An orange costs 1.5 yuan, so Dong Mingzhu shut down the supermarket at the vocational school. Her exact words were: “Are they ripping off our students? This kind of supermarket isn’t allowed to operate here.”
On the afternoon of October 19, Zhuhai Gree Technical School held its first lesson of the school year. Dong is both the chairwoman of Gree Electric Appliances and the school’s principal. She also said, “It’s not allowed for teenagers to talk about dating.”
The internet is arguing about the second half. I can’t help focusing on the first.
An orange costs 1.5 yuan. In her eyes, that’s ripping off students. She may well be right. The school supermarket really is expensive. But it’s worth thinking about who actually has the standing to say that. When a principal says it, she’s protecting students. When a chairwoman says it, she’s protecting labor costs. One person occupies both roles. When she speaks, both identities take effect at once. There’s no gap between them.
The admissions brochure actually says, “Enroll in the school, enter the company; graduate ready for the job.” It also says graduates may receive priority for internships and employment at Gree Electric Appliances and companies in its industrial chain. The first intake was planned for 300 students; more than 8,000 applied, and 326 enrolled. One in 26 got in.
One spot for every 26 applicants. What they were competing for was a future that looked fairly certain. Not a diploma. One student from Hunan scored 620 on the high school entrance exam, nearly got a perfect score in physics, and gave up a place in a key class at an ordinary high school. A girl from Jiujiang, Jiangxi, came despite scoring nearly 200 points above the regular high school cutoff. The parents’ reasoning was almost identical: the path was clear.
I read that line in the brochure over and over. The two words with the most weight were “priority consideration.”
“Priority” means moving up the queue. It doesn’t promise that you’ll be hired after graduation; it only promises that you’ll be moved ahead of others when conditions are equal. What counts as equal conditions, and who decides? No one can say. In the publicly available version of the brochure, I couldn’t find how the interview is scored, what proportion the entrance exam score counts for, how many places are reserved for applicants from outside the province, how students are assigned to majors after admission, or how many years they must work for the company. More than 7,000 of the 8,000-plus applicants were screened out, but outsiders can’t see how wide the holes in the sieve are.
A word like “priority” can’t be written onto a blockchain. A smart contract recognizes only whether conditions are met or not; it won’t execute a single word that can’t be encoded in bytes. So its boundaries are fixed—cold-looking. A promise made by a person is the opposite: whatever wasn’t written down gets explained on the spot by the person who made the promise. Its boundaries are fluid—warm-looking. But on that warm side, all the risk rests on who gets to interpret the promise.
The dating rule raises another, more practical issue. The technical school is recruiting students who have just finished middle school. They enter at 15 or 16 and finish three years later, at 18 or 19. The school can keep them in line during the first two years; it has a legal basis for that, since schools have a duty to supervise underage students. The problem comes in the third year, when the students are adults, yet the same rule is still in place. In 2005, the Ministry of Education removed the line “unauthorized marriage will result in expulsion” from Order No. 21, and universities have not concerned themselves with students’ marriages since then. Twenty-one years later, a technical school has brought similar words back with “not allowed.”
Whether the school has the authority to control students is a legal question. What concerns me more is how little it costs to exercise that control. Hair gets long? Invite a hairdresser to volunteer on the weekend and cut it. The supermarket charges too much? Shut it down. Dating is forbidden. These three things have one thing in common: none requires the students’ consent, and none has to be written into any document given to them. Not a word in black and white. That’s how it is.
As I see it, the real weight of the school rules has nothing to do with dating. At this school, the institution running it draws the boundaries of daily life unilaterally. Whether those boundaries are appropriate is another matter; there’s no dispute over who has the power to draw them.
For anyone thinking of enrolling, the most practical advice is this: flip to the last few pages of the admissions brochure and look for the required service period, the penalty for breaking the agreement, and what counts as a breach. Only when those three things are clearly spelled out does the word “priority” have any teeth. If you can’t find them, assume they don’t exist.
