Eight human rights lawyers have urged the Ministry of Education to abolish discriminatory enrolment policies at elite universities which put students from some impoverished and populous regions at a great disadvantage.
Chang Boyang, a lawyer from Henan who was one of those who signed the letter to the ministry, said they urged it to reform the university recruitment system, which has been linked to the controversial hukou, or household registration system.
Citing official statistics, Chang said that Peking University planned to recruit 614 first-year students in Beijing - a sixth of its enrolment for the 2012-2013 academic year - but that only 73,000 students sat the gaokao national university entrance exams in the capital last month. Meanwhile, it had allocated 108 first-year places for students from Henan province, where a whopping 825,000 sat the exam.
'In the end, you'd find it many times harder to get into a prestigious university like Peking University simply because you're born in Henan, Anhui or Shandong and not in Beijing,' Chang said. 'It's gross discrimination.'
Other top-tier universities, including Beijing's Tsinghua University and Shanghai's Fudan University, have similar policies favouring local students. Three years ago, a student with a Shanghai hukou was 287 times more likely to be admitted to Fudan than a student from Inner Mongolia.
The discriminatory enrolment policies offer further insight into the inequalities enforced via the outdated hukou system, which have increasingly become a source of discontent on the mainland.
