- Investigation follows violent protest at Nanjing school
- Students discovered nursing qualification was actually a home economics degree
in eastern China last month has prompted the Ministry of Education to order local governments across the country to check for similar frauds in their regions.
In a statement on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service, the city government in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, said on Tuesday the rally by students and parents at the school had attracted the attention of city and provincial authorities.
Investigations showed that when the school enrolled new students for its home economics major in 2016, it promised they would receive associate degrees and a nursing certificate upon graduation. The students were also guaranteed jobs.
Students about to graduate this summer were angry when they learned the school could not fulfil any of its promises.
At the end of last month, some parents started petitioning the local government. On the evening of April 26, dozens of students clashed with police and security staff, with two students sustaining leg injuries. Police took several people away for “stirring up trouble among students”, the police said on Weibo.
The city government said that, with the intervention of its education and human resources departments, 405 out of the 409 affected students had been transferred to higher level institutions, and the students and their parents had accepted that arrangement.
The investigation is continuing and school officials will be held accountable, it said.
The Nanjing government said some people had spread rumours online after the incident. The government statement said two people, both surnamed Wang, had falsely claimed a female student was beaten to death by school staff and her parents knocked unconscious by police in the incident.
The pair also claimed in their article, published on Monday, that the school’s security guards were armed during the confrontation with students.
The article went viral and the authors – one from Wuhan, Hubei province, and the other in Changsha, Hunan province, both in central China – were detained for causing trouble.
According to the government statement, they confessed to cooking up the rumour to attract online traffic and solicit rewards from readers.
They made 32,000 yuan (US$4,700) from the article.
Source: SCMP
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