BEIJING, Sept. 27 -- Forty-one teachers in a town in northeastern Liaoning province divorced in a single week earlier this month in the hopes of getting a better chance to retain their jobs, The Beijing News reported Tuesday. The town plans to lay off a number of teachers.

    Tongxing town in Dandong's Zhen'an district has a total of 81 primary and middle school teachers. Two of them are retiring and the town plans to lay off another nine to limit the number of teachers to a total of 70. Ninety-eight will be laid off among a total of over 1,000 teachers in Zhen'an district.

    The layoff plan was detailed in a circular issued by the education bureau of Dandong's Zhen'an district on September 6. However, the document says single parents with underage children will most likely be retained. This policy is believed to have led to the mass divorces among teachers in Tongxing earlier this month.

    Li Xia, an assistant at the Bureau of Civil Affairs in Tongxing, says she has accepted 11 divorces on September 12 alone. Many of them are teachers in the town. The number of divorces last year was 34 altogether.

    According to the circular, laid-off teachers will be reassigned in nine different ways, including working in remote or secluded locations and demissions. Many teachers are loath to the other options. Because the employment reassignments are held every three years, if they are unemployed this time, they will have no chance to reclaim their jobs for the next three years.

    Teaching is an honorable occupation in Tongxing. The monthly salary is 1000 yuan, while annual individual income in the town is only 3000 yuan.

    Wang An, a pseudonym, whose wife is a farmer, is one of the divorced teachers. He cares for his job very much. His wife has no fixed income. The only way she makes money is by running a shop selling lightly fried Chinese bread in the town. If Wang An is reassigned, life will be hard for the couple with four parents and a young son. Because of the huge pressure, Wang An made the decision to divorce. But there is no difference in their daily life, their neighbors say.

    Under this situation, on September 18, a workgroup made up of officials from the local education bureau and the town government moved into the schools to clarify the policy. The leader of the workgroup says the most important thing for them is to make the teachers remarry their former spouses as soon as possible.

    Through the efforts of the workgroup in talking to teachers and further explaining the policy, nine teachers have remarried and 30 teachers have decided to remarry. Two teachers have remained divorced regardless due to irreconcilable differences.

    The municipal government of Dandong held a special meeting and made the decision to suspend the layoff plan among teachers before reaching a new conclusion after further research about excess personnel. The head of the education bureau of the city's Zhen'an district, Zhao Xize, was temporarily suspended from his position.