06/04/26 - Eventually showing up in full plate to take her from the school by force.

“Parents force 21-year-old daughter into internet addiction school to force her to break up with boyfriend. Is this behaviour illegal?

The most ridiculous part of this is both sides’ identity. They’re both at least middle class, both with plenty of cards to play. They’re not going to stand around and argue, they will just use violence right away.

The parents immediately hired legal muscle (the internet addiction school was actually a training camp operated by retired veterans). And the boyfriend tried to report it to the police, but when it failed, he immediately gathered his friends and began his own investigation, looking for clues, trying to secure evidence, and putting pressure on the internet addiction school and forcing them to release his girlfriend. And eventually showing up in full plate to take her from the school by force.

All the identities involved:

Girl’s father: government employee, not temp worker.

Girl’s mother: currently employed teacher.

Girl herself: sweet and obedient, student at top three teaching college in a music major, makes 7K-8K a month as a piano tutor in her off time, currently financially independent, no internet addiction or any other bad habits, good grades.

Boyfriend: 3 years older than girl, used to study overseas in Canada, self-employed in his own business, has stable in come in Beijing, financially comfortable, brief history of marriage, currently divorced, owns multiple houses in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hainan, already provided evidence of his assets, personal hobby is armour.

I cannot understand—this girl looks so sweet and cute. How could her dad kick her right in public until she lost control of her bladder? If he damaged her bladder or uterus, he would’ve destroyed her whole life.

She was forced to squat down in the internet addiction school, and when her posture wasn’t quite perfect, she was kicked to the ground by the trainers. It makes me upset just hearing about it. Those animals.

The girl’s mom sounds like a total psycho too. One day, the girl took a nap and didn’t answer any calls. She called the girl and her boyfriend a dozen times each and no one answered, so she went on to call the boyfriend’s mom a dozen times. The boyfriend’s mom was in a meeting out of state and was forced to block the girl’s mom to avoid harassment.

There’s salso an interesting point here: after the girl’s boyfriend learned that her parents were against the relationship, he asked to meet with them to explain his personal situation and let them look into his assets and provided them with his family’s contact info. That’s how the girl’s mom had the opportunity to harass his mom over the phone.

This is the complete timeline:

Early March: Beijing, Tongzhou, girl has violent physical altercation with her parents over her boyfriend. Her parents beat her at home. Girl calls police for help after beating, and the whole family goes to Tongzhou Police Station for mediation. The father kicked the girl in the stomach, causing her to pee herself in the police station. The mother slapped her. The police forced them apart and pressured the girl to sign a letter of forgiveness. Never took her to have her injuries examined at the hospital.

15th of March, Beijing —> Henan, Sanmenxia City. Girl’s parents and aunt work with employees of the internet addiction school and lies that the girl’s cousin is involved in a police investigation and kidnapped the girl while disguised as police officers. They took her phone and transported her across state lines to Sanmenxia City in Henan, to a specialised internet addiction school for “reforming.” The girl was dragged into the school and forced to take a pregnancy test. She had to ask permission to shower or go to the bathroom, and was forced to film a video breaking up with her boyfriend.

15th-24th of March: Sanmenxia internet addiction school. Boyfriend calls police in Beijing. Police refuse to take the report as it is a family dispute. After investigating, boyfriend believes girl to be at Sanmenxia, Henan. In order to avoid being beaten by the family or school, he put own his own full metal plate armour and travelled from Beijing to Sanmenxia. The girl pretended to obey her family and secretly hid her phone and took what opportunity she could to send her boyfriend her location. The girl was kept prisoner at the internet addiction school for 10 days.

25th of March: Day of rescue:

In the morning, the internet addiction school allowed the girl’s family to take her from the school due to outside pressure. The parents originally planned to transfer her to another specialised training school, but they refused to take her in once they heard she was a legal adult. The girl’s family temporarily moved in to a cousin’s rental unit in Sanmenxia. Her parents, aunt, and cousin watched her closely at all times, controlled her phone, and she was forbidden from leaving.

The girl pretended to use the bathroom and locked herself in, and used the phone she had managed to hide on her to send her exact location at the rental apartment to her boyfriend.

The boyfriend hurried to the apartment, and the girl secretly opened the door from the inside and let him in.

The girl’s parents and family surrounded them and fought them, trying to take the girl back. The boyfriend was not injured due to his full plate. He never fought back, protected the girl, and drove off, safely returning to Beijing.

