Foreign shoes were given the boot at a secondary school in eastern China in an effort to cure students of their sneaker fever.
According to a February post on Hupu.com, a popular internet forum on sports, a teacher told parents in a group chat message that students would only be allowed to wear domestic shoe brands.
“If we find any student still wearing imported shoes, parents should send domestic shoes to the school for them to change into,” the teacher from privately owned Zijiang Middle School in Jinjiang, a city in Fujian province, reportedly wrote. The regulation was implemented to put a stop to the trend of “invidious comparisons of luxury goods.”
“Some students aren’t competing in their studies but instead are competing for footwear, and they ask their parents to buy expensive imported shoes,” the teacher wrote, adding that the phenomenon ran contrary to the secondary school students’ “austere and healthy image.”