do chinese schools have homework

What is Life Like in Chinese Middle Schools

by That's Mandarin | Jul 1, 2022 | Life In China

What is Life Like for Chinese Middle School Students

Chinese students are known for being good at passing exams. The most important exam senior middle school students in China need to take is 高考 (gāo kǎo). It’s a college entrance exam, which decides what universities they are qualified to enter depending on the score they get in the exam. For most Chinese middle school students, the purpose of studying is to enter a good university. Therefore, they study extremely hard to achieve this goal. You might be interested in knowing what it is like to study in a Chinese middle school. Well, here are five interesting facts about middle schools in China

1. Daily Routine

Chinese middle school students start their first class at 8 in the morning and finish all the classes at 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon. They take seven to eight 40-minute classes every day, with a 10-minute break after each class. The daily learning content covers different subjects including mathematics, English, physics, etc. Students in China should fully concentrate on the learning materials during each class. Any of them can be asked to stand up and answer questions in class. Those with poor school performance may experience prejudice from their classmates. And their teachers keep in touch with their parents in order to help them improve their overall learning abilities.

2. Homework

Since different subjects are taught in Chinese middle schools every day, most Chinese students have to finish a large amount of homework on a daily basis. Therefore, time management is the key for students to improve their learning efficiency. Diligent students manage to finish part of their homework during the lunch break and find time to do some extra reading in the evening. When it comes to the preparation for 高考 (gāo kǎo) – college entrance exam, “cramming” is the teaching style adopted at most schools in China. Which means students need to complete numerous exam-related questions and work on mock exam papers to solidify their knowledge of each subject.

3. Lunch Break

There is a canteen available in most middle schools in China, which means students don’t need to go out to eat lunch. Many students tend to take a nap during the one-hour lunch break, whereas some other students prefer to take a walk in the school. If there is an exam right after the lunch break, most students prepare for the afternoon session a bit earlier in order to focus their attention on the upcoming exam.

4. After-School Tutoring

In China, having a good knowledge of all the compulsory subjects is prerequisite for entering a prestigious university. However, some students are, let’s say, strong in arts subjects but weak in science subjects. Consequently, some teachers organize after-school tutoring on a weekly basis to help these students overcome the difficulties they come across during their studies.

5. Romantic Relationship? No!

In China, middle school students are not encouraged to “fall in love”. Romantic relationships are condemned by most schoolteachers. As they have a negative impact on students’ learning performance. Chinese school teachers believe that what students need to focus on is how to ace the college entrance exam. And they shouldn’t be distracted by any other factors that are not related to their studies.

To find out more interesting phrases and questions in Chinese, check out one of our blog posts 5 Small Talk Phrases in Chinese

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6 Details You Need to Know About Schools in China

There are three questions that I always get from family, friends, and anyone who finds out that I live in China and that my kids don't go to international schools: 

• What's school like in China? 
• Can foreign children really attend local Chinese schools?
• Students spend all day studying, right?

The quick answers are:

• It's quite different.
• Pretty much!

But there's more to it than that.

Foreign children in Chinese schools are not such a foreign sight these days, but they and their family get a totally different experience than what they'd get in their home country or an international school.

With just three years of experience as the mom of a child studying in China, I can't say I know everything, but I do have a good understanding of the system. More so than I had in my eight years just living here or even the five years I was in a classroom teaching.

My teaching memories vs. my son's learning experiences

When I was a teacher, I spent hours creating questions based on Bloom's Taxonomy that test a child's understanding of material.

I'd spend three hours on a Sunday afternoon putting up new bulletin boards or preparing for science experiments.

And I thought that spending only an hour correcting papers at night was pretty darn good.

But schools in China are quite different.

Memorization and regurgitation of facts is the main focus of homework and exams.

I've yet to find a bulletin board in a classroom (though I've seen extra chalkboards decked out with the latest propaganda slogan and accompanying cartoon-like drawings).

Teachers don't take home any work. That means that they actually correct homework during their office hours at school, or parents end up correcting it at home.

I remember my childhood teachers fondly, as kind women and men who had a passion for educating the next generation.

On the contrast, I've never seen my son's math or Chinese teachers smile.

I'm certain that these women are exceptions and that there are many caring teachers in Chinese schools, but the understanding that I have is that teachers are uber-strict and are to be respected and feared.

That said, there are benefits to be had by enrolling expat kids in Chinese schools.

Wiz kids in the making

1. They learn Chinese.  Perhaps it's obvious, but kids who study in schools in China get a great education in the Chinese language, both reading and writing.

Starting the school year, I could still read more than my son.

Ten months and seven hundred words later, I can't say that anymore.

Now, I can read well over 700 Chinese characters...just not the ones that are taught in first grade.

In first grade, they're learning the characters for many of the words that I can speak, but hadn't learned to recognize. 

2. They obtain mean math skills.  Asians are known for being excellent in math, and my son is on track to be a part of that stereotype.

In his book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell explains that part of the reason Chinese excel in math is that since the Chinese words for numbers are all monosyllabic, kids are able to mentally calculate numbers faster and spend more time on difficult problems before giving up.

My son is faster at calculating in Chinese than English.

I can only tell you my phone number in Chinese.

As much as I want him to be equally strong using English for everything, for now I encourage him to use Chinese only when doing math.

Foreign children in Chinese schools will get a real taste of daily school life and are treated like any one of the others.

While it’s frustrating that the teachers won't take into account the challenges my son has faced in being bilingual and potentially having a smaller vocabulary than his peers because of this, it's refreshing to know that he's not being singled out because he lags behind in some areas.

A fellow foreign friend, whose children are also half-Chinese, said that since her kids have the typical black hair and darker skin and speak perfect Chinese, most of their classmates don't even know there's a foreigner in class.

What the guidebooks never told me

4. Teachers use a "chalk and talk" philosophy. Unlike the colorful classrooms of my elementary school years, Chinese classrooms typically have one teaching aid: the chalkboard.

The teacher writes and lectures while students furiously copy the words into their notebooks.

There's very little interaction between teachers and students, and with classrooms containing upwards of 40 or more students, how could you?

A lot of teachers will tell you that they don't like this method of education. A lot of parents do all they can to get their kids into more progressive schools or even international ones.

I do believe there will be change one day. But with the snail-pace that things tend to go, I don't foresee it happening while my kids are studying in China.

I despised it so much that my kids didn't know of its existence until this year.

But I have a new perspective on, and appreciation for, this day as of recently. 

It was the only day all school year that the teachers didn't give any homework.

Even weekends and holidays have the equivalent of one day of homework for each day they're not in school.

As I write this, it's early August and my son is still putting in two hours a day doing homework and studying his second grade textbooks.

But wait, there's more. 

Parents have to attend meetings and lectures, and then write reports on what they learned several times each year! 

Besides that, we have to check the daily homework and have our son make corrections before signing off on it.

6. Schools have unpredictable schedules. Coming from a country where schools put out tentative schedules two to three years in advance, and generally stick to them, it's still hard for me to get used to the unpredictable schedules that schools in China operate on.

We're never quite sure when the term will end and the next will start. Once when they did tell us in advance, they were off by two weeks.

The daily schedule is also unreliable. School officially ends at 3:40 pm, but I never go there before 4:00 pm since it’s a rare occasion when the teacher lets them out on time. Or even within a half hour of that time. Although, I've heard this isn't as much a problem in top-tier cities where schedules tend to be more Western and don't allow for a two-hour midday rest.

Besides not being able to know for sure when school will start and end, you also have to account for the craziness that is the Chinese holiday schedule system.

In America, many holidays are observed on a Monday even if the official holiday happens on the weekend. China, however, celebrates holidays on the exact day, which can be confusing.

To allow people to have a longer holiday weekend, if a one-day holiday falls on a Thursday, kids will have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday off. But they start school on Sunday to make up for having Friday off!

Enrolling in Chinese Schools

Are you interested in having your kids attend Chinese schools?

I wish I could give you a step-by-step guide, but while talking with others, I've found that there's no cut and dry path to follow.

What works in one province won't in another.

We live in a small community, and by virtue of his birth in the country, my son is seen as a Chinese citizen. So enrolling was as simple as taking his passport to the school on registration day and filling out the paperwork like everyone else. We paid the minimal fees for books and uniforms and we were good to go.

I've heard others say that there are tests to ensure that the kids have good speaking and listening skills that are necessary for them to keep up.

The testing makes sense, but I’d stay far away from the schools that hint at needing a gift.

See situations where gift giving is actually appropriate .

Should Foreign Children Attend Chinese Schools?

Are Chinese schools right for everyone? 

No, certainly not. 

For some, it may be a hassle to get the school to accept their foreign-passport-holding child.

Others may be overwhelmed at the sheer amount of homework and work that the parents have to do. 

And honestly, I'm not always sure it's right for us. 

There are no international schools in my area (or more than a handful of foreigners for that matter), and my husband is not convinced that home education is an acceptable alternative to traditional school (even though I have a degree in elementary education).

It also probably doesn't help that home schooling is still illegal in China, so this concept is still quite foreign to my husband.

So, our son attends the local public school until we take the leap and move to the USA.

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14 fascinating teacher interview questions for principals, tips for success if you have a master’s degree and can’t find a job, 14 ways young teachers can get that professional look, which teacher supplies are worth the splurge, 8 business books every teacher should read, conditional admission: everything you need to know, college majors: everything you need to know, 7 things principals can do to make a teacher observation valuable, 3 easy teacher outfits to tackle parent-teacher conferences, how do chinese and american educational systems compare.

It is not an uncommon belief that Chinese students are smarter than their American counterparts.  Education experts, psychologists, and scientists have hypothesized and studied why Chinese students often outperform American students.  Part of the answer lies in the foundational beliefs about the purpose of education.

Aim of Education

In China, learning aims to accumulate knowledge .  Chinese students are taught from the age of 2-3 years that learning is critical to success, and that discipline and strictness are required in that pursuit.  There is a high focus on memorization and a fundamental understanding of calculations—Chinese students are not even allowed to use calculators.

American education, on the other hand, focuses more on creativity and how the student will use the knowledge in society.  Homework is not just memorizing facts and demonstrating skills, but applying originality to the work in the form of critiquing thoughts and challenging the status quo.

Structure of Education

Chinese students stay with the same two or three teachers all the way through elementary school and into primary school, and the teachers are responsible for groups of 40 or more students.  The Chinese teacher thinks, “How can I help this group the most?”  Homework is assigned every day, with assignments over all of the holidays and breaks, and there is strong pressure to perform well on end of year exams.

In contrast, American teachers are encouraged to focus on individual students, creating plans like Individual Education Plans to structure a subject to a specific student’s learning needs.  The American teacher thinks, “How can I help this student the most?”  Many schools have done away with homework altogether, whether because they think students don’t need the extra practice or because students don’t bother to do it.  End of year exams are often viewed as just another test to pass. 

Societal Expectations

In Chinese society, there is a high value on learning and education for future success.  Beginning in preschool, Chinese parents communicate early that their children are expected to succeed in school, which has a very competitive environment.  Students do not typically have time for extra-curricular activities as the school day runs long and then they must complete homework. 

American parents tend to view education and learning as just another part of their children’s lives.  A majority of American children play sports, learn an instrument and socialize with friends from a young age.  School typically does not begin for the American child until five years, which is usually the first formal school experience.  And the American student does not have to strive in a competitive academic environment until late high school and into college as the American educational system is focused on any achievement, not just high grades. 

There are other significant reasons why Chinese students take education more seriously than American students, but the shift in academic focus and thinking seems unlikely for American educators.  However, American students would be wise to take notice of what Chinese students model and incorporate some of those strategies into their own learning. 

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A brief introduction to the Chinese education system

This content is associated with The Open University Childhood and Youth Studies qualification .

Structure of the Chinese education system

In China, education is divided into three categories: basic education, higher education, and adult education. By law, each child must have nine years of compulsory education from primary school (six years) to junior secondary education (three years). 

Basic education

Basic education in China includes pre-school education (usually three years), primary education (six years, usually starting at the age of six) and secondary education (six years).

Secondary education has two routes: academic secondary education and specialized/vocational/technical secondary education. Academic secondary education consists of junior (three years) and senior middle schools (three years). Junior middle school graduates wishing to continue their education take a locally administered entrance exam, on the basis of which they will have the option of i) continuing in an academic senior middle school; or ii) entering a vocational middle school (or leaving school at this point) to receive two to four years of training. Senior middle school graduates wishing to go to universities must take National Higher Education Entrance Exam (Gao Kao). According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, in June 2015, 9.42 million students took the exam.

Higher education

Higher education is further divided into two categories: 1) universities that offer four-year or five-year undergraduate degrees to award academic degree qualifications; and 2) colleges that offer three-year diploma or certificate courses on both academic and vocational subjects.  Postgraduate and doctoral programmes are only offered at universities. 

Adult education

Adult education ranges from primary education to higher education. For example, adult primary education includes Workers’ Primary Schools, Peasants’ Primary Schools in an effort to raise literacy levels in remote areas; adult secondary education includes specialized secondary schools for adults; and adult higher education includes traditional radio/TV universities (now online), most of which offer certificates/diplomas but a few offer regular undergraduate degrees.

Term times and school hours

The academic year is divided into two terms for all the educational institutions: February to mid-July (six weeks of summer vacation) and September to mid/late-January (four weeks of winter vacation).  There are no half-terms.

Most schools start in the early morning (about 7:30 am) to early evening (about 6 pm) with 2 hours lunch break. Many schools have evening self-study classes running from 7 pm-9 pm so students can finish their homework and prepare for endless tests. If schools do not run self-study evening classes, students still have to do their homework at home, usually up to 10 pm. On average, primary school pupils spend about seven to eight hours at school whilst a secondary school student spends about twelve to fourteen hours at school if including lunchtime and evening classes. Due to the fierce competitiveness to get into good universities, the pressure to do well for Gao Kao is intense.  Many schools hold extra morning classes in science and math for three to four hours on Saturdays. If schools do not have Saturday morning classes, most parents would send their children to expensive cramming schools at weekends or organise one-to-one private tuition for their children over the weekend.

Find out more on Chinese education

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China reduces homework load in schools

BEIJING, April 25 (Xinhua) -- Chinese primary and junior high school students will no longer get overloaded by homework from teachers or after-school training institutions.

Primary schools should ensure that students in the first and second grades do not have written homework. Those in higher grades should complete their homework within one hour, a circular issued by the Ministry of Education stated.

Junior high school students will spend a maximum of one and a half hours on written homework each day, the circular said. It called for an appropriate amount of homework, even for weekends and summer and winter holidays.

