Voices

100-year rowing event that sank in a decade

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-10 13:51

The annual canoe competition between Tsinghua and Peking universities has been cancelled. The event, which was planned to last 100 years, has ended after only 10 years.

Canoe competitions between colleges originated in the West, with the best examples being the Harvard v Yale stoush in the US and the Cambridge v Oxford contest in Britain.

Eager to learn Western campus culture, the two first-class Chinese universities initiated their canoe competition.

Cross-campus competition is supposed to aim at exchanges and learning from each other, but Tsinghua and Peking universities attached too much importance on winning, and brushed aside entertainment, friendship and just taking part.

They went as far as to resort to cheating - they were found to have included participants who were not "real" students.

The short-lived campus event exposes many problems in our education system. Schools are usually short sighted, focusing only on winning, but ignoring the all-round development of students.

Chinese colleges and universities still have a long way to go to build their own campus.

Excerpts from a comment of Xinhua News Agency