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June 22, 2006
Rioting in China Over Label on College Diplomas
By JOSEPH KAHN
XINZHENG, China, June 21 — Shengda College in central China has a diverse curriculum, foreign faculty members to teach English and a manicured campus, where weeping willows shade a recreational lake.
But many students paid the college's rich tuition — at $2,500 a year one of the highest in China — primarily because Shengda promised that their diplomas would bear the name of its parent, Zhengzhou University, a more prestigious national-level institution, and not mention Shengda at all.
So when the graduating class of 2006 received diplomas that read "Zhengzhou University Shengda Economic, Trade and Management College," students erupted last Friday, ransacking classrooms and administrative offices, shattering car windows, scuffling with the police and staging one of the most prolonged student protests since the 1989 pro-democracy uprising that filled Tiananmen Square in central Beijing.
The protest, still simmering on Shengda's now tightly guarded campus, reflects the reality that the country's exploding population of college students must grapple with petty fraud, substandard instruction and an intensely competitive job market. Students, a traditional bellwether of political volatility in China, have become a fresh source of unrest in a society already angered by land grabs, unpaid wages and environmental abuse.
Once a magic ticket into the government or business elite, college has become an expensive gamble for millions of cash-short families who find that even the most prestigious degrees cannot guarantee success in a market economy.
The number of college graduates has multiplied fivefold in the last seven years, to an estimated 4.1 million this year. But at least 60 percent of that number are having trouble finding jobs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
Students at Shengda, a privately run college with 13,000 students outside Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, say they were assured on admission, and repeatedly afterward, that they would get graduation certificates that would appear identical to those issued by Zhengzhou, the top university in the province.
Most Shengda students did not perform well enough on national college entrance exams to enroll at Zhengzhou University itself, where the tuition is about $500 a year. So Shengda's promise persuaded students and their families to pay unusually steep tuition to gain an edge in the job market. What many of them say they did not know is that under a national regulation phased in beginning in 2003, the college is now required to use its own name on diplomas.
When this year's graduating seniors picked up their diplomas on Friday and saw the revised language, the reaction was instantaneous — and incendiary.
"We bought a Mercedes-Benz and they delivered a Santana," said one angry graduate, Wang Guangying, referring to a low-priced Volkswagen sedan made in China. "By that night, school officials had totally lost control."
Beer bottles rained down from dormitory windows, leaving a carpet of broken glass on the walkways. Television sets and washing machines followed, according to students who participated and photos of the post-riot scene.
Groups of students marauded around the campus, smashing cars, offices or any piece of property they felt belonged to someone in power. The front gate and a statue of the college's founder were toppled.
The local police arrived to break up the protest, but they retreated after they were barraged by bottles and rocks. Riot squads from Zhengzhou arrived about 3 a.m. Saturday, students said, after the violence had begun to subside.
The authorities sealed the campus and prevented most students from leaving. But marches and sit-ins continued in front of college headquarters through Wednesday, students said. Protesters shouted, "Give back my Zhengzhou University diploma!" Others demanded a refund or a discount on their tuition and a full apology from the headmaster, Hou Heng.
They scored at least a partial victory. Mr. Hou said Wednesday in a telephone interview that he had resigned after being told to do so by his superiors at Zhengzhou University.
He acknowledged that some promotional literature had "failed to state clearly" that Shengda would amend its diplomas. He denied that Shengda had intentionally provided false information but said he had to take responsibility for the unrest.
"I'm fulfilling the wishes of the people above," he said.
Shengda's problem with diplomas is not unique. In 1998 the government encouraged a vast expansion in college-level education. Hundreds of new colleges were founded almost overnight to accommodate millions of new students thought to be needed as engineers, bankers, traders and marketing experts in the fast-growing economy.
Under the regulations, new colleges had to find "mother schools" to supervise them. They used that link to their advantage. New colleges charged higher tuitions than the mother schools charged — Shengda's fees are nearly five times those of state-run Zhengzhou University — because they gave students who did not test highly the chance to affiliate themselves with a top college or university.
Not all of them went as far as Shengda in issuing diplomas that carried the name of the mother school, but some did. And when the authorities put an end to the practice, students reacted harshly.
In the northeastern city of Dalian, for example, some 3,000 students at the East Soft Information Institute, set up jointly by Northeast University and the East Soft Group Company, attacked campus facilities in December, sending several teachers to the hospital. They rioted after they were told that the word online would distinguish their diplomas from the regular ones issued by Northeast University.
At Shengda, the downgraded diploma struck some students as a body blow, one that could cripple their chances of securing a good office job.
"There are not many positions open in the business world compared with the number of applicants, and they all go to the national-level university graduates," said a Shengda junior studying transportation, who asked to be identified only by his surname, Wang, to avoid angering college authorities.