After-school training institutions are prohibited from giving any homework to primary and junior high school students, the circular said.

Besides the workload amount, schools are required to adjust the form and content of homework in accordance with the traits of different schooling stages and subjects, as well as the needs and abilities of students.

The circular called for assigning diversified homework, covering science, physical exercise, art, social work, and individualized and inter-disciplinary homework.

It also forbids giving homework to parents, directly or indirectly, or leaving homework corrections to parents. Enditem

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China passes law to reduce ‘twin pressures’ of homework and tutoring on children

Law makes local authorities and parents responsible for ensuring children are spared stress of overwork

China has passed a law to reduce the “twin pressures” of homework and off-site tutoring on children.

The official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday the new law, which has not been published in full, makes local governments responsible for ensuring that the twin pressures are reduced and asks parents to arrange their children’s time to account for reasonable rest and exercise, thereby reducing pressure and avoiding internet overuse.

The law will come into force on January 1 next year. China’s education system requires students to take exams from an early age and culminates in the feared university entrance exam at age 18 known as the “gaokao”, where a single score can determine a child’s life trajectory.

Many parents spend a fortune to enrol their children in the best schools or private lessons, which takes a toll on both their finances and the health of the youngsters.

Reducing the pressure on parents is also seen as a way to encourage Chinese people to have more children as the country’s population ages.

Beijing has exercised a more assertive paternal hand this year, from tacking the addiction of youngsters to online games, deemed a form of “spiritual opium”, to clamping down on “blind” worship of internet celebrities .

China’s parliament said on Monday it would consider legislation to punish parents if their young children exhibit “very bad behaviour” or commit crimes.

In recent months, the education ministry has limited gaming hours for minors, allowing them to play online for one hour on Friday, Saturday and Sunday only.

It has also cut back on homework and banned after-school tutoring for major subjects during the weekend and holidays, concerned about the heavy academic burden on overwhelmed children.

At the same time, China is urging young Chinese men to be less “feminine” and more “manly”.

In its “proposal to prevent the feminisation of male adolescents” issued in December, the education ministry urged schools to promote on-campus sports such as football.

Last year, Si Zefu , a member of a top advisory board called the Chinese people’s political consultative conference national committee, won headlines in China by telling delegates that the “feminization” trend among teenagers, if not checked, would harm the development of China.

The backdrop to Beijing’s drive for what could be called more traditional family values is the country’s growing demographic crisis. The latest census data released in May showed that China’s population growth has plunged to its lowest for almost 60 years despite the scrapping of the decades-long one-child policy several years ago.

The number of people of working and child-rearing age is going into decline. There are fewer young adults than there were 10 years ago, for example, something shown by a 31% drop in marriages from 2013 to 2019.

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China passes law to cut homework pressure on students

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The Two-Way

International, china weighs ban on homework; teachers, students argue against.

Bill Chappell

In the hopes of easing pressures on China's students, the country' education officials are considering a ban on written homework. Here, students walk to school in Beijing in June. Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

In the hopes of easing pressures on China's students, the country' education officials are considering a ban on written homework. Here, students walk to school in Beijing in June.

Chinese officials hope to rein in teachers who assign too much homework, as the country's Ministry of Education considers new rules that ban schools from requiring students to complete written tasks at home. Citing undue stress on students, the ministry would also limit the number of exams students take.

The goal of relieving pressure on students was also cited in July, when China's Education agency issued a ban on written homework for first and second graders during the summer vacation. Readers may recall that last autumn, French President Francois Hollande declared his wish to ban homework , as well.

Chinese officials presented a draft version of a long-term education reform plan for public comment last week. The plan calls for cutting homework, replacing it with visits to museums and libraries, and boosting "students' hands-on capabilities through handicrafts or farm work," the Xinhua state news agency reports .

The plan's goals include "raising the senior high school gross enrollment rate to 90 percent, and increasing the higher education gross enrollment rate to 40 percent," according to a press bulletin at the ministry's website .

One rule would prohibit any unified exams for students in the third grade and younger. Students in the fourth grade and above could not be required to take more than two exams per subject in each semester.

The plan would also require that "exam scores and contest awards shall not be used as criteria for school admission in the compulsory education phase."

Another proposal targets extracurricular academic classes, which many Chinese parents rely on to help their kids get ahead.

"Parents of one Shanghai second-grader said they have this year spent nearly 30,000 yuan (US$4,901) on extra classes such as English and mathematics," reports the SINA news site .

In the fight over homework, it seems the teachers may have an unlikely ally: their students.

"It's not that much work," one girl tells The Shanghaiist , in a video that some of her classmates probably hope goes unseen. "Sometimes it takes just half an hour to 40 minutes."

"It takes just 40 minutes to do the homework," another girl says. "If there's more from my mom, then it takes me just a little over an hour."

That's right — Chinese parents sometimes assign homework of their own. As another student explains, his parents require him to complete exercises that are separate from his school studies.

"My parents just bought me some workbooks," he says. "They just want me to learn better and get into a good junior high school."

The push to cut homework has also met with resistance among educators, who say it would undermine their efforts to have students retain what they learn. And teachers tell SINA that for issues like literacy, homework is crucial. Others say homework isn't the real problem.

"If homework or academic assignments are stopped, schools and parents will worry about the possible decline in enrollment rates, which remains the main assessment of education quality," elementary education director Wang Ming, of the National Education Development Research Center, tells China Daily .

"If we want to have a real impact on easing the burden, the assessment and enrollment systems, which still heavily count on examination results, should be adjusted," he says.

In June, Xinhua reported four recent instances of Chinese students killing themselves after they received poor scores on college entrance exams.

And The Shanghaiist reports that in 2011, three young girls "allegedly killed themselves over stress related to school work."

The site also notes that China's education officials have been urging cuts to homework burdens since 1988, with few positive results.

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Five Major Differences Between The Chinese And American Education System

Do Something Awesome; Share With A Friend Who May Benefit

Classrooms across the world are different, typically built upon government policy and cultural norms.

In recent years, classrooms across the Western world have gone through some changes. However, one of the most prominent concerns and discussions across school districts is the need for more innovation, creativity, personalized learning, as well as the freedom to prepare our youth for the 21st-century. The traditional classroom is obsolete, and teaching the way we were even ten years ago requires drastic changes.

Also, teachers in the States used to have a bit more freedom, especially when it came to building a unique curriculum to meet student needs. Albeit things are changing, there is still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to prepare our youth for an unknown job future in the best way possible.

Both local and federal government in America still create and place a lot of weight on standardized tests, as well as provide teaching and learning standards-leaving the teacher out of the discussion.

For local schools to continue to receive funding, public and private schools are required to follow the strings that come attached to those dollars.

In Eastern countries, the most noticeable changes have come down to technology. Although test scores are incredibly critical in the Eastern world, students are slowly starting to take part in 21st-century activities to prepare for the competitive future that awaits. Also, in China, for example, school environments continue to place high levels of pressure on students to compete and maintain high grades.

Below are the five significant differences between Chinese and American classrooms, followed by commentary from American teachers at HAWO American Academy.

Chinese teachers are responsible for larger student bodies in their classrooms than are American teachers. Some Chinese teachers work with more than 30 to 50 students. In America, teachers are beginning to have more freedom to focus on individual student needs. In China’s education world, the focus is more on the collective group of students as a whole. For example, in China, teachers can ask themselves, “What can I do to improve learning as a whole?” While American teachers ask  themselves, “What can I do to improve his or her learning?”

In the American school system after each year or grade, students will usually move on to a different teacher as they continue their education journey. In the Chinese education system, one group of students may have the same teacher throughout their education journey–or only two or three teachers, especially in the primary school years.

Chinese teachers, like American teachers, need to meet specific teaching qualifications.

Exams in the Chinese education system hold most substantial weight, and this pressure comes from both the home as well as the country.

The expectation for high grades has become ingrained in the Chinese culture, and all citizens take letter grades and standardized test scores seriously.

Not only does grading strictly determine the education level of the student, but it is also used to evaluate the teacher’s performance. If students do well on their exams, teachers often get a raise. In America, there can be slight consequences for teachers when it comes to student outcomes and performance on both oral and written exams.

In America, the arts and sports are highly encouraged from a young age. In China, however, there is usually no time for the creative arts or sports, leaving a system that continues to focus on memorization and test scores. However, we are beginning to see more examples of creativity and innovation in China. Although this change is slow and new, it is beginning to bubble to the surface in small ways.

Nationality and Individuality

Chinese students don’t get praised as individuals. For example, if an American or Canadian student does a great piece of work, they may be rewarded with a gold star or a great job sticker. In China, the state celebrates education success as a whole.

I had a chance to chat with some teachers in America and Canada who work for HAWO American Academy–working with Chinese students across the globe. Here is what they told me.

Shaundra Schlapia , “I have learned students in China have homework even during breaks and holidays. I think most students complete homework. In my experience in America, teachers may or may not assign homework during the holidays, and expectations are different during this free time.”

Jen, G ., “In my province (Ontario) Canada, although homework differs from teacher to teacher, we are advised to assign an average of ten minutes per grade per night. Homework has to be purposeful with a significant extension about something the students have learned. They do not focus on learning anything new at home. Also, students in China have a much longer school day. My students tell me they have (subject specific) teachers in elementary schools, while we have a homeroom teacher who teaches most subjects. Finally, class size is a significant difference. In my province, we have a limit of 20 students up to 3rd-grade. My students from China tell me they are in classes of 50+ students.”

Violeta Talavera , “Homework and reinforcement of learning is a significant factor in China. In America, teachers assign homework, however, sometimes teachers do not place as much weight assignments, and for some districts, students don’t always have to complete their work. There are even some school districts that have decided to do away with homework altogether. Others partner up with an outside company to assign homework, and since it’s usually based on technology, students tend to complete it.”

Heather Carter , “One critical difference I’ve noticed is that students in China never stop studying or learning, even during their summer vacation. Whereas students in America, it’s not required for students to study during the summer.”

Miss Davvison , “The difference between American and Chinese classrooms/education is an area that we used to dominate. We saw the importance in the marriage of learning and the intellect. This area, the Chinese culture is sliding quietly ahead of us. Do you see online classes to speak Chinese and other languages bursting at the seams in America, like we are witnessing here in the Chinese culture? Even their respect for the English language, their honor in the classroom and toward their teachers is eyeopening. They place educators on the same levels as our other American icons, which are adored and respected– given the highest praise and reverence. It’s been a surprising, life-changing, yet simultaneously humbling and amazing journey to learn about the differences among our cultures.”

James Seymour , “In China, every student has a pretty good idea where they rank in their class for each core subject.”

Kristy Diane , “In America/Canada students are moved into middle/high school based on where they live. In China, students must test into and apply to middle schools. Also, Chinese high school teachers do home visits before high school starts for welfare checks, and to ensure kids are actual residents of specific areas.

Some other things to consider among the differences include rigor, homework, after-school activities, school hours, sports (or lack thereof), and class size.

In China, rote memorization comes first, whereas in America we are starting to see more and more inquiry-based learning. The State evaluates Chinese teachers on how well their class progresses compared to using data from prior grades and classes over the course of three years or so.”

Sasha Truman Young , “From what several Chinese teachers have told me, discipline is a real problem in America and hardly an issue in China. Also, everybody is learning English in China, but very few people are learning Chinese in America. They speak English when they visit other countries-even in Asian countries, and I find this very ironic.

And finally, I want to piggyback on what Rhonda said about one’s economic level. In both countries, education will be vastly different due to financial means.”

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Explainer: what makes Chinese maths lessons so good?

Associate Professor, Beijing Normal University

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Kan Wei does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Chinese students begin learning their maths facts at a very early age: maths textbooks begin with multiplication in the first semester of second grade, when children are seven years old. In order to understand multiplication, pupils have to memorise the multiplication rhyme: “four times eight is 32, five times eight is 40” and so on, which was invented by ancient Chinese scholars 2,200 years ago.

Stemming from this tradition, most classrooms have few concrete teaching materials for maths lessons. The cultural traditions of Chinese maths education lead people to believe that routine practice is the most efficient way to learn.

This continues today. And as a result, schools in Shanghai have scored highly in recent years on international tests of maths ability. It is this aptitude for maths among Chinese schoolchildren that has led the UK government to announce plans to bring over 60 maths teachers from Shanghai to help teach in centres of excellence.

15 hours a week

The Chinese curriculum in maths is a nine-year programme divided into four mathematical stages, running from primary school to grade 9, when a child is 14 years old. The curriculum sets out four teaching periods a week for maths in primary and junior high schools. However, most schools arrange more than five periods each week.

Because of China’s standardised curriculum and teaching, the national exam system, and the one child policy , teachers and parents in China have big expectations for their students from early on. There is a high degree of parental involvement and parents prioritise their children’s education, especially in maths, which is one of three core curricular in national exams.

A typical teaching period in primary schools is approximately 40 minutes, extending to 45 minutes in secondary school. Teachers often set at least half an hour of homework every day for primary school pupils and more for secondary pupils. So it’s normal for Chinese pupils, particularly secondary and high school students, to spend more than 15 hours per week on maths both in and outside the classroom.

Made to understand

A new compulsory mathematics curriculum was introduced in 2001 and revised in 2011, setting out standards for “number and algebra”, “space and graph”, “statistics and probability” and “practice and applications”.

The goal of maths education in China is to develop conceptual and procedural knowledge through rigid practice. In comparison, the UK maths curriculum is less focused and consistent. China uses whole-class instruction, engaging all students in the material and prompting feedback. This is different to the UK model teaching of maths, which is more focused on small groups and individual attention.

Chinese students are taught to understand numerical relationships and to develop and prove their solutions to problems in front of the whole class. This means students understand whole concepts of maths, allowing them to apply previous knowledge to help them learn new topics.

When a Chinese teacher introduces a new topic, they tend to use different kinds of examples that vary in difficulty .

This way of teaching with variation has been applied either consciously or intuitively in China for a long time . In class, maths teachers also emphasise logical reasoning, prompting pupils with questions such as “why?”, “how?” and “what if?”.

Chinese maths teachers also emphasise the use of precise and elegant mathematical language. In secondary school maths exams, if pupils do not write according to the mathematical format required, marks will be deducted .

Teachers’ time

Nearly all Chinese teachers teach a single subject, rather than multiple subjects. Most of them teach only two classes per day in primary and secondary schools. But compared with their counterparts in the UK, most Chinese math teachers have to deal with larger class sizes without streaming for ability.

Chinese maths teachers usually spend a considerable amount of time each day writing out detailed lesson plans, or correcting homework and marking examination papers. They also have access once a week to locally-organised teachers’ research groups, where they can get suggestions for good lesson plans.

