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Correspondents Report - Students riot in China
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2006/s1670943.htm]
Correspondents Report - Sunday, 25 June , 2006
Reporter: John Taylor
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Well, whether or not China should be regarded as a "global stakeholder," it remains an authoritarian state, whose people are still a long way from enjoying the freedoms taken for granted in the West.
And despite the reassuring image of Shanghai's gleaming new skyscrapers, there's a dark side to China's economic transformation, with numerous outbreaks of social unrest that often go unreported in the official media.
The most recent example was at the Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College, in Central China, when up to 10,000 students went on the rampage.
The riot began when students were told their diplomas were to bear their College's name, and not that of a more prestigious affiliated University.
Here's our China Correspondent John Taylor.
JOHN TAYLOR: The last major student protest in China happened in 1989, centred on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
It resulted in the greatest challenge to Communist Party rule in China, and ended after the army shot dead hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters.
Rewind 20 years before that, and students were at the vanguard of Chairman Mao's disastrous "cultural revolution".
Go back another roughly 50 years before that, and on May the 4th 1919 students took to the streets in what's been described as the country's first example of a mass urban protest.
They were outraged by China's compliance with the Versailles Peace Conference. It had awarded Germany's pre-war privileges in Shandong Province to Japan rather than restoring them to China.
The effect of all this history is that Chinese leaders are very wary of student unrest.
So when, in recent days, students at a college in Central China's Henan province rioted, China's state-controlled media didn't mention it.
But by various reports, as many as 10,000 students attacked the campus, smashing windows, damaging cars, shops and dormitories.
The students claim they'd been misled into believing that they would receive diplomas from Zhengzhou University, but were later told they would instead be recognised by their less-prestigious Shengda College.
Russell Moses is a professor who's taught students at leading Chinese universities for many years.
He's now a Professor of International Studies at Beijing's Renmin University.
RUSSELL MOSES: The campuses have been simmering a little bit more this year than they had in past years. Part of this is because of the expectations of students, the hope to find jobs, the tightening employment circumstances here.
But clearly this is sort of a… if not a step backward, then it at least indicates that there are students who are so outraged at their particular circumstances that they're not really so scared of what the consequences might be, they're just going to express their anger in whatever form they see fit.
JOHN TAYLOR: After the initial violence, the campus was taken over by police.
Security guards checked identification papers of those going in and out.
Professor Moses believes the riot has highlighted some of the fault lines in Chinese higher education.
Higher education in China is expensive, and can take much of a family's income or drive them into debt. The perceived quality of a degree can be the difference between having a job or not. Brand names are very important.
RUSSELL MOSES: Image and face is uppermost in students' minds, it's uppermost in the minds of their peers and their family.
One goes to schools here, particularly at the colleges, to acquire not so much an education, but a particular brand. And so I think that this is one of the things that is really driving a lot of the educational processes. There's an enormous amount spent on advertising, on public relations, on recruiting students and very little effort to deal with what I think is the second problem, and that is actually teaching students.
I think students are a good deal smarter than some people give them credit for. They understand that the four years that they spend in college is usually best served by maybe studying for a year or so and then either self-studying or in fact going off and trying to find some sort of part-time work in preparation for a longer-term job.
And then there's I think the third thing, and that is that as time goes on, students more and more simply want to get out. They don't feel that education really offers them much of a future. And so in that respect they have more exposure to global forces, they see foreign faculty coming in, and they see there are alternatives and options and they ask themselves why is it that we have to suffer under these circumstances?
They read about scandals of academics, they read about plagiarism, they indeed practice it themselves sometimes, and there's not much attention given to them. So I think all these three sort of combine, where all you need is a single spark and you're going to get something very, very large.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Russell Moses, Professor of International Studies at Beijing's Renmin University. And that report by John Taylor.
And despite the reassuring image of Shanghai's gleaming new skyscrapers, there's a dark side to China's economic transformation, with numerous outbreaks of social unrest that often go unreported in the official media.
The most recent example was at the Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College, in Central China, when up to 10,000 students went on the rampage.
The riot began when students were told their diplomas were to bear their College's name, and not that of a more prestigious affiliated University.
Here's our China Correspondent John Taylor.
JOHN TAYLOR: The last major student protest in China happened in 1989, centred on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
It resulted in the greatest challenge to Communist Party rule in China, and ended after the army shot dead hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters.
Rewind 20 years before that, and students were at the vanguard of Chairman Mao's disastrous "cultural revolution".
Go back another roughly 50 years before that, and on May the 4th 1919 students took to the streets in what's been described as the country's first example of a mass urban protest.
They were outraged by China's compliance with the Versailles Peace Conference. It had awarded Germany's pre-war privileges in Shandong Province to Japan rather than restoring them to China.
The effect of all this history is that Chinese leaders are very wary of student unrest.
So when, in recent days, students at a college in Central China's Henan province rioted, China's state-controlled media didn't mention it.
But by various reports, as many as 10,000 students attacked the campus, smashing windows, damaging cars, shops and dormitories.
The students claim they'd been misled into believing that they would receive diplomas from Zhengzhou University, but were later told they would instead be recognised by their less-prestigious Shengda College.
Russell Moses is a professor who's taught students at leading Chinese universities for many years.
He's now a Professor of International Studies at Beijing's Renmin University.
RUSSELL MOSES: The campuses have been simmering a little bit more this year than they had in past years. Part of this is because of the expectations of students, the hope to find jobs, the tightening employment circumstances here.
But clearly this is sort of a… if not a step backward, then it at least indicates that there are students who are so outraged at their particular circumstances that they're not really so scared of what the consequences might be, they're just going to express their anger in whatever form they see fit.
JOHN TAYLOR: After the initial violence, the campus was taken over by police.
Security guards checked identification papers of those going in and out.
Professor Moses believes the riot has highlighted some of the fault lines in Chinese higher education.
Higher education in China is expensive, and can take much of a family's income or drive them into debt. The perceived quality of a degree can be the difference between having a job or not. Brand names are very important.
RUSSELL MOSES: Image and face is uppermost in students' minds, it's uppermost in the minds of their peers and their family.
One goes to schools here, particularly at the colleges, to acquire not so much an education, but a particular brand. And so I think that this is one of the things that is really driving a lot of the educational processes. There's an enormous amount spent on advertising, on public relations, on recruiting students and very little effort to deal with what I think is the second problem, and that is actually teaching students.
I think students are a good deal smarter than some people give them credit for. They understand that the four years that they spend in college is usually best served by maybe studying for a year or so and then either self-studying or in fact going off and trying to find some sort of part-time work in preparation for a longer-term job.
And then there's I think the third thing, and that is that as time goes on, students more and more simply want to get out. They don't feel that education really offers them much of a future. And so in that respect they have more exposure to global forces, they see foreign faculty coming in, and they see there are alternatives and options and they ask themselves why is it that we have to suffer under these circumstances?
They read about scandals of academics, they read about plagiarism, they indeed practice it themselves sometimes, and there's not much attention given to them. So I think all these three sort of combine, where all you need is a single spark and you're going to get something very, very large.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Russell Moses, Professor of International Studies at Beijing's Renmin University. And that report by John Taylor.
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