Mr. Wang, who spoke by telephone from inside the sealed campus, said he came from an impoverished farming community in Henan. His parents devoted their savings and borrowed heavily from friends and relatives to pay his tuition, which he said greatly exceeded his family's annual income.
"I do not support violence, but the spirit of the students just collapsed," he said. "The school must admit its error and refund our money."
His anger stems partly from the fact that most fresh college graduates will not find work that comes close to meeting their expectations, meaning they will have to struggle to pay off the debts their relatives shouldered on their behalf.
By the government's tally, China's economy, though growing by about 10 percent a year, will add about 1.6 million positions for people with college degrees this year. The country produced 4.1 million new college graduates.
A growing cadre of highly educated but underemployed urbanites is tailor-made to cause alarm in Beijing, which has always feared student unrest above nearly all other forms of social discontent.
Disgruntled students have often taken the lead in national protests against corrupt, inefficient or repressive officials. They have also inflated seemingly minor grievances affecting their personal prospects into broader political campaigns, as they did during the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989.
One of the Communist Party's greatest successes since that upheaval has been to create strong support for the market economy among urban residents, intellectuals and their children.
That bond has held strong for more than a decade, even as China has been engulfed in other types of unrest, including nearly 80,000 mass protests recorded in 2005 alone. Most such events involve peasants, migrant workers or workers laid off from state enterprises, who often lack media-savvy leaders and rarely demand substantive political change.
The situation could change if large numbers of students got involved, though there is no sign that the scattered protests at colleges will lead in that direction anytime soon.
Even so, China's cabinet announced new policies in May to enhance the value of degrees from vocational schools and high schools. The measures are aimed at reducing college enrollment, the cabinet said in a statement, without specifying a target.
"This is a good step for gradually solving conflicts in universities, especially to relieve the pressure on graduates finding jobs," the statement read.
In the short term, at least, college campuses are like kindling awaiting a spark. Even as the protests at Shengda were under way, thousands of students at the Jiangan campus of Sichuan University hurled bottles and barrels out their windows to protest the lack of electrical power at night.
Some students said they needed electricity at all hours to study for annual exams. But according to The Sun, the Hong Kong newspaper that first reported on the incident, the main grievance was that students needed power through the wee hours so they could watch live broadcasts of the World Cup soccer tournament.
Rioting in China Over Label on College Diplomas
By JOSEPH KAHN
XINZHENG, China, June 21 — Shengda College in central China has a diverse curriculum, foreign faculty members to teach English and a manicured campus, where weeping willows shade a recreational lake.
But many students paid the college's rich tuition — at $2,500 a year one of the highest in China — primarily because Shengda promised that their diplomas would bear the name of its parent, Zhengzhou University, a more prestigious national-level institution, and not mention Shengda at all.
So when the graduating class of 2006 received diplomas that read "Zhengzhou University Shengda Economic, Trade and Management College," students erupted last Friday, ransacking classrooms and administrative offices, shattering car windows, scuffling with the police and staging one of the most prolonged student protests since the 1989 pro-democracy uprising that filled Tiananmen Square in central Beijing.
The protest, still simmering on Shengda's now tightly guarded campus, reflects the reality that the country's exploding population of college students must grapple with petty fraud, substandard instruction and an intensely competitive job market. Students, a traditional bellwether of political volatility in China, have become a fresh source of unrest in a society already angered by land grabs, unpaid wages and environmental abuse.
Once a magic ticket into the government or business elite, college has become an expensive gamble for millions of cash-short families who find that even the most prestigious degrees cannot guarantee success in a market economy.
The number of college graduates has multiplied fivefold in the last seven years, to an estimated 4.1 million this year. But at least 60 percent of that number are having trouble finding jobs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
Students at Shengda, a privately run college with 13,000 students outside Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, say they were assured on admission, and repeatedly afterward, that they would get graduation certificates that would appear identical to those issued by Zhengzhou, the top university in the province.
Most Shengda students did not perform well enough on national college entrance exams to enroll at Zhengzhou University itself, where the tuition is about $500 a year. So Shengda's promise persuaded students and their families to pay unusually steep tuition to gain an edge in the job market. What many of them say they did not know is that under a national regulation phased in beginning in 2003, the college is now required to use its own name on diplomas.
When this year's graduating seniors picked up their diplomas on Friday and saw the revised language, the reaction was instantaneous — and incendiary.
"We bought a Mercedes-Benz and they delivered a Santana," said one angry graduate, Wang Guangying, referring to a low-priced Volkswagen sedan made in China. "By that night, school officials had totally lost control."
Beer bottles rained down from dormitory windows, leaving a carpet of broken glass on the walkways. Television sets and washing machines followed, according to students who participated and photos of the post-riot scene.
Groups of students marauded around the campus, smashing cars, offices or any piece of property they felt belonged to someone in power. The front gate and a statue of the college's founder were toppled.
