Lang Xianping Discusses the Kindergarten Situation in China

Older stories towards the bottom.

Kindergarten principal suspended in anti-viral drug case

Authorities in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, have suspended a kindergarten principal suspected of giving children prescription drugs without a doctor's authorization. It is the latest case of drugs being given to students without parents' knowledge to ward off illnesses and boost attendance.

Nie Aiqin, principal of Litian Kindergarten, in Qilihe district, is under suspicion of giving ribavirin, an anti-viral drug used to treat respiratory diseases and hepatitis C, to more than 200 children without informing their parents.

Guangzhou starts kindergarten inspections for unauthorized medicines

District-level education and health bureaus in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, started on Thursday a 22-day inspection on the unauthorized provision of medicines in kindergartens across the city.

The city education bureau will supervise such inspection between April 7 and 11, according to a statement issued by the bureau.

The move came after some kindergartens in Hubei, Shaanxi and Jilin provinces were exposed by the media to have given their children moroxydine, a prescription drug that fights the flu virus, without informing parents.

Licenses revoked at drug scandal-hit kindergartens

Two preschools at the center of the antiviral drug scandal in Xi'an, northwest China's Shanxi Province, have had their licenses revoked, the local government confirmed on Saturday.

Two new public kindergartens will be established on the sites of the Hongji Xincheng and Fengyun kindergartens, which are accused of having administered antiviral drugs to children since 2008.

Hubei kindergarten probed over drug claims

Kindergarten drug scandal leads to calls for overhaul of regulations

China kindergarten collapse kills child

The roof of a kindergarten in Central China's Henan Province collapsed early on Tuesday morning, killing one child and injuring three others, local authorities said.

The collapse occurred around 1 a.m. in Tuodian Village, Shihe District of the city of Xinyang, burying 13 children at the boarding kindergarten.

One child died on the way to hospital while three others who suffered minor injuries are still being treated in a local hospital, according to sources with the city government.

Initial investigation showed that the collapse was caused by the owner of the kindergarten, surnamed Yu, who dismantled the wall between two rooms on February 28, affecting the stability of the building, said the district's publicity department.

The kindergarten is unlicensed, it added.

Yu suffered a sudden heart attack in the wake of the accident and is being treated in a hospital under police surveillance, the department said.

Chinese Kindergarten Teacher Allegedly Lifts Student Off Ground By Ears, Shares Photo On Internet

Ear pulling video triggers online criticism

18 kindergarten students killed in China bus crash

Two Chinese kindergarten students die after rival school poisons yogurt

Chinese state media say two girls have died after eating poisoned yogurt placed outside their kindergarten at the direction of the head of a rival school.

The Xinhua News Agency says police believe the poisoning was motivated by competition for students between the schools.

It says the woman confessed that she injected the yogurt with rat poison and asked a man to place it with notebooks on the road to the rival kindergarten in Pingshan county in Hebei province.

Xinhua said Thursday that the girls’ grandmother found the books and yogurt and took them home on April 24. The children suffered convulsions after drinking the yogurt and died later.

Tower Crane Collapse Kills Five Children in East China

Five children died and two were injured when a tower crane collapsed on to a village kindergarten in east China’s Shandong Province on Friday.

Man Stabs 29 kids At Kindergarten in China

The screams of the 4-year-olds inside the kindergarten could be heard out in the street.

When people ran in to investigate, they found what one witness said was a scene "too horrible to imagine" — blood everywhere as a knife-wielding man slashed 29 children, two teachers and a security guard Thursday in the second such school attack in China in two days. Initially officials had reported that 28 children had been hurt but they later realized they had miscounted.

Experts called it a copycat rampage triggered by similar incidents Wednesday and last month. They said the wave of school attacks falls amid poor care for the mentally unstable and growing feelings of social injustice in the fast-changing country.

Lang Xianping mentions many of these incidents at the beginning. He breaks up the parents into three groups: those with power, those with money, and those with no power and no money.

Then he explains the situation with schools. There are 18,000 kindergartens in China.

11:15 Shows the first kind. 70% of kindergartens are private. 30% are public. Public schools are built by government or districts. So the Agriculture Department might have an Agriculture Department Kindergarten for their worker's children. So 1/3 of the schools are government financed, for children of cadres. Even the toilets are imported at these schools because they can't spend all the money they have.

12:50 Private schools. Kindergarten is not compulsory in China. He tosses out some figures: some of the schools cost 10,000 a month in tuition, some 80,000 a year ($1,700 a month / $13,000 a year). These schools are very small in number, and can't criticize these schools. The negative stories won't happen in these kinds of schools.

13:30 All of these incidents happen at the 12,500 private kindergartens （民营幼儿园）, among these the middle and low ranking kindergartens. In order to survive, they do not want the children to take a day off or have an absence. Why? Because they have to give back tuition according to media reports, so they give students medicine to keep them coming to class. Also, push down the teacher's wages. Things such as safety, cut costs everywhere to stay in business. If you can't raise tuition, you have to cut costs.

15:00 He explains HK has no public schools. There are very expensive international schools that receive no money from the government. Then there are non-profit schools that parents can choose, the HK government will subsidize their child.

16:30 In Japan, half are public, half are private. Japan has two subsidies. One is for the school, for construction, etc. The other goes to the student. Both private and public schools receive the subsidies so the schools are very similar. This is equal.

Reporters and others ask questions, they discuss whether this is a regulatory problem, a moral problem, a legal issue (there aren't many laws regarding giving children medicine at school). One person asks about America, but he says there kindergarten is compulsory, age 5 to 18 is compulsory. In China, there is only 9 years of compulsory education, from 6 to 15.

One professor, who defended Alibaba's Yue E Bao in the video I posted in Lang Xianping Explains China's Banking Crisis to a TV Audience, says if you want equality, all kindergartens should be private schools because the government schools will be unequal (the cadres and government workers will have much better schools).