with the girls father in which he said her needle marks were “fake”. It’s not clear what happened to her. I selected the quote because even if it wasn’t really said, it gives voice to something that is indisputably real and felt in China.

@Pha: as Tom said,
Menu->View->Encoding->UTF-8

@Ihamo: I can’t wait to see the blog. There is a regional dimension, but I can’t help but think that in general that maps well to economic class. How much money does the government pump into Beijing’s schools? How much money is pumped in to create comparable schools in poorer provinces, thus lessening the demand on a scant few elite schools?

January 21, 2007 @ 1:26 pm | Comment

PYC,

The geographical discrimination in college admissions indirectly results in discrimination by class. This is because the standard of living is higher in areas like Beijing and Shanghai where a larger proportion of the population have high earning white collar jobs than inland provinces like Hunan and Sichuan where most of the population are farmers or factory workers.

January 21, 2007 @ 1:49 pm | Comment

I guess I really should clean up that translation.

PYC: A study of college entrance scores from a single university freshman class in 2003 found that the average scores, across different socio-economic groups, were highest for students coming from a peasant/farmer family background, and lowest for students whose families had management/technical careers. In other words, the poorest students had to make higher grades in order to be admitted to university than students from comparatively wealthier families.

Those wealthier students have better access to private schools, tutors, textbooks, transportation etc. yet they are accepted with a lower score on a nationwide exam than a farmers kid. This, to me, is kind of the inverse of what admissions departments ought to do.

Xue Yong’s blog goes on to argue that the Chinese system should have some sort of quotas and incentives to combat growing inequality. If poor students are discriminated against, cut off state funding. If the university fails to have a certain minimum percentage of poor students, cut off funding. If a students family lives below a certain minimum household income, waive the tuition fee and increase public funds to the university accordingly.

Something like the Beida local resident score handicap that Ihamo mentions exacerbates inequality, mainly because its in Beijing. A tuition break for residents might be more appropriate, like public universities in the US. Using state funds to narrow inequality, as mentioned above, would also improve schools in other provinces through increased funding (crossed fingers) and the quality gap between universities might lessen a bit as well.

January 21, 2007 @ 1:57 pm | Comment

@Hui Mao: I agree about the regional thing, but I want to clarify that we’re inferring this. The blog post makes no reference to regional inequalities, and we don’t have a copy of the entire study.

January 21, 2007 @ 2:05 pm | Comment

Rui is the Chinese Bill O’ Reilly….He’s angling…. Unfortunately for him..the Chinese don’t give a rat’s ass about anything but themselves. Reactionary?…. sure. then what? He’ll move to the U.S or Australia as soon as he gets the chance. ..Very “Chinese”.

January 21, 2007 @ 6:26 pm | Comment

Davesgonechina wrote:

Yes, I noticed that, too. The discrepancies in some of the details, like the girl’s exact height and the amount of money offered are not surprising given that the BBS commenters are simply repeating what they’ve heard. Wasn’t there a similar case at EWSN of a young bar/hotel worker raped and murdered, it was believed, by local party officials?

January 21, 2007 @ 9:15 pm | Comment

@M-80: Actually, this might be (I can’t believe I’m typing this) the one time I’d say Bill O’Reilly compares favorably to some other muckraker. This post was inspired by three things: stumbling on that picture at the top, Brendan’s comment in the previous Starbucks thread (along the lines of “my god people, your country is falling apart and you’re worried about this?”) and third this comment by Rui Chenggang:

“Starbucks is a symbol of lower middle class culture in the west.”

It’s not the Western culture part that bothers Rui (he later says this isn’t a nationalist thing), it’s the “lower middle class” bit. And Bill O’Reilly always at least claims to fight for the lower middle class and the working man. It’s all marketing for the Falafel King (O’Reilly’s nickname) but Rui is flat out condescending to “lower middle class” here, Western or not. Meanwhile, poor people in China are horribly mistreated. The very priorities Rui champions are sickening in light of the daily struggle of China’s poor. That’s why I threw in a Mao quote, too.

@Sonagi: the additional bit I’m referring to was something Roland put in the :

It might well be that the rape story on the BBS was a cut and paste job by one of the regular lurkers. Or, it might be true and the police are covering up. Who knows. I went with the quote and picture because of what it evoked, not because it was 100% truth. It was the evocation of that same feeling that burned that building down – the feeling amongst those on the lower half of the ladder that they are getting shafted, and I tend to agree with them.

January 21, 2007 @ 11:43 pm | Comment

UPDATE: Wang Wei, the deputy party alleged to have called the girls death as important as a fart, had been suspended and placed under investigation:

Letters From China

January 22, 2007 @ 1:24 am | Comment

One of the translations referred to Liu Chikun as having been arrested for rape and described him as a bartender at the hotel. If this is true, it worries me greatly as I find it hard to believe there would have been such a coverup had it been a bartender who did it, rather than government officials or a high level mining company executive. Seems the scapegoating may have begun.

January 22, 2007 @ 10:35 am | Comment

Dave,

The way college admissions work in China is very different from how they work in the West. There are no recommendation letters, personal statements, essays, or even highschool class transcripts. It’s pretty much all based on the scores on the college entrance exam. In other words, university admission offices in China don’t actually select the individual students that are admitted so they are not directly picking students from higher class backgrounds. What they do do, however, is allocate the number of students to admit from each province. Places like Beijing and Shanghai and the rich coastal provinces are usually allocated a disproportionately large number of spots, which results in lower score cutoffs for admissions in these areas than in the poorer inland provinces. This is the regional discrimination that PYC is talking about and I believe it is also mostly responsible for the stats cited in your post.

January 22, 2007 @ 4:34 pm | Comment

@Hui Mao: yes, that’s how it works. I’m simply pointing out that we don’t have the details of the study so we don’t know if all the poorer students originate from other provinces. Children of “workers” (actually, I think it translates as “laid off workers”) had the second highest average scores – some of them could have come from Beijing. Conversely, some of the children of “white collar” or “management” parents may come from outer provinces. Bribery or connections could also be a factor for the low-scoring children of the better-off. This did occur at one university I worked at. We just don’t have the data.

January 23, 2007 @ 2:28 am | Comment

@China Law Blog: “Seems the scapegoating may have begun.”

Another reason to point this out is that the SCMP reported, according to ESWN (brief comments section again) an official claiming there was no property damage, no riot police deployed, and a “peaceful gathering” outside government offices. All of which is contradicted by the photographic evidence.

January 23, 2007 @ 2:30 am | Comment

starbucks rules

January 27, 2007 @ 7:52 am | Comment