I mean, has anyone ever actually found it necessary to offer a 'present' to a professor? If so, how much? Was it 'necessary'? If so, what were you 'buying'?

@mm, whether it's a widespread practice in the West to discriminate against certain races or nationalities of university students and intentionally giving higher grades to local White students, or culturally accepted to offer money to buy grades for your degree in chinese institutions, doesn't mean it's right.

There is a difference of course in the type of red bag you would give at a wedding or during Spring Festival and the type to give to a doctor to insure slightly better treatment or give to a high school teacher to make sure your kid gets more attention for his gaokao preparation. The latter type is bribery plain and simple.

A Chinese national who was a student in, I believe, Iowa, was charged and ultimately convicted of raping an American woman ( of Chinese ancestry) and is now serving 17 years in prison. The story bevame famous for a while because his patents flew to the states and started looking for the victim to bribe her into silence. They were in no way secretive and just felt they needed to get to the rape victim and give her some money and shut her up. They were arrested and no charges filed, citing " cultural differences" but many Chinese people were offended by this, by the idea that bribery is part of Chinese. Offended but in the end they had to admit it was true. More to the case than just that but that is enough. Bribery is part of the Chinese culture and when Chinese people talk of jobs they will go into the bribe process. Who to bribe. How much. It is dishonest but endemic. Not all Chinese believe in it but they do what they must.

However I have always understood laowai were basically exempt from the red bag thing as a bribe goes. Not a wedding gift or gift in general, just bribing for grades, or health service or jobs. I have never heard of this happening even one toms before to a foreigner.

Cultural acceptance of bribery or payments in red envelopes aside, the situation is a bit different for MA/MS/PhD level education, as the student is ostensibly paying for the time the examiners spend listening to the research defense (and then signing off on it). Generally, budget about 500-1000 per person, depending on what level you are at, in what discipline you are in, and at what institution you study for. Just a guess, but I'd be skeptical if it exceeded 5,000 RMB for a PhD level defense in Yunnan.

For the cultural side of things, @mm teacher, you are flat wrong. You say you want to let other cultures stand as they are and not be judged... fair enough. But cultures are not these boxed up entities you think they are that are immutable to change. Each culture is a product of contact with the others. Take Chinese food (which you love to praise for its 5000 year history). Any spice added into the cuisine is derived from peppers which are not endemically Chinese, but from N. and S. America. Prior to 1500 AD, you probably wouldn't recognize a single dish of Chinese cuisine if it had any spice in it aside from black or white pepper, meaning that (at best) modern Chinese food as a 500 year old history, and that presumes no further variations or contact with other cultures and influences on the cuisine. Bit of a misnomer then... Likewise, in terms of education, it is absolutely wrong to say its a "Chinese" thing and cannot be critiqued. There are no "classical" Chinese education institutions that have remained unchanged. All the modern University system is directly imported from the western university system, meaning that it is a free target for critique and discussion.

Bribery is a part of all cultures, in one form or another. There are also differences of degree. Not all red envelopes are bribes. All cultures are processes of change, rapid or slow. Levels of bribery, unsurprisingly, vary in response to numerous factors. Ridiculously high legal salaries can certainly be seen as institutionalized, legalized bribery, but called something else. So examine the laws, examine the rules.
A bit abstract for the present discussion, admittedly.

@Alien, its not abstract for the discussion. levels of "bribery" for lack of a better word tend to be correlated with the strength of institutions that either eliminate the need for them or actively combat them. Western legal systems are insanely complex, so high legal salaries are in some ways an institutionalized bribe to use them in your favor... in China, the higher education system has very mismatched levels of funding and institutionalized payments, so there is a "need" for payments that could amount to bribery in order for the system to function. University researchers are ridiculously underpaid in China (generally, those some are utterly useless and are overpaid at their current salaries—same as everywhere) so the red envelopes fill the void and pay people for their services. In this case, an astute and dedicated reader/evaluator who takes a substantial interest in the project and actively contributes to making it better probably is earning their fee, but many just show up to collect the cash.

Atwillden, you have a lot of specific knowledge on this subject. I'm curious did you experience these situations?

@xb, yes and no—never personally with my own research, but I work for a research institution in town, so this kind of thing comes up.

Nice, I enjoyed the read.

I hope that it will be possible to graduate without giving too many bribes. When they ask for a bribe I can always use magic "ting bu dong" ;) I'm already paying thrice as much as my classmates for tuition and dorm after all.