The tension rises in China

Anxiety is rippling through China. Millions of people know that what happens over the next two days could be a crucial turning point in their lives.

Think I’m kidding? Then you don’t understand the pressure that builds every year at this time before the annual college entrance examinations across China.

It’s a pressure cooker out there.

Some 10 million high school students will show up at schools Saturday morning and began testing -- two hours in the morning, then two hours in the afternoon. They return Sunday for hours more testing. When the testing is over at 5 p.m. on Sunday, there’ll be an audible sigh across the country as relieved students and parents head home to relax, glad that the ordeal is over.

Known as the “gao kao” in Chinese, the college entrance exam is considered the “test of a lifetime” because it determines whether and where you can get into university.

Doing well on the exam and getting into a top university is a ticket to a lifetime of opportunities. That is only partly because students at the top schools will have a social network of friends who will help them advance for the rest of their lives.

This year, some 5.95 million lucky high school seniors will be admitted to universities, a much smaller percentage than in other countries like South Korea and Japan.

This exam is serious business for parents. I’ve been hearing about it for months from one of our office workers, whose son will be sweating it out in the exam room this weekend.

Some parents actually will be renting hotel rooms near the testing locations tonight and over the weekend to take one less worry away before the testing.

According to this story, some parents are crowding into temples to pray for good fortune, and burn incense and candles.

Other parents are practically force-feeding their offspring special tonics meant to increase concentration.

"If you collected up all the empty bottles of tonic my classmates have drunk, you could make a small hill," high school student Vicky Yang told China Daily.

Every year before the exams, the issue of test security appears on the front pages of newspapers, and this year has been no exception. Authorities do their best to keep test questions from leaking out. According to the Beijing Evening News, as cited by the Danwei blog, the test papers have been labeled “top secret” and anyone caught trying to cheat will face severe punishments.

By Monday, all those students stoked up on tonic will be completely relaxed. But the tension will build toward June 28. That’s when the test results come back.

Comments

[A B]

I am anxiously awaiting the day when the students open the test package, and find a single question:

Q: Why?

[A B]

PS, I am giving a prize to the first Chinese national ordinarily resident in China since birth to post my answer to the question.

Hint: It is 2 words long.

[Marvin Foushee]

Only 12 percent of California's high school seniors are accepted into their university-wide system. I guess that if you walked down the street in China chanting, "May Governor Grope Live for a 1000 Years," you would probably get hit in the mouth by an angry parent.

[Marvin Foushee]

Going Global for the Future

Going global for the international education is getting more and more important for Chinese students to sharpen their competitiveness in their future career prospects. Each year since 2002, the number of Chinese students studying abroad continues to register more than 100,000. It is expected that the number will reach 200,000 by 2008.

Correspondingly, the number of high school and college graduates is expected to hit a record high of 14.8 million and 5.5 million in 2008. Last year, China had 14 million and 5 million fresh high school and college graduates, and one-fifth of those college graduates had failed to find a job by the end of last year, according to the Ministry of Education (MOE).

[A B]

If China were to wise up, they would set up a system of technical colleges like German Realschule, Hauptschule and Gesamtschule. followed by Fachhochschule and de-emphasize universities, which traditionally produce students with very few marketable skills unless they are in a professional school or a technical discipline that is readily marketable.

The last thing China needs is another 100,000,000 university graduates in Marx-Lenin-Mao-Deng thought.

[LBSH]

@AB

There is such a system in place. In Shanhgai, the most kids don't go to the college and don't bother to try. So if you get into one of the municipal or district "key" highs, you have 90-100% chance of getting into one or another college.

[James Cochran]

I wonder how many parents with pray and burn incense at the Lama Temple in Beijing?

They should include the grieving parents in Sichuan, the unfortunate disaster victims in Burma and the Tibetan people in their prayers.

[anon]

@ A B: Ah, critiquing on a system that you're completely clueless about. I've going to copy your example and assume you are ugly and American. Maybe you voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 as well.

China has an extensive system of technical colleges and vocational high schools. The problem is that a diploma from these schools will never lead to the upper middle class lifestyle that all Chinese urbanites aspire to. For urban middle class parents, having their only child attend a vocational school is a sign of their abject failure as parents, even if that's the best that the child is capable of accomplishing. This isn't a failure of government planning, but a problem of middle class vanity and unrealistic life expectations. Is that so hard to understand given the American propensity to buy expensive and expensive to maintain McMansions and SUVs?

Secondly, Chinese university are not ideological. They train their students in engineering, medicine, law, communications, etc., just like any Western university. While there is a compulsory political education component to the testing and university education, the young people I've met who went through the process describe it as a marathon memorization exercise where they cram as much meaningless Marxist and Maoist sayings into their head as possible for exam, and then immediately purge their brain after the test. Other than their vague but growing sense of nationalism, the young Chinese are some of the least ideological people around.