Compared with their counterparts in the UK, Chinese maths teachers are not very good at integrating concepts across the curriculum. Even though pupils spend 15 hours per week learning maths, teachers often complain that they lack time in their teaching schedule. They have to deal with frequent grade-level tests every two or three weeks and school level tests every term.

Some good maths teachers, particularly those who come from quality schools, encourage pupils to learn about the interrelationship mathematics has with daily life. They also give full consideration to meeting the individual needs of the students. They frequently use active participation to check for individual understanding during a lesson, and integrate methods and real life projects in teaching mathematics.

However, most pupils in rural areas have few chances to access to this high-quality teaching. Many Chinese teachers who face the pressure of an examination-oriented education system do not see a reason to do activities that connect maths to real-life. It’s easier to just give students the information required and teach them the process.

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SCHOOL LIFE IN CHINA: RULES, REPORT CARDS, FILES, CLASSES

School life in china.

According to China’s 2020 census and the National Bureau of Statistics of China: . the average years of schooling for people aged 15 and above increased from 9.08 years in 2010 to 9.91 years in 2020, and the illiteracy rate dropped from 4.08 percent to 2.67 percent in the same period. [Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China, May 11, 2021]

Primary and general secondary school students pay a nominal tuition fee. A typical school has few academic and athletic facilities other than a chalkboard, some desks, chairs and a Chinese flag and courtyard where children play. Better schools have a dirt soccer field. Few schools have air conditioning or heating. In the winter, teachers and students are often bundled up in heavy coats and gloves in the classrooms, their breath forming clouds.

Students are swamped with after school classes: music lesson, English, art and martial arts. All these activities are very competitive and rank students. English is graded on five levels.; piano-playing, 10. More than half of preteens take outside lessons. When parents are asked why they enroll their children in such classes the most often heard answer is “to raise the child’s future competitiveness.” When students are studying for major exams, parents switch television on mute so they can study better.

Students try to stay on their teachers good side, following the proverb: “A person who stands under someone else’s roof must bow his head,” If a kid is bullied and his parents are politically influentially they can pressure to have the bully transferred to another school. There are also stories of students getting into schools without taking entrance exams because their parents had a cousin who knew someone in the education bureau.

Pictures of Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, hang on the walls of classrooms. Above the playing fields at schools are signs that say things like “Education Changes Fate” and “Wisdom Leads You to Glory.” The top two school rules are: 1) love the motherland; 2) “Cherish the honor of the group.” The use of instructional technology in China's classrooms is often inadequate. Many schools, particularly in rural area, still rely on blackboard and chalk as their major instructional media

Websites and Films About Schools in China

Good Websites and Sources: School Life in Beijing bvs-os.de/eigenes/china ; Life in New China whatkidscando.org ; Scenes from Primary School Life radio86.co.uk/china-insight/china-perspective/one-mans-china School Life Video YouTube ; Precious Children PBS Show pbs.org/kcts/preciouschildren ; China Education Blog chinaeducationblog.com

See Separate Articles:CHINESE SCHOOLS Factsanddetails.com/China ; CHILD REARING IN CHINA factsanddetails.com ; LITTLE EMPERORS AND MIDDLE CLASS KIDS IN CHINA factsanddetails.com ; VILLAGE SCHOOLS IN 19TH CENTURY CHINA factsanddetails.com ; SCHOOL CURRICULUM IN CHINA factsanddetails.com ; PROBLEMS AT CHINESE SCHOOLS: CHEATING, EXPLOSIONS AND MYOPIA factsanddetails.com ; TEACHERS IN CHINA factsanddetails.com ; PRESCHOOLS AND KINDERGARTEN IN CHINA factsanddetails.com ; PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN CHINA factsanddetails.com ; SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN CHINA factsanddetails.com THE GAOKAO: THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE EXAM factsanddetails.com

Good Websites and Sources on Education in China : History of Education System in China math.ksu.edu ; Center on Chinese Education at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College tc.columbia.edu ; China Today on Chinese Schools chinatoday.com ; China Education Blog chinaeducationblog.com ; Wikipedia article on Chinese Education Wikipedia ; China Education and Research Network (Chinese Government Site) edu.cn/english ; China Education and Research Network Statistics edu.cn/HomePage/english/statistics ; Busy Kids chinadaily.com.cn ; Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) Education Bibliography mclc.osu.edu ; Chinatown Connection chinatownconnection.com ; Education in the 1980s cis.yale.edu ; China Research Paper Search china-research-papers.com

The novel “Triple Door” by Han Han offers insightful description of Chinese schools but it hasn't been translated into English. ‘Village Middle School’ a documentary by Tammy Cheung ( visiblerecord.com is a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the life in a rural school.

“ Senior Year “ (2005), a film by Zhao Hao, is an in-depth examination of how a class of teenagers prepares for the national college entrance exams in China. When it comes to anxiety about how the U.S compares with other nations, there’s always plenty to go around. But for a real wake-up call, nothing can compare to Zhou Hao’s Senior Year, an in-depth examination of how a class of teenagers prepares for the national college entrance exams that will determine their destinies. Faced with mountains of memorization and rigid behavioral standards, most buckle down, but some rebel and some simply crumble under the pressure. Zhou brings tenderness, humor, and quiet outrage to this rare, behind-the-scenes look at China’s educational system.

“” The Village Elementary “ (“ Changchuan cun xiao “) by new director Huang Mei is a deceptively simple film about rural education and poverty. Huang’s honesty, her respect for her subjects,including a charismatically intellectual, politically aware, but sadly frustrated Sichuanese elementary teacher, gives the film a dirt-poor lyricism that tightly binds the minute details of individual lives to larger issues of political powerlessness and economic dependence.”

RECOMMENDED BOOKS: School Life” “Studying in China: A Practical Handbook for Students” by Patrick McAloon Amazon.com ; “Other Rivers: A Chinese Education” by Peter Hessler Amazon.com ; “Educating Young Giants: What Kids Learn (And Don’t Learn) in China and America” by N. Pine (2012) Amazon.com ; Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve by Lenora Chu, Emily Woo Zeller, et al. Amazon.com ; “Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood” by Shih-Wen Sue Chen Amazon.com ; “Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China” by Andrew B. Kipnis Amazon.com ; “No School Left Behind” by Wei Gao and Xianwei Liu (2023) Amazon.com ; Preschool: “Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan, and the United States” by Joseph Tobin, Yeh Hsueh, et al. Amazon.com ; “Embracing the New Two-Child Policy Era: Challenge and Countermeasures of Early Care and Education in China”by Xiumin Hong, Wenting Zhu, et al. (2022) Amazon.com ; Cram Schools: “The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry” by Le Lin Amazon.com ; “Demand for Private Supplementary Tutoring in China: Parents' Decision-Making” by Junyan Liu Amazon.com ; Vocational Education: “Class Work: Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth” by Terry Woronov Amazon.com ; “Improving Competitiveness through Human Resource Development in China: The Role of Vocational Education” by Min Min and Ying Zhu Amazon.com

School Day and School Year in China

School begins around 7:30 with a flag raising ceremony and a lecture from the principal who speaks through a bullhorn. Describing the first day of school in a small town school, Peter Hessler wrote in The New Yorker, “The loudspeakers crackle, and music came on for the flag-raising. The older children, wearing the red kerchiefs of the Young Pioneers, marched in place while the national anthem played."

Children typically go to school from 7:00am to 4:00pm. Elementary school begins at 7:30am. They study mathematics, reading, writing and propaganda, and often write on thin, brittle paper that feels like onion skin and glows if held up to the light. During recess children do calisthenics and relaxation exercises that consist of pressing two finger on one's eyes, nose or cheeks.

Middle class children fill the hours after school with homework, music lesson and other enrichment programs. English classes and math Olympics are popular. Parents spend sizable chunks of money on classes at computer schools and language academies. Children often have lots of homework, which they often do in copybooks in front of their parents.

Calvin Henrick wrote in the Boston Globe, “Medfield social studies teacher Richard DeSorgher, who spent six weeks in Bengbu, said the differences between the two systems are stark. He said students in China spend long hours at school, and extra time being tutored on nights and weekends for college entrance exams. Class sizes of up to 60 students mean rote learning is common, he said. DeSorgher said he asked a Chinese-born student living in Medfield for advice before the trip. “He said, “Make it fun. The more you can make it fun, the more they’ll want to continue to learn English.” So I went over there armed with a ton of American candy."I think I was kind of an oddity there," DeSorgher added. “I put them in groups, I had them standing and sitting. It was just very different, I think." [Source: Calvin Henrick, Boston Globe, March 20, 2011]

Languages and Schools in China

The teaching language in China is Putonghua, (Mandarin, Standard Chinese). Occasionally, local dialects are used as the teaching language in minority areas; however, the teaching of Mandarin Chinese is strictly enforced and is mostly used alongside local minority languages. Languages in which classes are taught include , Yue (Cantonese), Wu (Shanghaiese), Minbei (Fuzhou), Minnan (Hokkien-Taiwanese), Xiang, Gan, Hakka dialects. In recent years there has been a movement to have all classes in schools in Putonghua.

Chinese is replacing the languages of minorities with Mandarin Chinese as the main teaching medium in schools despite the existence of laws aimed at preserving the languages of minorities. In October 2010, at least 1,000 ethnic Tibetan students in the town on Tongrem (Rebkong) in Qinghai Province protested curbs against the use of the Tibetan language. The protests spread to other towns in northwestern China, and attracted not university students but also high school students angry over plans to scrap the two language system and make Chinese the only instruction in school, London-based Free Tibet rights said. [Source: AFP, Reuters, South China Morning Post, October 22, 2010]

See Separate Articles REPRESSION IN XINJIANG AND DISCRIMINATION AGAINST UYGHURS factsanddetails.com ; EDUCATION IN TIBET factsanddetails.com

School Costs in China

Parents generally have to pay fees for books and uniforms, which are required at most schools. Often they also have to pay for things like electricity, paper, snacks and even report cards. In Beijing, parents have to dish out $20 or more a month for kindergarten. Often the fees add up to several hundred dollars a year. Many rural families can't afford these fees nor can they afford to lose the help of their children in the fields.

Ting Ni wrote in the World Education Encyclopedia: “ Although the law says the nine-year compulsory education should be free for all children, schools, often driven by economic necessity, ask parents to pay many fees, such as examination paper fees, school construction fees, water fees, and after-school coaching fees. Sometimes due to the high fees charged by schools, rural parents have to pull their children out of school (Lin 1999). [Source: Ting Ni, World Education Encyclopedia, Gale Group Inc., 2001]

Secondary students have to pay a long list of fees, including those for tuition, dormitory rooms, textbooks, and computer access. The fees often are between $200 and $300 a year and are often more than what rural farmers make in a year. Students whose families are behind on their payments are often scolded by their teachers in front of the other students in class. Teachers in turn are pressured by administrators to collect. Those that don’t collect have money docked from their salary.

Rural families often make great sacrifices to send their children to school. The children in turn feel a lot of pressure to perform well, get good jobs and provide for the parents and relatives that made so many sacrifices.

Chinese families spend more on education than anything else except housing. Education is a huge growth industry. Between 2002 and 2005 the market for courses, books and materials more than doubled to $90 billion.

In the mid 2000s, tuition fees were waved for 150 million rural students as part of an effort to narrow the standard-of-living gap between the rich coastal areas and the impoverished countryside. Students became exempt from tuition and incidental fees for their nine-year compulsory education beginning in the spring of 2007. The effort costs the Chinese government about $2 billion per year

Exams, Report Cards and Memorization in Chinese Schools

Students must memorize vast amounts of information to pass major tests, with the biggest determining factor in who attends elite universities and who does not being the “gaokao”, China’s grueling, ultra-competitive university entrance exam. Chinese spend much of their childhood memorizing and writing characters. By the time a student is 15 he or she has spent four or five hours a day over nine years learning to write a minimum of 3,000 characters.

Stephen Wong wrote in the Asia Times, “It's possible that no other country has as many exams as China. From school admissions and job recruitment to promotion in the civil service, exams are an inseparable part of Chinese life. Incomplete statistics show that there are 200 government-organized nationwide examinations and that nearly 40 million people take national tests each year. The number would be much bigger if local-level tests were included on the list. [Source:Stephen Wong Asia Times, August 22, 2009]

There is a strong emphasis on studying and academics over sports. In many school less than two hours a week is devoted to sports. A Stanford University math professor who studied the math curricula in East Asia told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a very small body of factual mathematics that students need to learn but they need to learn it really, rally well.

Elementary school report cards are 30 pages long. On them are measurements of weight, height, eyesight, hearing, lung capacity accompanied by information on where one fits in with the national average. Teachers give grades, but parents and other students are encouraged to add their assessments, usually pointing out some fault or weakness. On one page there are blank faces where students are expected to evaluate themselves with smiley or frowning faces for things like “takes care of himself” and “cherishes the fruits of physical labor.” A typical teacher evaluation goes: “Everybody loves you. Your thinking is very nimble and the teacher and the other students all admire you. But only if cleverness is combined with hard work will you have improvement.”[Source: Peter Hessler, The New Yorker, March 31, 2008]

Silly School Rules in China

All the students at Luolang Elementary School, a yellow-and-orange concrete structure off a winding mountain road in Huangping county in southern China, know the key rules: Do not run in the halls. Take your seat before the bell rings. Raise your hand to ask a question...and salute all cars when they pass by. Education officials were sharply criticized when news of the rule found its way to the Internet. This is just pitiful, wrote one in a post last year. Only inept officials would burden children with such a requirement rather than install speed bumps, others insisted. [Source: Sharon Lafraniere, New York Times, October 25, 2009]

Sharon Lafraniere wrote in the New York Times, “Education officials say compliance is strictly voluntary. Asked whether they follow it, elementary students here tend to burst into nervous giggles. The rule’s purpose is twofold: to keep children safer on the county’s corkscrew mountain roads and to teach manners. Nearly 30 schools are located along roads without sidewalks or speed bumps. Signs posting speed limits are few and far between; virtually no signs indicate a school nearby.

“Long Guoping, deputy chief of the county education bureau, said those measures were coming. Little by little, the government is installing them, he said. In the meantime, the salute might avoid some accidents, he said. It allows the drivers to notice the children and the children to notice the drivers.”

“Luo Rongmei, who teaches first grade at Luolang Elementary School, is all for it. Since they started saluting there has not been one traffic accident, she said, as the students ran and shouted in the yard. Guo Yuozhang, 63, whose grandson attends the Luolang school, said he was more ambivalent. If the cars come from one direction, that is not too bad, said. Cars coming in both directions is a bigger hassle. Sometimes they are just turning in circles and they get kind of stuck, he said. He spun around to illustrate the point, smiling slyly.”

