Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  I looked down at her résumé. She had gotten a perfect score. In fact, she had gotten a perfect score on the whole test. Of the nearly 1.7 million prospective college students to take the test that year, Lin Lin was one of the 583 who had earned a perfect score—2400. And she took the test in her second language.*

  “Of what achievement or experience are you most proud?” I asked Lin Lin.

  “My book sales and my scholarship fund,” she replied. The young woman pictured on the book cover beneath her palm was, in fact, Lin Lin. Love You on the Moor, a book of poems, written in English, inspired by the Victorian authors and poets she loved to read in middle school, was published when Lin Lin was fifteen.

  Lin Lin had spearheaded the advertising and sales efforts for Love You on the Moor. She began with a book sale at school. She explained, “I was really nervous because I worried that the students would not accept my poetry, which took me years to complete. However, I convinced myself to give it a try, because, after all, the worst that would happen would be failure. I did lots of preparation work beforehand, practicing a sales speech and making a roll-up banner.” On the day of the sale she gave a rousing speech in front of her homemade banner and sold 325 copies to a student body of only eight hundred. Riding high on that success, she contacted Dangdang, one of China’s biggest online booksellers, and asked it to sell her book on its site; she used the sales she made at school to demonstrate the book’s potential. Dangdang agreed. With the proceeds from the book sales, Lin Lin started her own scholarship fund in rural Chongqing, sponsoring the high school education of four exceptional students from the rural village of Ersheng.

  Chengdu, her hometown, was the center of China’s Develop the West strategy, an attempt to mend the economic fractures riddling China. Due to quick and uneven development, the economic distance between a city like Chengdu and a village like Ersheng was staggering, better measured in decades than miles.

  “Why did you select these prospective majors?” I asked.

  “My dream to study economics and political science is rooted in funerals,” she told me.

  I blinked and asked, “Your dream is about funerals?”

  “Funerals,” she repeated. “In the rural areas in my home province, Sichuan, people have to save as much as possible for huge one-time expenditures, like big surgeries and traditional grand funerals. Their income is low, and their land yields inconsistent results, often quite meager. Whenever someone dies or get sick, these families shoulder a large economic burden.”

  “The Chinese urban-rural wealth gap seems like a problem best studied in China. Why not consider Tsinghua or Peking universities?” I asked.

  Shrugging, Lin Lin swept the hair out her eyes before explaining, “I’ve considered those options. My dream is to study at a university that promotes…” Lin Lin looked up in thought, sifting through her expansive files of English words and phrases. She was also the third prizewinner of CCTV’s Star of Outlook English Talent Competition, beating out tens of thousands of contestants nationally, “critical thinking and innovation. Plus, Chinese universities are not the best in the world. The best are in America. I want to go there.”

  * * *

  In recent years, people all over China have become fluent in the soul-searching language of dreams. While ambition has always been native to China, the self-centric idea of dreams has not always found a place in China as it had abroad. Surprisingly, the Chinese government had a hand in normalizing dreaming.

  President Xi Jinping first introduced the Chinese Dream to his country in 2012. It has since come to epitomize his administration. When he first enunciated the idea, he kept it vague. Xi explained obliquely that the Chinese Dream meant “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The word rejuvenation, though, doesn’t capture all its meaning. It can also be translated as “renaissance.” The idea was abstract and profound; the president of a nearly 1.4 billion-person country was urging his people to dream.

  As time passed, the notion of a Chinese Dream became increasingly personal. Teachers began to ask their students to write papers about their Chinese Dream, and the best might be featured in local news. On China’s hit TV series Voice of China, the host suddenly began by asking contestants, “What is your Chinese Dream?” TV reporters covered the heart-wrenching story of a student from a disaster zone who made it to a province-level science fair and won first prize; they praised the winner for “actualizing his Chinese Dream.”

  It takes guts to dream sincerely, and China is also in a so-called pre-ironic phase. People are not jaded about the idea of dreaming, nor are they discouraged from speaking from the heart. Debbie Ho, a popular post-90s podcaster who is a Peking University student and originally from Tibet, told me, “Say what you will about China and Beijing, but at least it is a place where no one will laugh at your dreams.”

  Eventually, President Xi became clearer about what the Chinese Dream means for the country. He announced the “Two 100s,” goals to be reached by the centennial anniversary of two pivotal moments in Chinese history. The first is to become a “moderately prosperous nation” by 2021, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. At the crux of this goal is doing away with poverty and improving the standard of living for China’s poorest people; Xi wants to double China’s 2010 per capita GDP (then about US$10,000) by 2020. For stability’s sake the Communist Party wants to bring wealth and prosperity inland and out west. The second 100 is to become a fully developed nation by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. These are to be the pillars of China’s modern renaissance.

  The Two 100s are based on a new vision of China’s economy, which, under Xi’s direction, is straining to become more innovative. To beat poverty and become a developed nation, China needs not just manufacturers but also scientists and entrepreneurs.

