Migrant Kids Get a Raw Deal

The Beijing Municipal Education Commission recently announced that migrant children should go back to their rural hometowns for senior high school education.

However there are dire consequences to this decision. If the children choose not to go back to the countryside, either they have to study in Beijing where they presently live as unregistered students, with no right to participate in the college entrance exam, or they have to quit school and enter the working world at a young age, being gradually marginalized. Any one of these consequences is a loss to the children, their parents and the nation as a whole.

Throughout China, children going to school in places where they don't have permanent local residence permits now account for over one third of the total primary and middle school students.

Education equality is an important foundation for social equality but the unequal education scheme facing migrant children is laying a foundation for future social inequality.

Modern Express

Railways Oblivious to Service

On January 13, a college student was killed by a moving train after being jostled off a crowded platform in Anhui Province. Every year, railway travel around the Spring Festival is the cause of much heated debate. For years, the focus has been on ticket price increases; this year, the young woman's death has drawn people's attention to railway safety and services.

For the Chinese, Spring Festival is a time for family reunion, a custom that has lasted for thousands of years. At this traditional ritual, almost anyone away from home will try to reunite with their families, making railway traffic extremely congested. Anyone who has experienced Spring Festival travel knows it is a terrible ordeal, to be crammed into a carriage like sardines and offered poor services to boot.

In China, the railway operates in an environment without any competition. As a monopoly industry, during peak travel periods, particularly the Spring Festival, the railway sector seldom shows respect to travelers' rights and interests. Moreover, the sector also tries to make additional profits by selling more seats than are available, leading to overwhelmingly crowded carriages.

The railway sector is known for its excuses about unsatisfactory services, although in most cases the reality is that the situation can be largely improved. Tragedies similar to the death of the college student are predictable, as long as the railway monopoly remains.

Jiangnan City News

Future of Colleges Hangs in the Balance

"Struggling colleges might well go bankrupt in five years!" warned Guo Shenglian, Vice Governor of central China's Hubei Province at a recent education conference. This is because the following years will see a drop in middle school graduates after years of the one-child policy. If this shrinking trend continues, China's colleges will become redundant, posing a threat to the survival of many poorly recognized institutions of higher learning.

In March 2007, a survey released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that before 2005, state-run colleges' bank loans had hit 150 billion ($18.5 billion then)-200 billion yuan ($24.66 billion). In line with internationally conventional financial accounting standards, some of them were already bankrupt at that time. In the foreseeable future, heavily indebted educational institutions are unlikely to be allowed to cope with their problems through debt restructuring, like many state-owned enterprises used to do. Therefore, for some struggling colleges, going bankrupt is just a matter of time.

Recent years have seen many colleges blindly expand by simply transforming secondary polytechnical schools into institutes and institutes into universities. Instead of teaching quality, they pay more attention to increasing student enrollment and squeezing more profits.

The time has come to make an overall audit of Chinese colleges' total debts and assets, which is of vital importance to the formulation of a feasible solution.

Guangzhou Daily

Mobile Service Providers Unreasonable

In response to mobile subscribers' rising complaints about airtime fees, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Information Industry jointly held a hearing on January 22 in Beijing to reset the ceiling price for domestic mobile roaming charges.

The two monopolistic mobile service providers, China Mobile and China Unicom, argue that such service fees are collected to cover the extra operational costs of transregional calls that are transferred from one local operator to another. However, according to industry experts, currently adopted technologies have already lowered operational costs, while others say that roaming calls actually incur no extra costs for the operators. It's reported that in most developed countries, the domestic roaming service fee has already been scrapped.

In the early years after China launched mobile communications services, it was because of the gap in network size, subscriber number and service rates between western and eastern parts of the country that the roaming charges were introduced to protect operators in less developed regions. Nevertheless, after years' of effort, China has developed the biggest mobile communications network while the operators have already made huge profits. Therefore, it's unreasonable to ask users to continue to pay so much for mobile phone calls.

Dazhong Daily