ABSTRACT
In recent years, China’s gaokao1 has received much attention from popular media and academic scholarship both inside and outside China (see, for example, BBC4 2008; PBS; Jing 2007; Mullins 2005; Davey et al. 2007). The majority of these accounts focus on problems with the examination, such as corruption (Xing 2004), regional discrimination (Zhou 2005) and the ways in which concessions are exploited (for example, because entry requirements for foreign nationals are significantly lower than they are for Chinese nationals, some families may emigrate in order to apply as non-Chinese students). Commentators also scrutinize the exam-oriented education system (yingshi jiaoyu, 应试教育) (Kipnis 2001: 11) that places emphasis on rote memorization rather than on the critical application of concepts. Emerging from such accounts are vivid pictures of young Chinese as viciously overworked and under-rested, or even psychologically damaged (see, for example, Siegel 2007) by the pressures placed on them by parents, family, teachers and Chinese society as a whole2. These accounts portray young Chinese as passive, docile and prey to forces above and beyond their control.3 It is not my intention to contest these depictions. In fact, my ethnographic research, like that of Vanessa Fong in Dalian (2004a: 124) very quickly yielded accounts from Chinese students of pressure, discipline and competition. Students also described feelings of anxiety, frustration, fear, trepidation and depression that, in some cases, became expressed in physical symptoms, and blamed their troubles on excessive amounts of study and unreasonable parental expectations. For example, 18-year-old Chen Yingxia commented:
Senior high school was not a good time as I was over-anxious . . . I had a pile of books to read and I found myself trying to read all of them within one night. I got some Chinese medicine and this reduced my anxiety.
