The footage from above was taken in a Hubei high school. Images of the scene have been circulating the Internet since a student posted them on her Weibo account last week. ChinaSMACK has translated the original press coverage and a collection of netizen reactions. Shanghai Daily has more on the use of intravenous study aids in Hubei classrooms:

Xiaogan City No. 1 High School said each student was subsidized 10 yuan (US$1.6) by the provincial education bureau for amino acid injection to relieve their stress ahead of the National College Entrance Exams.

But the [Hubei education] bureau denied giving amino acid injection subsidies, the Beijing Times reported today.

[...]Li Jingren, a Beijing doctor, told the newspaper that the abuse of amino acid could harm to the students’ health and each bottle would cost nearly 100 yuan.

Sun Zhongshi, an expert with the State Food and Drug Administration, said students are prone to get cross-infection when receiving injections in the classroom. “Whether amino acid can improve memory remains a question.”

Global Times quoted a teacher from the Hubei high school, who was interviewed by local media:

“Some students were not feeling well these days due to the bad weather. As the exam is approaching, more students are coming for the IV drip at the clinic than its capacity can hold,” the teacher said.

“It is for this reason that the school has decided to let students have drips in the classroom.”

[...]Students may not need to use the IV drips but they are willing to give it a try when they see their classmates are doing so, Yang Dongping, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, an NGO that researches educational policy, told the Global Times.

“It is useless to talk about whether it is effective to have IV drips for energy supplement at the moment. The case shows the competition for entering a prestigious college is extremely harsh for these students,” Yang said.

As fierce competition leads to questionable practices on the domestic stage, it may also be contributing to Chinese success in international student assessment campaigns. In 2009, students in Shanghai outshone those in the U.S. on global assessment exams administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, leading to an internal debate about the merits of China’s education system. The next round of the OECD exams takes place this year, and BBC looks at the 2009 results to ask if China is the “world’s cleverest country”. They talked to Andreas Schleicher, coordinator of the OECD’s international exam, for his take on China’s statistical superiority:

Mr Schleicher says the unpublished results reveal that pupils in other parts of China are also performing strongly.

“Even in rural areas and in disadvantaged environments, you see a remarkable performance.”

[...]The Chinese government has so far not allowed the OECD to publish the actual data.

But Mr Schleicher says the results reveal a picture of a society investing individually and collectively in education.

On a recent trip to a poor province in China, he says he saw that schools were often the most impressive buildings.

[...]“You get an image of a society that is investing in its future, rather than in current consumption.”

There were also major cultural differences when teenagers were asked about why people succeeded at school.

“North Americans tell you typically it’s all luck. ‘I’m born talented in mathematics, or I’m born less talented so I’ll study something else.’

[...]“In China, more than nine out of 10 children tell you: ‘It depends on the effort I invest and I can succeed if I study hard.’

“They take on responsibility. They can overcome obstacles and say ‘I’m the owner of my own success’, rather than blaming it on the system.”

Also see prior CDT coverage of education in China, the college-entrance exams, and the stress that students face in preparation.

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These students’ lives are remarkably devoid of choice and of what might be classified in American high-school culture as “fun.” Classes are picked for them. Dating is forbidden. Fashion is largely irrelevant: The blue-and-white Second High uniform is a unisex polyester track suit so devoid of shape and visual interest that it negates almost everything attractive about the wearer. For many years, long hair, perms, and hair dye were banned, though it could be a sign of China’s baby-step liberalization that girls may now grow out their locks. “Before, they didn’t. That was a violation of our human hair rights!” says Yang Keyang, a senior with long braids whose English names include Coppelia, Pealina, Coco, and Rosalind. (English names being one of the few areas of total liberty for the students, she chose those–all of them.)

The point of all this rigor: to remove every possible distraction as the students prepare for the gaokao, the national college-entrance exams, which are seen as the gateway to success in life. For seniors at Second High, the pressure is extreme. If all goes as planned, its students will eventually join the elite that is driving China’s political and economic resurgence. They will become thought leaders, Communist Party officials, power brokers, billionaires–and, just maybe, reformists.

Over the past year, I followed a group of seniors as they prepped for the gaokao and the next stage of their young lives. What are their teenage dreams? What gives them angst? How do they express themselves, or not? What hopes do they have, for themselves and for their country? I also wanted to hear from their parents. How are the real Tiger Mothers and Fathers–with a strong helping hand from the peculiar species one might call the Tiger Teacher–grooming a new generation of Chinese leaders?

