Liu Yu on the Arms Race in Chinese Education

Liu Yu, “My Daughter is Inexorably Becoming an Ordinary Person”[1]

Introduction by David Ownby
 
Liu Yu (b. 1975) is a professor of Political Science at Tsinghua University and a prominent commentator on democratization in China and elsewhere.  She did her Ph.D. at Columbia, held a post-doc at Harvard, and taught at Oxford for several years before returning to China, and thus is obviously fluent in English.  She is a classic example of a public intellectual who seeks to reach an audience outside of academia through social media, and her first two books were collections of materials already published online:  Details of Democracy:  Observing Contemporary American Politics 民主的细节：当代美国政治观察 (2009) seeks to explain the realities of American political life to skeptical Chinese readers, and Democracy:  The State of the Art 观念的水位 (2013) examines the state of democratization in East Asia and Latin America. 

A third volume, The Day after the Great Change:  Success, Failure, and Choice in New Democracies 巨变第二天：新兴民主的得失与选择 is in press, and is scheduled to be published this year (see Liu’s Tsinghua web page for her C.V., which includes publications in both Chinese and English; her Aisixiang page is here).  As these titles suggest, Liu is herself a proponent of democracy, and she discusses the difficulties China’s rise has posed for liberals and democratization in China in a 2015 interview with journalist Ian Johnson.
 
The text translated here—in fact the transcription of a talk—has little to do with democratization, but instead addresses the topic of education in China, drawing on Liu’s experience as a mother, and on her celebrity as a public intellectual (why else ask her to speak on the subject?).  As is widely known, China’s educational system is fiercely competitive, an “every moment counts” Long March that begins…at birth, and continues through years of homework and cram schools, culminating in the university entrance exam which decides the fate of most Chinese students by sorting them into universities of varying degrees of quality and prestige.     

Yet “culminating” is not the right word, as Liu points out, because the tendency among Chinese students, encouraged by their parents, is to do an M.A. and/or a Ph.D. in China and/or abroad, in the belief that every additional diploma will give them one more “comparative advantage” in the endless race to get ahead.  The process is exhausting, as the American journalist Lenora Chu describes in her book Little Soldiers, which chronicles her experiences when she decided to send her young children to a Chinese school in Shanghai (Cindy Yu interviews Chu in an excellent episode of the Chinese Whispers podcast).
 
The point of Liu Yu’s talk is to say “enough is enough.”  All parents, and all children, are being driven crazy by the endless competition, the endless drive to be the best.  Obviously, Liu insists, we cannot all be number one, so let’s get off this merry-go-round before it kills us, enjoy life, and let our children be.  Liu’s tone is mostly humorous (which I hope survived the translation), but the issues are very serious.  I have a Chinese friend—a single mother—who decided to leave her young daughter with her (the mother’s) parents in Canada to avoid the mind-numbing “arms race” of the Chinese educational system, a sacrifice I can hardly imagine.  One wonders whether Liu Yu’s public promise to renounce her Tiger Mom persona will hold.  Liu’s views are refreshingly liberal, but unilateral disarmament is not without consequences.    
 
Translation by Selena Orly
 
Uncertainty, the Price of Progress

While uncertainty brings freedom and opportunity, it also brings lots of anxiety. In modern society, we have the freedom to choose a career and thus also the freedom to lose our job; we have the freedom to be educated and thus also the risk of failing exams. The good thing about freedom is unlimited possibilities; the bad thing about freedom is unlimited competition.

Therefore, in order to cope with this kind of risk and competition, human beings have invented various protective mechanisms, such as social security, financial instruments and insurance, charities, etc. The rise of mass education is, to a large extent, one of these protective mechanisms, as we need it to acquire a wide range of knowledge and skills to help us cope with all kinds of risks.

But the problem is, the process of knowledge accumulation gives rise to vicious competition. This is also the current situation in educational system, which has taken on the model of an "arms race" with two basic strategies—the more degrees you have, the better, and the more skills you have, the better.
 