School Files in China

Everyone in China who has been to high school has a file — a sealed Manila envelope stamped top secret, containing grades, test results, evaluations by fellow students and teachers, and if they have one a Communist Party application and proof of a college degree. Sharon Lafraniere wrote in New York Times, “The files are irreplaceable histories of achievement and failure, the starting point for potential employers, government officials and others judging an individual’s worth. Often keys to the future, they are locked tight in government, school or workplace cabinets to eliminate any chance they might vanish. [Source: Sharon Lafraniere, New York Times, July 26, 2009]

The files are crucial for getting any kind of good job. Heaven forbid if they ever get lost . But that is exactly what happened to Xue Longlong and 10 others, all 2006 college graduates with exemplary records, all from poor families living in Wubu, a gritty north-central town on the wide banks of the Yellow River. With the Manila folders went their futures, they say.

“While not quite as important as in Communist China’s early days,” Lafraniere wrote , “when it was a powerful tool of social control, the file, called a dangan, is an absolute requirement for state employment and a means to bolster a candidate’s chances for some private-sector jobs, labor experts say. Because documents are collected over several years and signed by many people, they are virtually impossible to replicate.”

“Today, Xue, who had hoped to work at a state-owned oil company, sells real estate door to door, a step up from past jobs passing out leaflets and serving drinks at an Internet cafe. Wang Yong, who aspired to be a teacher or a bank officer, works odd jobs. Wang Jindong, who had a shot at a job at a state chemical firm, is a construction day laborer, earning less than $10 a day...If you don’t have it, just forget it! Wang Jindong, now 27, said of his file. No matter how capable you are, they will not hire you. Their first reaction is that you are a crook.”

Learning in Chinese Schools

There are often 40 to 50 students in a classroom and can be up to 60 kids in a class. Students sit in rows and are often expected to sit upright with serious expressions on their faces. The school day often begins with the teacher tapping her pointer on the desk and the students rising in unison and dutifully shouting, “Hello, teacher!” The teacher them signals every everyone to sit down and leads them like a conductor as they shout out memorization drills. Having some many students encourages rote learning rather than student-driven activities and discussions. One Chinese educator told the New York Times, “You let them free, but it’s such a big group, its hard to get them back. It’s a real challenge how to get the balance right.”

Ting Ni wrote in the World Education Encyclopedia: While some subjects (such as English, geometry, or algebra) provide more opportunities for students to practice or to drill, the structure of the lessons, their pace, and the nature of questioning are all determined by the teachers, who control the nature of classroom interactions. The most common experience for students is to go through the forty-five minute period without talking once, without being called on individually, or without asking a question. Students are taught that important knowledge comes from teachers and textbooks; that learning involves listening, thinking, and silent practice; and that the knowledge espoused by teachers and textbooks is not to be challenged, despite the lack of connection between course material and the immediate lives of the students. [Source: Ting Ni, World Education Encyclopedia, Gale Group Inc., 2001]

A fashion designer told the Washington Post, “Chinese people are educated to be the same.” Schools emphasize group activities and discipline and repeating what one has been taught and play down individualism and critical thinking. Class activities generally features students dressed exactly the same — boys in blue tracks suits and girls in red ones — performing the same kind of banner-waving drills or marches.

Reforms include using a wide variety of textbooks, removing dense passages from textbooks, reducing class size, using groups and partners and more hands-on learning, encouraging students to figure out problems themselves and emphasizing project-based learning. Private schools are at the forefront of these reforms. They often have many clubs and activities outside of school. The main thing that holds these kinds of reforms back is that there are not enough teachers trained in such methods.

Problems with Learning in China

The educational system stresses obedience and rote learning over creativity. Children are taught to be obedient and conform in accordance with an old Chinese proverb that goes: “The bird that flies out its flock is the first one targeted by hunters.” When children learn to write they began with specific strokes and copy them over rand over. They then combines these into characters and copy them over and over.

Peter Hessler wrote in The New Yorker, “Everything revolves around repetition and memorization, which works beautifully for math. But other subjects often developed into scattered facts that careen between traditional and modern, Chinese and foreign. I was amazed by the stuff Wei Kia learned — the most incredible assortment of de-systemized knowledge that had even been crammed into a child in the forth grade.” [Source: Peter Hessler, The New Yorker, March 31, 2008]

“In English he memorized odd vocabulary lists: “Spaceship,” “pizza,” “astronaut.” A textbook called “Environmental and Sustainable Development” must have spawned from some collaboration with a foreign N.G.O. It taught the “the five R’s” — Reduce, Reevaluate, Reuse, Recycle, Rescue Wildlife — which make no sense when translated into a language with no alphabet. Fifth graders memorized pages of instructions for Microsoft Front Page XP.”

Among the things that the students learned were that Google was started by a brother and sister in America, that the Buddha in Leshan was 70 meters tall. Wei didn’t know what a province was, thought San Francisco was in China and thought the current leader of China was Mao Zedong, Among the things he did for homework was recite the Tao te Ching.”

A proposal to reform the curriculum in Chinese schools in 2013 suggested reducing the value of the English portion of the multisubject test and increasing the value of the Chinese and social or natural sciences (students can choose) parts. Adam Minter of Bloomberg wrote: Perhaps even more significant, the English section would also put a stronger emphasis on practical listening skills, rather than grammar and reading. Though the proposal is local, the fact that it’s happening in China’s capital is a signal that other schools can — and probably should — consider similar reforms.[Source: Adam Minter, Bloomberg, October 29, 2013]

Homework-Doing Robots and Classrooms Facial Recognition

“On Weibo, a popular social media platform, commenters who had suffered through endless hours of similar homework themselves were split, though most appeared to be sympathetic or even impressed. “Give her a break. How meaningful is copying anyway?” one commenter asked. “The difference between humans and other animals is that they know how to make and use tools,” another reasoned. “This young lady already knows how to do this.”

“The Chinese newspaper reported that the girl had spent about 800 yuan, or $120, that she had saved from Lunar New Year presents to buy the robot. She finished a slew of text-copying assignments in two days, much faster than her mother expected, the newspaper reported. The mother discovered — and then smashed — the machine while cleaning the girl’s room, according to the article. Such technology typically uses robotics to drag a pen across an anchored piece of paper. Some of the products feature pre-loaded handwriting styles, while some allow users to digitize and copy their own handwriting.

In 2018, a network of surveillance cameras backed by facial-recognition technology was installed into every classroom at a high school in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Sup China reported: Praised by the school’s principal as “insightful eyes,” the cameras are capable of capturing and analyzing students’ body movements and facial expressions during class, offering teachers real-time feedback on how attentive their students are. According to Sina News, with the newly installed cameras that can tell who might be discreetly taking a nap, students at Hangzhou No. 11 High School are more focused in class than ever. “Before the introduction of these cameras, I sometimes took naps or did other stuff while having classes that I don’t like,” one student told reporters, adding that his classmates all felt the same. “But now, I always feel there are mysterious eyes staring at me, so I don’t dare do things that are unrelated to class anymore.” [Source: Jiayun Feng: Sup China, May 16, 2018]

“Based on data collected by these cameras, a system automatically creates a report at the end of each day that includes information about how many students look neutral, happy, sad, angry, scared, abhorrent, or surprised. “This system not only motivates students to study harder, but it also supervises the quality of teaching,” said the school’s vice principal. On the social media platform Weibo, many people expressed disgust at the measure, criticizing it as “inhumane” and accusing the school of going too far to monitor students’ facial expressions. “Big boss is watching you,” one commenter wrote. In a reference to a recent statement by the U.S. Embassy in China, in which the U.S. government called Chinese “political correctness” “Orwellian nonsense,” another internet user wrote, “This looks like Orwellian education.”

Cram Schools in China

Many school-age children in China attend cram schools to augment their education mainly with the goal of doing well on tests like the gaokao, the university-entrance exam. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education the after-school tutoring is a lucrative business sector that has grown rapidly over the past few years as the country’s education system became increasingly cutthroat. By some estimates it is worth $120 billion a year. So much money is spent by China’s middle class on cram school education that economists say it deprived other economic sectors of money. [Source: SupChina, June 16, 2021]

According to the South China Morning Post in 2019: Beijing-based New Oriental and TAL Education Group, the two largest listed education companies, both reported accelerating double-digit revenue growth in the first half of this year. New Oriental said total student enrollment in academic subject tutoring and test preparation courses increased by 44.9 per cent year-over-year to 2.06 million for the quarter ended May 31. TAL, meanwhile, said total student enrolment surged by 88.7 per cent from a year earlier to nearly 2 million students in the same quarter. [Source: Jane Cai, South China Morning Post, October 16, 2018]

According to a survey of nearly 52,000 parents across the nation, most of them middle class, conducted by website Sina.com in November 2017, spending on education accounted for an average 20 per cent of household income. About 90 per cent of preschool children and 81 per cent of K12 students, aged six to 18, have attended tutoring courses. Families with preschoolers spent an average 26 per cent of their income on education, while those with K12 children had education-related outlays of 20 per cent of their income. Of all the respondents, about 61 per cent said they had plans to send their children to study overseas.

According to Sup China: “Concerned about the market’s unchecked growth, which was largely fueled by exploitation of parental paranoia and problematic tactics like false ads and misleading campaigns, Chinese regulators have introduced a plethora of restrictions, including caps on fees that firms can charge and time limits on after-school programs. In April 2021, the education authorities of Beijing’s municipal government hit four Chinese education giants with fines for deceptive pricing and misleading marketing tactics, following a previous mandate ordering local tutoring schools to put a temporary halt to offline teaching. A month later, during a meeting on health and education, Xí Jìnpíng lashed out at the sector’s “disorderly development” and vowed to rectify it. In may, rumors surfaced that China was preparing to ban private education companies from going public, which led to a major sell-off of education shares. [Source: Jiayun Feng, SupChina, June 16, 2021]

Cram School Life in China

Studying a wider range of subjects in more depth than the public school syllabus requires and getting a head start by studying topics before they are covered in school have become common tactics used by parents trying to help their children compete in a challenging educational environment in China. “Chinese parents, especially the middle class, understand it’s hard to climb the ladder of success if children from ordinary families do not possess degrees from a good university,” Hu Xingdou, an independent economist, said. “Amid fear and anxiety, the middle class are pushing their children to study hard and are willing to save every penny to invest in education.”

Jiang is from a rural part of northern Shanxi province, but she graduated from a top university in Beijing. Her annual income of 100,000 yuan (US$14,500) is twice that of the average urban worker’s in the city.That makes her a member of China’s so-called middle class of three million, with a yearly salary of between US$3,650 and US$36,500, according to the World Bank definition.

She attributes this success to the education she received. So now, Jiang spends 12,000 yuan a year on maths lessons for her daughter, 12,000 yuan on Chinese, and 25,000 yuan on English. On top of that, she has spent about 50,000 yuan on dancing and piano lessons for Jiejie, and 20,000 yuan on an overseas trip to help the child “gain some international experience”. Education expenses account for about 30 per cent of her household income, she said. “Don’t call me middle class – my husband and I have never bought any clothes priced higher than 100 yuan since we had Jiejie,” she said. “We’re saving every penny for our daughter, as education provides the only channel in China for ordinary people like me to secure a decent life in the future.”

China Cracksdown on Homework and Cram School Pressures

The BBC reported: “The law received a mixed reaction on social media site Weibo, with some users praising the drive for good parenting while others questioned whether local authorities or the parents themselves would be up to the task. "I work 996 [from 9am to 9pm, six days a week], and when I come home at night I still need to carry out family education?" one user asked, quoted by the South China Morning Post newspaper. "You can't exploit the workers and still ask them to have children." [Source: BBC, October 23, 2021]

In August 2021, China banned written exams for six and seven year olds. Officials warned at the time that students' physical and mental health was being harmed. In July, Beijing stripped online tutoring firms operating in the country of the ability to make a profit from teaching core subjects. China's parliament is also considering legislation that would punish parents if their children exhibit what it regards as "very bad behaviour" or commit crimes. In recent months, the education ministry has limited gaming hours for minors, allowing them to play online for one hour on Friday, Saturday and Sunday only.

In 2019, Zhejiang province published draft guideline proposing students go to bed at a decent hour — 9:00pm for primary school students and 10:00pm for middle school students — even if they hadn’t finished their homework. According to AFP: “The proposal has touched a nerve in China, with some parents concerned that reducing the homework burden will put children at a disadvantage when preparing for the highly-competitive college entrance exam. [Source: Helen Roxburgh and Qian Ye, AFP, October 31, 2019]

Harvard MBA Who Did Poorly in Chinese Schools

Raymond Li of the South China Morning Post interviewed Yu Zhibo, who was a “mainland parents fear, an academic failure for a child. Now 29, the Harvard MBA holder explains how moving to the United States to study let him explore his individuality and find his way, things he said he could not have done at home.” How badly did you do at school? Li asked. Yu said, “Here are two examples: when I was nine, I had to repeat grade three because I did so poorly in my studies after my family moved from Shanghai to Chengdu. Then, when I was at secondary school, my overall scores put me third from the bottom in my class.” [Source: Raymond Li, South China Morning Post, January 16, 2011]

Was that because you did not study hard enough? “I actually studied harder than any other classmate. In order to help me catch up in maths, physics and chemistry, my parents once hired threeafter-school teachers. But every time I came across a maths formula or the periodic table of elements, I told myself I would not want to see them again in my life. I liked geology and history and excelled at sports. But that counted for little in the way people looked at you.”

How did you feel at the time? “Some of my classmates made fun of me as someone with a well-developed body but no brain. The pressure to perform well in science subjects in order to enter a university became so intense that I felt I could hardly breathe. I was so depressed that I was loath to study and wanted to run away.”

What prompted you to go to the US? “It was a summer trip in 1996; I had the chance to live with an ordinary American family in Oregon for three weeks. What struck me most were small details in daily life. For example, I was driving with the mother one day when she stopped at a stop sign, even though there was no pedestrian in sight. Another time, she told me to pick up a Coke can I threw on the ground and reminded me it wasn't the right thing to do. I was very impressed and wondered how someone from a blue-collar family with not much education could care so much about the environment. Later I realized it must be the way people were taught. On the other hand, nobody asked how I'd scored in maths or chemistry and I got the chance to play a lot. I had such a pleasant three weeks that two years later, I enrolled in an Oregon high school.”

