News You Might Have Missed: The Price of Eggs and School Scandals

Inflation is one thing, but RMB 30,000 for eggs? (Hint: It's not what you think.) Meanwhile, problems have been cropping up in schools around China and we're waiting to see when the teachers here in Beijing will start demoralizing their students.

Where can you buy Beijing's most expensive eggs? At Beida and Tsinghua. Female students at these two universities bring in the biggest bucks when selling their ova. Frankly, this doesn't shock us that much. (Have you seen what other body parts are being sold on the black market?) To be honest, these figures are a bargain in comparison to 23 chromosomes from Harvard.

The girls at Renmin might not be fetching the same high prices for their goods, but the university has created some polarizing chatter on Weibo over its new admissions policy. The school has decided to allocate five percent of its enrollment for rural applicants from families that have not had a college graduate in three generations. Here's a sampling of netizen reactions:

• "Proud to announce I don't qualify and there are college students in my family. I don't need government assistance!"
• "Now we blame our ancestors for being college students?"
• "It's not that I don't qualify, our whole village qualifies, how does that help us? We can fight to see who gets accepted, what we need is fair living conditions and fair public resources."

Classes aren't just for the fertile or underprivileged. A new "wife academy" has recently opened up in Beijing. The curriculum includes classes on cooking, flower arranging and other vital life skills. The wifely lessons will also focus on emotional management of the home and how to protect their marriage from love rivals. (A note to husbands: Marriage classes do not count as a Christmas present.) Keep an eye on our blog; we're hoping to audit a class or two, as long as we don't need to get married first.

Shaming students seems to have become the latest schooling trend in China, as we've mentioned. The latest tactic: The worst students are being put outside during exams. If getting your desk back inside before the winter isn't incentive enough to study harder, I'm not sure what is.

Does anyone have stories of their own about being shamed in school? Or can you come up with a creative new way to deflate children's self-esteem, because the teachers must surely be running short on ideas by now.

Photos: fertilized-chicken-eggs.com, chinawhisper.com