Power erodes justice

It will become an important event in the education history of China.

It is not only because of the covert way a rural girl's opportunity to study at a university was snatched by an imposter in 2004. It is also because the unscrupulousness and the abuse of power witnessed in the entire process undermine the principles of justice and fairness in the system of higher education.

The rural girl Luo Caixia from the county of Shaodong, Central China's Hunan province, was fortunate enough to be enrolled by another university in the second year after she passed the national college entrance examinations. If she had given up without another try and reconciled herself to being a villager all her life, she would have never known of the machinations - by the father of one of her classmates - that had deprived her of the chance to study at another university a year earlier.