5th of April, Beijing: The girl reported what happened to the police once she got back to Beijing, accusing her parents and the internet addiction school of false imprisonment. The Beijing police refuse to pursue a criminal investigation.

Sigh, probably because it’s a family dispute.

Since she can’t get a criminal case built, I suggest she write a letter and report her parents, since they’re both government employees.

Statute 40 of the Government Employee Penalty Code says, “The follow behaviour warrants a warning, a written notice, or a severe written notice. Aggravated circumstances may lead to demotion or suspension. Particularly aggravated circumstances will lead to discharge:

5. Domestic violence, abusing or neglecting family members.

6. Other behaviour which severely violate family morals and societal values.

In this case, scamming your adult daughter and kidnapping her across state lines to an internet addiction school where she’s false imprisoned for a long time is definitely domestic violence and in violation of family values, so this statute applies.

Statute 59 of the Government Employee Law says, “Government employees should obey the law and the principles of their station, societal values, and family morals. They should not violate other people’s personal and property rights and will be punished in accordance with the law otherwise.”

Finally, I hope they live happily ever after.”

[The original article has multiple photos of the girl and guy involved, taken from their social media accounts. I’m not actually sure how they feel about having their face all over the internet. You can click on the link and check it out if you want to, but all I’ll screenshot here is what the school looked like.]

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“Why can’t the whole country use the same exam for the Gaokao? Because our ancestors used 1000 years of painful lessons to teach us that uniform national exams is a dead end!

A lot of people naively believe that if everyone uses the same exam, then Gaokao will be absolutely fair. I used to support this point of view strongly, but ever since I systematically studied Chinese history and the history of Chinese education, I realised how childish my reasoning was.

1400 years ago, when the national exam system was first instituted, the Tang Dynasty did use a uniform national exam. At the time, the ministers believed that everyone is a citizen of Tang, so a uniform exam is the best method for justice and fairness. But by mid-Tang, the Chang’an region basically monopolised all the slots in the national exam. There was a saying back then, that scholars come from the capital every year, enough in numbers to rival all other counties. Basically, that the number of scholars passing in the entirety of the rest of Tang wasn’t as many as was coming out of Chang’an.

The point of creating the national exam was to end the monopoly of nobility, but now, most of the ministers in parliament came from noble houses in Chang’an. It changed nothing about passing down power and station by blood.

By the Song Dynasty, it got even more ridiculous. The exam in the second year of Jiayou was known as the hardest exam in a millennia. Not only did this exam produce many famous writers, philosophers, and even a well-known general, nine people from this year ended up becoming chancellor and greatly affecting Song history. But do you know how many people on this list was from the south? The answer is as much as 78%. Literary masters like Su Shi, Su Che, Zeng Gong were all from the south. But the most populous provinces like Henan and Hebei didn’t get a single scholar on the list.

As southern scholars took control of parliament, the Ying Emperor of Song oversaw the very first official debate about the distribution of exam quotas in Chinese history.

The northern representative, Sima Guang, believes that quotas should be assigned according to region, and there shouldn’t be a uniform exam.

Southern representative Ouyang Xiu believed that only a uniform national exam is truly fair.

Both were set in their beliefs and argued endlessly and nobody could come up with a perfect solution, and in the end, they were forced to maintain the same exam for the whole country.

This conflict didn’t fully explode until 300 years later, in the Ming Dynasty.

In the 30th year of Hongwu, during the rule of Zhu Yuanzhang, the infamous “northern southern list case” that shocked the whole country took place. As an Emperor who came from nothing, of course Zhu Yuanzhang wanted to give all the poor scholars of China a fair chance to compete. So he continued using the national exam system from Tang and Song and tried to select talent using a uniform national exam.

But when the list of scholars who passed came out, the whole country was shocked, because all 51 successful scholars were from the south. No one from the north passed. Once the news came out, northern scholars were furious. Northern clans almost took to arms. The whole country was discussing whether there was cheating going on, and the most extreme populace even tore up the list, refusing to acknowledge the results of this exam.

When the news reached Zhu Yuanzhang, he was furious. He honestly thought there was cheating, so he sent emissaries out to investigate the case. But after a month of systematic investigation, everyone was forced to admit that the southern scholars really were just better. There was nothing wrong with the exam.

