Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
Students attend a class at a primary school in Dahua Yao Autonomous County, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, May 29, 2020. Guangxi, one of the major battlefields in China’s poverty alleviation campaign, has been making painstaking efforts to improve education for poverty-stricken children, as schooling is believed to be the best way to empower the youngsters to lift their families out of poverty. The region has taken various measures in this regard, including granting students stipends, improving school facilities and nutritional conditions of rural students, and helping more students from rural and impoverished areas have access to higher education. As many households from inhospitable areas have moved into relocation sites built for poverty alleviation in the county seats, relocated children can study in schools in and near resettlements, instead of trekking hours back and forth in mountains for schooling. The faculty is a key to education. The regional government has called in capable teachers to help schools in rural areas, and has been committed to guaranteeing payment to teachers and filling vacancies of teachers in rural areas through special programs. Reducing poverty must begin with reducing ignorance. Therefore, giving rural children a good education is an important task in poverty relief, and also a crucial means to stop poverty being passed on through generations.
BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) — China’s youth organizations awarded May Fourth Medals to 94 individuals and 34 groups Tuesday for their great contributions to the country.
The medals, which are awarded annually, are the top honor for young Chinese. The Central Committee of the Communist Youth League and the All-China Youth Federation released the list of winners.
Medical teams assisting Hubei Province to combat the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic are among the groups awarded.
Covering a wide range of sectors, the individual winners include firefighters, military personnel, scholars, teachers, engineers, workers and medical staff.
Among the list, 34 were honored posthumously, including those who sacrificed their lives in the fight against COVID-19.
Image copyright FENG VIDEOImage caption Wu Huayan ate only rice and chillies in order to save money to help her ill brother
Well-wishers have donated almost a million yuan to a Chinese student who was hospitalised after living on 2 yuan ($0.30, £0.20) a day for five years.
The case of Wu Huayan shocked Chinese people after it hit the headlines earlier this week.
The 24-year old woman became seriously malnourished while struggling to study and support her sick brother.
Ms Wu’s story also sparked anger at authorities for failing to recognise her plight and help her much earlier.
After the story was reported, donations began pouring in for the college student in the city of Guiyang – reportedly totalling some 800,000 yuan ($114,000, £88,000).
What is Wu Huayan’s story?
Earlier, this month, the young woman went into hospital after having difficulty breathing, according to Chinese media.
She was only 135cm (4ft 5ins) tall, weighing barely more than 20kg (43 pounds; three stones).
The doctors found she was suffering from heart and kidney problems due to five years spent eating minimal amounts of food. She said she needed to save money to support her sick brother.
Wu Huayan lost her mother when she was four and her father died when she was in school.
She and her brother were then supported by their grandmother, and later by an uncle and aunt who could only support them with 300 yuan ($42, £32) each month.
Most of that money went on the medical bills of her younger brother, who had mental health problems.
This meant Ms Wu spent only 2 yuan a day on herself, surviving largely off chillies and rice.
The siblings are from Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China.
Media caption China’s uphill struggle fighting extreme poverty
What has the reaction been?
The case sparked an outpouring of concern – and anger at authorities.
Many people on social media said they wanted to help with donations, and many voiced concern about her college not helping her.
One user called her situation “worse than that of refugees in Afghanistan”, while another pointed to the extravagant cost of China’s 70th anniversary celebrations, saying the money could have been better spent.
Others expressed their admiration at her efforts to help her brother, while also persevering with her studies in college.
Aside from the donations on crowd funding platforms, her teachers and classmates donated 40,000 yuan ($5,700; £4,400), while local villagers collected 30,000 yuan to help her.
Officials released a statement saying Ms Wu had been receiving the minimum government subsidy – thought to be between 300 and 700 yuan a month – and was now getting an emergency relief fund of 20,000 yuan.
“We will keep following the case of this strong-minded and kind girl,” the Tongren City Civil Affairs Bureau said.
“We will actively co-operate with other relevant departments to solve the problem according to the minimum living standard and temporary assistance responsibility that the civil affairs department bears.”