Read more about the gaokao via CDT.

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China’s pioneering South University of Science and Technology has come under fire for appointing a board loaded with government and Communist Party officials despite pledging to maintain an independent administration and curriculum, the South China Morning Post reports. The newly opened university in Shenzhen is widely seen as a litmus test for higher-education reform in China as its outspoken president, Zhu Qingshi, has criticized national government meddling in universities. His battles with the Ministry of Education to obtain a license, ignore college-entrance-exam scores, and enroll the first 45 students in March drew national coverage.

Read more about the university from China Daily and “China’s unconventional university gets mixed welcome” from SciDev.net.

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Taking exams has been the way to get ahead in China since the 7th century AD. Back then, mastering the Confucian classics was the ticket to a job in the imperial bureaucracy. Today, 15-year-olds here in Shanghai overwhelmingly beat out their peers throughout the world last year in the Program for International Student Assessment, an International standardized test. American 15-year-olds ranked 17th.

Wang Jianding: This test proved that our students from Shanghai are the world’s best students in reading, science, and math.

Wang Jianding is the principal of Xinzhuang High School in Shanghai.

Jianding: I think there are several factors contributing to our students’ success: First, Chinese society traditionally values education. Secondly, the Chinese government has ensured a solid education system as the foundation of rapid economic development.

But is acing a standardized test the key to an innovative economy?

Shaun Rein: The education system and its inability to train analytical students is the biggest crisis facing China today.

Listen to the full report. Read more about the gaokao via CDT.

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In his book A Theory of Justice, the political philosopher John Rawls conducted a thought experiment in which people, shrouded under a ‘veil of ignorance,’ were asked to devise a new social structure to live under. Unsure of their lot in this new society, people would be risk-averse, John Rawls assumed, and would agree to a society that ‘maximised the minimum,’ which is to say a society that aimed for equality, fairness, and social mobility.

So let us return to John Rawls’ ‘original position’ and ‘veil of ignorance,’ gather 1.3 billion Chinese into a nice conference room, and see if we can all work together to negotiate an alternative to the gaokao.

Because everyone in the room has Chinese cultural values and lives in the not too pleasant realities of modern China, there’ll be certain constraints that this new education system must consider. First, every Chinese can agree that this new education system ought to be a meritocracy and that the most diligent and brightest students ought to reach the top.

Second, every Chinese can agree that China has limited education resources for too many people; while it would be nice to educate everyone to the best ability of the state as is the case in Finland and Singapore, China is too poor to do so. Third, China is a guanxi-based society with little respect for institutions, processes, and laws; whatever new system that everyone agrees to must be able to resist the pull and power of the well-connected and wealthy. Fourth, Chinese can agree that education is first and foremost about social mobility (rather than about national economic development), about the opportunity for anyone who is willing to work hard to rise in society.

So, given all this, we can now begin constructing an alternative to the gaokao.

See also a report from Marketplace on the impact of the gaokao on student’s lives.

15 year-old Sun Jia Lu wakes up each morning at six, eats breakfast on the bus to school, sits through eight classes, and then returns home where she studies until one in the morning the following day. She wakes up five hours later and repeats. Weekends aren’t for resting. They’re for tutoring sessions. She’s done this for nine years. “All of this for the gaokao,” she tells me outside her high school in a Beijing suburb. The gaokao, China’s college entrance examination that will be administered over three days this week, is the ultimate tool of social advancement in China. It’s the reason why Chinese high schools are glorified test prep institutions. Sun Jia Lu says it’s also behind the nickname teenagers in today’s China have given themselves: The Damaged Generation.

Sun’s still got two years before she takes the gaokao. But for many recent high school graduates in China, this week is the most stressful one of their lives.

Read more about China’s all-important college entrance exam.

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In the United States, students have long turned to independent college counselors, but in recent years, larger outfits have entered the market, offering full-service designer courses, extracurricular activities and focused application assistance. These services have spread to the fast-growing and lucrative market in China.

With China sending more students to American colleges than any other country, the competition for spots at the top schools has soared. During the 2009-10 academic year, 39,947 Chinese undergraduates were studying in the United States, a 52 percent increase from the year before and about five times as many as five years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education, a U.S. organization.

But students from China can find themselves ill-prepared for the admissions process at American colleges. The education system in mainland China focuses on assiduous preparation for the national university entrance exam, the gaokao, often at the expense of extracurricular activities.

