No Dating, No Long Hair, No Pricey Oranges: Dong Mingzhu Sets the Rules at Her New Vocational School
The billionaire chairwoman of Gree Electric opened her technical school's first term with a lesson in campus discipline — and reignited a debate about whether paternalistic company culture belongs in the classroom.
Dong Mingzhu has spent three decades running Gree Electric, the air-conditioner giant she turned into a household name, and she is famous for managing it like an extended family over which she presides. On October 19, that style made the leap from the factory to the classroom: Dong, now principal of the Zhuhai Gree Technical School, opened the school's first-ever term with a "first lesson" laying down campus rules — and the rules went viral.
Her concerns were strikingly domestic. Inspecting the campus supermarket, she found an orange priced at 1.5 yuan and took offense on her students' behalf. "That's fleecing our students," she said, according to a Red Star News report; supermarkets like that would not be allowed to operate on campus. Seeing students with long hair, she arranged for a team of professional hairdressers to volunteer on weekends and cut it for free. And dating was off the table entirely: "Ten-something kids talking about romance — that is not allowed."
A Red Star News clip of the remarks drew more than 8,000 likes, and the arguments it set off ran along familiar lines. On Zhihu, the day's most-discussed question on the story framed it as a choice between "restraint and protection" (束缚还是保护). Supporters pointed out the obvious: these are teenagers, roughly of high-school age, at a private vocational school, and a principal is entitled to set rules. "Aren't these basically high-schoolers?" one Weibo user asked. "What's odd about banning dating? This isn't a public school — the principal makes the rules. Want to date? You can always drop out."
Critics see something else: a billionaire boss importing factory-floor paternalism into education, treating students less like learners than like future employees whose haircuts, snacks and romances all reflect on the company. The orange is the tell. In Dong's world, discipline and care arrive together — she polices the price of fruit because she polices everything, and the free weekend haircuts are the same impulse in a kinder register.
There is a policy backdrop that makes the school more than a stunt. China has spent years pushing vocational education, trying to steer students into skilled trades as the graduate job market saturates, and manufacturers complain they cannot find enough technicians. In her remarks, Dong told the inaugural cohort that skilled talent has many possible paths, name-checking Zhang Xue — a young technician Gree trained — as the kind of person the school could produce. Whether teenagers raised on smartphones will accept a rulebook written like a factory handbook is the question the school's first term will now answer.