Child bloggers at a primary school in southwest China's Sichuan Province have set up a cyber home on the school website, though experts warn it could lead to Internet addiction.

 

The blog page on the website of Chengdu Experimental Primary School in the provincial capital features photos, diaries and apologies that a child can be reluctant to make otherwise.

 

"I'm sorry I cut your hair, Yiyun. I didn't know it would hurt you so much and I hope you would forgive me," reads an apology from a second-grader nicknamed "Ear", a boy who mischievously cut a girl's hair.

 

One of the most frequently read blogs was written by Wang Yujia, a girl who criticized her teacher for passing a bicycle that had fallen in front of him.

 

"I was about to say 'Hi' when I saw him walking by, pretending he didn't see it," the girl wrote. "I was shocked. He should've put it back into place. We are taught to do such favors for others. How come our teacher refuses to do something he tells us to do?"

 

Li Yong, the teacher she criticized, said he could not remember the incident, but he "trusted what the girl had seen and should've been more observant."

 

"Children want their teachers to be perfect," he wrote in response to the blog. "Now I have to ask myself: when I criticized the students for not cleaning up the dust on the classroom floor, could it be that they really didn't see it?"

 

In her own response to the posting, the girl's mother thanked Li Yong for being so broad-minded.

 

"In fact I asked Yujia to think twice before she put up that impudent posting," the mother wrote. "But she felt she had to pour it out. She was relieved when she read Li's reply. Teachers make good examples and the children look up to them."

 

Tianfu Morning Post, a Chengdu-based newspaper, collected the postings into a feature story earlier this week titled Primary school student impeaches teacher.

 

Even first-graders write blogs with the help of their parents, often in pinyin as they have not learned to type out all the Chinese characters.

 

The school authorities said each class had a public blog page and all students were encouraged to open their own. Teachers under 40 were requested to write blogs to share experiences or just to vent their feelings.

 

A blogger named "Eternal Child" told the story of a girl who had problems concentrating on her work.

 

"She always chatted with others in class. I was so fed up of having to remind her time and again that I blew up at her, and decided I would talk to her parents about it."

 

When the teacher tried to call the girl's parents, however, she found they did not live in Chengdu.

 

"I talked with the girl in private and found she met her parents only once a month," she said in her blog.

 

The girl's parents had sent her to the provincial capital to receive a better education, and placed her with a local family. She was lonely because her guardian was an elderly lady who spoke little.

 

At the end of her blog, the teacher said she was sorry she did the girl wrong. "I should be a better observer and listener."

 

"Our blog page is a platform for more effective communication between teachers, students and parents," said the school's vice principal who gave only his family name as Li.

 

But a sociologist said it was still too early to assess the benefits or otherwise of blogging for children. "Avid child bloggers might turn out to be Internet junkies," said Prof. Hu Guangwei of the Sichuan Provincial Academy of Social Sciences.

 

China has developed a huge Internet culture, boasting more than 17.5 million bloggers, a 30-fold increase in four years. An estimated 75 million Chinese - more than half the country's estimated 130 million Internet users - are regular blog readers, according to a recent survey by the Internet Society of China.

 

But Internet addiction has proven to be the downside of information technology in China and is blamed for 80 percent of those who have dropped out of college and university, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found in a survey.

 

(Xinhua News Agency November 15, 2006)