School exam madness - Fuyu madness - stock market madness leads to driving madness

JUNE 8, 2007: We were told we had 3 days off from classes due to big nationwide exams. For our school (the company, that is, not the high school they send us to) this meant crowds like this one that they could parade us in front of. But these are not your average Chinese crowds. Photos

Exams here are a huge deal. Like the TEE except...well, except they actually are a huge deal. You really are screwed if you screw up - no STAT test, no TAFE bridging courses, no second chances at all. They're such a big deal that the police block the roads that go past the exam venues and maintain a heavy presence.


A teacher said the pressure combined with the June heat (it was well over 30C in Songyuan and in Beijing it's usually over 35C) means some students just pass out come crunch time. These students do not get to re-sit. They just have less time to do the same exam once they come-to.

Add all this to the One-Child Policy and it's no wonder hordes of parents simply cannot drag themselves away from the school gates after they bid their children farewell. They sit, fidget and smoke for three hours. They stand, wander and stare. Sunflower seeds are shelled on an industrial scale.

Their glazed eyes and zombie-esque motions mark them as perfect targets for blindsides from leaflet-bearers. Before long the number of flyers given out rivals the number of sunflower husks on the ground.

Our school employed the dual attack of leaflet bombing and foreigner parade in its effort to rope in stunned parents to send their kids for summer holiday classes. The project to canvass every major high school in the area led us away from Songyuan's exam traffic madness all the way to Fuyu.





Until fifteen years ago, the oil-rich northern half of Songyuan City was called Fuyu County. When Songyuan City was founded in 1992, the new government simply booted Fuyu County out to a dusty, Indian-style country town over 100km away. And that place became Fuyu.

In Songyuan City most people drive, take taxis, or ride motorbikes (this means exam time causes traffic madness above). But in Fuyu roughly the same percentage walk. Songyuan's wide, kerbed highways are dominated by the super-rich in their sleek Audis. Fuyu's super-rich navigate their bumpy alleys in brightly-coloured 3-wheel hatchbacks, avoiding crowds of pedestrians. And most predictably, while Songyuan's oil flows steadily, in Fuyu there is absolutely no sign of it. I didn't see an oil pump for at 70km before we arrived.

Aside from the fact the school actually saw fit to advertise there, the only thing i could see going for Fuyu was a strange abundance of shiny 3-wheeled hatchbacks. Perhaps Fuyu's a 3-wheeler manufacturing centre. But even if it is, it's not a very successful one. I haven't seen these cars anywhere else - and i can make a pretty educated guess as to why: The forecast was for 30C, and, though it was only 10am when we got there, the majority of these sparkling, brand new gogomobiles had their bonnets unlatched.



On another madness tack, when the school sent us and about 30 students on a boat ride on Wednesday it hired a second driver for the day to take us to the location down-river. As we drove further and further in the opposite direction from the river, we were all wondering the obvious: where the hell is he taking us? It soon became clear...bloody Chagan Lake again. Goddammit, i thought, do they think because we don't know Chinese that we don't know the difference between a wild river and the same goddam lake we've just been sent to twice in the last 3 weeks? But i held my peace and prepared to make the best of Chagan Lake, again. So did everyone else. But as soon as we arrived in Chagan Lake the driver talked briefly on his mobile and we promptly turned around and drove all the way back to Songyuan. The driver had apparently lost a bunch of money in a stock market crash the day before. He'd followed it up well by losing a bunch of money in fuel.

And on a far more serious madness tack, on the journey to Fuyu a black Camry swept past us doing about 150km/h (yes, Camry - they're a different breed here, only for the super-rich...if you don't believe me, ask yourself when the last time you saw a black Camry was). The fact it passed us on the wrong side of the road was standard, but it did so just as a truck in front of us tried to overtake a peasant cart. Annoyed at being forced to slow down to avoid ploughing into the truck, the driver tried to overtake the truck on the hard shoulder of the WRONG SIDE of the road. They did this completely blindly, though apparently safe in the knowledge that the only users of the hard shoulder are peasants on donkey-carts. I read an article recently in the (government-sanctioned) China Daily decrying the scaled compensation rates for causing the death of a city versus a country Chinese.

"This is essentially a caste system that condemns a vast majority of the nation's citizens to a secondary status, with no safety net of insurance, healthcare or welfare to fall back on. Education is way below the urban standard, and salary-earning jobs are virtually non-existent.

This discrimination extends to the afterlife, so to speak. According to the current regulation, compensation rates are calculated by the average per-capita disposal income of the town, if the victim is a city slicker, or the average net income in the case of a rural resident. Since urban income is much higher, an urban resident, even when killed in a traffic accident, can command far higher compensation.

As revealed by Li Yuling, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, using the 2005 rates, the urban-rural gap for such compensation is 98,000 yuan ($12,700) in Sichuan, 110,000 ($14,300) in Hubei, 130,000 ($16,900) in Hunan, 140,000($18,200) in Jiangsu."

Raymond Zhou, 'All lives are equally precious', China Daily, April 28

Car-is-king in practice means rich people are king. The supreme irony of a country ruled by a party swept to power by the peasantry.