A video clip about a group fighting of college students is a pungent illustration of the fanatic seats-occupying phenomenon in Chinese universities.

An online video clip showed that students of two departments in Shandong Normal University, a Jinan-based school, were involved in a fight as they both claimed their rights to the seats in a classroom.

The two came to blows as one side asked the other to leave the room, rooted in the view that the classroom was legitimately allotted to their department by the school. Probably angered by the humiliation, the outsiders refused and at last led to the fight.

Their frenetic scramble for the seats is an increasing commonplace in Chinese universities. Students have to get up early and jostle with one another before establishing a presence in the classrooms.

To skip the onerous and arduous scramble, smart ones decide to keep the seats to themselves by locking the desks or sticking warnings on them. Some even take their toothbrushes and thermos bottles near the seats as a testimony of possession.

“Go and Occupy the Seats” has become a bitter inside joke among the students. The story says that as the semester drew to an end, a boy and a girl were running to the classroom to study. The girl fell on the ground by accident, and vehemently said: “Don't worry about me! Go and occupy the seats!”

According to the school regulation, any student had to study in the classroom assigned to their departments and it forbad seats-reservation of any descriptions. The school also launched sweeping campaigns to clear the classrooms, but most of the efforts fell on stony ground. The students refused to leave their dominations and would rather reinstall themselves in which they were studying.