[anon]

@ A B: Ah, critiquing on a system that you're completely clueless about. I've going to copy your example and assume you are ugly and American. Maybe you voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 as well.

China has an extensive system of technical colleges and vocational high schools. The problem is that a diploma from these schools will never lead to the upper middle class lifestyle that all Chinese urbanites aspire to. For urban middle class parents, having their only child attend a vocational school is a sign of their abject failure as parents, even if that's the best that the child is capable of accomplishing. This isn't a failure of government planning, but a problem of middle class vanity and unrealistic life expectations. Is that so hard to understand given the American propensity to buy expensive and expensive to maintain McMansions and SUVs?

Secondly, Chinese university are not ideological. They train their students in engineering, medicine, law, communications, etc., just like any Western university. While there is a compulsory political education component to the testing and university education, the young people I've met who went through the process describe it as a marathon memorization exercise where they cram as much meaningless Marxist and Maoist sayings into their head as possible for exam, and then immediately purge their brain after the test. Other than their vague but growing sense of nationalism, the young Chinese are some of the least ideological people around.

[A B]

Fun to see the literacy level of the readers.

So maybe some rote memorization and repetition is necessary:

"If China were to wise up, they would set up a system of technical colleges like German Realschule, Hauptschule and Gesamtschule. followed by Fachhochschule"

The German system produces graduates that are very skilled, very employable, and earn an exceptionally good wage substantially higher than the lower end of the university graduates in Germany that places them well into the middle class.

The Chinese equivalent produces students that basically do not meet this test because they do not achieve what the German system is able to do - students who leave a technical college with highly prized skills and habits learned from work, not just text book curriculum.

Sure, they are named technical college, etc. in China that sounds like their German equivalent, but what do they really teach? What do they really turn out? And what do the graduates do for jobs? Pretty clear few of them make "middle class".

Now, second example of lack of literacy:

"....universities, which traditionally produce students with very few marketable skills unless they are in a professional school or a technical discipline that is readily marketable."

The phrase UNLESS clearly exclude subjects which there are marketable skills like engineering, etc.

So clearly the ones who remain "anon" in their comments have a requirement to conceal their identity so as to not expose their inability to read and comprehend the English language at the Grade 12 level - which is what the above was written at.

I shudder to wonder if "anon" is an American university grad that can't comprehend English and still got a University degree.

[anon]

So you passed strawmen construction and tried to divert the conversation by attacking people who responded to your original statements with completely irrelevant points...am I supposed to be impressed?

Firstly, someone calling him/herself A.B. critizing the anonymity of others is rich. You made two false assumptions in your original statement: that the Chinese lack a decent vocational school system and that Chinese universities would produce useless ideologues unsuited for anything else. Once refuted by others with greater knowledge about China, you resort to mocking their grammar rather than answer their clearly stated points.

(The higher quality Chinese vocational schools DO produce graduates who have better job prospects than their lower tier university peers. They also have higher test cutoffs compared to those fly-by-night universities.

But generally speaking, a 4 year university education is overwhelmingly preferred by both the general Chinese citizenry and Chinese hiring managers, especially for promotions and managerial jobs).

You can be the grammar authority and proudly stand by your internet moniker. And if you think those qualities make you an authority on anything else, I'm in no mood to argue further with an ugly American.

[A B]

Adjusting my colonial tricorner hat here....

Time to get going on USS Powhatan etc. to visit the next port of call.

[Wilbur Varela]

A B, forget anon. You are playing piano to a water buffalo.....

[A B]

The Korean educational system is widely regarded as better than the Chinese, and look what Korean parents are doing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/world/asia/08geese.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

Sending kids abroad for high school to fight the rigid thinking perpetuated by the system.

For those who read the fine print (in German), someone might have noticed that students are streamed into technical high schools and then college. By the time they get out of high school, it is often too late to start them onto being good technicians.

That is the experience of the Americans, who for centuries relied on skilled craftsman from the "old world" to come and fill jobs in the US that American high schools and colleges do a poor job of training for.

(Don't get me started on how hard it is to hire good techs in the US.)

That was partly remedied by the switch to computerization and IT as the principal driver, which America, at least during the last 10 years, turned out a good number of good people in.

I note with humor that no poster took my bait to post the answer to the exam question "Why?".

It will be a long time before China's educational system overcome the deficit in turning out students with imagination, creativity, etc. on a par with the US.

The only thing that is saving them is there are so many Chinese that they need fewer at work with those attributes.