After arriving at the North gate of CCNU at the beginning of this semester, I had to swipe through the newly equipped face-scanner with my identity card. No sooner had I entered the campus did I find out that the facial recognition scanners had appeared at every gate of campus and every dormitory building.
Another difference I soon realized was that once I entered the campus, it’s hard for me to get out again. According to the request given by the Education Bureau, many colleges had taken closed-off management, blocking students from getting out frequently. To me, the first 7 days in campus was bearable, for most of my time was contributed to review and preparation for the final exam left by last semester, but when the exam week came to an end, me and my roommates had received a 7-day pure holiday—no homework, no dormitory removal, and we began to think of sneaking out of the campus. We got out successfully from the South gate at the afternoon of 5th September, thanks to the hearsay that the guard there wouldn’t stop students from getting out. But just the second day of our half-day tour out of school, the South gate suddenly took a close check on students’ gate pass—it’s said that someone had reported that the guard let students without gate pass out. The news, though not a breaking one, still spread really fast among all the students, and had caused a small argument on the ‘CCNU Confession Wall’, the QQ account posted a screenshot in which an anonymous student expressed his/her endorse of the whistle-blowing, the anonymous said, ‘don’t all of you know why our school need to block us inside the campus? I understand that some students need to get out dealing with emergencies, as for those who just go out for entertaining, it’s your own business to be willing to get infected, but at least be responsible for people around you (who don’t want to be infected). ’
Those words had received strong object, many students agreed with a comment that the closed-off was totally useless because college faculties and their relatives could always get in and out of campus freely. One said, ‘it’s not the closed-off us opposite, but the inequality’. Someone joked in the comment section, ‘students don’t have gills for breath, that’s where they’re wrong.’
Not coincidentally, in September, a student from USTC tip-off that many students in the college got out without permission, and his report had caused the university to decide to take stricter measures to stop students from getting out of campus frequently. The whistle-blower was blamed by many of his schoolmates on Zhi Hu, and in the answer area of questions relative to isolated campus, many users consider the closed-off management taken by colleges as an act of formalism, a Procrustean bed.
The CCNU campus is like an isolated island now, with only a few people can come and go freely. Though not so satisfied with this kind of restriction, people in or out of the campus still try hard to accommodate it. The students in the isolated campus, together with restaurants and fruit shops which are on the wrong side of the gate, had figured out a way to guarantee the daily delivery of take-outs. They made up several Wechat groups, and students order fruits and takeaway food by the way of ‘connect the dragon’ (Jielong in Chinese), and the delivery driver of each shop will deliver those food to the dormitory building every noon and afternoon. One time when I was taking my takeout lunch upstairs, a girl call me up, and asked me to invite her into the takeout Wechat group. As she was scanning my QR code on my phone, she said casually, ‘hope the closed-off would end soon.’
‘Hope so.’ I replied.
Author: Qin Hailan
Date: October 10, 2020
Words: 639
