Shan He University

About a few months ago, a Chinese college student HuanGe (not real name) created one of his personal projects in programming. It was a site about an imaginary college that primarily takes students from Shan Dong, Shan Xi, He Nan, and He Bei.

Although it may seem weird at first since a college that only takes students regionally works against the ideology of the fairness of education, HuanGe has his own reason behind it.

The college policy in China makes the educational resources extremely skewed to the metro areas such as Bei Jing, Shang Hai, and Hong Kong. On the other hand, the provinces mentioned above such as Shan Dong and He Bei do not have so many good colleges for students to choose from.

What makes it worse is that the population in those provinces is very high and most students have to score exceptionally well to even go to a college. (Colleges require different scores for different provinces in China) Therefore, it is every student's dream to have a decent college in their province that does not take a ridiculous testing score.

Shan He University was born to be the dream school of students in those provinces. As an ideal example of what a University should look like, it, without a doubt, also got into many controversies.

Despite its original goal for helping students, many organizations started to profit on top of it through social media. Many took the name of the project and asked for people's donations online. Many more used the project's fame to gather personal information of those who saw it on places like TikTok.

What made it worse was that the Chinese Government started to intercept with this newly born "University". After witnessed how influential it could be, the government shut the website and social media group down just a couple of weeks later. Although none of the members were arrested or questioned over this topic, it was obvious that the "Shan He University" was about to come to an end.

Looking back on this whole project, I see the possibility of the younger Chinese generation fighting against their living environment and society. There is a great amount of power within them that can change the world around them. I do not know if it is the beginning or the end, however, I do hope that one day, there will be an actual University that aims for the benefit of those four provinces' students. It should bring up the topic of education equality to the public one more time.