What were the highlights in your studies and work in the U.S.” “I spent three months working on an Oregon farm after graduating from high school. There I had my first taste of the thrill and hardship of an American farmer. Inspired by what my father did in 2002 to promote Chinese literature studies via an international forum, I launched a Greater China Supply Chain Forum at Michigan State University. In 2004, I got my first job at Dell headquarters in Austin, Texas, and went on to study at Harvard. The Harvard offer did not come easy as I had to sit the GMAT three times. Now I'm a senior assistant to Yang Yuanqing, chief executive of Lenovo. The most important thing about studying in the US was that I felt I could decide what I wanted and what I enjoyed.

Advise from Harvard MBA Who Did Poorly in Chinese Schools

Raymond Li of the South China Morning Post asked Harvard MBA Yu Zhibo: You have written a book referring to yourself as a boy who lost out at the starting line. Is there a "starting line" in a person's career or life and once you lose out at the beginning you lose all the way? “I do believe there is such a line, but what I don't share with many mainland parents is that there is more than one starting line in your life. For example, you will have a starting line at primary school and another one at secondary school, and even when you are 40 or 50. It depends how you look at your life. I didn't do well at primary and secondary schools, but it doesn't mean I will be at the losing end all my life. Every time you are back on your feet, it's a new starting line.” [Source: Raymond Li, South China Morning Post, January 16, 2011]

What would you tell mainland parents who are anxious about their children's future? “Do not give the children pressure, because it might force them to rebel or go to extremes. Parents should back off a bit to give a good analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of their children in order to nurture what they are good at, instead of forcing them to compete with others in what they are not good at. Secondly, parents should realise that they would take greater comfort in seeing their children do what they enjoy.”

Some say mainland schools are like bird cages. What's your opinion? “I am even more critical than that. I see the mainland education system as a prison. It's like students are being locked up in a jail by their teachers and parents and made to do what they want them to do. Schools are pretty much controlled by the authorities and the public has little say in how they are run. I never felt I was studying for myself, and I believe I'm not the only one who feels this way. It speaks volumes when we see students burn their textbooks upon graduation.”

In response to Uy’s comments Andrew Field, a Shanghai-based professor wrote, “It's nice to see alternative points of view from Chinese people about education in Shanghai or other parts of China. Yu Zhibo's responses are interesting, but I think he's off target. Yu tells Mainland parents to "not give their children pressure" and let them excel in what they are already good at. This strikes me as pretty weak advice, since it isn't the parents alone, but the entire system that puts the pressure on the kids. As I've already mentioned in previous posts, my daughter is in first grade in a local school here in Shanghai. We get phone calls on a regular basis from my daughter's teachers about her performance. There's a lot of social pressure as well, and the teachers themselves are under tremendous pressure to enhance their students' performance. So telling parents to take it easy on their kids is not a real solution. Funny advice from a Harvard MBA...The only solution to changing China's current educational system is to reform the system from the top down so that it doesn't emphasize rote learning and test taking as much, but as anybody here knows, that is not likely to happen any time soon.

Image Sources: Wiki Commons: Nolls China website ; ; Columbia University; Beifan.com ; University of Washington; Bucklin archives

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated August 2022

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• Countries Who Spend the Most Time Doing Homework

Homework is an important aspect of the education system and is often dreaded by the majority of students all over the world. Although many teachers and educational scholars believe homework improves education performance, many critics and students disagree and believe there is no correlation between homework and improving test scores.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental organization. With headquarters in Paris, the organization was formed for the purpose of stimulating global trade and economic progress among member states. In 2009, the OECD conducted a detailed study to establish the number of hours allocated for doing homework by students around the world and conducted the research in 38 member countries. The test subjects for the study were 15 year old high school students in countries that used PISA exams in their education systems. The results showed that in Shanghai, China the students had the highest number of hours of homework with 13.8 hours per week. Russia followed, where students had an average of 9.7 hours of homework per week. Finland had the least amount of homework hours with 2.8 hours per week, followed closely by South Korea with 2.9 hours. Among all the countries tested, the average homework time was 4.9 hours per week.

Interpretation of the data

Although students from Finland spent the least amount of hours on their homework per week, they performed relatively well on tests which discredits the notion of correlation between the number of hours spent on homework with exam performance. Shanghai teenagers who spent the highest number of hours doing their homework also produced excellent performances in the school tests, while students from some regions such as Macao, Japan, and Singapore increased the score by 17 points per additional hour of homework. The data showed a close relation between the economic backgrounds of students and the number of hours they invested in their homework. Students from affluent backgrounds spent fewer hours doing homework when compared to their less privileged counterparts, most likely due to access to private tutors and homeschooling. In some countries such as Singapore, students from wealthy families invested more time doing their homework than less privileged students and received better results in exams.

Decline in number of hours

Subsequent studies conducted by the OECD in 2012 showed a decrease in the average number hours per week spent by students. Slovakia displayed a drop of four hours per week while Russia declined three hours per week. A few countries including the United States showed no change. The dramatic decline of hours spent doing homework has been attributed to teenager’s increased use of the internet and social media platforms.

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New guideline set to reduce homework, tutoring burden on students

China's central authorities have issued a new guideline to significantly reduce the excessive burden of homework and after-school tutoring for students in primary and middle schools within three years.

The guideline, jointly issued by the general offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, was released on Saturday. It bans local authorities from approving any new tutoring institutions for academic course training.

All existing curriculum-based tutoring institutions are required to register as non-profit organizations and they are barred from raising money from the public or other capital-related activities, the guideline said, adding that listed companies are also prohibited from investing in such institutions.

They are not allowed to teach foreign subjects or content too advanced for the school curriculum, it said.

Tutoring institutions cannot conduct training on weekends, national holidays or winter and summer vacations, the guideline said.

In a separate explanation issued by the Ministry of Education, the ministry said that after the curriculum-based tutoring institutions are registered as non-profit organizations, local governments should set out the standard for course fees they can charge.

The new guideline will be implemented in nine cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and gradually be rolled out nationwide.

The guideline also required primary and middle schools to reduce the amount and the difficulty of homework and offer after-school service with activities, including homework tutoring, sports, arts, reading and interest groups.

Local governments also should gradually increase the enrollment quota of good high schools from students in ordinary middle schools and eliminate the rate race for the high school entrance exam.

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How Chinese Students Experience America

By Peter Hessler

Listen to this article.

In my composition class at Sichuan University, in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, the first assignment was a personal essay. I gave some prompts in case students had trouble coming up with topics. One suggestion was to describe an incident in which the writer had felt excluded from a group. Another was to tell how he or she had responded when some endeavor went unexpectedly wrong. For the third prompt, I wrote:

Have you ever been involved in a situation that was extremely threatening, or dangerous, or somehow dramatic? Tell the story, along with what you learned.

It was September, 2019, and the class consisted of engineering majors who were in their first month at university. Like virtually all Chinese undergraduates, they had been admitted solely on the basis of scores on the gaokao , the national college-entrance examination. The gaokao is notorious for pressure, and most of my students chose to write about some aspect of their high-school experience. One girl described a cruel math instructor: “He is the person whose office you enter happily and exit with pain and inferiority.” Edith, a student from northern Sichuan Province, wrote about feeling excluded from her graduation banquet, because her father and his male work colleagues hijacked the event by giving long-winded speeches that praised one another. “That’s what I hate, being hypocritical as some adults,” she wrote.

Few students chose the third prompt. Some remarked that nothing dangerous or dramatic had ever happened, because they had spent so much of their short lives studying. But one boy, whom I’ll call Vincent, submitted an essay titled “A Day Trip to the Police Station.”

The story began with a policeman calling Vincent’s mother. The officer said that the police needed to see her son, but he wouldn’t explain why. After the call, Vincent tried to figure out if he had committed some crime. He was the only student who wrote his essay in the third person, as if this distance made it easier to describe his mind-set:

He was tracing the memory from birth to now, including but not limited to [the time] he broke a kid’s head in kindergarten, he used V.P.N. to browse YouTube to see some videos, and talked with his friends abroad in Facebook and so on. Suddenly he thought of the most possible thing that happened two years ago. In the summer vacation in 2017, he bought an airsoft gun in the Internet, which is illegal in mainland China but legal in most countries or regions. Although it had been two years since then, he left his private information such as the address and his phone number. In modern society, it is possible to trace every information in the Internet and [especially] easy for police.

Vincent’s parents both worked tizhinei , within the government system. The boy approached his father for advice, and the older man didn’t lecture his son about following the rules. Vincent described their exchange:

“If you are asked about this matter,” dad said, “you just tell him that the seller mailed a toy gun and you were cheated. And then you felt unhappy and threw it away.” Sure enough, two policemen came to his home the next day.

Vincent stood about six feet tall, a handsome boy with close-cropped hair. He always sat in the front of the class, and he enjoyed speaking up, unlike many of the other engineers, who tended to be shy. On the first day of the term, I asked students to list their favorite authors, and Vincent chose Wang Xiaobo, a Beijing novelist who wrote irreverent, sexually explicit fiction.

As with many of his classmates, Vincent hoped to complete his undergraduate degree in the United States. I was teaching at the Sichuan University–Pittsburgh Institute, or SCUPI . All SCUPI classes were in English, and after two or three years at Sichuan University students could transfer to the University of Pittsburgh or another foreign institution. SCUPI was one of many programs and exchanges designed to direct more Chinese students to the U.S. In the 2019-20 academic year, Chinese enrollment at American institutions reached an all-time high of 372,532.

Nobody in Vincent’s section had previously studied in the U.S. Almost all of them were middle class, and they often said that their goal was to complete their bachelor’s degree in America, stay on for a master’s or a Ph.D., and then come back to work in China. A generation earlier, the vast majority of Chinese students at American universities had stayed in the country, but the pattern changed dramatically with China’s new prosperity. In 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Education reported that, in the past decade, more than eighty per cent of Chinese students returned after completing their studies abroad.

Vincent also intended to make a career in China, but he had specific plans for his time in the U.S. Once, during a class discussion, he remarked that someday he would purchase both a car and a real firearm. The illegal airsoft pistol that he had acquired in high school shot only plastic pellets. In 2017, when Vincent ordered the gun, it had been delivered to his home at the bottom of a rice cooker, as camouflage. At the time, such subterfuges were still possible, but the government had since cracked down, as part of a general tightening under Xi Jinping.

In Vincent’s essay, he was surprised that the two policemen who arrived at his home didn’t mention the forbidden gun. Instead, they accused him of a much more shocking crime: spreading terrorist messages.

“That’s ridiculous,” Vincent said. “I have never browsed such videos, not to mention posted them in the Internet. You must be joking.” “Maybe you didn’t post it by yourself,” the policeman said. “But the app may back up the video automatically.”

Vincent admitted that once, in a WeChat group, he had come across a terrorist video. The police instructed him to get his I.D. card and accompany them to the station. After they arrived, they entered a room labelled “Cybersecurity Police,” where Vincent was impressed by the officers’ politeness. (“It’s not scary at all, no handcuffs and no cage.”) The police informed him that they had found a host of sensitive and banned material on his cloud storage:

“But how interesting it is!” the policeman said. “They sent pornographic videos, traffic accident videos, [breaking news] videos, and funny videos.” “Yes,” he said helplessly, “so I am innocent.” “Yes, we believe you,” the policeman said. “But you have to [sign] the record because it is the fact that you posted the terrorism video in the Internet, which is illegal.”

On one level, the essay was terrifying—Chinese can be imprisoned for such crimes. But the calm tone created a strange sense of normalcy. The basic narrative was universal: a teen-ager makes a mistake, finds himself gently corrected, and gains new maturity. Along the way, he connects with the elders who love him. Part of this connection comes from what they share: the parents, rather than representing authority, are also powerless in the face of the larger system. The essay ended with the father giving advice that could be viewed as cynical, or heartwarming, or defeatist, or wise, or all these things at once:

“That’s why I always like to browse news [but] never comment on the Internet,” father said. “Because the Internet police really exist. And we have no private information, we can be easily investigated however you try to disguise yourself. So take care whatever you send on the Internet, my boy!” From this matter, Vincent really gained some experience. First, take care about your account in the Internet, and focus on some basic setting like automatic backup. Besides, don’t send some words, videos, or photos freely. In China, there is Internet police focus on WeChat, QQ, Weibo, and other software. As it is said in 1984 , “Big Brother is watching you.”

More than twenty years earlier, I had taught English at a small teachers’ college in a city called Fuling, less than three hundred miles east of Chengdu. The Fuling college was relatively low in the hierarchy of Chinese universities, but even such a place was highly selective. In 1996, the year that I started, only one out of twelve college-age Chinese was able to enter a tertiary educational institution. Almost all my students had grown up on farms, like the vast majority of citizens at that time.

In two years, I taught more than two hundred people, not one of whom went on to live abroad or attend a foreign graduate school. Most of them accepted government-assigned jobs in public middle schools or high schools, where they taught English, as part of China’s effort to improve education and engage with the outside world. Meanwhile, the government was expanding universities with remarkable speed. In less than ten years, the Fuling college grew from two thousand undergraduates to more than twenty thousand, a rate of increase that wasn’t unusual for Chinese institutions at that time. By 2019, the year that I returned, China’s enrollment rate of college-age citizens had risen, in the span of a single generation, from eight per cent to 51.6 per cent.

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When I had first arrived, in the nineties, I believed that improved education was bound to result in a more open society and political system. But in Fuling I began to understand that college in China might work differently than it did in the West. Students were indoctrinated by mandatory political classes, and Communist Party officials strictly controlled teaching materials. They were also skilled at identifying talent. In “River Town,” a book that I wrote about teaching in Fuling, I described my realization that the kind of young people I once imagined would become dissidents were in fact the most likely to be co-opted by the system: “The ones who were charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, and brave—those were the ones who had been recruited long ago as Party Members.”

This strategy long predated the Communists. China’s imperial examination system, the ancestor of the gaokao , was instituted in the seventh century and lasted for about thirteen hundred years. Through these centuries, education was closely aligned with political authority, because virtually all schooling was intended to prepare men for government service. That emphasis stood in sharp contrast with the West, where higher learning in pre-modern times often came out of religious institutions. Elizabeth J. Perry, a historian at Harvard, has described the ancient Chinese system as being effective at producing “educated acquiescence.” Perry used this phrase as the title for a 2019 paper that explores how today’s Party has built on the ancient tradition. “One might have expected,” she writes, “that opening China’s ivory tower to an infusion of scholars and dollars from around the world would work to liberalize the intellectual climate on Chinese campuses. Yet Chinese universities remain oases of political compliance.”

