Cleanliness is crucial to academic success at one Chinese university where compulsory labor is part of a program designed to award class credits while instilling students with proper moral values.
But for many students at the Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, the program is an unnecessary burden, one they say detracts from their studies. It also carries echoes of China’s camps for so-called re-education through labor, which were used to silence activists and dissidents before they were abolished last year.
During winter, the sky is still dark at 6:30 a.m. when the university’s first-year students begin sweeping the 165-acre campus. Another cleaning shift awaits them later in the day. Each shift can take up to an hour, students said. Afterward, inspectors check the students’ work. Should a student miss a piece of trash or errant cigarette butt, he or she can lose academic credits and the opportunity to compete for certain titles and scholarships.
While all students at Shengda are required to clean their dormitories and classrooms every day, first-year students are the only ones required to sweep the campus. According to students, cleanliness inspections are conducted every weekday.
The compulsory labor is worth two academic credits, a university official, Sun Peng, said in a Tuesday interview with The Henan Economic Daily.
The cleaning program is also linked to a points-based “moral education” system. Such programs are often used by high schools and universities in China.
High scores in moral education can translate into scholarships and honorable titles such as “excellent student” and “excellent student cadre.” A high moral standing can also improve a student’s chances of joining the Communist Party or clinching a so-called iron rice bowl — a job with almost guaranteed lifetime employment at a state-owned company.
Some students, however, feel the demands of the cleaning program are a distraction.
“The inspections are too stringent,” said a second-year student who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “You get your points deducted for even trivial matters.”
“Once I got my points deducted because there was dust in the area I was responsible for,” he said, recalling his first year, during which he and his fellow students often showed up late and hungry to their morning classes after rushing to sweep the campus and clean their rooms.
A Shengda representative could not be immediately reached for comment on Friday.
While many Chinese universities encourage their students to maintain clean living areas, compulsory cleaning programs that also give academic credits are rare.
Shengda, which was founded in 1994 by a Taiwanese educator, Wang Kuang-ya, touted its decade-long program of “labor education” as one of its defining characteristics in an interview with The Orient Daily on Wednesday.
The newspaper sought comment from the university after several students complained publicly about the program, saying they were at Shengda to study, not sweep.
In his interview with The Henan Economic Daily, Mr. Sun, the university official, said that labor was good for building character and fostered “the spirit of hard work.”
“Cleaning and labor, as such, can help students develop healthy routines and good sanitation habits,” he said.
The recent media coverage of the compulsory cleaning program has prompted heated debate on Weibo, the Chinese microblog platform, with users posting thousands of comments. More than 9,000 comments have included the hashtag “floor-sweeping university.”
Some users, many claiming to be graduates or current students of Shengda, have accused complaining students of being “whiny.”
“I’m in Year 4 and about to leave,” said one user. “We are always proud of our clean campus. We never litter because we’ve been through the labor and understand that we should respect the fruits of labor of ourselves and others.” Others said the labor program could be viewed favorably as exercise.
But notable detractors of the program include the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. “Two hours of labor has gone beyond working out,” the university said on its official Weibo account. “The spirit of hard work should by no means be achieved through daily floor-sweeping.”
Many critics also suspect the school is merely trying to put a positive face on what some see as labor exploitation.
One Shengda student, who declined to give her name because she was concerned about possible repercussions, said that apart from the timing, she did not mind cleaning the campus.
“I wouldn’t say it’s hard labor,” she said. “But the time is too unreasonable. It’s dark until almost 7 in the morning here. And it’s so cold.”