CHINA: Education minister dismissed

Facing rising criticism over the quality of schools and a crush of jobless college graduates, China's legislature announced last Monday that it had removed Minister of Education Zhou Ji after six years on the job and replaced him with a deputy, writes Michael Wines for The New York Times. His dismissal follows a corruption scandal involving a university in Wuhan, where Zhou had been mayor and, before that, president of another university. Zhou has not been publicly linked to the corruption charges, which remain under investigation.

Zhou had become a prime target for critics of China's education system, which has stumbled during breakneck expansion that was intended to raise literacy rates and build a world-class university system. The official English-language newspaper China Daily said the education system had been "plagued with problems, such as underfunding of primary and secondary schools and poor standards in higher education". Zhou was widely criticised for moving too slowly to correct such problems.

Late Monday, the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences stated on its website that Zhou would join the organisation, further indicating his departure was unrelated to corruption charges. Still, some Chinese newspaper columnists suggested that Zhou's departure offered the government a chance to address broader corruption in academia, in which excellence and the search for truth had been subverted by politics and the search for a fast buck.
Full report on The New York Times site