How Chinese students cope with increasing competitiveness

The Chinese education system is without a doubt the most competitive in the world. Every year, nearly 10 million students take the Gaokao, the gruelling two- or three-day end-of-school exam that determines which universities students can gain admission to, and what direction their careers and futures may take. As one of our own employees described it: “It’s hard to imagine for non-Chinese people how decisive the Gaokao is. The results determine whether you will be admitted to the country’s top universities and even one slightly lower mark in one subject can limit your opportunities.”

With this intense level of competition comes enormous pressure to succeed, anxiety about potential failure, and sheer exhaustion due to the effort needed to keep up with peers. In this high-pressure environment, it’s not surprising that many Chinese students can become disillusioned or burned out. 

In this article, we take a closer look at what drives this level of competition, how this manifests at universities and what the consequences are, and what Chinese students are doing to cope.

  The concept of ‘involution’

In China, the term ‘involution’ has been quickly gaining ground. Originally, involution was a term used to describe a certain type of agricultural economy in which each additional worker consumed the extra amount they produced, leading to an equilibrium and a stagnation.

But now it has come to mean a circular trap in which seemingly all of Chinese society is now caught. As anthropologist Xiang Biao, a professor at the University of Oxford and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, describes it: “If involution is said to originally have referred to a structural pattern in agricultural society which is repetitive, lacks competition, and prevents progress, then involution today is an endless cycle of self-flagellation, feeling as if you’re running in place and constantly having to motivate yourself day in, day out.”

“Everyone in China has the same goals: Earn more money, buy a home of more than 100 square metres, own a car, start a family, and so on,” says Xiang. “This route is very well marked, and everyone is highly integrated. People are all fighting for the same things within this market.”

Education is of course a huge aspect of this involuted culture, with many seeing a good education as key to reaching these goals. “The current middle-class anxiety is real,” says one student. “Even if children are no longer required to achieve intergenerational upward mobility like their own generation, they still need to prevent their offspring from falling and being afraid of being thrown out. Education has become a defensive strategy here. If you don’t participate, you are out.”

 How does this intense competition play out at universities?

Chinese students envision university as a time of making new friends, exploring new interests, and experiencing arts and culture. Instead, students find themselves back in the same intense atmosphere as at the end of school, with people too busy studying to make friends with others. This is how one student described it, in the article “When GPA Is King: The Prisoners’ Dilemma for Young People in China’s Top Universities”: “When I return to the [university’] dormitory building, my mind is full of the nightmare atmosphere of the end-of-school exam preparation.”

Students’ hopes of finding themselves and exploring their own interests are dashed soon after entering university, with senior students, counsellors and teachers all advising students to focus not on personal fulfilment, but on their grade point average (GPA). This is because GPAs are largely used to determine admission into masters and post-doctorate degrees, internships, and jobs. 

This leads to students crafting their course selection not on what they are passionate about or what would challenge them the most, but what is more likely to guarantee a good grade. In the end, going to university is less about broadening one’s horizons than simply doing what is deemed necessary to reach those top spots.

It’s unsurprising that such a competitive environment can leave many feeling highly stressed. As one teacher described it: “Competition means that not everyone can achieve the goal … Many students are in a panic because of this. One of my students could barely breathe because of an essay. He felt that if this article was not written well, his grades would be bad, and the bad grade would affect his whole GPA.”

Many find themselves simply going through the motions and not actually caring much about what they learned – as long as they obtain a degree from a top university, little else matters.

   How do Chinese students cope with this intense competition? 

Many are starting to recognise the shortcomings of tertiary education in a society so geared towards involution. Not only does it cause huge amounts of stress for the students, to the point where some see suicide as the only way out, but it results in graduates who have lost their love of learning and are afraid to challenge themselves and think outside the box.  

“The school has become a scientific chicken farm,” says Gan Yang, dean of Xinya College in Tsinghua University. “What is studied is how much hormones can be used, whether the lights can be brighter, and how to stimulate students to remember more things.”

Some Chinese universities are taking steps to combat this. Qu Jingdong, professor of sociology at Peking University, encourages students to perform a play every two or three years, as a way of breaking them out of the endless cycle of studying and competition.

Similarly, Professor Gan asked his first-year student to go to the countryside to do farm and factory work for a couple of weeks. This again encourages comradery – there is no mobile phone reception, so students are forced to socialised. But it also gives them some much-needed grounding, and it gives them time to escape from their usual rhythm of life.

Liberal arts schools are also slowly gaining in popularity, with many recognising that assets like creativity and intellectual curiosity are essential assets in a fast-evolving global economy.

Overseas education also remains a huge drawcard for those students looking to escape this relentless competition – and for their parents too. Far from the “tiger mum or dad” stereotype of parents putting a lot of pressure on their children to do well in school, one survey in fact found that many parents who sent their child abroad for their education did so because they did not want their child to have the same high-pressure Chinese education they had. These parents want their children to have a broader worldview, to be fluent in English and Chinese, and still have a competitive edge over other local Chinese students without the stress of performing well academically. Chinese international students also have the space to branch out, explore different interests, find new hobbies and, as Professor Gan says, “[think] about what kind of person they want to be and what kind of life they want to live”.