Pressure and loneliness: the harsh daily life of a Chinese high school student
Nine hours of lessons a day plus homework in the evening, parental expectations, anxiety about the gaokao, the exam that opens the doors to the best universities. A recent study reveals the widespread feeling of never being good enough. The toll of the long years of the ‘one-child policy’ is also evident in the relational difficulties of today's teenagers.
Beijing (AsiaNews) - It is 9.10 p.m. on a hot evening in late March and in the blink of an eye the courtyard of one of the most prestigious secondary schools in south-east China is filled with students, ready to return to their dormitories in an orderly fashion.
This is how a typical day ends for a Chinese high school student, whose alarm clock rings very early in the morning, usually no later than 6.30 a.m.
At 7:40 a.m., the notes of Simon & Garfunkel's ‘The Sound of Silence’ announce the start of classes over the campus loudspeakers. The first 20 minutes are devoted to revision, followed by five hours of lessons from 8:00 a.m. to 12:10 p.m.
After lunch, at 1.20pm, they return to the classroom for another four hours, until 4.45pm. From 4.45pm to 6pm, students have time to eat dinner in the canteen before the last phase of the school day begins, which is dedicated to completing the homework assigned by their teachers and ends after 9pm.
As is well known, Chinese teenagers spend much more time at their desks than their Western peers. In a culture that has always been defined as ‘exam-centric’, such as China's, learning plays a central role in the lives of young people, especially in preparation for the final exam of the second cycle of education, known as the gaokao.
The latter is considered decisive for their future: the score achieved determines access to the best universities and allows them to be more competitive in the job market.
Given the importance attached to education and this final stage of their educational path, young Chinese people are under considerable pressure at school, with obvious repercussions on their psychological well-being.
Data from the latest national survey on the mental health of the Chinese population, dating back to 2023, reveal that more than 40% of high school students suffer from mood disorders.
Previous surveys also show that 19.3% of young Chinese people have had suicidal thoughts, fuelled mainly by excessive school pressure and family conflicts.
According to one of the most recent studies on the subject, carried out on a sample of twenty high school students in Sichuan, the main stress factor for Chinese high school students is the high expectations that they themselves, their teachers, parents and relatives place on their academic performance. However, these expectations are not always realised in reality, often causing feelings of guilt.
Sun, one of the students interviewed by the researchers, admitted: ‘I think my stress mainly comes from the fact that my family's expectations of me do not match my actual situation. My parents have built so much and been so successful. I admire them. They expect me to reach a higher social status than they have, but I feel that... given my current academic performance, it's very unlikely.’
Zhao's testimony is equally significant: ‘My grades have always been good since I was a child, and my parents had high expectations for my future. Then, after I entered high school, my test results were not ideal; there were too many bright students here, and my parents became very angry. They vented their dissatisfaction by telling me how brilliant other people's children were and did not consider how I felt or whether I could bear it. They also said very hurtful things to me, and I felt really hurt, and I didn't dare to argue with them, because if I did, my parents might cry...’
Faced with the crumbling of their certainties and their first unexpected failures, young Chinese people find themselves defenceless. As Fei, a teacher with two decades of teaching experience, testifies: ‘Many students considered themselves geniuses because they had achieved excellent results in primary and secondary school. But after entering high school, they discovered that they had many problems with their studies that they were unable to solve. At that point, they began to doubt themselves and lost motivation to the point of giving up on themselves’.
This sense of frustration is also fuelled by the fact that Chinese high schools are highly competitive environments where it is difficult to stand out. Such a context hinders the possibility of forming strong interpersonal bonds between classmates and finding comfort in sharing feelings with each other.
What's more, when conflicts arise between peers, Chinese teenagers tend to repress their anger and dissatisfaction, prioritising the maintenance of good interpersonal relationships in the school environment, with repercussions on their mental well-being. According to researchers, the reason for this behaviour is not only cultural – Chinese society values the Confucian concept of harmony (hexie) in interpersonal relationships – but also the lack of interpersonal skills among young people.
This is mainly due to the fact that many of them, being only children, do not have the natural conditions to acquire and practise these skills in the family environment. Excessive use of mobile phones has further reduced the opportunity to practise interacting with real people, while the consumption of television programmes, films and novels has distorted and misled perceptions of social relationships.
Romantic relationships deserve a separate discussion. Since school rules do not encourage high school students to form emotional bonds with the opposite sex, let alone with people of the same sex, their feelings often remain unexpressed.
Another source of unease among Chinese students is their often conflictual relationship with their parents. In addition to having very high expectations of their children's academic performance, parents sometimes adopt a controlling attitude towards them, limiting their privacy.
A girl surnamed Wong said: ‘Parents always say they want to create a relaxed learning environment for me. In reality, what they do is put a lot of pressure on me, making it impossible for me to achieve that kind of inner relaxation’.
Some students, on the other hand, suffer from being away from their parents, whom they can only see once a month because they live far away from the school.
Looking at the problem in more detail, a study published in 2023 in the journal Psychology Research and Behaviour Management reveals that adolescents from low-income families suffer most from school stress because they have more limited access to the educational resources they need for their specific needs. Another at-risk group is girls, as female adolescents are generally more emotionally sensitive than their male peers. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the psychological well-being of young Chinese people should also not be overlooked.
In recent years, the central government has taken massive action to address the issue of student mental health. In addition to reforming the gaokao system, in 2019 it launched the Healthy China Action Plan (2019-2030), a programme of measures aimed at safeguarding the health of Chinese citizens, particularly young people.
More recently, The Special Action Plan for Comprehensively Strengthening and Improving the Mental Health Work of Students in the New Era (2023-2025) was promoted, a plan aimed at strengthening mental health care in Chinese schools. Further actions have been taken at the local level.
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