Alcohol bans on Chinese campuses backed by 65 per cent of students in poll
- Some mainland universities have banned drinking on and even off campus, with one threatening to send photos of drunk students to parents
- Over 80 per cent of students said peers drank regularly, in poll by Communist-affiliated newspaper and questionnaires website
More than 60 per cent of university students in China who took part in an online poll support bans on drinking alcohol on campus.
There has been heated discussion about alcohol bans since some mainland Chinese universities last year clamped down on drinking, with one college in southwestern China threatening to send evidence of students’ drunkenness to their parents.
In an online survey of 2,000 university students by China Youth Daily, the Communist Youth League’s official newspaper, and Wenjuan.com, a questionnaires website, 65 per cent of those who took part sided with a ban, with 21 per cent of them opposing it, the newspaper reported on Thursday.
Among the respondents – 64 per cent of which were male – 83 per cent said many people around them drank regularly, while 75 per cent said they had encountered situations in which their peers were drunk.
In March, Yunnan Arts University announced a ban on campus, saying it would send photographs of drunk students to their parents and invite the parents to visit to help educate their children.
An unnamed senior official from the university was quoted by Guangzhou Daily as saying the order was part of a safety education programme and was aimed at creating a “safe, orderly and harmonious campus environment”.
Xian Fanyi University in the northwestern province of Shaanxi has gone further, by banning its students from drinking alcohol both on and off campus. Students who got into trouble with police for being under the influence of alcohol would be expelled, it said on social media app WeChat.
In November, the university sent patrol teams that included faculty and student volunteers to check restaurants near the campus and tried to persuade restaurant owners not to sell alcoholic drinks to students, Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily reported.
Some of its students told the newspaper they saw the strict rules as “beneficial for us”, but there was a backlash on social media, with many people questioning the right of universities to run students’ lives.
“I don’t think universities have the right to stipulate whether their students can drink alcohol or not,” wrote one commenter on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform. “They are adults, don’t treat them like kids.”
Another wrote: “University students are allowed to marry in China, so why can’t they drink alcohol?”