This is reflected concretely in the fact that young people in China go to college, then get their Master’s, then their doctorate, and when they finish studying in China they study abroad, where they get one degree after another, and in addition to degrees they also want to get all kinds of certificates. Parents also push their children to excel all kind of martial arts and take part in various extracurricular activities from an early age. In the face of this infinite vicious competition, many parents have called for suzhi (quality) education 素质教育.[2] So the Ministry of Education responded positively but cooked up more tests in the context of suzhi education, so that the very mention of the word strikes terror into the hearts of parents.
 
The Consequences of the "Arms Race"
 
What are the consequences of this this kind of "arms race" model of education? Everyone is utterly exhausted. Your kid goes to bed at ten o’clock, my kid goes to bed at eleven, his kid goes to bed at midnight. You go to two cram schools, he goes to four. Some time ago I was in a WeChat moms’ group and saw a forwarded news item about a liberal arts mom who transformed herself into a science and technology expert in order to tutor her child for university.

After reading this, I felt I had to take a stand.  I said I had already thought this through and that my daughter would be opening a milk tea shop in the future. Then the other moms said that their kids would do the same thing. Realizing that the milk tea shop competition was getting out of hand, we decided to point my daughter toward opening a pancake shop.
 
In my opinion, this vicious competition has several unfortunate consequences.

First, it harms women. Countless professional women who could have blossomed in their careers have been caught up in this competition and have had to put most of their energy into the "arms race" of their children's education, abandoning their careers.

Second, it harms family relationships. An originally harmonious family can be turned upside down because you are forcing your kid to study this, that, and the other.

Third, it harms education equality and fairness. In the end, you will find that education largely depends on the financial resources of the parents. If you can afford the best private and international schools, then your child has a future.
 
 But the biggest damage in all of this is to the children themselves. Depression and anxiety are common among adolescents, and the trend of suicide at a younger age is very serious, with one in five high school students having considered taking their own life. A child grows up with an infinite vision of the world, only to have all of us adults conspire to tell them that the purpose of his first half of life is to take exams, which is completely uninteresting. Even if they are not depressed or suicidal, a child can easily become a "hollow person" if they grow up surrounded by such harsh competition. And even if they have learned all those martial arts, they have no idea what to do with them!
 
How to Ease the Pressure of the Arms Race?
 
The arms race cannot be avoided completely, but it can be slowed down. How?

First, know yourself. This may be more important than understanding the world and acquiring a battery of knowledge and skills. The goal of our education is for children to acquire as many skills as possible. But children are rarely encouraged to think about things like “Who am I? What am I best suited for? What can I do? What do I like best?” Children are seldom encouraged to explore and discover themselves.

Is life really about “the higher you climb, the faster you run, the more you get?” I doubt it. I think that the purpose of life is not to get higher, faster, or more, but to find the right place for yourself. If a person goes to a first-class university because of intensive tutoring or expensive counseling services, and spends four to eight years in college surrounded by the best and the brightest, it may not be conducive to their growth. If, because of dumb luck, a guy near you gets a girl he doesn't deserve, will he live a happy life? Not necessarily. He may live a very tiring life. If free-spirited people, because they listened to their parents, took the civil service exam, no matter how high they climb, they may still feel every day that they are wearing shoes that don’t fit.
 
Why are there so many depressed and anxious teenagers now? It is because of this mismatch. Many people simply don't choose their majors or find jobs based on their own interests, personalities, and characteristics, but study majors they don't like, take jobs they don't like—they "follow other people's paths and ignore themselves."[3]
 
So, our education does not encourage young people to discover themselves, but to escape themselves. To escape from a unique self to become an average “other,” to escape from individuality to embrace the mainstream, to escape from risks in the interests of safety. If you ask parents why they enroll their children in extracurricular classes, they say it's because "everyone else is doing it." If you ask college students why they chose this major, they say it's because "it's good for finding a job." If you ask people in the workplace why they do this job, they say it’s because of "stability, high income, and my parents’ peace of mind." Even if you change jobs, it's not because you like the new job, it's because you hated the last one so much. Thus, your life is an endless process of running away.
 
