China's lost children

Catherine is a Chinese 14 year old in a class of about nine similarly aged others, mainly girls. Most are sweet, cute and bright but heart-breaker Catherine doesn't yet understand why boys fight over her.

She's certain she wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. When she feels like it she shows what an outstanding one she'd be, expressing her strong, definite character, and complex, reasoned opinions about an array of topics most Chinese adults couldn't discuss. But she only does it talking privately with me, never in front of the class.

I routinely ask students about their doings; I want them to speak and I like getting to know them. Most kids spontaneously elaborate when I demand it but in class Catherine is usually very closed, grunting simple answers. What did you do on your vacation? "Nothing." What did you do this week? "Study." How are you feeling now? "No feeling."

Giving these replies her manner is sullen, disinterested and passive. I'd be relieved to see some rebellious spirit in one so deep; instead the total absence of that hints at something far deeper. At first I thought it was just a kid being lazy so I pressed her for specifics.

What do you mean you just studied last week? That's all you did? "Yes." All day, every day? "Yes." Although her parents live locally, she spends the week in a boarding school. Teachers and guardians make her study all the time. And unlike some nations where the good boarding schools are out in the country, as China's biggest city, Shanghai also has the best schools. So her home is local, the school is local, yet she only stays home two days a week. I ask: What about weekends? What do you do then? "Study." You study the whole weekend? "Yes." She only sees her parents in passing because they send her to a gruelling regime of weekend classes, including mine. Her parents never do anything with her. Their idea of raising a child is to cram as much study into the week as possible, leaving nothing else. It's an empty, loveless life.

Catherine truly has nothing to say, and worse, no feeling about her life, and it really does consist of just study. When she talks about it her posture and expression are defeated. It's as if she accepts her fate and has already given up trying to escape it.

All kids I see have varying degrees of this lifestyle. I remember when kids used to run around and play outside, but Shanghai kids never do. Schools start about 8 am, finishing around 4 or 5 pm, and class time is very intense. The schools officially have lunch breaks but (allegedly) for liability reasons kids are not allowed outside, so they stay inside doing homework. And they need to do it during lunch, and at any other spare moments such as during breaks in my class, because then they may at least complete their solid evening of homework around midnight. Weekends and school vacations involve a full load of classes every day. During vacations students must complete special extra homework which is assessed to determine if they progress to the next grade. Depending on the age group school vacations may also involve compulsory community service work and army training. From the time they start school they have hardly a minute of free time; most western kids would show ill-effects after a few days of that, but Chinese kids experience the same unvarying routine for years on end. Recently I suggested a weekend off to another favourite, seventeen, in light of her down mood; she agreed it was a good idea but didn't know what to do.

In this bleak, loveless society, most adults also don't know what fun is. Most western people could hardly imagine depriving children of play, vital for learning and development. But Chinese systematically do that while withholding everything else kids desperately need: love and sleep. Most kids have permanent dark bags under their eyes. It would hardly be possible to design a more abusive, harmful system.

Adolescence is a time for kids to work out who they want to be, but these kids get no time for that. They never ponder, wonder or daydream. So they never work out who they are and what they want, effectively never growing up.

Parents make it worse by suppressing independence and individuality, making every tiny decision for their kids well into their 20s and often beyond. Kids have no input into what they will study or do with their lives. Very often this parental decision-making extends to whom they should marry. Worse, parents do every domestic thing for their kids; the reason kids do no cooking or housework is to make more study time. But it means kids reach adult age unable to do even the smallest things for themselves. Chinese are raised disabled and helpless.

That alone suggests many conclusions about Chinese parenting. Parents teach their children nothing except how unwanted they are and that money is more important than anything. Parents are "too busy" working to spend time with their children. Kids are often home alone late into the evenings, making their own dinners of instant noodles, and those whose school vacations are occasionally not full of regimented activity must stay home all day alone because it's "too dangerous" to go out with friends. Not that most have friends, except internet chat friends. In this overwhelmingly single-child country most kids spend almost zero time with anyone related to them.

Much of the reason for filling kids' lives with endless classes is babysitting. Parents don't know what to do with the kids therefore send them to classes even when kids clearly don't need them.

Parents think spending money on their kids is the same as caring for them. Catherine turns up with an expensive mobile phone, watches, electronic dictionary, and, seemingly redundantly, MP3 players plus iPod. It's standard equipment for most children of China's new upper-middle class. Some wear jewellery too. Catherine goes further by alternating over a few weeks several pairs of expensive pink NewBalance running shoes. Kids have everything they want but nothing they need.

Much of this stems from why Chinese parents have children in the first place. Primarily it concerns social obligation. If they were half-honest many parents would admit they don't really want kids, but they do it anyway because, like marriage, it's one of those gotta-dos. They never question it. Later they discover they have no time, no ability, and even less interest in caring for their kids so they palm the job onto others. To the extent most parents value their kids at all, it's mainly for selfish reasons. Some of it concerns status. If they must have a child, and since for most people it can only be one, then it should be a perfect child, better than everyone else's. Children are status symbols. And these days since some families can have more than one if they can afford it, extra children have become a symbol of very high status. Thirdly, it's about investment. Historically Chinese were always raised with a sense of obligation and duty to parents. Today it means parents want kids to get "good" jobs, which in Chinese thinking invariably means well-paid, so they can support the parents in old age: a major reason for the study urgency. Parents never think about what's best for the kids nor what they might want. Concern for others is typically not a Chinese strength.

