SHENZHEN FOREIGN LANGUAGES SCHOOL — The Shenwai Broad of Directors recently announced its decision to expel a sophomore by the name of Marquis de Foofyette. While the Board of Directors maintained that they reached the decision because Mr Foofyette “would score higher in the Water Test should he be transformed into a donkey,” an insider by the pseudonym of Snowball revealed that Mr Foofyette’s expulsion was part of an insidious humanitarian crisis escalating at Shenzhen Foreign Language School.

“He took four pieces of tissue in the bathroom,” choked a teary Mr Snowball, “And they expelled him for it.”

While Shenzhen Middle School (SMS) students have enjoyed an almost inexhaustive supply of toilet paper, bought with taxpayer money, an average Shenwai student, even when diarrhoeal, is allowed a mere three pieces of tissue per day, a policy implemented not to kill less trees, but to allow the oligarchy of superintendents to detect civil disobedience. Whenever the amount of toilet paper was found under the expected values by the end of the day, all students had to take carpentry classes for the following week until the guilty confess. Although the Shenwai Board of Directors have repeatedly denied their authoritarian atrocities, a satellite image taken above SFLS showed a suspicious courtyard, where experts believe the headmaster gleefully tap dance in manure-sodden boots on donations of toilet rolls before a wipe-hungry audience. With its four thousand students and teachers, SFLS has become the largest institute to curtail the usage of toilet paper since the Nazi Germany.

The rest of Shenzhen were appalled at the tissue famine unfolding at SFLS. The right to a clean bottom was first added to the SMS Constitution by Amendment XII in 1986. In 2001, SMS students included it in the Universal Declaration of Shenzhen Student Rights, a time-honouredpassage that shielded our citizens from the tyranny of typhoid and toilet-roll-abstaining tree-lovers. Many freedom-loving SFLSers condemned their superiors, launching an underground resistance campaign known as the #MeFour Movement, but tyranny would not be easily conquered.

“The school knows how to play the revolutionaries against each other,” Mr Bill Of Rights, leader of the resistance, told our reporter. According to Mr Of Rights, the Board of Directors established a tissue hierarchy, with the students at the bottom, with three pieces of tissue per day, teachers in the middle, with five pieces per day, and superintendents at the top, with seven pieces a day. Students were also rewarded additional tissues for high grades and good behaviour, and some of them bought additional rolls with individual income. “The high-scoring intelligentsia has estranged itself from the low-scoring peasants, the faculty gentry from the student liberal, the international department bourgeoisie from the Gaokao proletariat.”

The Shenwai Board of Directors also isolated the resistance from any form of reinforcement, notoriously water-hosing any takeaway deliverers who approach the school and establishing an extensive system of censorship. The volumes censored include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for the seditiously named protagonist Nick Bottom, and Yertle the Turtle, for its subversive portrayal of Yertle.