Parents worry more about bullying than anything else

“THEY forced my ten-year-old son to wear used toilet paper on his head,” complained a mother in Beijing on WeChat, a Chinese social-media site, in 2016. Her post soon went viral. It touched a nerve in a country where school bullying has traditionally been seen as a rite of passage. Her son’s school, one of the best in Beijing, dismissed the brouhaha as “harmless mischief between kids”. But a spate of reports about even more vicious acts of bullying at other schools soon followed.

Officials reacted swiftly, passing anti-bullying legislation at both national and local levels. So today China’s anti-bullying policies are among the world’s toughest. In one Beijing district staff at public schools are required to report incidents of bullying to the local education authority within ten minutes of observing them. (How to punish the bullies is yet to be worked out.)