Schedium

(source: www.gov.cn)  On January 22 the General Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (PRC) issued a notice  stating that private kindergartens in urban residential communities must all be handed over to local education authorities to be turned into public or non-profit kindergartens. China currently has a system in which  public kindergartens , which are run by local authorities and use material provided by the government, compete with private ones, which enjoy a certain independence and can choose their own textbooks.  Over the past two decades private kindergartens have become a booming business. According to Beijing-based business consultancy ResearchInChina, between 2003 and 2015 private kindergartens grew from 55,000 to 143,000, while only 15,000 public kindergartens were opened during the same period. From 1997 to 2017, the number of children attending public kindergartens decreased from 95% to 44%. However, in recent years th

Hong Kong University (by Adon3465 via Wikimedia Commons) Chinese websites sell fake diplomas of major Hong Kong universities that even experts cannot recognize as forgeries. According to Hong Kong-based newspaper HK01 , there are a large number of websites in mainland China that sell fake diplomas of Hong Kong's eight major universities. An HK01 reporter asked Chong Yiu Kwong (莊耀洸), a Solicitor and Teaching Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, and Alexa Chow (周綺萍), a Human Resources Consultant, to examine two diplomas. One was a fake 2017 bachelor's degree in business administration from Hong Kong University (HKU), which the journalist had purchased from a Chinese website for 1,200 RMB. The other one was a real 2014 diploma from HKU. Both Chong Yiu Kwong, who is also a HKU alumnus, and Alexa Chow mistook the fake one for authentic. Ms. Chow explained that there are is no standard for how diplomas should look like. Their layout, colour, size and pa