Foreign students should not be spoiled rotten

Amid the growing debate on the preferential policies enjoyed by overseas students in China, the Ministry of Education recently said it would make more efforts to ensure Chinese and foreign students get similar but not the same treatment.

Yet many micro bloggers have wrongly assumed the national education policy is to grant preferential treatment to overseas students. All national regulations on overseas students stress the principle of equality, and none of them talks about giving them any privileges vis-��-vis their Chinese counterparts.

According to the ministry's data, about 492,000 overseas students from 196 countries and regions were registered in 2018 to study in China, with 12.8 percent of them getting government scholarship - similar to what the Chinese students got. In fact, in quite a few key universities, the percentage of Chinese students getting scholarships was higher.