Tag: Education (K-12)

Dormitory Fire Kills 13 in Central China

Media Library

A fire in the dormitory of a kindergarten and elementary school in central China killed 13 people, Chinese state-owned news media reported on Saturday. A 14th person was being treated for injuries in a hospital after the fire broke out late Friday night, China Central Television said. The blaze was extinguished quickly, and the head of the school was taken into custody, the report said. No further details were provided, including whether any of the dead were children. It was not immediately known whether all the students at the school…

China Gym Roof Collapse Claims at Least 11 Lives

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Anger rose in China on Monday following the collapse a day earlier of the roof of a middle school gym near the Siberian border, killing at least 10 members of the school’s trophy-winning girl’s volleyball team who were practicing inside, as well as a coach. School safety has long been an emotional issue in China. The collapse of 7,000 classrooms during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, which killed as many as 10,000 schoolchildren, triggered a national outcry. Shoddy initial construction of schools, widely described as “tofu” buildings, was widely blamed…

China Helped Raise My American Kids, and They Turned Out Fine

Chin@Strategy

When Covid was raging across the world a couple of years ago, I came across a picture online of an American woman wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I refuse to co-parent with the government” — a response to perceived government overreach regarding school mask mandates. I laughed out loud: My own kids were, in a way, co-parented by the Chinese government. My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government…

Your Tuesday Briefing: Political Turmoil in Pakistan

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering political turmoil in Pakistan and schools reopening in the Philippines. Political tensions swell in Pakistan Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was charged under the country’s antiterrorism act on Sunday. He is trying to stage a political comeback after he was ousted from power in April following a no-confidence vote. The charges followed a rally in Islamabad, the capital, where Khan condemned the recent arrest of one of his top aides and vowed to file legal cases against police officers and a judge involved in the…

China Increasing Rejects English, and Outside Ideas

Chin@Strategy

As a student at Peking University law school in 1978, Li Keqiang kept both pockets of his jacket stuffed with handwritten paper slips. An English word was written on one side, a former classmate recalled, and the matching Chinese version was written on the other. Mr. Li, now China’s premier, was part of China’s English-learning craze. A magazine called Learning English sold half a million subscriptions that year. In 1982, about 10 million Chinese households — almost equivalent to Chinese TV ownership at the time — watched “Follow Me,” a…