Dubbed “Little Wang”, his story also went viral, leading to international donations from people impressed by his resilience, and shocked at his poverty.
Image copyright PEOPLE’S DAILY
While China’s economy has skyrocketed over the past decades, poverty has not disappeared, and inequality has grown.
One major reason cited is the huge divide between rural and urban areas.
As a point of comparison, in rural region of Guizhou where Ms Wu lives, that figure is around 16,703 yuan.
China has moved from being “moderately unequal in 1990 to being one of the world’s most unequal countries,” according to a 2018 report by the International Monetary Fund.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics in 2017, 30.46 million rural people were still living below the national poverty line of $1.90 a day.
China has previously pledged to “eliminate” poverty by 2020.
As well as earning three times the industry average, successful candidates are promised 165 days’ leave
Social media posts linked to story attract more than 60 million views
Authorities in Shenzhen are offering three times the national average salary to attract more teachers. Photo: Weibo
A recruitment advertisement offering schoolteachers in southern China the chance to earn up to 280,000 yuan (US$39,500) a year – more than three times the industry average – has sparked a massive response on social media.
Published by the Longhua district education bureau in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, the advert said it was looking for 400 high, middle and primary schoolteachers. As well as an annual salary of between 260,000 yuan and 280,000 yuan, depending on qualifications, the very best candidates would receive a bonus of between 30,000 and 80,000 yuan, it said.
New recruits would also be entitled to 165 days’ leave per year, though the advert – published on Tuesday on WeChat, China’s most popular messaging platform – did not make clear if that included weekends.
The Longhua district education bureau says it is looking for 400 new teachers. Photo: Weibo
The hashtag “Shenzhen middle schoolteachers are being recruited for almost 300,000 yuan a year” racked up almost 60 million views on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.
While some people praised the authority for trying to attract the best possible candidates – it said itself that hundreds of teachers currently working in the district were graduates of China’s top universities, including Peking and Beijing Normal – others said that even with a sky-high salary most young professionals would find it hard to get by in Shenzhen.
“Do you know how expensive houses are in Shenzhen?” one person wrote on Weibo. “You need to wait several years after graduation before buying a house, unless you already have money.”
“Even if your starting salary is 200,000 yuan or 300,000 yuan, you’ll still need to wait 10 years before you’ve saved up enough to buy a house,” said another.
The advert said the new teachers will be get 165 days’ leave per year. Photo: Xinhua
The education bureau has not released any additional information about the recruitment campaign and calls to its offices on Friday went unanswered.
However, it said in a recent Q&A on its website that teachers’ salaries were in line with those of civil servants in the district, and had been steadily rising under a reform of the pay system.
Longhua is not the first district in Shenzhen to offer attractive salary packages, however. In May, 21st Century Business Herald reported that authorities in Yantian district had recruited 20 teachers from Beijing with the offer of between 290,000 yuan and 330,000 yuan a year.
According to central government figures released in May, teachers in China’s public schools earned an average of 92,383 yuan last year.
While Shenzhen has grown from a once sleepy fishing village to a vast metropolis, and is now slated to become a model city for China, its education facilities have failed to keep pace with other areas of development. It also faces competition from more established centres, like Beijing and Shanghai.
Despite having a population of about 15 million, the city has just 344 primary schools. By comparison, the provincial capital Guangzhou, which has a similar population, has 961 primary schools and about 17,000 more primary schoolteachers.
According to official figures, of the nearly 80,000 students who applied for places at public secondary schools in Shenzhen last year, just 35,000 were accepted. That left the parents of the remainder having no option but to pay for places at private schools in the city or, in some cases, send their children overseas to study.
The problem is set to get worse as Shenzhen’s preschool system is already straining under the pressure of the city’s high birth rate.
Parent posts photos of son’s bruised bottom and it is claimed pupils are too scared to go to school
Education authority says teacher is under investigation
The education authority said the teacher was under investigation. Photo: Shutterstock
A primary school teacher in eastern China has been sacked and detained for hitting a young boy on the bottom with a stick over 100 times, education authorities have said.
The teacher, surnamed Han, was dismissed by No 2 Experimental Primary School in Tancheng county, Shandong, the county’s education and sports bureau announced.
