Parents have complained to Southern Metropolis Daily after a teacher at Shangfen Primary School in Shenzhen’s Longhua New Zone punished students by stamping red or blue marks on their faces.  They say it’s no different than branding criminals in ancient times.

A journalist from the paper went to the school and saw three students that had either red or blue stamps on their faces in a third-grade classroom.

A parent surnamed Zhang told the paper that a neighbour’s child came home one day with a blue stamp on his face. After inquiring, he discovered that the teacher gave blue stamps to students he deemed bad and red stamps to students he deemed good.

A student with a blue stamp on his face said he was laughed at by his classmates and could only wash it off when he got home.

It later emerged that as of this school year, the school has had a policy in place of marking children’s notebooks with red or blue stamps to denote whether they have been good or bad.

A new teacher, surnamed Guo, went a step further and marked the students’ faces without permission from her superiors.

The vice principle of the school, surnamed Li, has apologized to students and pledged to train new teachers better in future.

During the Cultural Revolution it was common to punish criminals by pouring black ink over their hair and faces.