College students are express mailing their dirty laundry home for their parents to wash, an official with State Post Bureau said during an online chat staged by the news center of the two sessions on Sunday.
Most express delivery services on college campus are for college students who mail their dirty clothes home and get clean clothes back by express, said Liu Liangyi, a vice director at the bureau's market supervision department, people.com.cn reported Monday.
Mailing their dirty clothes home proves that China has made rapid progress in logistics, Zhang Zhiyong, a chief expert with Beijing Modern Logistics Research Base at Beijing Wuzi University, told the Global Times on Monday.
"The cost of mailing clothes is cheap for students while the efficiency is high," Zhang said.
This kind of behavior should not be promoted, Lao Kaisheng, an education professor at Capital Normal University, told the Global Times.
"Both school and parents should focus on fostering students' life skills," Lao said. "Otherwise how can they become independent individuals in the future?"
It's common for freshmen to ask their parents to wash their clothes, Sun Xiankui, a student adviser from the Wuhan-based Hankou University, told the Hubei-based news portal cnhubei.com. Some female students even ask their boyfriends to do it, he said.
Not everyone approves.
A freshman from a university in Wuhan, Hubei Province sent a pile of dirty laundry to his parents in nearby Xiangyang in September 2012, cnhubei.com reported. They refused to wash it.