STRINGENT REQUIREMENTS: Current pension insurance policies could force many migrant workers to withdraw from the system (XINHUA)

Side Effects of Speed

The Beijing Municipal Health Bureau issued a public health report in September, showing a marked increase in birth defects. In 1997, the birth defect rate in Beijing was 90.78 per 10,000; by 2008, it had almost doubled to 170.82. The same trend holds nationwide. On the whole, China now has the highest rate of birth defects in the world.

The causes are obvious: environmental pollution and having children later in life.

Nowadays, the young are working under heavy pressure, sitting long hours in front of computers and having almost no time for physical exercise. Besides, people are exposed to smoking, omnipresent industrial pollution and polluted food. In some regions, even safe drinking water is not guaranteed. No matter whether you are male or female, if you live and work in such an environment day after day, the quality of your future baby is questionable.

Apart from the environment factor, having children later in life is also a problem. Women have to work in dog-eat-dog modern society just as men do. Due to policies that discriminate against them, it's quite possible for some women to miss the best childbearing age.

As the economy speeds up, why is the overall birth quality falling? Looking around the globe, people today are threatened by a huge survival crisis. We must reconsider our way of living and way of work.

The Beijing News

Orientation Matters

Recently, 54 college graduates in Wuhan, Hubei Province, returned to polytechnic schools for training. Due to the difficulty he faced finding a job after graduation, one of them even said, "College education is useless." What did he mean by this statement? Either the students have idled their college days away or the nature of higher education itself is at fault.

In the past few years, almost all colleges have been busy carrying out market-oriented reforms, opening whatever programs that are said to be profitable. For those who still believe that colleges are places to nurture high-caliber talents, they will probably find that they are wrong when it comes time to find a job.

In many other countries, there are many kinds of post-secondary education institutions, which all have clear training objectives. But in China, despite nominal divisions, sometimes there is no actual difference between junior college students and university undergraduates.

The country's development demands both white collars and technical workers. In developed countries the latter makes up the majority of the working class. In China, however, the number of college recruits is sharply increasing, squeezing the number of polytechnic school graduates and creating a bottleneck for China's rapid development. Maybe that is why undergraduates go back to polytechnic schools, since their identity as college graduates doesn't help them.

Beijing Times

Ineffective Coverage

Most migrant workers in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, have participated in local pension insurance program since 1998. But if they want to receive pension annuities, they have to make uninterrupted payments until 2013 according to local regulations. However, some of them will soon retire, which means they would end up with nothing after paying into the system for 10 years.

This is not only happening in Guangzhou. It's unfair to ask migrant workers to suffer the consequences of a defective pension system. Migrant workers now face a dilemma: They can either withdraw from the local pension insurance system and enter old age with no financial support, or they can transfer the insurance contract to their hometown and pay a 50,000-yuan ($7,200) penalty, which is a large sum for most of them.

By the end of 2008, only 17 percent of the country's migrant workers had been covered by pension insurance programs. What is blocking the vast majority of migrant workers from pension insurance? Isn't it because of complicated insurance procedures and some irrational regulations? Unless this problem is properly addressed, migrant workers' passion and even national economic development will be negatively affected.

Dazhong Daily

Not So Real

Before this year's Teachers' Day on September 10, the Ministry of Education announced the 100 winners of the National Award for Distinguished College Teachers. Of these, 90 are university presidents, department deans or other senior school officials.

It is all right for some prestigious scholars to serve as university presidents or department deans. After all, they are well-versed in their field as well as their schools' situations. If they are equally capable of managerial work, the work can be done quite effectively. However, in China's case, it's not always that scholars become school officials but school officials turn themselves into scholars.

As we know, university president is a very time-consuming profession. Once someone assumes such a post, he (she) has to concentrate on heavy managerial work, putting aside teaching and research. This is a big loss for his (her) academic career.

A person's energy is limited. Do those awarded college teachers really have enough time to conduct academic research, carry out administrative work and run profitable programs at the same time? It's quite questionable what kind of scholars they are.

Yangcheng Evening News