The result is people who don't know how to live. By the time they reach adult age most people's only ambition is to join the corporate herd. Only the most exceptional hope to do anything more with their lives. Most have no dreams, no choices, no individuality. They can't think or make decisions because every aspect of life is decided for them; someone is always telling them what to do. For those raised disabled and dependant, herds are safer.

Money is all they want but it costs every bit of life they have.

While I don't like the parents, I really care about the good kids, these bright, troubled girls. Catherine is deepest, most powerful, but also makes me saddest: she's probably a young Germaine Greer or Hillary Clinton, but in China the path to greatness she might have taken in any other society is forever closed. Sometimes I have teacher-moments where I think about helping her achieve her potential; the price would be exclusion from her society. I grieve for their tragic lives even as they enrich mine.

This is not true for certain other types of student whom I actively dislike. Many of the first generation of older teenagers born since China opened up, already struggling at high school, are completely spoiled and helpless, giving up at the first sign of difficulty. The only time Chinese ever rebel is to fight teachers urging them to grow. They don't want or need to grow; it's easier to remain children, and Chinese do love what's easiest. The only thing kids understand is that whenever life gets difficult someone will baby them.

Every bratty thing students do is indulged, or perhaps not noticed, especially for boys. Probably it's easier: Chinese adults are no different to kids in their avoidance of difficulty.

Maybe I can understand and forgive Chinese teachers not caring: they have all the same problems as teachers elsewhere, only with bigger classes and worse resources. But it's far worse than simple indifference. Regular classes are deliberately ineffective to create demand for extra, real classes, for which parents must pay. Test answers are also available this way. Small, reasonable favours cost. For example, a recent true story: a parent writes to a primary school teacher asking that the child be moved closer to the front due to poor vision. Many kids needlessly suffer vision problems because of China's poor or often non-existent optometric care. The teacher responds with a demand for a bribe, and when not forthcoming, moves the child to the back of a class with 60 screaming kids between her and the distant blackboard. Teachers gouge for every possible thing. The theme is: pay up or we'll get your kids.

University is perhaps worse. Postgraduate students must bribe their professors and failure to do so may result in disqualification. PhD students work for the professors for free, and can only graduate after the professors feel they've been useful enough. This, according to an Australian Chinese lecturer I know, can take up to seven unpaid, full time years. No written guidelines or arbitration exists and students are totally at the mercy of the professors' whims. Gaining a postgraduate university place can involve the same kind of bribery; I know of a boy who qualified on merit and was denied admission in favour of those who had paid. He ultimately committed suicide. Long before any tests, some pre-university students are already completely certain they will gain a place; it's been arranged. And the bribes required are 4-5 years of a professor's salary, or for a common family, 10 years' salary. No wonder Chinese professors so commonly own rental property.

Junior university teachers, who do the bulk of teaching, are often "qualified" without any research, industry or even teaching experience. They have no new ideas, are totally resistant to new ideas, and once they can perfectly reproduce the Old Masters' thoughts without any of their own, they can skip from undergraduate to lecturer.

Such "learning" that takes place is passive, based on recall of dead material. Questions and new interpretations are punished, as is failure to recall precisely. The only intellectual skill students possess is recall; their cognitive abilities are almost absent because they get almost zero cognitive stimulation. No-one ever asks them what they think; they don't know what they think because for their whole lives others have been deciding everything for them and ensuring they never have time to think. Even most university and pre-university students can't discuss the juiciest topics. On the rare occasions they have anything to say it's usually the easiest and most obvious answer. They're conditioned to uncritically repeat verbatim whatever information they're fed. This has always been the Chinese ideal.

It would make sense to examine the psychological impact of this systematic child abuse with expert comment. Except there's no need since the effects are painfully obvious.

Chinese parents produce helpless, dependant children and schools extend it. Kids play when they're supposed to study and study when they're supposed to play: never really achieving either. Schools are miserable, grey places of grim conformity. Even if kids want to read and learn on their own, they can't; school texts have no meaningful content and schools have dusty book museums instead of libraries. Instead of confident, articulate young adults with something to say, what emerges is stunted, semi-autistic cripples, forever unable to learn or grow, and in very real ways mentally retarded.

Catherine could have done anything she wanted but she will end up as a corporate drone. There's no alternative for middle class families. Some young kids have ideas and still care about issues, teachers just have to coax it out. But by age 22 or so (when they start work) nearly everyone has surrendered to orthodox views about everything, giving up whatever feeble dreams and individuality they once had. Most have no idea who they are or what they want. Ultimately nearly everyone is crushed into incurious deadness, caring about nothing except money.

Compassionate people might ask how can Chinese allow their system to produce weak, programmable robots: not that Chinese could accept that. But the question only makes sense when you realize the system's whole purpose is to produce robots.

More and more I hear "China is the future"; but for me this is a nightmarish statement because it's probably true.

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