At Sichuan University, which is among the country’s top forty or so institutions, I recognized some tools of indoctrination that I remembered from the nineties. Political courses now included the ideas of Xi Jinping along with Marxism, and an elaborate system of Party-controlled fudaoyuan , or counsellors, advised and monitored students. But today’s undergraduates were much more skilled at getting their own information, and it seemed that most young people in my classes used V.P.N.s. They also impressed me as less inclined to join the Party. In 2017, a nationwide survey of university students showed decreased interest in Party membership. I noticed that many of my most talented and charismatic students, like Vincent, had no interest in joining.

But they weren’t necessarily progressive. In class, students debated the death penalty after reading George Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” and Vincent was among the majority, which supported capital punishment. He described it as a human right—in his opinion, if a murderer is not properly punished, other citizens lose their right to a safe society. Another day, when I asked if political leaders should be directly elected, Vincent and most of his classmates said no. Once, I asked two questions: Does the Chinese education system do a good job of preparing people for life? Should the education system be significantly changed? Vincent and several others had the same answer to both: no.

The students rarely exhibited the kind of idealism that a Westerner associates with youth. They seemed to accept that the world is a flawed place, and they were prepared to make compromises. Even when Vincent wrote about his encounter with the Internet police, he never criticized the monitoring; instead, his point was that a Chinese citizen needs to be careful. In another essay, Vincent described learning to control himself after a rebellious phase in middle school and high school. “Now, I seem to know more about the world,” he wrote. “It’s too impractical to change a lot of things like the education system, the government policies.”

Vincent took another class with me the following fall, in 2020. That year, China had a series of vastly different responses to COVID . Early on, Party officials in Wuhan covered up reports of the virus, which spread unchecked in the city, killing thousands. By February, the national leadership had started to implement policies—strict quarantines, extensive testing, and abundant contact tracing—that proved highly effective in the pre-vaccination era. There wasn’t a single reported case at Sichuan University that year, and we conducted our fall classes without masks or social distancing. Our final session was on December 31st, and I asked students to write about how they characterized 2020. Vincent, like more than seventy per cent of his peers, wrote that it had been a good year. He described how his thinking had evolved after observing the initial mistakes in Wuhan:

Most people held negative attitudes to the government’s reaction, including me. Meanwhile, our freedom of expression was not protected and the supervision department did a lot to delete negative news, critical comments, and so on. I felt so sad about the Party and the country at that time. But after things got better and seeing other countries’ worse behaviors, I feel so fortunate now and change my idea [about] China and the Party. Although I know there are still too many existing problems in China, I am convinced that the socialist system is more advanced especially in emergency cases.

In 2021, after suspending visa services for Chinese students during the pandemic, the U.S. resumed them. Throughout the spring, I fielded anxious questions from undergraduates who were thinking about going to America. One engineer itemized his concerns in an e-mail:

1. How to feel or deal with the discrimination when the two countries’ relationship [is] very nervous? 2. What are the root causes [in] America to cause today’s situation (drugs; distrust of the government, unemployment, and the most important, racial problem)?

They generally worried most about COVID , although guns, anti-Asian violence, and U.S.-China tensions were all prominent issues. One student who eventually went to America told me that in his home town, in northeastern China, ideas about the U.S. had changed dramatically since his childhood. “When people in the community went to America, the family was proud of them,” he said. “But this time, before I went, some family members came and they said, ‘You are going to the U.S.—it’s so dangerous!’ ”

Vincent’s mother was on a WeChat group for SCUPI parents, and that spring somebody posted an advisory from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C.:

Since the COVID pandemic, there have been successive incidents of discrimination and violent crimes against Asians in some cities in the United States. . . . On March 16, three shooting incidents occurred in Atlanta and surrounding areas, killing 8 people, of whom 6 were Asian women, including 1 Chinese and 1 Chinese citizen. . . . When encountering such a situation, you must remain calm, deal with it properly, try to avoid quarrels and physical conflicts, and ensure your own safety.

That month, Vincent told me that he planned to buy a .38 revolver after arriving in Pittsburgh. He had already researched how to acquire a hunting license and a firearm-safety certificate. In July, a month before he was scheduled to leave, I had dinner with his mother. She said that she worried about gun violence and racial prejudice. “Lots of people say that now in America you can’t rise to the highest level if you are Chinese,” she said.

Vincent’s mother was born in 1974, the same year as many of the people I had taught in Fuling. Like them, she had benefitted from a stable government job during the era of China’s economic boom. She and her husband weren’t rich, but they were prepared to direct virtually all their resources toward Vincent’s education, a common pattern. Edith, the girl who wrote about her graduation banquet, told me that her parents were selling their downtown apartment and moving to the suburbs in order to pay her tuition at Pittsburgh—more than forty thousand dollars a year. Like Vincent, and like nearly ninety per cent of the people I taught, Edith was an only child. Her mother had majored in English in the nineties, when it was still hard to go overseas. After reading “Gone with the Wind” in college, she had dreamed of going abroad, and now she wanted her daughter to have the opportunity.

At dinner with Vincent’s mother, I asked how his generation was different from hers.

“They have more thoughts of their own,” she said. “They’re more creative. But they don’t have our experience of chiku , eating bitterness.”

Even so, she described Vincent as hardworking and unafraid of challenges. I saw these qualities in many students, which in some ways seemed counterintuitive. As only children from comfortable backgrounds who had spent high school in a bubble of gaokao preparation, they could have come across as sheltered or spoiled. But the exam is so difficult, and a modern Chinese childhood is so pressured, that even prosperous young people have experienced their own form of chiku .

They often seemed eager for a change of environment. In my classes, I required off-campus reporting projects, which aren’t common at Chinese universities. Some students clearly relished the opportunity to visit places that otherwise may have seemed illicit or inappropriate: Christian churches, gay bars, tattoo parlors. Occasionally, they travelled far afield. One boy in Vincent’s year who called himself Bruce, after Bruce Lee, rode a motorcycle several hundred miles into the Hengduan Mountains, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, to research a road that had been constructed as part of China’s supply chain during the Second World War.

Vincent liked interacting with people from different backgrounds, and he researched a massage parlor, a seedy pool hall, and an outdoor marriage market in Chengdu’s People’s Park. At the marriage market, singles tried to find partners, often with the help of parents and various middlemen. In Vincent’s opinion, Chinese parents were too controlling, and young people had spent so much time studying that they had no dating experience. He wrote:

Because of one-child policy and traditional ideology, many parents consider their children as their treasure which belongs to the parents instead of the children themselves. . . . I hope the future Chinese children can have genuine liberty.

Vincent’s mother told me that she and her husband had made a point of allowing their son to decide for himself whether to go to America. But many parents were nervous, including Bruce’s father, who didn’t want his son to go to the U.S. because of the political tensions with China. In the end, Bruce decided to take a gap year before leaving. The delay was probably fortunate, because while researching the highway in the mountains he drove his motorcycle around a blind curve and was hit by a thirteen-ton dump truck. Bruce and the motorcycle slid beneath the truck; by some miracle, the vehicle came to a halt before killing the boy. I didn’t hear about the accident from the police, or the hospital, or anybody at the university. It was characteristic of these hardworking students that the news arrived in the form of an e-mailed request for an extension:

Dear Prof. Hessler, I had an accident on my way to the Lexi Highway. I was turning a corner when I was hit by a truck. Now I have a fracture in my left hand and a piece of flesh has been grinded off my left hand. Then the ligaments and nerves were damaged, and the whole left hand was immobile. My left foot was also injured. It was badly bruised. The whole foot was swollen and couldn’t move. I’m in hospital now. I’ll have to stay in the hospital for a while before I can come back. So I may not be able to write the article about the Lexi Highway. I don’t know what to do now. Can I write the article at a later date? Because I can’t do my research right now. And it’s really hard for me to type with one hand. Best wishes, Bruce

The first time I saw Vincent in Pittsburgh, in October, 2021, he had lived in America for only eighty-two days, but already he had acquired a used Lexus sedan, a twelve-gauge Winchester shotgun, a Savage Axis XP 6.5 Creedmoor bolt-action rifle, and a Glock 19 handgun. “It’s the Toyota Camry of guns,” he said, explaining that the Glock was simple and reliable.

Vincent had studied the gun laws in Pennsylvania, learning that an applicant for a concealed-carry permit must be at least twenty-one, so he applied on his birthday. The permit cost twenty dollars and featured a photograph of Vincent standing in front of an American flag. He had also researched issues of jurisdiction. “I can use it in Ohio,” he said. “But not in California. I don’t like California.” One reason he disliked California was that state law follows the Castle Doctrine, which, in Vincent’s opinion, provides inadequate protection for gun owners. “Pennsylvania has Stand Your Ground,” he said, referring to a law that allows people to defend themselves with deadly force in public spaces. “They made some adjustments to the Castle Doctrine.”

Vincent was thriving in his engineering classes, and he said that some of the math was easier than what he had studied in high school in China. His views about his home country were changing, in part because of the pandemic. Vaccines were now widespread, but the Party hadn’t adjusted its “zero COVID ” strategy. “Their policy overreacts,” Vincent told me. “You should not require the government to do too many things and restrict our liberties. We should be responsible for ourselves. We should not require the government to be like our parents.”

A couple of times, he had attended Sunday services at the Pittsburgh Chinese Church Oakland, an evangelical congregation that offered meals and various forms of support for students. In China, Vincent had never gone to church, but now he was exploring different denominations. He had his own way of classifying faiths. “For example, a church with all white Americans,” he said, referring to his options. “One of my classmates joined that. I think he likes it. He goes every week. He can earn so many profits. Even the Chinese church, they can pick you up from the airport, free. They can help you deliver furniture from some store, no charge. They do all kinds of things!”

In 2021, there were more than fifteen hundred Chinese at the University of Pittsburgh, and around three thousand at Carnegie Mellon, whose campus is less than a mile away. I came to associate the city with Sichuanese food, because I almost never ate anything else while meeting former students. Some of them, like Vincent, were trying to branch out into American activities, but for the most part they found it easy to maintain a Chinese life. Many still ordered from Taobao, which in the U.S. is slower than Amazon but has a much better selection of Chinese products. They also used various Chinese delivery apps: Fantuan, HungryPanda, FreshGoGo. The people I taught still relied heavily on V.P.N.s, although now they used them to hop in the other direction across China’s firewall. They needed the Chinese Internet in order to access various streaming apps and pop-music services, as well as to watch N.B.A. games with cheaper subscription fees and Mandarin commentary.

For students who wanted to play intercollegiate basketball, the Chinese even had their own league. An athletic boy named Ethan, who had been in my composition class at Sichuan University, was now the point guard for the Pittsburgh team. Ethan told me that about forty students had tried out and seventeen had made the cut. I asked if somebody like me could play.

“No white people,” Ethan said, laughing.

“What about hunxue’er ?” The term means a person of mixed race.

“I think that works.”

One weekend in 2022, I watched Pitt play Carnegie Mellon. Or, more accurately, I watched “UPitt,” because that was the name on the jerseys. My father attended Pitt in the late sixties, and I had grown up wearing school paraphernalia, but I had never heard anybody refer to the place as UPitt. The colors were also different. Rather than using Pitt’s royal and gold, the Chinese had made up uniforms in white and navy blue, which, in this corner of Pennsylvania, verged on sacrilege: Penn State colors.

The team received no university funding, so it had found its own sponsors. Moello, a Chinese-owned athletic-clothing company in New York, made the uniforms, and Penguin Auto, a local dealership, paid to have its logo on the back, because Chinese students were reliable car buyers.

The Northeastern Chinese Basketball League, which is not limited to the Northeast, has more than a hundred teams across the U.S. On the day that I watched, the Pitt team played a fast, guard-dominated game, running plays that had been named for local public bus lines. “ Qishiyi B!” the point guard would call out: 71B, a bus that runs to Highland Park. It was the first time I had attended a college basketball game in which the starting forward hit a vape pen in the huddle during time-outs.

The forward was originally from Tianjin, and his girlfriend was the team manager. She told me that she was trying to get him to stop vaping during games. Her name was Ren Yufan, and she was friendly and talkative; she went by the English name Ally. Ally had grown up in Shanghai and Nanjing, but she had attended high school at Christ the King Cathedral, a Catholic school in Lubbock, Texas, where she played tennis. “I was state sixth place in 2A,” she said. She noted that she had also been elected prom queen.

Ally often answered questions with “Yes, sir” or “No, sir,” and her English had a slight Texas twang. Her parents had sent her to Lubbock through a program that pairs Chinese children with American host families. Ally’s host family owned a farm, where she learned to ride a horse; she enjoyed Lubbock so much that she still returned for school holidays. In the past ten or so years, more Chinese have found ways to enroll their kids in U.S. high schools, in part to avoid gaokao agony. In Pittsburgh, my Sichuan University students described these Chinese as a class apart: typically, they come from wealthy families, and their English is better than that of the Chinese who arrive in college or afterward. Their work patterns are also different. Yingyi Ma, a Chinese-born sociologist at Syracuse University, who has conducted extensive surveys of students from the mainland, has observed that the longer the Chinese stay in the U.S. the less they report working harder than their American peers. Like any good Chinese math problem, this distinctly American form of regression toward the mean can be quantified. In Ma’s book “Ambitious and Anxious,” she reports on her survey results: “Specifically, one additional year of time in the United States can reduce the odds of putting in more effort than American peers by 14 percent.”

Ally’s boyfriend had attended a private high school in Pennsylvania that cost almost seventy thousand dollars a year, and he drove a Mercedes GLC. “We are using our parents’ money, but we can’t be as successful as our parents,” Ally said. Neither her father nor her mother had attended university, but they had thrived in construction and private business during the era of China’s rapid growth. Now the country’s economy was struggling, and Ally accepted the fact that her career opportunities would likely be worse than those of the previous generation. Nevertheless, she planned to return to China, because she wanted to be close to her parents. I asked if anything might make it hard to fit in after spending so many formative years in America.

“My personality,” she said. “I’m too outgoing.”

“There are no prom queens in China, right?”

By my second visit to Pittsburgh, in November, 2022, Vincent had decided to stay permanently in the U.S., been baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and added an AK-47 and two Sig Sauer handguns to his arsenal. He had also downgraded to a less expensive car, because the Lexus had been damaged in a crash. Rather than getting the Glock 19 of automobiles, Vincent decided on the Camry’s cousin, a used Toyota Prius. He picked me up in the Prius, and we headed out for a traditional Steel City meal of lajiao and prickly ash. Vincent wore a Sig Sauer P365 XL with a laser sight in a holster on his right hip. The car radio was playing “Water Tower Town,” a country song by Scotty McCreery:

In a water tower town, everybody waves Church doors are the only thing that’s open on Sundays Word travels fast, wheels turn slow. . . .

