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Testing times stymie student hopefuls

  As China's schoolchildren sweat over the national college entrance examination, overseas-based Chinese hoping to study at the country's top universities are finding that their ambitions are being dashed by regulations originally designed to help them.

  Chinese citizens living overseas are finding their path to higher education blocked in their ancestral homeland, and a measure that was specifically designed to meet their needs is the biggest stumbling block to academic success.

  There are generally two ways for overseas-based Chinese to study in the motherland: They can apply for admission to two designated universities for overseas Chinese via a recommendation from their high school, or they can take a college entrance exam especially formulated for Chinese living overseas and then try to gain admission to a university on the basis of the result.

  Experts said the exam was created with the best of intentions, but in reality it is hampering the efforts of a large number of talented overseas Chinese who want to study on the mainland, and is also disrupting China's chances of maintaining ties with ethnic Chinese living overseas.

  Despite the good intentions underpinning the exam, very few overseas Chinese are successfully admitted to their dream university, according to Wang Qiang, head of Bofei Education, a cram school in Beijing that helps to prepare students for the test.

  "A lack of publicity means very few overseas Chinese know that the government has provided a specially designed exam. Most simply aren't aware that they can gain entry to universities on the Chinese mainland in this way," he said.

  According to Wang, about 4,000 overseas Chinese register for the exam every year - the overwhelming majority come from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

  However, very few of them can earn scores high enough to gain admittance to the best universities in the mainland, he said.

  "From my observations, most overseas Chinese students score about 400 out of 750 points in the exam, which means they can only attend the most ordinary universities or colleges, while the very prestigious ones they have been dreaming of - universities such as Peking, Tsinghua and Fudan - are far beyond their reach," he added.

  Limited choice

  Wang Yiyi, who was raised in Japan but has kept her Chinese passport, is a good example.

  The 23-year-old didn't consider changing her nationality because of her parents' affection for the motherland. She considered taking the exam around the time of her high school graduation, but quickly abandoned the idea.

  "At that time, I had never studied in China, not even for a single day. My Chinese wasn't very good and I even didn't know what China was like. It was unimaginable that I could earn a score high enough to guarantee I would be accepted by any mainland university," she said.

  Eventually, she chose to gain admission through recommendation, and enrolled to study medicine at Jinan University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, which was initially founded for returnees from overseas.

  Although grateful to the university for accepting her, Wang Yiyi still thinks it's a pity that there are so few ways for overseas Chinese students to gain admission to schools in their ancestral homeland.

  "In Japan, both foreigners and Japanese citizens who return from residing overseas have plenty of access to higher education, while here in my home country there's not much choice for students like me," she said.

  Yin Qiang, director of the Research Center on Overseas Chinese at Renmin University of China, said simplifying the admissions process for overseas Chinese to enable them to study at the best universities is of huge importance for the country's future development.

  "There are roughly 60 million overseas Chinese residing across the world, but the second and third generations increasingly have scant knowledge of the motherland, because many of them have never set foot in China," said Yin, who is also a professor of journalism and communications at Renmin University of China.

  He said overseas Chinese are a positive new force that could help to accelerate China's future development: "It's necessary to create convenient conditions for them to come back and attend university."

  The exam

  No official date has been recorded for the creation of the entry exam for overseas Chinese. However, government documents show that in 1997, it was held in six places during the month of June, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macao.

  About 100 colleges and universities on the mainland were qualified to recruit overseas Chinese students on the basis of the exam results that year.

  The exam divided prospective students into two streams: those following a liberal arts track and those studying the sciences. Students who wished to study liberal arts at a university were tested in five subjects: Chinese, English, math, Chinese history, and geography.

  To qualify to take the exam, the students must first have obtained long-term or permanent residency, and must have lived outside China for at least two of the previous four years.

  Now, almost two decades later, the form and content of the exam haven't changed a great deal, but the number of colleges and universities qualified to recruit Chinese students from overseas has risen to more than 300.

  Zhou Yan, who runs a tutorial class in Beijing for overseas Chinese who plan to take the exam, said the students usually earn quite low scores as a result of poor adjustment to the domestic learning environment and the content and form of domestic tests.

  "These students are especially bad at math, with many failing the math tests," Zhou said, adding that some students speak and write good English, but it depends on the country they resided in before arriving in China.

  "The only subject they are all generally good at is geography, which I guess has something to do with their experience of living and traveling abroad," he said.

  Unlike many of her peers residing overseas, 19-year-old Li Sijia was sanguine about taking the entry exam because she left China at a relatively late age, which meant she had finished most of her high school courses before moving abroad.

  However Li, who was born in Jiaozuo, Hunan province, was still beset by difficulties. She said the math test is far harder than those she took in South Africa, where she has permanent residence, and the number of historical figures and events make it difficult to study for the history test.

  "Besides which, I haven't read or written Chinese characters for two years. It will take me some time to get used to it," she said.

  Much to be done

  Pan Qinglin, standing committee member of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, has spent years advocating the removal of all obstacles that prevent overseas Chinese from studying in their homeland.

  As a returnee himself, Pan, who now lives in the northern port city of Tianjin but spent many years living and working in Japan, said he visited many of his peers when he lived overseas. He noticed that a great many of them shared the same aspiration - to raise their children as Chinese and send them to study at a university on the mainland when they are old enough.

  "People at home just can't imagine how much those living and working overseas miss the motherland and how much they wish to come back," he said. "We should pave the way for them, rather than erect barriers."

  Bofei's Wang Qiang, who has run the school for 10 years, said he has known many students who, having failed to gain admission to their ideal university, have abandoned the idea and finally headed to another country.

  "At first, I thought the country treated these students too harshly and that the admission standards should be lowered to help them to attend their dream universities.

  "Gradually, though, I began to realize that simply lowering the standards wasn't a once-and-for-all solution because lower standards may enable these students attend their favorite universities, but what about their studies when they finally go to university? Many of them can't catch up with their classmates who have grown up and studied in China," he said, adding that some overseas Chinese students even had difficulty graduating from run-of-the-mill universities.

  Wang Yiyi, the Jinan University medical student, understood Wang Qiang's concerns. She remembered taking a freshman Chinese course where the teacher asked the students to select an ancient Chinese poem and analyze it on their own.

  "All of my classmates picked very splendid and complex poems. I didn't, because the only Chinese poem I know is In The Quiet Night, a very simple poem which is familiar to all Chinese people, even young kids," she said.

  "I was embarrassed at the time, and I was also worried about whether I would pass the final exams and graduate," she said. "Fortunately, I passed, but my score was really low, despite the huge amount of time I had devoted to my studies."

  Yin Qiang, the Renmin University of China professor, said much remains to be done to improve the situation, but it will require the combined efforts of a number of departments, including the State Council's Office of Overseas Chinese Affairs, the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, and the Ministry of Education, not to mention Chinese embassies and consulates across the world.

  "For example, we need to formulate policies that will meet the diverse demands of overseas Chinese who want to attend all levels of school in China. We must also offer more guidance to the students about registering for and taking the college entrance exam, and we must provide courses on Chinese language and culture to help them become more familiar with the motherland," he said.

  "Don't allow these students to arrive full of hope, only to leave full of disappointment."

 
Date:2015-06-16 09:17     
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