About 400 overseas education agencies — including joint Chinese-foreign schools, language training centers and college application consulting agencies — are certified by the Chinese Ministry of Education. The ministry is affiliated with the two largest application consulting agencies in China, the China Center for International Education Exchange and Chivast Education International.

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For 41-year-old Zhang Jiandang, who left Anhui province 16 years ago to make his fortune in Beijing, life is going well.

He has a nice house, a car and a family-owned company in the capital, but something is still missing.

As is the case with other so-called migrant families, Zhang’s son is excluded from taking part in the crucial national college entrance examination in Beijing because none of the family’s members have permanent residency papers for the capital – a coveted Beijing hukou.

[...] Now, Zhang is among 10 parents who are organizing a campaign calling for changes.

The parents have written a series of letters lobbying the Ministry of Education and the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education.

[...] The letter was signed by 12,532 parents, of which 90 percent were migrant workers living in Beijing.

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I spent four years at the Wuhan Foreign Languages School, one of the best high schools in my hometown of Wuhan, in Hubei province. Since it was a boarding school, students were required to stay on campus for five and half days per week. Students start studying at 7 a.m. and take classes until 11 p.m.

Many American students find it hard to understand the Chinese schedule. But we accepted the rigor because competing for the few high-ranking Chinese universities requires a lot of work. Nearly 8.8 million students take the college entrance exam each year, and only about 20,000, or 0.2 percent, make it to the top colleges in China.

Some of my classmates from high school are the hardest-working people I have ever met. The school’s schedule was never enough for them. After the lights went out at 11 p.m., they carried flashlights to bed and read textbooks under their blankets. They finished meals early, so they could use 10 extra minutes to memorize more historical facts and English vocabulary. They lived like this for six years to prepare themselves for the three days of the examination, which would determine their fate. They were like the Sadhus of Hinduism, the ascetics whose focus shuts out everything else. They rebelled in their own way, too, sneaking bites of dried noodles like the rest of us, and sometimes secretly reading newspapers in class — though that was usually to prepare for a politics exam. They taught me an important lesson: work hard and persevere. If you’re going through hell, as Winston Churchill said, keep going.

There is a more somber Chinese saying, “Chi de ku zhong ku, fang wei ren shang ren,” that explains why Chinese students work so hard: Those who can overcome the highest level of hardship and pain will become the elite in this world.

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While the students took their exams, parents were streaming into the vermillion gates of the temples, to burn incense and pray for good scores. (One friend told me today about a fellow mother who is so crazed that she has been visiting Catholic churches as well, just for good measure.) The city itself even got into the spirit, ordering drivers to avoid honking, which might disturb students, and, in some places, closing down Internet cafes in the days before, to encourage studying.

Over lunch, I asked Wang Hao—a gaokao veteran and sharp young journalist who has helped me on many stories—why China maintains a system that puts so much pressure on a single test, instead of factoring in essays, recommendations, and other measures. “My parents’ generation, which went through the Cultural Revolution, will tell you that the test is the only way to keep it fair,” he said. “Otherwise, all of the good schools would be filled entirely by people with connections.” It’s a good point, and, if anyone wonders whether corruption is really a risk in China’s education system, Chinese papers this week have been full of news of foiled cheaters, including the crime rings in Fujian province that were selling a product line that included “wireless earphones, signal emitters, scanner-imbedded pens and watches.”

Read more about the college entrance exams via CDT.

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The objective of this contemporary education system is to mold “new people”. When I say “new people”, I mean a new generation of individuals different from the historically backwards ones. But during this process of “molding” it is impossible for us to throw off tradition. No matter how we mold [new people], we still must depend on the day in and day out tradition of educating unobtrusively and imperceptibly, of teaching students according to their individual abilities.

When the great Confucius said that we should “teach students according to their individual abilities”, he certainly did not mean that we should teach only from some textbook for some test, he meant that we should identify and cultivate each student’s individual and unique genius[….]

Gaokao Prep Books

In the past, teachers praised and criticized students on the good and bad deeds they performed—this determined whether or not a student was a good or bad child. Now, teachers praise or criticize students solely on their grades. Students who score high on their exams represent “Socialism’s ‘new person’”. Whether or not the student has morals, faith in socialism, or is an empathetic person is not important. Scores determine everything. An inhumane student with good grades is still considered to be a “new person”.

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