Chinese cities to relax school entry for rural migrants

BEIJING | Sun Dec 30, 2012 10:25am EST

BEIJING (Reuters) - Three populous Chinese regions plan to relax restrictions on the children of workers from rural areas trying to enter university-track high schools, China National Radio reported on Sunday, in an apparent response to protests over discriminatory practices.

The planned changes come too late to help a teenager whose plight has become a cause célèbre among activists pressing for reform of China's household registration, or hukou, regime.

Chinese high school students can only take university entrance exams where they are registered, a stipulation that effectively locks out the children of migrant workers in cities.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved to cities from rural areas over the past three decades, but most migrants are still treated as second-class citizens without the same access to education, housing or health insurance as registered urban residents.

Reformists had seized on the case of Zhan Haite, 15, the daughter of migrants who had been raised in Shanghai but was ineligible to attend a university-track high school there. Her case triggered protests in Beijing and Shanghai this month, while her father was detained for several days for campaigning to secure education rights in Shanghai.

The rules as announced still do not treat the children of migrants as equals of city residents with legal registration.

"It's not ideal. They have just made the regulations more detailed, not changed the underlying situation," Zhan said from her home in Shanghai. The new criteria were so strict that she, and others like her, would still be ineligible, she said.

"I bet only 5 percent of the kids would meet the new requirements."

Beijing and Shanghai as well as Guangdong Province, whose Pearl River Delta factories are a magnet for migrants, will phase in access to the higher-education exams for students living within their borders, China National Radio reported.

But in practice, academically gifted migrant children will still face discrimination.

From 2016, Guangdong will allow migrant children to sit the exams and apply to university on an equal footing with legal residents.

Beijing and Shanghai plan to relax admission rules for vocational-track schools and in some cases open the door to university education to students who have first graduated from a vocational school program.

Migrant children may take the university exam in Beijing from 2013 and in Shanghai from 2014, but their university applications will still be processed in their legal hometown.

The children of migrants long resident in Beijing already have some rights to attend elementary school, but in practice they are often kept out by high fees, red tape and complicated admission procedures.

(Reporting by Lucy Hornby and Sabrina Mao; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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Videogames under fire, Hollywood lays low after school shooting

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES | Wed Dec 19, 2012 6:57pm EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The multi-billion-dollar videogame industry came under scrutiny on Wednesday after Hollywood canceled, postponed or played down a slew of movies and TV shows with violent content in the wake of last week's shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.

In Washington, Senator John Rockefeller called for a national study of the impact of violent videogames on children and a review of the rating system.

Although investigators in Newtown, Connecticut, have given no motive for Friday's shooting rampage, some U.S. media have reported that the 20-year-old gunman played popular videogame "Call of Duty" - in which players conduct simulated warfare missions - in the basement of his home.

The gunman, Adam Lanza, killed himself at the scene after gunning down 20 young children, six school employees and his mother.

Rockefeller said he had long been concerned about the impact of violent games and videos on children.

"Major corporations, including the video game industry, make billions on marketing and selling violent content to children. They have a responsibility to protect our children," Rockefeller said in a statement.

The Entertainment Software Association, which represents the $78 billion U.S. videogame industry, on Wednesday offered its "heartfelt prayers and condolences" to the Newtown families.

But it said in a statement that "the search for meaningful solutions must consider the broad range of actual factors that may have contributed to this tragedy.

"Any such study needs to include the years of extensive research that has shown no connection between entertainment and real-life violence," the association said.

NEW 'CALL OF DUTY,' 'HALO' GAMES RAKE IN BILLIONS

Activision Blizzard's latest title in its "Call of Duty" franchise - "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" - hit $1 billion in sales two weeks after its launch last month.

Other popular videogames include Microsoft's "Halo 4," in which players kill evil aliens. The game racked up $220 million in global sales on its launch day in November.

Mike Hickey, an analyst at National Alliance Capital Markets, said backlashes against videogames were not rare, but he was unaware of an instance of games being pulled off store shelves in the past.

When the Columbine school shooting happened in 1999, there was a similar outcry because the two perpetrators were students who played the shooter game "Doom," Hickey told Reuters.

Executives at Hollywood movie studios and TV networks have mostly laid low this week as Americans seek answers to the Newtown slaughter, and discuss how to prevent similar gun violence.

However, content seen as sensitive has been pulled from the airwaves, including an episode of the SyFy TV series "Haven" that contained violent scenes in a high school setting, and the premiere next week of a TLC show called "Best Funeral Ever."

Discovery Channel canceled a third season of its reality series "American Guns" about a family of gun makers. Some radio stations stopped playing pop star Ke$ha's bubbly new single "Die Young" to avoid any potential offense.

Glitzy red carpet premieres for violent upcoming new movies "Jack Reacher," starring Tom Cruise, and "Django Unchained" starring Jamie Foxx, were canceled out of respect for the Newtown victims, but both movies will open in theaters as planned in the next seven days.

INSENSITIVE TODAY, OK TOMORROW?

The Parents TV Council praised the response of the entertainment industry this week, but said it shouldn't be confined to the immediate aftermath of such tragedies.

"If a television network changes its programming because of content that could be insensitive today, why would that same content be appropriate at a later time?," council president Tim Winter said in a statement.

"If producers and performers rightly question whether their industry is complicit in creating a violent media culture that feeds real-life tragedies, why would there be a later time to produce and distribute more of it?," Winter added.

Most major Hollywood stars have remained silent about the potential influence of violent movies on U.S. society. But "Django Unchained" star Foxx was quoted as saying the movie industry should not shirk its responsibility.

"We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn't have a sort of influence," Foxx was quoted as saying while promoting the film in New York.

Director Quentin Tarantino called the Newtown shootings "a horrible tragedy," but in an interview with CNN on Monday he declined to link screen violence with real life events.

"This has gone back all the way down to Shakespeare's days ... when there's violence in the street, the cry becomes 'blame the playmaker.' And you know, I actually think that's a very facile argument to pin on something that's a real life tragedy," Tarantino said.

(Additional reporting by Malathi Nayak in San Francisco, editing by Stacey Joyce)

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