However, this sense of security brought by going with the flow is, in my opinion, actually a false sense of security, because how can you be safe when you are struggling in a crowd? This has to be the kind of competition where your toes get stepped on. Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley investor, wrote a book called Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future about this very investment principle. The same goes for education. To win the competition, you have to be number 1, not number 10,001. If you start out at number 10,001, you will definitely lose the race before it starts, because there are already 10,000 people ahead of you.
 
My husband and I once discussed the idea of having our child learn to play the piano. I said, no. Just think about it. There may be more than 3 million children in Beijing learning piano. There are four or five kids in our building alone. Isn’t it looking for trouble to try to be good at the piano under such circumstances? We might as well let the kid learn ancient Greek and Roman history. Of course, I am actually lazy, the kind of mother that surrenders without a fight.

Peter Thiel said one thing that greatly impressed me.  He said that people always say "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," (from Tolstoy) but in fact the opposite is true:  unhappy people are all alike, and happy people are happy in their own way. Why? Because the unhappy people are following the paths of other people, while the happy people take a different path. When everyone is doing finance, they do the Internet; when everyone is doing the Internet, they make movies; when everyone is making movies, they do education; when everyone is doing education, they come back to finance. This is taking your own path. Only by finding your own uniqueness can you gain a competitive advantage.
 
This is also true from the perspective of national competitiveness. Many people have discovered the paradox of education in China and the United States.  China's basic education is very good.  By way of contrast, many elementary and middle school students in the United States who are not even good at basic math skills. However, when it comes to university, especially at the graduate level, the advantages of the United States begin to emerge. In the end, they have won the most Nobel Prizes, while Nobel Prize winners trained in China are few and far between. I think this paradox between basic education and higher education has to do with whether "self-exploration and self-discovery" are encouraged.

When everyone is encouraged to find their greatest talents and exert their greatest strengths, the creativity of a society will be developed to the fullest. When most kids are stepping on one another’s feet and competing for the same thing, and are too busy to explore their own interests, it is difficult for them to excel. They may pass their exams, or even do well, because of strong external pressure, but because of the lack of internal enthusiasm, it is difficult for them to be excellent, and do their best.

Some young people may say: it’s not that I do not have courage to try, but I don't know what to do; I also want to follow my heart, but my heart is telling me nothing. This is not surprising, because you have been on an assembly line since you were little, and you really don’t know what you should do when you get off. As you grew up, society, your parents, and your teachers have all shown you the direction in which to move forward—go right, turn left, turn right—and suddenly one day someone gives you the steering wheel and you don’t know what to do. It is normal to be confused. 
 
Freedom is not just a space, it is an acquired ability. People’s individuality is a result of continuous exploration and trial and error. You can't sit in a room racking your brains, and suddenly have an epiphany, and say, “aha, I should do this!” No one's "self" is a finished product in their teens or twenties. Your “self” is not a precious stone you find in the grass. What you initially find is just a stone, and you have to carve it into your “self.” This is process of self-discovery. 
 
Second, have the courage to fail.  In trial and error, mistakes will definitely be made, and the result may be failure. Many parents, teachers, and young people dare not try and make mistakes because they are afraid of failure.
At present, our society is full of the science of success 成功学, but there is no science of failure 失败学. Society, teachers, and parents keep guiding children with the philosophy of "where there's a will, there's a way," but in fact, success has multiple factors such as native ability, luck, relationships, family background, emotional intelligence, etc.  It's not simply a matter of having the passion to succeed.

Recently, the suicide of an M.A. student at the Dalian University of Technology shocked the entire country. Everyone found it unbelievable. Before he died, he wrote a suicide note. Because his laboratory experiment failed, he felt like he was a loser, and committed suicide. This is of course very sad. People can't figure out why he would rather commit suicide than drop out of school. I think a large part of the reason is that our society looks at failure the wrong way.

Our view of failure is primarily reflected in the idea that only success is allowed, not failure. But failure is actually a necessary path to self-understanding, because failure lets us know the limits of our ability, the limits of our interests. Failure is a signaling mechanism that reminds us to turn when it's time to turn, and not to keep walking into the darkness. But our education despises giving up, despises failure, and has even invented many positive words to encourage this extremely painful persistence: perseverance, determination, never giving up, overcoming oneself ...... You say you are going in the wrong direction, why should you remain steadfast? You’ve reached a dead end, why not give up? Very often, giving up is a mechanism of cutting your losses. 
 