The boy, a first-year pupil surnamed Wang, sustained minor injuries from Han’s corporal punishment, the bureau said on Thursday in a post on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.
One of the boy’s parents posted pictures of his red and swollen bottom on social media. “It’s a shock to me,” they wrote, according to news outlet The paper. “I wish it were possible to take my son’s place to be beaten 100 times.”
Chinese kindergarten teachers arrested after camera shows beatings
A Weibo post by someone who said they lived in the county claimed the teacher had beaten the boy in a classroom on Tuesday after telling him to bend over so that he could strike the boy’s hip more easily.
One of the boy’s parents posted pictures of his bruises on social media. Photo: Weibo
“Now the students in that class are too scared to go to school,” they wrote.
The paper reported that, at a meeting between school staff and the boy’s parents, the principal blamed Han but acknowledged that the school, too, had been responsible. The principal did not say whether the school would compensate the boy, according to the report.
Han’s actions were being investigated jointly by the local police and education authorities.
Kindergarten teacher accused of stepping on child’s face, abusing two others
It is not rare for allegations to surface about mainland China’s pupils being beaten by teachers for making mistakes at school.
Last December, a primary school teacher from Huating in Gansu province was suspended and investigated for allegedly using a plastic water pipe to beat a third-year pupil who could not remember English words correctly, leaving the boy’s arms swollen and bruised, according to The Beijing News.
A maths teacher in Chenzhou, in Hunan province, was sacked and investigated in 2017 for allegedly lashing the bottom of a 10-year-old boy with a bamboo whip for three consecutive days for not finishing his homework, news portal qq.com reported.
BEIJING, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) — China had over 2.9 million teachers in rural areas by the end of 2018, the Ministry of Education said Tuesday.
Close to 2.5 million rural teachers work at primary and secondary schools, while 420,000 teachers work at kindergartens, according to the ministry.
The ministry is striving to build a high-quality team of rural teachers and dispatched a great number of college graduates to the rural areas, especially the poverty-stricken regions, said Liu Jiantong, an official with the ministry’s department of teachers.
The central budget financed 4.5 billion yuan (670 million U.S. dollars) last year as an allowance for 1.27 million teachers from over 80,000 rural schools in China’s central and western regions, said Liu.
In 2018, 1,800 retired teachers in good health registered to teach at rural schools. In addition, 19 provincial-level regions dispatched 4,000 teachers to support education in Tibet and Xinjiang, said the ministry.
Three kindergarten teachers in northeast China have been detained on suspicion of physically abusing pupils in their care, including stabbing them with toothpicks, according to local media reports.
Police in Shenyang, Liaoning province, launched an investigation into the Kubeiland Emile International Kindergarten after receiving complaints from parents that at least 15 of its pupils had been abused by staff.
“They [pupils] would be pricked if they couldn’t finish their meal, or moved during nap time or didn’t dance well,” one parent was quoted as saying by China Business Journal.
The youngsters were even warned that if they spoke out about the punishments they received there would be worse to come, another parent said.
Several parents had medical records and photographs showing multiple prick marks on their children’s hands, legs, bottoms and abdomens, the report said.
Another parent said the school even tried to cover up the abuse by sending children who bled after being pricked to the school clinic to have their wounds cleaned up and sterilised.
In a report by video news website Pear Video, a mother was quoted as saying that she became suspicious after catching her son stabbing other children with a toothpick. When she challenged him about it, the boy said he was copying his teacher.
A father of another of the pupils echoed the claim that the children were warned not to report the abuse.
“He [the man’s son] said a teacher told them she could see and hear them talking to their parents, so they must not tell.”
The police officer in charge of the case said that three people had been detained pending a full investigation into the allegations.
However, Su Ning, the kindergarten’s legal representative, dismissed claims children had been abused and said the school had provided footage from its surveillance cameras that would invalidate the charges.
Accusations of child abuse in schools are not uncommon in China. Last month, eight teachers from a nursery in Shanghai were sentenced to prison terms of up to 18 months for roughly handling young children and force feeding them mustard.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 
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