Deportation of Chinese students provokes soul-searching

Deportation of Chinese students using fraudulent documents in New Zealand has provoked soul-searching at home.

A total of 299 Chinese students had been confirmed to have used falsified papers to obtain their visas, and of them, 219 had begun studying in New Zealand, David Mills, head of Immigration New Zealand (INZ), a government agency, told Xinhua.

Twenty-six had already been deported by the end of October, Mills added.

An investigation into the visa scam is still on-going, according to Marc Piercey, a spokesperson for INZ.

Many Chinese called it a shame and expressed their disgust at what is widely perceived to be long-existing, murky practices behind the scandal.

"This does not come as a surprise ... given the chaotic market in which reckless agencies collaborated with overly-ambitious students," said a blogger nicknamed Hang Yin, on Sina Weibo, China's equivalent to Twitter.

HARD DRIVEN

Studying abroad is now no longer exclusively reserved for elites in China, with more family can afford their children's overseas education.

Over 2.2 million Chinese have pursued study overseas from 1978, when China adopted the reform and opening-up policy, to 2011, Yuan Guiren, Minister of Education, said in a September press conference.

In 2011 alone, however, China saw nearly 340,000 citizens going out for education, according to statistics by the Ministry of Education.

Numerous consulting agencies have since prospered, mostly in urban areas, taking in service fees for aiding prospective students' applications.

While a few students decide to do on their own, many more would choose an agency to handle the troublesome application procedure.

It has long been known that a majority of Chinese high school students apply to the U.S. universities via consulting agencies, and many universities have established ties and maintained cooperations with them, said Dr. Stanley Nel, Vice President for International Relations at University of San Francisco, in an October briefing in Beijing.

But as increasingly more Chinese applicants target top destinations like the Ivy League, and consultants who go all-out for big profits in a over-crowded market, a combination of both could provide incentives to dubious practices.