Earlier in the year, some Mormon missionaries had struck up a conversation with Vincent on campus. “Their koucai is really good,” he told me, using a word that means “eloquence.” “It helps me understand how to interact with people. They say things like ‘Those shoes are really nice!’ And they start talking, and then they ask you a question: ‘Are you familiar with the Book of Mormon?’ ” Now Vincent had a Chinese app for the Book of Mormon on his phone, and he attended services every Sunday. He had been baptized on July 23rd, which was also the day that he had quit drinking and smoking cigarettes, a habit he’d had since Sichuan University. He thought that the church might be a good place to meet a girlfriend. He had a notion that someday he’d like to have a big family and live in a place like Texas, whose gun laws appealed to him.

Corn grows high, crime stays low There’s little towns everywhere where everybody knows. . . .

During the winter of Vincent’s first academic year in the U.S., his political transformation had been rapid. “I watched a lot of YouTube videos about things like June 4th,” he told me, referring to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in 1989. He began to question the accommodationist views that he had previously held. “Young people are like this in China,” he said. “They tend to support the system.”

In the spring of 2022, Vincent became dismayed by the excessive COVID lockdown in Shanghai. He posted a series of critical remarks on social media, and in May he sent me an e-mail:

In recent months, I make some negative comments on WeChat on the humanitarian crisis caused by the lockdown in Shanghai and some other issues. My parents got nervous and asked me to delete these contents because their colleagues having me in their contact lists in WeChat read my “Pengyou Quan” [friends’ circle] and reminded my parents of potential risks of “Ju Bao” [political reporting] that would affect my parents’ jobs.

One day, a man who may have been from the Chinese security apparatus phoned Vincent’s parents. Unlike in the call from years before, this man didn’t identify himself as the police. But he said that Vincent’s actions could cause trouble for the family. Such anonymous warnings are occasionally made to the parents of overseas Chinese, and they weigh heavily on students.

Vincent deleted his WeChat comments. But he also decided that he couldn’t imagine returning to China. “I would say something and get arrested,” he told me. “I need to be in a place where I have freedom.” An older Chinese friend in Pittsburgh had made a similar decision, and he advised Vincent on how to eventually apply for a green card.

Vincent told his parents that he planned to stay in America for at least five years, but initially he didn’t say that his decision was permanent, because he worried that they would be upset. In the meantime, he didn’t want to waste their money, so he earned cash on the side by teaching Chinese students how to drive. Professional garages charged at least five hundred dollars to install a passenger brake, but Vincent found one on Taobao for about eighty-five dollars, including shipping from China. “I don’t know if it’s legal,” he told me. With his engineering skills, he was able to install the brake in the Prius.

The number of Chinese studying in the U.S. had dropped to the lowest level in nearly a decade. But there were still almost three hundred thousand, and many of them arrived in places like Pittsburgh and realized that qishiyi B and other public buses weren’t adequate for their needs. They preferred to hire driving instructors who spoke Mandarin, and Vincent’s rate was eighty dollars an hour. He charged even more for the use of his car during exams. Vincent told me that a Chinese-speaking driving instructor who hustled could earn at least two hundred thousand dollars a year. In my own business, the Chinese political climate had made it almost impossible for American journalists to get resident visas, and specialists of all sorts no longer had access to the country. Sometimes I envisioned a retraining program for old China hands: all of us could buy passenger brakes on Taobao and set up shop as mandarins of parallel parking.

I knew of only a few former students who, like Vincent, had already decided to make a permanent home outside China. It was viewed as an extreme step, and most of them preferred to keep their options open. But virtually all my former students in the U.S. planned to apply to graduate school here.

They were concerned about the economic and political situation in China, but they also often felt out of place in Pittsburgh. American racial attitudes sometimes mystified them. One engineer had taken a Pitt psychology class that frequently touched on race, and he said that it reminded him of the political-indoctrination classes at Sichuan University. In both situations, he felt that students weren’t supposed to ask questions. “They’re just telling you how to play with words,” he said. “Like in China when they say socialism is good. In America you will say, ‘Black lives matter.’ They are actually the same thing. When you are saying socialism is good, you are saying that capitalism is bad. You are hiding something behind your words. When you say, ‘Black lives matter,’ what are you saying? You are basically saying that Asian lives don’t matter, white lives don’t matter.”

It wasn’t uncommon for Chinese students to have been harassed on the streets. They often said, with some discomfort, that those who targeted them tended to be Black. Many of these incidents involved people shouting slurs from passing cars, but occasionally there was something more serious. One group of boys was riding a public bus at night when a passenger insulted them and stole some ice cream that they had just bought. Afterward, one of the students acquired a Beretta air pistol. He was wary of buying an actual gun, but he figured that the Beretta looked real enough to intimidate people.

One evening, I went out for Sichuanese food with four former students, including a couple who had been involved in that incident. They seemed to brush it off, and they were much more concerned about Sino-U.S. tensions. One mentioned that if there were a war over Taiwan he would have only three options. “I can go back to China, or I can go to Canada, or I can go somewhere else,” he said. “I won’t be able to stay here.”

“Look at what happened to the Japanese during World War Two,” another said. “They put them into camps. It would be the same here.”

They all believed that war was unlikely, although Xi Jinping made them nervous. Back in China, my students had generally avoided mentioning the leader by name, and in Pittsburgh they did the same.

“It all depends on one person now,” a student said at the dinner. “In the past, it wasn’t just one person. When you have a group of people, it’s more likely that somebody will think about the cost.”

I asked whether they would serve in the Chinese military if there were a war.

“They wouldn’t ask people like us to fight,” one boy said. He explained that, in a war, he wouldn’t return home if his country was the aggressor. “If China fires the first shot, then I will stay in America,” he said.

I asked why.

“Because I don’t believe that we should attack our tongbao , our compatriots.”

I knew of only one Pitt student who planned to return to China for graduate school. The student, whom I’ll call Jack, was accepted into an aerospace-engineering program at Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai. Jack was one of the top SCUPI students, and in an earlier era he would have had his pick of American grad schools. But Chinese aerospace jobs are generally connected to the military, and American institutions had become wary of training such students. Even if a university makes an offer of admission, it can be extremely difficult to get a student visa approved. “Ten years ago, it would have been fine,” Jack told me. “My future Ph.D. adviser got his Ph.D. at Ohio State in aerospace engineering.” He continued, “Everybody knows you can’t get this kind of degree in the U.S. anymore.”

When I met Jack for lunch, I initially didn’t recognize him. He had lost twenty pounds, because in Pittsburgh he had adopted a daily routine of a four-mile run. “In middle school and high school, my parents and grandparents always said you should eat a lot and study hard,” he said. “I became kind of fat.”

He had assimilated to American life more successfully than most of his peers, and his English had improved dramatically. He told me shyly that he had become good friends with a girl in his department. “Some of my friends from SCUPI are jealous because I have a friend who is a foreign girl, a white girl,” he said. “They make some jokes.”

He said that he would always remember Pittsburgh fondly, but he expected his departure to be final. “I don’t think I’ll come to the U.S. again,” he said. “They will check. If they see that you work with rockets, with the military, they won’t let you in.”

On the afternoon of January 10, 2023, at around three o’clock, in the neighborhood of Homewood, Vincent was stopped behind another vehicle at a traffic light when he heard a popping sound that he thought was fireworks. He was driving the Prius, and a Chinese graduate student from Carnegie Mellon sat in the passenger seat. Vincent wore a Sig Sauer P365 subcompact semi-automatic pistol in a concealed-carry holster on his right hip. The Carnegie Mellon student was preparing to get his driver’s license, and Vincent was taking him to practice at a test course in Penn Hills, an area that was known for occasional crime problems.

At the traffic light, Vincent saw a car approach at high speed and run a red light. Then there were more popping sounds. Vincent realized that they weren’t fireworks when a bullet cracked his windshield.

He ducked below the dashboard. In the process, his foot came off the brake, and the Prius struck the vehicle ahead of him. The shooting continued for a few seconds. After it stopped, the Carnegie Mellon student said, “ Ge , brother, you just hit the car in front!”

“Get your head down!” Vincent shouted. He backed up, swerved around the other vehicle, and tore through a red light. After a block, he saw a crossing guard waiting for children who had just finished the day at Westinghouse Academy, a nearby public school.

“Shots fired, shots fired!” Vincent shouted. “Call 911!”

He parked on the side of the road, and soon he was joined by the driver whose car he had struck. They checked the bumpers; there wasn’t any damage. The driver, an elderly woman, didn’t seem particularly concerned about the shooting. She left before the police arrived.

A woman from a nearby house came out to talk with Vincent. She remarked that shootings actually weren’t so common, and then she walked off to pick up her child from Westinghouse Academy. After a while, a police officer drove up, carrying an AR-15. Vincent explained that he was also armed, and the officer thanked him for the information. He asked Vincent to wait until a detective arrived.

For more than two hours, Vincent sat in his car. The Carnegie Mellon student took an Uber home. When the detective finally showed up, his questions were perfunctory, and he didn’t seem interested in Vincent’s offer to provide dashboard-camera footage. A brief report about the incident appeared on a Twitter account called Real News and Alerts Allegheny County:

Shot Spotter Alert for 20 rounds Vehicles outside of a school shooting at each other. 1 vehicle fled after firing shots.

Later that year, Vincent took me to the site. He recalled that during the incident he had repeatedly said, “Lord, save me!,” like Peter the Apostle on the Sea of Galilee. The lack of police response had surprised Vincent. “I didn’t know they didn’t care about a shooting,” he said. For our visit, he wore a Sig Sauer P320-M17 on his right hip. “Normally, I don’t open-carry,” he said. “But this gun can hold eighteen rounds.”

It had been four years since Vincent arrived in my class at Sichuan University. Have you ever been involved in a situation that was extremely threatening, or dangerous, or somehow dramatic ? Back then, he had written about what happened when the Chinese Internet police came to his home. Now Vincent’s American story was one in which the police effectively didn’t come after twenty rounds had been fired near a school. But there was a similar sense of normalcy: everybody was calm; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The following month, four students were shot outside Westinghouse Academy.

I asked Vincent if the incident had changed his opinion about gun laws.

“No,” he said. “That’s why we should carry guns. Carrying a gun is more comfortable than wearing body armor.”

At Sichuan University, I also taught journalism to undergraduates from a range of departments. Last June, I sent out a detailed survey to more than a hundred and fifty students. One question asked if they intended to make their permanent home in China. A few weren’t certain, but, of the forty-three who answered, thirty said that they planned to live in China. There was no significant difference in the responses of students who were currently in China versus those abroad.

Since the pandemic, there have been increasing reports of young Chinese engaged in runxue , or “run philosophy,” escaping the country’s various pressures by going abroad permanently. A number of my students pushed back against the idea that runxue had wide appeal. “I think that’s just an expression of emotion, like saying, ‘I want to die,’ ” one student who was studying in Pittsburgh told me. “I don’t take it very seriously.” He planned to go to graduate school in America and then return home. He said that in China it was easy for him to avoid politics, whereas in Pittsburgh he couldn’t avoid the fact that he was a foreigner. During his initial few months in the city, he had experienced three unpleasant anti-Asian incidents. As a result, he had changed the route he walked to his bus stop. “I think I don’t belong here,” he said.

Yingyi Ma, the sociologist at Syracuse who has surveyed Chinese students in the U.S., has observed that almost sixty per cent of her respondents intend to return to their homeland. She told me that young Chinese rarely connect with the political climate in the U.S. “But what makes America appealing is the other aspects,” she said. “The agency. The self-acceptance. Over time, as they stay in the U.S., they figure out that they don’t have to change themselves.”

One former student told me that she might remain in America in part because people were less likely to make comments about her body. She’s not overweight, but she doesn’t have the tiny frame that is common among young Chinese women, and people in China constantly remarked on her size. In Pittsburgh, I met with Edith, the student who had written about her graduation banquet. Now she had dyed some of her hair purple and green, and she avoided video calls with her grandparents, who might judge her. Once, she had gone to a shooting range with Chinese classmates, and she had attended church-group meetings out of curiosity. She told me that recently she had taken up skateboarding as a hobby.

It was typical for students to pursue activities that would have been unlikely or impossible in China, and several boys became gun enthusiasts. Nationwide, rising numbers of Asian Americans have purchased firearms since the start of the pandemic, a trend that scholars attribute to fears of racism. One afternoon, I arranged to meet a former student named Steven at a shooting range outside Wexford, Pennsylvania. I knew that I was in the right parking lot when, amid all the pickup trucks, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said “E=mc 2 .” On the range, whenever the call came for a halt in shooting—“All clear!”—a bunch of bearded white guys in camo and Carhartt stalked out with staple guns to attach new paper covers to the targets. Steven, a shy, round-faced engineer in glasses, was the only Chinese at the range, and also the only person who used quilting pins for his target. He told me that the quilting pins were reusable and thus cheaper than staples. He had come with a Smith & Wesson M&P 5.7 handgun, a Ruger American Predator 6.5 Creedmoor bolt-action rifle, and a large Benchmade knife that he wore in a leather holster. At the range, he shot his rifle left-handed. When he was small, his father had thought that he was a natural lefty, but he was taught to write with his right hand, like all Chinese students. He told me that shooting was the first significant activity in which he had used his left.

On the same trip, I met Bruce for a classic Allegheny County dinner of mapo tofu and Chongqing chicken. After the accident in the Himalayas, Bruce had sworn off motorcycles. At Pitt, in addition to his engineering classes, he had learned auto repair by watching YouTube videos. He bought an old BMW, fixed it up, and sold it for a fifty-per-cent profit. He used the money to purchase a used Ford F-150 truck, which he customized so he could sleep in the cab for hiking and snowboarding excursions to the mountains. He had decorated the truck with two “thin blue line” American-flag decals and another pro-police insignia around the license plate. “That’s so it looks like I’m a hongbozi ,” Bruce said, using the Mandarin translation of “redneck.” “People won’t honk at me or mess with me.” He opened the door and pointed out a tiny Chinese flag on the back of the driver’s seat. “You can’t see it from the outside,” he said, grinning.

Over time, I’ve also surveyed the people I taught in the nineties, and last year I asked both cohorts of former students the same question: Did the pandemic change anything significant about your personal opinions, beliefs, or values? The older group reported relatively few changes. Most are now around fifty years old, with stable teaching jobs that have not been affected by China’s economic problems. They typically live in third- or fourth-tier provincial cities, which were less likely to suffer brutal lockdowns than places like Shanghai and Beijing.

But members of the younger generation, who are likelier to live in larger cities and generally access more foreign information, responded very differently. “I can’t believe I’m still reading Mao Zedong Thought and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” one graduate student at a Chinese university wrote. “In this collectivist ideology, there is no respect for the dignity and worth of the individual.” Another woman, who was in graduate school in the United Kingdom, wrote, “Now I’ve switched to an anarchist. It reduces the stress when I have to read the news.”