$BTC $ARB $ENS
#格力技校 #职业教育 #DongMingzhu
On the afternoon of October 19, Zhuhai Gree Technical School held its first lesson of the school year. Dong is both the chairwoman of Gree Electric Appliances and the school’s principal. She also said, “It’s not allowed for teenagers to talk about dating.”
The internet is arguing about the second half. I can’t help focusing on the first.
An orange costs 1.5 yuan. In her eyes, that’s ripping off students. She may well be right. The school supermarket really is expensive. But it’s worth thinking about who actually has the standing to say that. When a principal says it, she’s protecting students. When a chairwoman says it, she’s protecting labor costs. One person occupies both roles. When she speaks, both identities take effect at once. There’s no gap between them.
The admissions brochure actually says, “Enroll in the school, enter the company; graduate ready for the job.” It also says graduates may receive priority for internships and employment at Gree Electric Appliances and companies in its industrial chain. The first intake was planned for 300 students; more than 8,000 applied, and 326 enrolled. One in 26 got in.
One spot for every 26 applicants. What they were competing for was a future that looked fairly certain. Not a diploma. One student from Hunan scored 620 on the high school entrance exam, nearly got a perfect score in physics, and gave up a place in a key class at an ordinary high school. A girl from Jiujiang, Jiangxi, came despite scoring nearly 200 points above the regular high school cutoff. The parents’ reasoning was almost identical: the path was clear.
I read that line in the brochure over and over. The two words with the most weight were “priority consideration.”
“Priority” means moving up the queue. It doesn’t promise that you’ll be hired after graduation; it only promises that you’ll be moved ahead of others when conditions are equal. What counts as equal conditions, and who decides? No one can say. In the publicly available version of the brochure, I couldn’t find how the interview is scored, what proportion the entrance exam score counts for, how many places are reserved for applicants from outside the province, how students are assigned to majors after admission, or how many years they must work for the company. More than 7,000 of the 8,000-plus applicants were screened out, but outsiders can’t see how wide the holes in the sieve are.
A word like “priority” can’t be written onto a blockchain. A smart contract recognizes only whether conditions are met or not; it won’t execute a single word that can’t be encoded in bytes. So its boundaries are fixed—cold-looking. A promise made by a person is the opposite: whatever wasn’t written down gets explained on the spot by the person who made the promise. Its boundaries are fluid—warm-looking. But on that warm side, all the risk rests on who gets to interpret the promise.
The dating rule raises another, more practical issue. The technical school is recruiting students who have just finished middle school. They enter at 15 or 16 and finish three years later, at 18 or 19. The school can keep them in line during the first two years; it has a legal basis for that, since schools have a duty to supervise underage students. The problem comes in the third year, when the students are adults, yet the same rule is still in place. In 2005, the Ministry of Education removed the line “unauthorized marriage will result in expulsion” from Order No. 21, and universities have not concerned themselves with students’ marriages since then. Twenty-one years later, a technical school has brought similar words back with “not allowed.”
Whether the school has the authority to control students is a legal question. What concerns me more is how little it costs to exercise that control. Hair gets long? Invite a hairdresser to volunteer on the weekend and cut it. The supermarket charges too much? Shut it down. Dating is forbidden. These three things have one thing in common: none requires the students’ consent, and none has to be written into any document given to them. Not a word in black and white. That’s how it is.
As I see it, the real weight of the school rules has nothing to do with dating. At this school, the institution running it draws the boundaries of daily life unilaterally. Whether those boundaries are appropriate is another matter; there’s no dispute over who has the power to draw them.
For anyone thinking of enrolling, the most practical advice is this: flip to the last few pages of the admissions brochure and look for the required service period, the penalty for breaking the agreement, and what counts as a breach. Only when those three things are clearly spelled out does the word “priority” have any teeth. If you can’t find them, assume they don’t exist.
$BTC $ARB $ENS
#格力技校 #职业教育 #DongMingzhu