Rich-poor gap among students causes concern

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, March 29, 2004

Rich-poor gap among students causes concern

While some students are reliant on government financial aid to fulfill their college studies, others have enough money from their parents to spend on rents and cars, luxury cosmetics and fashion.

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While some students are reliant on government financial aid to fulfill their college studies, others have enough money from their parents to spend on rents and cars, luxury cosmetics and fashion.

This is the mixed landscape of campus life in China today, which illustrates a financial disparity among Chinese college students and implies a looming social problem for young people, according to sociologists and psychologists.

There is a popular saying in China's universities: "500 yuan (US$60) a month is poor, 1,000 yuan is hardly enough, 2,000 yuan can be cool, and with 4,000 yuan you are well-to-do." The average monthly earnings of a white-collar worker in China is about 5000 yuan.

Yet this is believed to depict the real life of Chinese college students nowadays. Quite a few of them live a lavish, or as some put it, "aristocratic" life.

With monthly expenses of more than 3,000 yuan, Li Na, studying at Xinjiang Business School in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, has rented a flat equipped with a wide range of electric appliances. Though he has to spend 600 yuan in rent and a bit more in water and power supplies a month, he has a comfortable life.

"Though my spending is rather high compared with my classmates, it makes up only a very small proportion of my parents' income," Li says. "I don't think it's extravagant."

Wearing esprit fashions and Lancome cosmetics from France, Wang Hui, an English major in the city, is a bit different from Li, as she spends about 2,000 yuan each month that she earns from teaching English and doing translation work part-time.

But college students like Wang, who are financially independent, account for only 10 percent of the total number of powerful consumers on campus, according to a questionnaire survey of university students in Xinjiang.

"Last semester I spent nearly 10,000 yuan, excluding tuition fees and related charges," Li says with a guilty conscience. When her parents asked her where the money had gone, she dared not tell them, as most of it was spent on luxuries.

This kind of extravagance is opposed by some students.

"It leads to competition on campus and a mentality of reliance," says Wei Li from the Xinjiang Teacher's Training University.

But as many as 60 percent of the students surveyed say that extravagant spending is a personal activity and irreproachable provided the family concerned can support it, according to the study.

It seems that the tolerance of such behavior has encouraged overspending and unfortunately, has imposed extremely high pressure on students from low-income families.

Source: Xinhua

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