The Beijing News
December 12, 2008

A 12-year-old gymnast named Gao Shuai sued his training school yesterday, demanding 150,000 yuan in compensation for being subject to physical abuse and having training withheld.

The photo on the front page of The Beijing News shows Gao's mother displaying video evidence to the court. The school, Beijing's Xiannongtan Sports School, denied all the charges.

Gao started gymnastics training when he was three and won many titles, including national champion in his age group. But when he left the school after a year and seven months, Gao could not perform some of the basic moves he was once able to accomplish easily. The reason, according to his mother, is that his training was withheld: the school does not have any records of his training for the last four months he attended.

Even worse, Gao was diagnosed with depression and is receiving medical treatment. Gao wrote in his diary that the bigger boys used to beat him and threatened him so he would not tell his parents. Gao's mother believes that her son's mental condition is related to the beatings and corporal punishment he received.

The training school retorted that the the alleged "corporal punishment", including lengthy head stands and kneeling for hours, was all part of training. Gao's coach explained that he simply forgot to record the boy's training for four months, and another coach who originally admitted that he received instructions not to teach Gao reversed his testimony in court.

Speaking of kneeling for hours, today's newspaper has a report about a teacher in Fuzhou who is under fire after a photo of seven kneeling students apparently serving out a punishment surfaced on the Internet. The teacher explained that the students, all of whom had broken school rules, weren't actually kneeling. Instead, he was using training he learned in the military to have them stand for one class period, and then sit in a "frog position" for another period.

The Fuzhou Education Bureau called the teacher's methods "improper."