Major events on Chinese social media in 2014

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Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong Province has long been a household name to Chinese, thanks to its aggressive promotion campaigns on provincial TV, which said: "Which school offers the best excavator skills? Lanxiang School in Shandong!"

Scandals at Lanxiang Vocational School

Little did the school's management expect that this catchy slogan had already found itself in other seemingly unrelated stories, being used to add a humorous touch, and scandals surrounding school began to emerge starting from September.

A teacher taking his students for a revenge brawl in another province, and the school president violating family planning policies once made headlines in the major press, while social media including Weibo and WeChat understandably made them even more sensational.

Lanxiang did not wish to see such scandals exposed, at least not in the same way as it loved people's free promotion for its excavator courses online. But the more limelight it receives from the press, the more problems are likely to get exposed under the same limelight.

After getting to know both sides of the Lanxiang story, many rural youth began to make more cautious decisions. Statistics show that since 2006, Lanxiang's social influence peaked in October this year before it started to subdue, in an unexpected shift of the social agenda initiated by social media.