Father Accused of not Paying Tuition Fee for SonA high school graduate recently accused his father of not paying for his imminent undergraduate study.Lu Wentai, 18, who lives in east China's Zhejiang province, did well in the national matriculation examination in June and was admitted to a university in Xi'an in mid-west China, which demanded tuition and living costs totaling 8,204 yuan (about 1,000 US dollars) when he registers for classes at the end of this month. However, his father, Lu Hongguang, refused to pay the fee, with the excuse that his son did not perform well enough to qualify to enter any of the three renowned universities like Peking University, Qinghua University and the Fudan University. His father, a self-employed farmer operating a freight truck, had agreed to pay for his son's tuition fee when he divorced his wife (a vegetable grower) in 1998. Persuasion from local officials failed to change his mind so the son finally lodged a suit against his father, asking that his father cover all four years of his undergraduate study, which is estimated at about 40,000 yuan (about 4,800 US dollars). But the father claims that he earns only about 5,000 yuan a year and cannot afford to pay his son's tuition alone. Understanding the father's financial difficulty, the court decided that the father cover 8,000 yuan for the first academic year and 5,000 yuan for each of the following three years, and his son has to pay the rest. |
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