The right connections will no longer protect students

As the People’s Liberation Army has had some of the world’s top weapons, it is also pursuing top talent and has begun to raise the threshold for professionals, PLA Daily reported.

In the past, it would be very complicated for a military academy to expel a student because regulations were loosely executed and the affected student would always find someone well-connected to lobby the school, the PLA’s flagship newspaper said in a front page story on Monday.

But now the situation has begun to change, the report noted, citing examples from the PLA Second Artillery Engineering University in Xi’an, Shaanxi province.

Since the beginning of last year, the university has expelled 45 students due to disciplinary violations, poor academic performance and health conditions, with no intervention accepted. Among them were two children of the academy’s teachers, who were dismissed after being found to be cheating in exams.

Academy leaders have also tightened controls over admission procedures.

A postgraduate applicant was rejected in the oral test despite the fact that one of his parents is an acquaintance of the principal’s younger sister and that his family found various people to help ask for favors from the principal, PLA Daily added.

In addition, a total of 96 students failed to obtain a degree because their academic scores could not reach the standards.

Ao Zhengjun, head of teaching affairs at the academy, told PLA Daily that intervention used to be the major obstacle for academy management if they wanted to expel a student, but the school decided last year that it would strictly follow regulations and ignore all lobbying.

“As far as I know, all of the military’s schools have strengthened their control over students’ qualifications as the top leadership has repeatedly urged them to train capable officers,” a human resources management researcher at a PLA institute surnamed Wang said.

“On the other hand, intervention is now no longer tolerated in PLA schools because they were usually connected to corruption and other misconducts,” he said.