Once the naked truth was presented, the norhtern scholars and officials still refused to give up. They collectively reported the emissary for accepting bribes, causing over 20 officials who participated in this investigation to be sentenced to death by a thousand cuts. Even the top scholar that year was drawn and quartered. In the end, in order to stabilise the situation, Zhu Yuanzhang was forced to write up an exam, review the answers, interview the students, and eventually admitting 61 northern scholars.

After this, Ming began to practice having separate exams for north and south, and the era of the uniform national exam had ended.

I know people are going to say that the times have changed now. The situation is different. We can’t compare directly like this.

Okay, then let’s look at a real example from modern society.

In 1952, China first established the Gaokao system. At the time, the practice was the same exam for the whole country, the same admittance line. Everyone thought this system was incredibly fair, but what was the wrong? It shocked everyone, because in the Gaokao in 1965, the number of students admitted from Beijing far exceeded more populated states like Henan and Shandong. The students admitted to top universities almost exclusively came from big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and provinces with less educational resources didn’t produce any college students at all.

So by the time we got to 1977, when the Gaokao was restored, we began to admit by province.

If the last century is still too far away, we can look at what happened in 2021. In order to get used to the reformed Gaokao, the Department of Education organised over 3.3 million students to participate in an 8 province joint exam, and nobody predicted the results. Of the 340,000 students from famous education state, Jiangsu, more than 10,735 students got more than 600 in physics. But of the 620,000 students in Henan, only 5695 people got more than 600. Jiangsu was 16 whole points higher on average than Henan in English.

Afterwards, netizens analysed that if we actually used this model for the actual Gaokao, then more than 80% of the students in top universities in China would be from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Hubei, and there would be very, very few students from Guizhou, Tibet, and Ningxia.

The reason this happens isn’t because students from other provinces aren’t as smart, but because there’s a big developmental difference in different regions of China.

Overall, China’s educational resources are stronger in the east and weaker in the west, stronger in the cities and weaker in the countryside. More than a decade ago, kids growing up in urban areas of Jiangsu would be studying English in 3rd grade. Not only do they have a professional English teacher, they have multimedia equipment. But in small towns in the western regions, kids may not interact with English at all until middle school, and their teacher was probably just a self-taught old guy.

And computer lessons. 20 years ago, primary schoolers in Beijing and Shanghai were learning how to operate a computer, but kids in rural regions in central and western China might not have been able to touch a computer except in internet cafes in town.

If you put these two batches of students together and tell them that it’s fair for them to be taking the same exam, that’s kind of like asking a 162cm tall, 48kg Zou Zhiming to box a 201cm tall, 91kg Zhang Zhilei. It’s ridiculous!

The reason there are weight classes in boxing is because everyone knows that people are different. You have to make people compete against others their own size. It’s the same for the Gaokao. Making rural western children take the same exam as Beijing kids is like asking an otaku that works 996 hours to play LeBron James. It looks like they’re competing on a level playing field, seemingly fair, but this is just using the levelness of the playing field to disguise the unfairness in how they were raised.

So stop talking about a uniform national exam. If that really happened, the real victims are gonna be kids from ordinary families like ours, because middle class and wealthy families can afford to hire private tutors. They can make PhD students from Qinghua and Beijing University tutor their kids. They have the most advanced educational equipment, and the most scientific curriculum. When their kids are learning in museums and labs, our kids are still making mud pies in a rural village.

Sure, there’s some things wrong with the Gaokao right now, but it’s a pretty fair balancing point in our current times. It needs to find a balance that everyone can accept between fairness and efficiency, between finding talent and providing a security net for the lower class. That’s not easy to do.

We have to understand that true fairness was never about making everyone start from the same line, but to help people who have to start from a lower line. Dividing the Gaokao by state looks unfair, but actually, it’s a little bit of restorative fairness for kids in remote mountains. Without this favoured system, those kids in the mountains will have an even harder time changing their fate.

There’s a lot to improve about our Gaokao, but we can’t do it by making the whole country take the same exam, because our ancestors have taught us over 1000 years that that is a dead end!”

Comments say, “There’s a difference between taking the same exam and admitting everyone based on the same scores. You can adjust the admittance line on a state-by-state basis while using the same exam. The key is how you divide the quota.”

“So how come these regions with better educational resources and advanced equipment actually has a lower admittance line?”

“Don’t try to change the topic here. There’s no conflict between using the same exam and admitting province by province. It’s not just A or B. We can absolutely use the same exam and set a different quota for each state, so every state has a different admittance line. We can even have special projects that help less privileged regions.”

“So what is Henan supposed to do? T_T”