Beijing University has once again fallen into controversy, this time, over allegations that it has discriminated against Hepatitis-B carriers, short people, and obese people. RFA reports that in an open letter to the president of the university, a Beida student -Lei Chuang (雷闯) has pointed out that a person from the office the Health Sciences Centre has openly stated that the centre will not enroll Hepatitis-B carriers, and that male students must be over 1.6 meters tall, females over 1.5 meters tall, and prospective students’ body weight must not be 20% over the average. (One wonders what the vertically-challenged but brilliant Deng Xiaoping and the corpulent Mao Zedong might have thought of such a discriminatory policy).

Joel Martinsen from Danwei has translated two articles that shed new light on the problems in the petitioning system. The first, written by a frustrated official working in a small town petitioning bureau, shows the obscene amount of time and money that local petitioning officials spend in keeping tracking of petitioners locally and in “retrieving” petitioners who travel to higher level petitioning offices to reflect their problems. The petitioning officials suppress these petitioners rather than solving their problems because, under the current “zero tolerance policy” system, a blemish on their record could permanently tarnish their careers. The second article, written by highly respected CASS researcher Yu Jianrong, shifts the focus back towards seeing things from the petitioners’ point of view, and shows how the “zero tolerance policy” is not conducive towards solving the petitioners’ issues and providing justice, nor towards enhancing judicial authority.

In recent press interviews about the global economic crisis and its impact on social stability in China, I’ve said that the majority of migrant workers who suffered pay cuts or even lost their jobs were not angry at the boss but rather accepted that their loss was the result of global economic forces beyond their control. I added that this could all change however if bosses started to use the economic crisis as a pretext to lay-off workers without due compensation or cheat them out of their wages. Now, according to one blogger, Pang Zhujun, this appears to be happening.

After more than 200 days, the vacancy for the most unwanted job in the Chinese Communist Party – Secretary of the Linfen Municipal Party - has been filled. The lucky candidate is Xie Hai, the former Party boss of another Shanxi coal mining town, Yangquan.

Wanted: Candidates for the position of Linfen Municipal Communist Party Secretary: Must be able to tolerate hardship, the worst pollution in China, and accept responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of miners. Ever since the last Linfen Party secretary was dismissed in September 2008, following the Tashan iron ore mine disaster in Xiangfen county in which 276 people died, China’s most notorious and polluted coal town has been without a Party boss. And given that, since 2005, the central government has held senior local government and Party officials liable for any mine accident on their patch, it is little wonder no one is queuing up for the job.

If you’ve ever wondered exactly how the Chinese government works: go to see the film 冬月 (The Transition Period) by award winning documentary maker Zhou Hao. The documentary, screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival last night, provides a fascinating insight into the workings of local government and shows unequivocally that China is still a country ruled by individual officials (人治) rather than one ruled by law (法治).

Due to the devastating impact of the world financial crisis on migrant workers in export-driven sectors in China’s developed eastern seaboard, vast numbers of migrant workers' children are being sent back to the countryside to go to school, and many rural schools are unable to cope with the sudden influx of students, according to a recently-published investigative report by the Southern Daily (南方日报). Due to economic difficulties and the discriminatory household registration system (户籍制度), many migrant workers who work in the city are forced to leave their children behind in the countryside to be raised by their grandparents and to attend generally sub-standard schools. CLB has previously looked into the difficulties that these “left behind children” face in terms of accessing quality education, becoming victims to violent attacks and sexual assault, and in dealing with other psychological problems caused by being cut off from the warm love of their parents. For the education community, this new influx of students is compounding the already very difficult challenge of educating a problem-prone disadvantaged group. Now, for many teachers, the old “left behind children” are seen as an “old pain”, while the new returnees are seen as a fresh “new wound”.

2009’s “Two Sessions” (两会) of the NPC and CPPCC continue to produce a flurry of news items, from proposals about reform of the national holiday system to proposals about reverting back to traditional Chinese characters. Serious questions about the “Two Sessions” system continue to persist, with analysts pointing out that migrant workers continue to be underrepresented at the “Two Sessions” (comprising just three out of 3,000 representatives) and that the whole “Two Sessions” process seems to be caught in a gossipy and commercialized news media that seeks to find the most interesting or outrageous proposals to gab about.

Every year, thousands of people are lured or kidnapped into illegal work places. The victims are forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions, beaten up or even killed. However, the maximum punishment for forced labour is only three years imprisonment, and only gross violations are brought to court.

Right now, as the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC) take place in Beijing, fifteen lawyers and scholars have satirically proposed that the government establish a “Chinese Re-education Through Labour Day”. This new festival would take place annually on August 3, in commemoration of the day in which the “Re-education through labour” (RTL) system was formally announced.