Society

BEIJING – Nearly 1,000 people have been caught cheating on China's notoriously competitive civil service entrance exams, some with high-tech listening devices in their ears, state media reported Monday.

The official China Daily newspaper said in an editorial the number caught cheating was the largest ever for the exam.

Cheating during tests is common in the country of 1.3 billion people, where pressure to pass competitive national exams for entrance to universities and civil service jobs is intense. About 9.5 million young people take college entrance exams each year, but only one in four are eligible for college enrollment.

The cheaters had people feeding them information through wireless mini earplugs, and bought standard answers for the exams from outside companies, the official Xinhua News Agency cited the State Administration of Civil Service as saying.

About 775,000 people took the competitive civil servant exam last year to fill just 13,500 available positions. In some cases thousands were competing for more coveted positions, such as a ministry or a department with travel prospects, Xinhua reported.

Calls to the State Administration of Civil Service rang unanswered Monday.

There are no specific rules in dealing with cheaters in regards to civil servant exams, but they should face the harshest punishment, the China Daily said.

"Those who cheat in examinations for civil servants fall into the category of worst offenders and deserve the severest punishment," the editorial said. It said civil servants should be role models in moral integrity.

An earlier Xinhua report warning the public not to buy exam answers, said exam papers were state secrets and those caught leaking them faced three to seven years in prison.

China's civil service exam has been in place from imperial times and has long been seen as a stepping stone to social status and financial stability.

Li Zhengying, Chen Shanwu and their 7years old son boarded on K160, the train sent off from Kunming realway station,  at 8:00 Janaury 14th. They were going to attend the funeral of Li Zhengying's father.

About 4:00 Janaury, Li Zhengying found out that her husband started to groan. She asked the train attendant for help, but one train attendant insisted on that her husband can manage to Chongqing. At 7:50 the same day, when the train arrived Chongqing, Chen Shanwu had stopped breathing.

 

There were 4000 netizens left their comments before 20:00 this evening, one comment "Because you are not a japanese" got 13644 supports from visitors.

Last year, a train stopped far before next realway station in order to let japanese passengers catch up theirs airplane.The real way station even arranged a car to send them to airport.

The contrary result lights up the rage of the Chinese netizens.

BEIJING – A 2-year-old girl in northern China has tested positive for bird flu and is in critical condition — the second case of human infection in a month.

The girl fell ill on Jan. 7 in central Hunan province and was taken to a hospital by her grandparents four days later after she returned home to Shanxi province, the Health Ministry said in a notice on its Web site late Saturday.

Tests confirmed she was infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus, it said. It did not say how the girl, surnamed Peng, was infected or what she was doing in Hunan.

"The patient is in critical condition, and the health department of Shanxi province is sparing no efforts" to save the girl, the notice said.

All the people who had close contact with the girl were under medical observation, the ministry said, and no one else has been found ill.

The case comes at a worrisome time for authorities as tens of millions of people are on the move between cities and rural hometowns for Chinese New Year, which begins on Jan. 26. The Agricultural Ministry has said it will step up checks before the holiday.

China, which raises more poultry than any other country, has vowed to aggressively fight the virus.

A spokeswoman for the World Health Organization in Beijing said it was informed of the case and was staying in close contact with the Health Ministry.

Earlier this month a 19-year-old woman died from the bird flu virus in a Beijing hospital after contact with ducks in a market in a neighboring province, the first death from bird flu since February last year. The WHO said the case did not appear to signal a new public health threat.

Health officials worry the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that could spread easily among people.

According to the latest WHO tally, bird flu has killed 248 people worldwide since 2003, including 21 in China. The young girl brings the total number of cases in the country to 32.

SHANGHAI, China – A court in central China has sentenced a woman to death for hiring someone to strangle her 9-year-old son so she could have another child with her new husband without violating population laws, a court official and reports said Friday.

The case stems in part from Chinese policies — in effect for more than three decades — that limit most couples to only one child.

The Higher People's Court in Shaanxi province ordered the death penalty for former bank clerk Li Yingfang, overturning a lower court decision that might have allowed her a life sentence, said a court official.

The official at the lower court in Weinan, a city in Shaanxi, said he was familiar with the case and confirmed that the death sentence had been ordered. As is common with Chinese officials not authorized to speak to media, he gave only his surname, Liu.

Calls to the Shaanxi Higher Court rang unanswered Friday.

Liu also confirmed reports by Shaanxi Television that said Li, 36, gave custody of her son from her first marriage to the boy's grandmother after her first husband died.

She remarried, but her second husband also had a daughter from his first marriage, so the couple could not legally have another child, it said.

The report said Li first paid 70,000 yuan (about $10,000) to have a man named Wang Ruijie kill her second husband's daughter, but the girl resisted and escaped. Li then took her son to a meeting with Wang, who strangled the boy and left him by a rural road.

Li initially received a death sentence suspended for two years because she had suffered from depression after having two abortions due to the rules against her bearing another child, the reports said. Such sentences are often commuted to life in prison.

But the higher court found that her depression was not directly related to her crime.

Wang also was given a suspended death sentence, which the higher court upheld. Both were ordered to pay compensation to the bereaved grandmother.