@Peter: Problem with mainstream media is not only about nihilist zombies, postmodernists and lunatics - the mainstream has been feeding us bs for a long time. Read Edward Bernays, PROPAGANDA (pub. in the 1920s; Goebbels liked it, started the modern advertizing industry); or Noam Chomsky (MANUFACTURING CONSENT, about 1986), whom you perhaps don't like, but what he says from his near-anarchist position backs up a number of things that people from the middle or right, especially, have been saying lately. It's all there for those who look.
North Koreans have a somewhat different media problem, but it's related. There's more than one way to confuse a cat.

There are nasty people everywhere doing nasty things. Chances you will be affected are slim. Note that large percentage of the population of Kunming, and many other places in China, eat stinky tofu and seem to be walking around all right. Best not to think about it too much, & adapt. Eat it if you like it, chances of any serious results are pretty small.

Not sure if this is to the point, but I've also heard that the idea of university in Japan is also 'Hard in, easy out' (i.e., easy to graduate) - or at least that it was some years ago.

@927: I wonder how often local undergraduate university students really get interested in their subjects, or are inspired by teachers. When I was an undergraduate university student I had better- than-average marks, but I wasn't really good - I got very interested in some courses, largely thanks to good teachers, but if the teacher himself was not particularly interesting I didn't get interested and perhaps didn't work very hard in that particular course. It was only several years later, when I had been away from university, that I really became deeply interested in certain things, and when I went back to study at a postgraduate level I worked very hard, read everything even suggested about my subject, whether I thought the particular professor was interesting or not. And this had little to do with any hope of, or primary interest in, getting a good job later, etc. - it was a matter of real enthusiasm for learning what I wanted to know, for its own sake.
Two things: first, in my experience anyway, many undergraduate students (such as myself) seemed to require a really good professor before he/she could get interested in the subject matter; this is largely about the immaturity of undergrad students, and also because 20-year-olds have plenty of other things to think about - only later I found that certain fields of study were, to me, fascinating, at which point I would do a very great deal of work whether the instructor was interesting or not.
My impression is that, thanks to China's examination-driven educational system and the emphasis on future career and money-making (not that these are absent in other countries), Chinese students are perhaps better than I was at forcing themselves to do the required work because they want to pass the exams; but I wonder how often students are really inspired by their instructors, or the material that they must learn.
It's not everybody who is going to, or needs to, get deeply interested in academic material, but some sorts of knowledge and thinking are necessary for most people if society is going to work well, in China or anywhere. Who, or what, is at fault here - or is there no problem, or is no one at fault? Anyway, what could or should be done? Opinions?

@kevindeen: can't follow you.