Shanghainese youth borrow a page from Hong Kong's regionalist slurs
With the central government moving to compel schools in coastal cities to open university entrance exams to 'non-local' students beginning next year, things are getting a little crazy.
Zhan moved to the city with her parents when she was just four years old and went straight into the local education system, thriving academically throughout her nine years of compulsory education.
She hit her first obstacle when the better public junior middle schools in the city began refusing to accept her as a student due to based on her non-local status.
Instead of putting her into a vocational school or relocating to Jiangxi to let Zhan finish school smoothly but with significantly reduced expectations, the family chose to stay in Shanghai and challenge the system.
"I want to take my gaokao exam here," Zhan has written online, "but I don't want that to depend on my parents' job, income, taxes, assets or pensions. If that's what it takes, then what chance does that leave kids from poor families? How would they be able to change their fate through education?"
Zhan's parents found a privately-run school which agreed to take her, but Shanghai authorities wouldn't budge and Zhan dropped out of junior high the same day all her classmates took their senior high placement exams - many of them going on to top-tier schools, Chinese media have reported.
Zhan has been home-schooling ever since, but now finds herself at the centre of a debate in the city as explosive as it has proven divisive.
When Zhan tried earlier this year to deliver her demand to be allowed to continue with school in the city, in person, to local education authorities, other parents showed up and blocked her from getting close.
When she followed that up with a call to her young and adult interlocutors to debate her in public, police showed up at Zhan's door with the concern that a larger-than-expected turnout would spin out of control.
Zhan and her father, Zhan Quanxi
Zhan has kept her activism mostly confined to her Sina Weibo microblog since then, during which time her story has blown up online and across the media spectrum.
One argument Zhan is putting to her critics is that in the same way that access to education is her right as a citizen, it's also her civic duty to push for it.
The issue of regional discrimination in assigning gaokao seats has come to a head recently due to the Chinese State Council's decision to begin phasing out the practice in major coastal cities in 2013.
Some Shanghainese need to understand people aren't locusts that want only eat all your leaves and crops, but are intelligent creatures that actually create wealth and provide services, and deserve respect.