CHINA: Thousands of university students rioted in eastern China this week over reports that college authorities were letting people in without the right qualifications and issuing fake diplomas, say official reports.
It's the latest report of discontent among education-hungry young people in a country where education has supreme value, but where money is increasingly the yardstick of success. And given the student unrest of 1989, no Chinese leader ignores the political significance of unhappy scholars.
Students at the Clothing Vocational College in Jiangxi province took to the streets, angry at local media reports that college authorities had deceived new students about their qualifications and issued fake diplomas.
Competition for university places in China is intense and any whiff of corruption in the granting of places, or suspicions of cheating in the way degrees are given, are met with massive disapproval.
In June this year there was a riot at a private college in the central province of Henan, when thousands of students took to the streets, angry at the wording on their diplomas.
They smashed windows and ransacked their campus, which was later sealed off.
Police said they had stationed anti-riot police on campus to avoid demonstrations turning into something more serious.
The Chinese authorities tend to listen to student concerns, mindful that the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 was largely peopled by student protesters.
In many ways the row is a debate about a deeper problem within China's educational system. With the economy booming, private colleges have flourished, where previously all education was in the hands of the state. Since the days of the imperial era and very difficult civil service exams, third-level education has been a hard station in China.
CCTV, the state television station, ran a story about how the privately-run Clothing Vocational College had recruited about 20,000 students, well above approved quotas, in the past three years by promising them diplomas it was not qualified to award.
Zhou Yongkang, minister of public security (the police), yesterday urged the government to strengthen control of its increasingly diverse and demanding society as it seeks to tame rising unrest. Mr Zhou said China had 74,000 "mass incidents", or protests and riots, in 2004, compared with 58,000 in 2003.