It's not a great story, really. Obviously the guy wasn't going to do anything shocking or "conquer" Tianya.

Also the credit cards were never issued, though the fact that they faked students' signatures shows a breach of trust.

Are they really calling it "credit card gate?". I hate that cliche even more than "A Mecca for X". Lazy. I wonder when that started? I know the Edison Chen celeb photo shocker was called yanzhaomen - "erotic photo gate."

FYI, there's no such formal name of Xidian University. Xidian is short for Xi'an Dianzi Keji Daxue which is the Xi'an University of Electronic Technology. The name Xidian is especially confusing to me since there's another famous college which bears the same name - the West Point Military Academy.

The school seems to prefer "Xidian University" over other English-language options: homepage.

Many of China's universities are among the most corrupt organisations in the country. Students routinely get shafted because they are considered to be at the bottom of the hierarchy.

@ stuart

At least the college students in China don't routinely get shot or electrically shocked like in another country's universities.

Yes, but they graduate with worthless "degrees" and no skills whatsoever...including social skills.

Hui, how can anyone possibly confuse Xidian University 西電大學 with West Point 西點軍校, in English or Mandarin? The pronunciation, the characters, the phrasing are distinctly different.

> At least the college students in China don't routinely get shot or electrically shocked like in another country's universities.

Errr.... Students die on Chinese campuses every day. The most common cause of death is suicide (top universities in Beijing will have several suicides a year) but murder is also very common.

Here’s a story from this week where a student “loan shark” was beaten to death by four classmates in Yichang after he demanded a 100 yuan repayment on a 40-yuan loan. link

And Chinese students have been killed or injured over a lot less than 100 yuan, believe me.

It might take me longer to find a case of electrocution but I'm sure I could.

The problem runs deeper than a few corrupt personnel.

Judging by the response from ICBC, I have the feeling that even after all the publicity, the bank was still not aware that they did anything wrong by illegally accessing private information and intruding upon the victims' lives. After all, they got the info from someone representing school authority, right? The latter is supposed to be a patriarchial stand-in for the students' parents, right? So this was as good as offering a "child" his/her 1st card through daddy, right? So what the fcuk was wrong?!

Anyway not more wrong than sending cops to arrest newly-weds for watching porns in the privacy of their home, or wife going to the hubby's employer in tear-and-snot-drenched hysteria to seek "justice" in a case of infidelity. To me the assumption that grown-ups of all ages should still be treated as wayward kids who can use some decision-making parental proxy is among the most squalid aspects of Chinese life.

@ Scott Loar

I'm talking about the names in pinyin as shown here. Surely the two universities' written Mandarin names wouldn't be confused. BTW, the abbreviated 西电 is pretty new to my native ears.

@ David D

You obviously missed my point. As to the 40-yuan execution, mentally retarded kids do this kind of things everywhere. Remember the one who killed dozens of other students in classrooms with guns in Virginia Tech? However, unfortunately the deadliest murder is on campus in US and campus violence is orders of magnitude higher than in China.

Hui, Xidian would never be confused with West Point which is always translated. No one refers to famous West Point as "Xidian" in English, just as no one using English would use pinyin to render Oxford as Niujin.

@ Scott Loar

Yes you are right about the translation. Since I haven't heard about Xidian University before, as I said, my first guess of it is the West Point Academy. I'm sure that not only me who have same impression when seeing the "Xidian University". It's interesting to see such "short circuit" response by multilingual people. Once an American who studied Chinese in China and returned to his hometown, when he saw the traffic sign "Xing", his first response is the Chinese character 行, which accidentally has the same meaning of the English word.

Anyway, giving full name of the University is always better in telling what kind of university it is (electronic tech) and where it locates (Xi'an). Not many Chinese are familiar with the short name and foreigners are even fewer.

Xidian U rank no.2 in the communication engineering major in China. One should not value a university by one issue. The phenomenon is quite common in China, xidian is just an unlucky one to be exposed. The academic level of this University should be judged more comperhensively.