The new sadness:

Student intake in these unpopular courses will be downsized, even the programs canceled altogether, if less than 60 percent graduating in these subjects in two successive years failed to find work, said the ministry.
This is the latest move of the ministry in ensuring employment for university graduates, whose number will reach 6.8 million in 2012, an increase of 200,000 since the current year.
"I could have opted for majoring in another subject, if the ministry's policy change happened earlier," Wang Huan, a 27-year-old man working with a travel agency, told China Daily on Tuesday.
He majored in Russian language, but found his Bachelor's degree was not good enough to win him a decent job in 2006.
"Now most of my classmates are working in fields that do not require Russian-language skill, and I have forgotten how to speak Russian," he said.

For some double happiness, let's turn to Dickens. In this passage, the great 19th century novelist describes a Chinese junk that docked in London:

…Gaudy dragons and sea monsters disporting themselves from stem to stern, and on the stern a gigantic cock of impossible aspect defying the world…it would look more at home at the top of a public building, or at the top of a mountain…than afloat on the water…But by Jove! Even this is nothing to your surprise when you go down into the cabin. There you get into a torture of perplexity. As what became of all those lanterns hanging to the roof when the junk was out at sea? Whether they dangled there, banging and beating against each other…Whether the idol Chin Tee, of the eighteen arms, enshrined in a celestial Punch’s Show, in the place of honor, ever tumbled out in heavy weather. Whether incense and the joss stick still burnt before her, with faint perfume and a little thread of smoke, while the mighty waves were raging all around. Whether that preposterous tissue-paper umbrella in the corner was always spread, as being a convenient maritime instrument for walking about the decks with in a storm? Whether anybody on the voyage ever read those books printed in characters like bird-cages and fire-traps.