Their generation is unique in Chinese history in the scope of their education and in their degree of contact with the outside world. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that their concerns are broader. In my survey, I asked what they worried about most, and, out of forty-seven responses, three mentioned politics. Another three worried about the possibility of war with Taiwan. Only one cited environmental issues. The vast majority of answers were personal, with more than half mentioning job opportunities or problems with graduate school. This seemed to reflect the tradition of “educated acquiescence”: there’s no point in concerning yourself with big questions and systemic flaws.

Nevertheless, their worldliness makes it harder to predict long-term outcomes, and I sense a new degree of unease. On a recent trip to California, I interviewed a former student who commented that even when she and her Chinese boyfriend were alone they instinctively covered their phones if they talked about politics, as if this would prevent surveillance. I noticed that, like many other former students, she never uttered the name Xi Jinping. Afterward, I asked her about it over e-mail, and she replied:

I do find myself avoiding mentioning Xi’s name directly in [California], even in private conversations and in places where I generally feel “safe.” . . . I guess it’s a thing that has been reinforced millions of times to the point that it just feels uncomfortable and daunting to say his full name, as it has too much association with unrestrained power and punishment.

In the survey of my Sichuan University students, I was most struck by responses to a simple query: Do you want to have children someday? The most common answer was no, and the trend was especially pronounced for women, at seventy-six per cent. Other surveys and studies in China indicate a similar pattern. One former student explained:

I think that Chinese children are more stressed and profoundly confused, which will continue. We are already a confused generation, and children’s upbringing requires long periods of companionship and observation and guidance, which is difficult to ensure in the face of intense social pressure. The future of Chinese society is an adventure and children do not “demand to be born.” I am worried that my children are not warriors and are lost in it.

By my third visit to Pittsburgh, in November, 2023, Vincent had graduated, been baptized again, and embarked on his first real American job. The previous year, I had attended Sunday services with him at a Mormon church, but this time he took me to the Church of the Ascension, an Anglican congregation near campus. When I asked why he had switched, he used a Chinese word, qihou . “Environment,” he said. “They aren’t pushy. The Mormons are too pushy.”

He liked the fact that the Anglicans were conservative but reasonable. He saw politics in similar terms: he disliked Donald Trump, but he considered himself most likely to vote as a traditional Republican if he became a citizen. He had been baptized in the Anglican Church on Easter. “I told them that I had already been baptized,” he explained. “But they said that because it was Mormon it doesn’t count.”

The previous summer, Vincent’s mother had visited Pittsburgh, where, among other places, he took her to church and to the shooting range. During the trip, he told her about his plan to live permanently in the U.S. When I spoke with her recently by phone, she still held out hope that he would someday return to China. “I don’t want him to stay in America,” she said. “But if that’s what he wants I won’t oppose it.” She said that she was impressed by how much her son had matured since going abroad.

After receiving his degree in industrial engineering, Vincent decided not to work in the field. He believed that he was best suited for a career in business, because he liked dealing with all kinds of people. He had started working for his landlord, Nick Kefalos, who managed real-estate properties around Pittsburgh. One morning, I accompanied Vincent when he stopped by Kefalos’s office to drop off a check from a tenant.

Kefalos was a wiry, energetic man of around seventy. He told me that on a couple of occasions a roommate had left an apartment and Vincent was able to find a replacement. At one point, he persuaded a Japanese American, a Serbian, and a Dane to share a unit, and all of them had got along ever since. “We could see that he had a knack,” Kefalos said. “He was able to find unrelated people and make good matches.” Kefalos also liked having a Chinese speaker on staff. “We think a diverse population is ideal,” he said. Vincent was currently studying for his real-estate license, and he hoped to start his own business someday.

Kefalos’s grandfather had come from Greece, and his father had worked as an electrical engineer in the steel industry. Many of his current tenants were immigrants. “My personal experience is that they are relatively hardworking,” he said. “And I think that’s true with most immigrants who come into the country. Whether it’s for education or a better life.” He looked up at Vincent and said, “My sense is that most U.S. citizens born in the United States don’t have any idea how fortunate they are.” ♦

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By Jessica Winter

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Students do homework at school. /CGTN

China's primary and middle schools have opened in most parts of the country. But this semester is set to be different as education authorities enforce a campaign to reduce homework stress.

Shanghai's Yan'an Middle School is among schools that have introduced the "double reduction" reforms. Beginning this semester, students will be required to finish assigned homework during the first session of after-school classes, meaning that there will be none or very little for them back home. Teachers will be available to answer questions from students on the spot.

"It took me half an hour to finish all the written homework at school. I finished everything at school yesterday and played with my brother when I got home," said Niu Jianran, a grade eight student at Yan'an.

The school has offered after-school classes for more than a decade, but they were not compulsory. Now, students are being asked to finish their homework during these sessions, reducing the pressure on them and their parents.

"Homework causes friction between children and their parents, and so it ends up taking longer. If children can finish homework under the guidance of teachers at school, it's great news for us parents," said Niu's mom.

Shanghai's education commission forbids schools to assign any written homework to first and second-grade students. The average time spent on homework for students from third to fifth grade cannot reach more than 60 minutes; for middle school students, it's 90 minutes.

Parents and students are all happier about the changes. But the next question is how to make sure the amount of homework is appropriate.

"Ninety minutes refers to the average time for most students to complete the tasks. Our lesson preparation group will adjust the amount of homework as we continue," said Xu Jun, principal at Yan'an.

The school also plans to make homework more diversified and creative to improve students' hands-on capabilities. Extracurricular activities like sports and painting will also be offered.

Nationwide, schools in different cities have also brought up different campaigns to reduce the burden on students. In eastern Jiangsu Province, for example, though some schools have not reopened yet due to COVID-19 epidemic, students are receiving online lessons in music, painting and sports to ensure they receive a comprehensive curriculum while at home.

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Related Stories

• Become Debt-Free Student debt relief due to financial   hardship could be on its way
• Earn Over 150,000 student loan borrowers   will soon have their debt forgiven
• Become Debt-Free President Biden forgives student debt for   nearly 78,000 borrowers through PSLF
• Become Debt-Free Some student loan borrowers will start   seeing their debt forgiven in February
• Earn New FAFSA rollout has faced several   obstacles and delays—what students can do

25 million student loan borrowers could see their balances shrink under Biden’s new forgiveness plan

President Joe Biden and his administration are moving forward with plans to provide student debt relief to as many people as possible.

The administration announced Monday the details of its new plan to reduce student debt balances for millions of borrowers. The proposed regulations — which were drafted as part of the months-long negotiated rulemaking process — feature several different ways for borrowers to see their debt balances reduced, if not eliminated entirely. 

The provisions of the plan include forgiving excessive interest that has accrued, discharging balances that have been in repayment for 20 years or more and relief for borrowers who attended now-closed or insolvent institutions.

"[The] plan is focused on the reasons that people are struggling with their student loan debt," James Kvaal, Under Secretary of Education, told CNBC Make It. 

"People who are upside down on their student loans because interest has racked up faster than they could pay it, people who have been making payments on their loans for decades and still owe those loans — it's a sign of how aggressive the President is [being] in tackling the student loan crisis," he said.

The relief provisions will soon be open for a public comment period where the administration will consider revisions to its proposal before it goes into effect. Some provisions are expected to roll out as early as this fall, the administration said.

As with Biden's previous student debt forgiveness proposals, it's possible this plan will come under legal scrutiny if challenged by opponents. But this plan differs from his previous action by using a different legal authority — the Higher Education Act — and narrowing the scope of borrowers eligible for relief.

In the event this plan is enacted and a future presidential administration wanted to repeal it, it would need to go through the same lengthy rulemaking process, Kvaal said.

Here's the relief borrowers may expect to see in the coming months.

Up to $20,000 of accrued interest forgiven

Interest accrues daily on student loans and some borrowers have interest rates as high as 8%. As a result, many borrowers wind up with balances higher than what they initially took out for school, despite making regular payments.

Biden's plan aims to address that "runaway interest" by canceling up to $20,000 of the amount a borrower's balance has grown due to unpaid interest after entering repayment. Single borrowers who earn $120,000 or less and married borrowers earning $240,000 or less who enroll in an income-driven repayment plan would be eligible to have their entire excess interest balances discharged, the administration said. 

Some 25 million borrowers stand to benefit from their interest balances being reduced if the plan goes into effect as proposed. An estimated 23 million of those borrowers will have their entire balance growth forgiven, according to the administration.

Automatic loan discharge for forgiveness-eligible borrowers

The Biden administration has canceled debt for over 1 million borrowers through existing forgiveness programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness , income-driven repayment and closed school loan discharges.

The administration estimates another 2 million borrowers are eligible to have their debt forgiven under these programs, but have not yet applied .

The new plan will allow the administration to use available data to identify and automatically clear balances for these borrowers as they are eligible, without borrower action.

Debt forgiveness for long-term borrowers

Another 2 million borrowers could benefit from a provision that will clear debt balances that are at least 20 years old for undergraduate borrowers and 25 years for graduate borrowers. It will apply to undergraduate borrowers with direct loans or direct consolidation loans who entered repayment on or before July 1, 2005, and graduate school borrowers who entered repayment on or before or July 1, 2000.

Currently, borrowers enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education plan or other income-driven repayment plans are eligible to have their remaining balances discharged after 20 or 25 years, but the new regulation would eliminate the IDR requirement.

Relief for attendees of 'low-financial-value' programs

The Biden administration has made a concerted effort to "hold colleges accountable when they leave students with mountains of debt and without good job prospects," it said in its statement. 

As such, the new plan would waive loans for borrowers who attended institutions or programs the administration identifies as "low-financial-value."

That includes schools that have lost eligibility to receive federal student aid or were denied recertification due to cheating or taking advantage of students, as well as programs that have since closed or have a history of leaving students with high debt loads and poor earnings outcomes.

Help for borrowers facing financial hardship

The administration says it is committed to pursuing a "specific action" for student loan borrowers experiencing a variety of financial hardships , although it's not yet clear who may receive relief and to what degree their balances will be reduced.

"This could include delivering automatic forgiveness to borrowers predicted to be likely to default on their loans, or through an individualized applications where borrowers could detail their financial hardship that is preventing them from being able to fully pay back their loan, such as a child care or medical expense," the administration said in its statement.

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Solar eclipse maps show 2024 totality path, peak times and how much of the eclipse people could see across the U.S.

By Aliza Chasan

Updated on: April 9, 2024 / 5:00 AM EDT / CBS News

A total solar eclipse  crossed North America Monday with parts of 15 U.S. states within the path of totality. Maps show  where and when astronomy fans could see the big event  as skies darkened in the middle of the day Monday, April 8.

The total eclipse first appeared along Mexico's Pacific Coast at around 11:07 a.m. PDT, then traveled across a swath of the U.S., from Texas to Maine, and into Canada.

About 31.6 million people live in the path of totality , the area where the moon fully blocked out the sun , according to NASA. The path ranged between 108 and 122 miles wide. An additional 150 million people live within 200 miles of the path of totality.

Solar eclipse path of totality map for 2024

The total solar eclipse started over the Pacific Ocean, and the first location in continental North America that experienced totality was Mexico's Pacific Coast, around 11:07 a.m. PDT, according to NASA. From there, the path continued into Texas, crossing more than a dozen states before the eclipse enters Canada in southern Ontario. The eclipse exited continental North America at around 5:16 p.m. NDT from Newfoundland, Canada.

The path of totality included portions of the following states:

• Pennsylvania
• New Hampshire

Small parts of Tennessee and Michigan also experienced the total solar eclipse.

Several major cities across the U.S. were included in the eclipse's path of totality, while many others saw a partial eclipse. These were some of the best major cities for eclipse viewing — though the weather was a factor :

• San Antonio, Texas (partially under the path)
• Austin, Texas
• Waco, Texas
• Dallas, Texas
• Little Rock, Arkansas
• Indianapolis, Indiana
• Dayton, Ohio
• Cleveland, Ohio
• Buffalo, New York
• Rochester, New York
• Syracuse, New York
• Burlington, Vermont

Map of when the solar eclipse reached totality across its path

The eclipse began in the U.S. as a partial eclipse beginning at 12:06 p.m. CDT near Eagle Pass, Texas, before progressing to totality by about 1:27 p.m. CDT and then moving along its path to the northeast over the following few hours.

NASA shared times for several cities in the path of totality across the U.S. People could have also  checked their ZIP code on NASA's map  to see when the eclipse was to reach them if they were on, or near, the path of totality — or if they saw a partial eclipse instead.

How much of the eclipse did people see if they live outside the totality path?

While the April 8 eclipse covered a wide swath of the U.S., outside the path of totality observers may have spotted a partial eclipse, where the moon covers some, but not all, of the sun, according to NASA. The closer they were to the path of totality, the larger the portion of the sun that was hidden.

NASA allowed viewers to input a ZIP code and see how much of the sun was to be covered in their locations.

Could there be cloud cover be during the solar eclipse?

Some areas along the path of totality had a higher likelihood of cloud cover that could interfere with viewing the eclipse. Here is a map showing the historical trends in cloud cover this time of year. 

You could have checked the latest forecast for your location with our partners at The Weather Channel .

Where did the solar eclipse reach totality for the longest?

Eclipse viewers near Torreón, Mexico, got to experience totality for the longest. Totality there lasted 4 minutes, 28 seconds, according to NASA. 

Most places along the centerline of the path of totality saw a totality duration of between 3.5 and 4 minutes, according to NASA. Some places in the U.S. came close to the maximum; Kerrville, Texas, had a totality duration of 4 minutes, 24 seconds.

What is the path of totality for the 2044 solar eclipse?

The next total solar eclipse that will be visible from the contiguous U.S. will be on Aug. 23, 2044.

Astronomy fans in the U.S. will have far fewer opportunities to see the 2044 eclipse they had on April 8. NASA has not yet made maps available for the 2044 eclipse but, according to The Planetary Society , the path of totality will only touch three states.

The 2024 eclipse will start in Greenland, pass over Canada and end as the sun sets in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, according to the Planetary Society.

Aliza Chasan is a digital producer at 60 Minutes and CBSNews.com. She has previously written for outlets including PIX11 News, The New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo. Aliza covers trending news, often focusing on crime and politics.

More from CBS News

How often do total solar eclipses happen?

When is the next total solar eclipse in the U.S.?

Is it safe to take pictures of the solar eclipse with your phone?

See the list of notable total solar eclipses in the U.S. since 1778