  The government began this search for innovation by trying to fix the systems that destroyed it—namely, corruption. The aspirations of Chinese once were limited by their station and standing with the local government. Pew Research quantified that helplessness in 2015 when it reported that Chinese say the single biggest problem in their country—more than polluted water, unsafe food, or hazardous air—is government corruption.1 Only those with the right connections could enter the guarded doors to success. In an era of dreaming, it made sense that the other pillar of Xi’s administration has been his well-documented anticorruption campaign, which he introduced almost concurrently with the Chinese Dream.

  But some dreams of Chinese young people began to drift overseas. A piece of punditry that circulated widely in WeChat circles jibed, “Young people’s Chinese Dream is to leave China and study abroad in America!”

  When Xi introduced the Chinese Dream in 2012, nearly a third of all study-abroad students in the United States came from China, a full three times more than from India, which has a larger college-age population than China and similar education ambitions. The number of students China sent abroad increased on average just under 20 percent a year between 2007 and 2016.2 By 2015 more than half a million Chinese students were studying abroad, bringing the total number of Chinese students outside China to almost a million, a third of which were in the United States.3 The Chinese Dream seems to increasingly revolve around other countries, especially the United States.

  It seems strange. Why does a political party deeply invested in information control allow young minds to be shaped abroad? The Chinese government, if it chooses to do so, has a dozen different ways to eliminate, restrict, or, at the very least, severely hamper efforts of students to study abroad. Visa restrictions would be a one-stroke solution if the Party were so inclined. But it has not been. The government is even passing legislation that encourages students to study overseas.

  What role does America—and countries like the UK, Australia, Japan, and Canada, all with large Chinese study-abroad populations—play in China’s plans for rejuvenation? For renaissance?

  * * *


  First Lady Michelle Obama arrived in Sichuan Province in 2014 amid much fanfare. All the local and national media covered her visit: Mrs. Obama visits the panda conservatory; the First Lady tries tai chi with students; Michelle speaks with local high school students.

  Obama visited Chengdu No. 7, one of China’s four “national model high schools,” a designation bestowed by the Ministry of Education in 2009. It also happened to be eighteen-year-old Ju Chao’s high school, and Ju Chao was tapped to give the speech welcoming America’s first lady. Ju Chao, a senior from Chengdu, then was in the process of applying to colleges abroad. We met when I interviewed him for Columbia. He was a natural choice for the speech—the president of the school’s Model United Nations Club, an honors student in science, and a standout English speaker with charisma. Still, he was nervous. In his Columbia college application essay he had described some of his emotions when he was called to his principal’s office and greeted by Beijing officials, who briefed him on the speech he would prepare:

  Due to the strict diplomatic codes, I had to pay great attention to my words. “No, you can’t say ‘warmly welcome.’ Just ‘welcome.’” I was cautioned many times about minor details. Like dancing with shackles, I tried to squeeze in some of my own ideas besides conveying Beijing’s message, which occupied most of the space.*

  In addition to Columbia, Barack Obama’s alma mater, Ju Chao then was applying to a half-dozen other top American universities.

  Ju Chao groaned as he recalled the essay: “My writing voice sounded so uptight. What was my problem? I needed to relax.” He whisked two pairs of chopsticks out of the red plastic container on the table and handed one to me. Then, with a sly grin, he said, “Pretty cool, though, eh? The First Lady listened to me speak.”

  Ju Chao’s dream of studying abroad had begun when he was ten and his father read to him from a science magazine. “My father read to me about the Apollo mission. It was such fantasy, so far outside of the ‘get up, study, go-to-sleep’ pattern here. My dad loved to read it to me, and I loved to listen.” Columbia, he told me later, was not his first choice—that was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which the Apollo article had mentioned repeatedly.

  During his interview, Ju Chao had evidenced a cheerfulness that had startled me. The other students had looked pained, laboring in English to convey they were thoughtful, responsible college candidates. But Ju Chao seemed completely at ease. His enthusiasm was infectious. When he began talking about his interests—astrophysics and space travel—his wide-open features lit up.

  Ju Chao’s English was more fluent than Lin Lin’s, more colloquial. He told me he had honed it since he was fourteen by taking online courses provided by Coursera and edX from some of the best universities in the world. (According to Coursera, the site has more than one million registered users in China.)4 By the time I was interviewing him, Ju Chao had already taken two semesters of college-level courses in his spare time, all while maintaining his high school grades and schedule. The first class he completed was titled Justice and given by Harvard. The next seven were from MIT, including Introduction to Aerospace Engineering: Astronautics and Human Space Flight.

  I asked Ju Chao if his parents had pushed him to take the courses. He raised his eyebrows and smiled, “My parents can’t speak English. Do you think they know what Coursera is?” He shrugged. “I was just curious, I guess.”

  Ju Chao was also one of the best SAT testers in the world. He was ten points shy of a perfect score, placing him among the 810 best SAT testers globally that year.

  I asked Ju Chao why he didn’t want to go to Tsinghua or Peking universities. He said that if he did go to school in China, he would try to go to the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

  “Our universities are getting better for research, but there is still not a great reputation for promoting new ideas,” he said. “Plus,” he added with a grin, “neither was used as a base for Launch Control.”

