Tsinghua Student Life

The Chinese government sets limits to the number of acceptable student suicides per year at every college. If the number is exceeded, the college is punished — perhaps by a reduction in administrator salaries. Although colleges conceal suicides from their own students, they dare not conceal them from the government. At Tsinghua (with about 12,000 students) the annual limit is six. (So far this year, there have apparently been none.) In the electrical engineering department recently, more than six students were thought to be considering suicide. Because of this, a psychology professor gave the EE majors a talk about looking at the bright side of things.

A newly-formed Tsinghua student club has a Chinese name that means Sing Your Heart. It is for students who want to volunteer to teach in poor rural areas. The club has a special song that they sing at every meeting. They are remarkably ambitious: They want to set up a training program to train students to teach in these areas.

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences has a debate competition every year. This year’s topic is: Should the Fuwa (the Beijing Olympic mascots) have genders?

4 thoughts on “Tsinghua Student Life

  1. As I know, in our school (THU), there would be student suicides every year.
    In the beginning of 2009, one of my friend suicide, he is Tsinghua’s student, and I cried every time when I thought about him…

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