Peking University Bans Meetings at 21 Scenic Areas, from Huangshan to Sanya
A notice approved on September 1 and published ten days later bars Peking University from holding meetings at Badaling, Huangshan, Jiuzhaigou, Sanya and seventeen other scenic areas. Weibo's first reaction was disbelief that it was real; its second was a knowing nod at where the conferences used to go.
Peking University has put in writing where its meetings may not happen: Badaling and the Ming Tombs, the Mountain Resort at Chengde, Wutai, Lake Tai, Putuo, Huangshan, Jiuhua, the Wuyi Mountains, Lushan, Taishan, Songshan, Wudang, Zhangjiajie's Wulingyuan, Baiyun Mountain, the Li River at Guilin, Sanya's coast, Emei and Leshan, Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong, Huangguoshu, Xishuangbanna and Mount Hua. The 21 national scenic areas sit at the center of the university's new "Implementation Measures for Implementing the Requirements of Living a Tight Life" — approved on September 1 and made public on September 11, with an operative line that is blunt: meetings "must not" be convened at any of them.
The first reaction was disbelief. "At first I thought it was a parody," the user who posted the notice's screenshot wrote, in a repost liked more than 5,000 times. "I checked — it's real." In the comment threads beneath the trending topic, some readers assumed the document had to be doctored, on the grounds that no official notice would put things so plainly; one wrote that for a moment they thought they had been transported back to the 1980s.
Others read it as the most honest document of the season. The title's phrase — guo jin rizi, "living a tight life" — is the official catchphrase for institutional austerity, and commentary treated the notice less as a new rule than as an old one finally said out loud. What the ban is really about, one widely read commentary argued, is not mountains and lakes but invoices: the "morning group photo, afternoon cable car, evening banquet" pattern of a conference booked at a resort and filed, on the receipt, as academic exchange. Huangshan and Jiuzhaigou simply make the pattern legible.
The skeptics kept their own tally. "So there was quite a lot of scenic-area conferencing before," one user shrugged. The commentary's sharper point was that naming 21 postcard landscapes only plugs one hole: without approving fewer meetings and demanding agendas and outcomes, next year's script becomes a guesthouse just outside the protected zone, "with a field trip attached." Tight budgets, in its telling, are meant to pull the money out of fruit platters, welcome flowers and backdrop banners and put it back into classrooms and laboratories.
That was the part that outlasted the jokes. "Universities living tight isn't about Peking University running out of money," the commentary concluded. "It's that the public has had enough of public money spent on pomp — while research pleads poverty.