  So Ju Chao, like Lin Lin, wanted to study abroad, and the government was allowing him to do it.

  * * *

  “How did you prepare for the writing section?” I asked Lin Lin. What I really wanted to know was, how did you beat the SAT?

  Forty-five days before she was to take the test, Lin Lin recognized her greatest weakness was writing. She was surprised to realize that the writing section would be her Achilles heel, but a weakness is a weakness, she reminded herself, and went about strengthening it the best way she knew how—methodically. Every morning for the next forty-four days, she woke up fifty minutes early to write a practice essay, culminating with her forty-fifth and final essay on test day, which was perfect.

  The best Chinese test takers all use the same specific strategy to prepare for any and all tests. It is called 题海战术, tíhǎi zhànshù, or “the sea of questions strategy.” That was how Ju Qiao and Lin Lin both beat America’s formidable college entry exam.

  The sea of questions strategy is to learn the content of the test through the test itself, to throw yourself into the deep sea of test-prep questions until you’ve learned to swim. Ju Qiao explained, “For the SAT, I had never taken the classes. I just went through the problem sets, because that was the most direct way for me to get familiar with the problems. All the answers are in those questions.” Ju Qiao’s study strategy was to buy practice tests and take them, then buy test-prep books and read them. The best testers in China take the practice tests repeatedly until they are ready to take the real test.

  The danger of throwing anyone into the sea is, of course, drowning. The psychological strain of the sea of questions strategy is sizable. It takes supreme comfort with being consistently wrong for a long time. All the colleges to which they applied also required Lin Lin and Ju Qiao to take the SAT II (formerly the achievement tests), and both decided to take American history. Ju Qiao did it because he wanted a challenge. Lin Lin chose US history because she wanted to learn more about the country in which she would be studying.

  Because he had never taken a course in American history, Ju Qiao answered every single question incorrectly on the first practice test he took. “Every single one,” Ju Qiao grimaced. “But after I got them all wrong, I knew I’d never do as badly again.” He tested again and did better. The time after that he did even better.

  Both said that familiarizing themselves with the types of questions, the way questions are asked, and then the timing for the test was the most important preparation. Ju Qiao would read the standard high school history book at what he called hyperspeed and then dive into the tests. “All the facts are there in the test,” he asserted.

  The SAT II would be the most formidable major test either had ever taken in English, so learning test lingo and test strategy was just as important as learning the content. The difficult part of the math section of the SAT I and of the subject tests was the English idioms used to ask the questions.

  “How old were you when you learned the relevant math for the SAT II physics test?” I asked Lin Lin.

  She laughed, pulling her shoulders up by her ears and looking around the room. “Thirteen,” she said.

  When she was sixteen, she transferred to a boarding school that was famous for having students who studied extremely hard and administrators who ran a tight ship. The dorm room lights shut off promptly at 10:40 every night. Teachers recommended each student have a flashlight for studying in the dark.

  I asked Lin Lin if she was happy there.

  She laughed awkwardly.

  “Actually, I don’t know how to explain, when you stay at school and then you study all day, it’s not as hard as you imagine. I mean, before I transferred to this school, I heard other students were really hard working and I was afraid that every one of my classmates would study until 1:00 a.m. and I would be the only one who went to sleep early. After I transferred to this school, I found that the students were not so scary and hardworking, and that it’s okay if you get up early because it’s a routine that is set for you and you ju
st have to follow it. You don’t have to decide anything.”

  She thought for a beat before concluding with a nod, “It’s kind of natural.”

  Ju Qiao made a deal with his parents. When he was fifteen, he told them he wanted to go to college abroad. He wanted to learn more about space than he thought he could at a Chinese university, he said. They agreed but only if he secured a scholarship for half the tuition. So he hunkered down to work on his English. Doing that, Ju Qiao knew, meant he would have to find opportunities to practice English in Chengdu.

  Ju Qiao spent almost every Friday night of high school hanging out at two flagpoles outside the Sichuan University gymnasium and speaking English with strangers. He took me there once. A small crowd had already formed in the shade of the gymnasium, which towers over the parking lot and has a roof that resembles that of the Sydney Opera House. Ju Chao mingled comfortably in the crowd. By the time darkness fell and the streetlights buzzed to life, people were swarming like bees, gathering, dispersing, and then reforming again in tight-knit groups around the flagpoles. This was English Corner.

  Cities and towns all across China have English corners. They have only one rule: you must speak English. Sometimes, in a big city or on a larger campus, a foreigner comes along, and a group hoping to practice with the genuine article orbits around that person. The attendees are mostly Chinese—college students, high school students, mothers with their children, grandparents with their grandchildren, and a curious array of hobbyists.

  When I was in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, a group of grinning college students converged on me. They were desperate to know—in English, of course—where I was from and what I thought of the local cuisine. At the English Corner in Guangzhou, the mother of a seven-year-old boy told me that exposing him to English now would no doubt help him get into a good university and secure a good job in the future. The seaside port city of Ningbo, the mountain metropolis of Chongqing, and even a tiny village on the border of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces all have some permutation of the weekly English Corner.