The local police arrived to break up the protest, but they retreated after they were barraged by bottles and rocks. Riot squads from Zhengzhou arrived about 3 a.m. Saturday, students said, after the violence had begun to subside.
The authorities sealed the campus and prevented most students from leaving. But marches and sit-ins continued in front of college headquarters through Wednesday, students said. Protesters shouted, "Give back my Zhengzhou University diploma!" Others demanded a refund or a discount on their tuition and a full apology from the headmaster, Hou Heng.
They scored at least a partial victory. Mr. Hou said Wednesday in a telephone interview that he had resigned after being told to do so by his superiors at Zhengzhou University.
He acknowledged that some promotional literature had "failed to state clearly" that Shengda would amend its diplomas. He denied that Shengda had intentionally provided false information but said he had to take responsibility for the unrest.
"I'm fulfilling the wishes of the people above," he said.
Shengda's problem with diplomas is not unique. In 1998 the government encouraged a vast expansion in college-level education. Hundreds of new colleges were founded almost overnight to accommodate millions of new students thought to be needed as engineers, bankers, traders and marketing experts in the fast-growing economy.
Under the regulations, new colleges had to find "mother schools" to supervise them. They used that link to their advantage. New colleges charged higher tuitions than the mother schools charged — Shengda's fees are nearly five times those of state-run Zhengzhou University — because they gave students who did not test highly the chance to affiliate themselves with a top college or university.
Not all of them went as far as Shengda in issuing diplomas that carried the name of the mother school, but some did. And when the authorities put an end to the practice, students reacted harshly.
In the northeastern city of Dalian, for example, some 3,000 students at the East Soft Information Institute, set up jointly by Northeast University and the East Soft Group Company, attacked campus facilities in December, sending several teachers to the hospital. They rioted after they were told that the word online would distinguish their diplomas from the regular ones issued by Northeast University.
At Shengda, the downgraded diploma struck some students as a body blow, one that could cripple their chances of securing a good office job.
"There are not many positions open in the business world compared with the number of applicants, and they all go to the national-level university graduates," said a Shengda junior studying transportation, who asked to be identified only by his surname, Wang, to avoid angering college authorities.
Mr. Wang, who spoke by telephone from inside the sealed campus, said he came from an impoverished farming community in Henan. His parents devoted their savings and borrowed heavily from friends and relatives to pay his tuition, which he said greatly exceeded his family's annual income.
"I do not support violence, but the spirit of the students just collapsed," he said. "The school must admit its error and refund our money."
His anger stems partly from the fact that most fresh college graduates will not find work that comes close to meeting their expectations, meaning they will have to struggle to pay off the debts their relatives shouldered on their behalf.
By the government's tally, China's economy, though growing by about 10 percent a year, will add about 1.6 million positions for people with college degrees this year. The country produced 4.1 million new college graduates.
A growing cadre of highly educated but underemployed urbanites is tailor-made to cause alarm in Beijing, which has always feared student unrest above nearly all other forms of social discontent.
Disgruntled students have often taken the lead in national protests against corrupt, inefficient or repressive officials. They have also inflated seemingly minor grievances affecting their personal prospects into broader political campaigns, as they did during the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989.
One of the Communist Party's greatest successes since that upheaval has been to create strong support for the market economy among urban residents, intellectuals and their children.
That bond has held strong for more than a decade, even as China has been engulfed in other types of unrest, including nearly 80,000 mass protests recorded in 2005 alone. Most such events involve peasants, migrant workers or workers laid off from state enterprises, who often lack media-savvy leaders and rarely demand substantive political change.
The situation could change if large numbers of students got involved, though there is no sign that the scattered protests at colleges will lead in that direction anytime soon.
Even so, China's cabinet announced new policies in May to enhance the value of degrees from vocational schools and high schools. The measures are aimed at reducing college enrollment, the cabinet said in a statement, without specifying a target.
"This is a good step for gradually solving conflicts in universities, especially to relieve the pressure on graduates finding jobs," the statement read.
In the short term, at least, college campuses are like kindling awaiting a spark. Even as the protests at Shengda were under way, thousands of students at the Jiangan campus of Sichuan University hurled bottles and barrels out their windows to protest the lack of electrical power at night.
Some students said they needed electricity at all hours to study for annual exams. But according to The Sun, the Hong Kong newspaper that first reported on the incident, the main grievance was that students needed power through the wee hours so they could watch live broadcasts of the World Cup soccer tournament.
But here, one school is offering the diploma of another better school. Or at least was. I don't blame the students for being upset. The competition is so extreme to get into good schools. Students who don't have those names on their diplomas are at a severe disadvantage in the dwindling middle class job market. I hope my old students do well.
The other issue is, that these kinds of violent protests seem to be the order of the day. I wonder what would have happened, if peaceful protests were tolerated to begin with.
Anyway, UR where did you graduate from again?
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