They arrived on the first day of the new semester wearing makeup and left with red faces from all the scrubbing.
At a secondary school in Guizhou, southern China, a teacher waited for the female students at the entrance with a bucket of water and a towel. He wet it, wrung it out, and wiped a student’s face. Then he used the same towel on the next one, and the next. “A student should look the way she is supposed to look”, he said, smiling, while another staff member prevented those who did not want to cooperate from covering their faces with their hands.
The school justified the scene by saying that 80% of its students are boys who grow up without their parents nearby, and that they therefore run the risk of ‘going to extremes’ with their appearance. Jiangsu Television reported the case without revealing the school’s name to protect the teenage girls. The video, recorded that same week in September 2019, ended up showing something very different from what the school was seeking: the anger of thousands of people who saw nothing but abuse disguised as discipline.