College accused of giving better dorms to foreign students
A college in East China’s Jiangsu Province has given foreign students better dorm rooms, sparking an uproar among Chinese students who claim that the school favors foreign students.
“Student dormitories are the college’s public resource, and it’s normal to adjust dormitory arrangements,” reads a statement released on Wednesday by the Wuxi Institute of Technology.
“The college will enroll more than 320 foreign students in the second half of 2018, with some of them housed at the Liyuan dormitory. Some 406 (Chinese) students who originally stayed there will be moved to the Fangyuan dormitory,” the statement said.
The statement added that round-the-clock hot showers are temporarily unavailable at Fangyuan. However, the statement stressed that students can use a public shower room.
A person who claims to be a student at the college placed a video on Sina Weibo on Tuesday, which shows Chinese students confronting a teacher trying to persuade them to leave their dormitory.
The post said that the college has enrolled too many foreign students and has forced Chinese students to leave for an inferior dormitory. The post was later deleted.
Thousands of comments under the statement say that the adjustments are unfair to Chinese students and favor foreign students.
“It is true that Fangyuan is inferior to Liyuan when it comes to facilities,” a spokesperson at the college’s publicity department, surnamed Chu, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
The college will renovate Fangyuan during the summer break, Chu said.
The post also claimed that each room at Liyuan was used by as many as six Chinese students, but will be used by only two to three foreign students. It also said that the college threatened students with the use of force to get them to leave.
Chu denied the accusations, claiming that the post is inconsistent with the truth.
The foreign students at the college come from countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, and South Africa, Chu said.