USA Today has a revealing story today (May 10, 2000) on brutality in Chinese schools. Here are some highlights:
Tianzhuang, China -- The news was shocking: a fourth-grade math teacher in this
remote village ordered 28 boys to beat a classmate who hadn't done his homework.
She told them to hit him with a stick 10 times each, 280
whacks in all.
By some media accounts, the beating lasted 40 minutes. The boy, 9, wound
up in the hospital, his backside pummeled to a swollen, purple pulp."...
Newspapers across China used the incident...to highlight a disturbingly common
occurrence. Many Chinese teachers terrorize their students with beatings
and public humiliation."...
The Chinese media are filled with horror stories:
In another Shaanxi province town, a teacher used a knife to carve the word
'thief' onto the face of an elementary school student accused of stealing a
small amount of money.
An elementary school teacher used a pair of hot tongs to grab a 6-year-old girl
who hadn't been listening in class. The girl suffered burns on her neck.
A 9-year-old girl in Urumqi, capital of the western region of Xinjiang, was
forced to pull her pants down in front of her class because she didn't finish
her homework on time. The teacher then ordered the other students to stuff
a rag in the girl's mouth.
A teacher in Tianjin, a coastal city near Beijing, ordered students who
performed poorly on an exam to slap themselves in the face--one time for each
point they scored below 60%."