Li Xueqin 李雪琴 (b. 1995) is currently one of the best standup comedians in China. Before she went to study in New York, she was a typical Peking University student, but due to depression or for personal reasons, she returned to her hometown without getting a degree and started selling things online. In the view of the world, she failed. But this failure was just a turning point for her. She transformed herself into an internet celebrity and a standup comedian. To my mind, the loss of such an outstanding standup comedian to China is much larger than the loss of a female white-collar worker to a New York investment bank. So, knowing oneself is a process of trial and error. Without the courage to fail, there is no surprise of discovery.
 
So, what if the transformation takes time or doesn’t happen? The risk is of course the possibility of failure, and that you may go from one failure to another. But repeated failure is better than suicide or leading a life not worth living (lit. “chronic suicide 慢性自杀”), right? And it is better to be a brave loser than a cowardly one. In the end, even if you achieve nothing, you have become a brave and honest person.
 
Third, what is success?  Another of our frightening “views of failure” is the narrowness of our success criteria. What is success? Success means getting ahead, earning more money, becoming a bigger official, having more fans... In short, if you are an ordinary person, then you have failed.
 
How can a society have so many successful people? How many Jack Mas, how many Lang Langs, how many Yao Mings can there be? Most people are ordinary people. One of my friends said something that really stuck with me, she said: You must firmly believe that your child will grow into an ordinary person. This sentence is my motto as a mother, so from the beginning I unleashed myself from the Tiger Mother's juggernaut and gained the freedom to be a mother.

Some people may say, Professor Liu, this is fake modesty, your whole family is from Tsinghua and Beida, and you also went to an Ivy League school, so your child will surely be excellent.  Let me tell you:  my child attends the Tsinghua University primary school, where all the parents are famous scholars and professors with Ivy League diplomas.  So what?  There is still only one number one in a class. In all of Beijing, the admission rate to Tsinghua and Beida is about 5 per 1000, and those who can get into American Ivy League schools are even rarer, so what makes you think your child will be the one to win the lottery? This is not scientific. So, it's not modesty, it's a rational person's respect for the science of probability.

Of course, if it turns out that my daughter is a prodigy for the ages, I will certainly be secretly thrilled, but so far, that friend of mine was right, my daughter is inexorably becoming an ordinary person. Once we admit that the vast majority of people are ordinary people, what is the correct view of education? It is not that we make a patch of grass into a huge tree, instead we make the patch of grass lovely and healthy.  Most people may have ordinary talents, but their interests, hobbies, and personality all have their own uniqueness. My mission as a parent is: to follow my child and help her find things that she rejoices in.
 
Some parents may say: What if our child has no “comparative advantage?” In fact, everyone has their own comparative advantage. What we call comparative advantage does not mean the one thing you do better than everyone else, but rather the thing you do best among all the things that you do. Even if it is a common thing, like cooking or putting on makeup, if you work hard at it, it can become your comparative advantage. There is a job in Japan called "storage consultant," so you see, putting things away can become a job, or even a career. Your child may not be a genius, but it's enough to live a happy life in a small world, and that's what success is.
 
Other parents say: My child is very lazy, how do I go about changing them? One way is to help them find what they are good at, let them develop an inner drive to grow. There is however a real possibility that some people are lazy by nature and "don't try hard no matter what they do.” Even with this kind of child, I still think we should not try to make them “ashamed to fail,” but instead help them understand that character is destiny and that they will have to bear the consequences of their present attitudes in the future.
 
Perhaps because I was an “achiever” since I was a child, I have assumed for a long time that others should be the same. Although it is impossible for everyone to become Bill Gates or Jack Ma, everyone should still strive to become "the best version of themselves" and pursue excellence. However, as I grew up, I began to have doubts. Why? Because I gradually realized that what we call success often comes with great responsibility and pressure. Everyone’s values are different. Not everyone is willing to exchange comfort, ease, and relaxation for success. And the pursuit of comfort, ease, and relaxation is not necessarily a sin. It is not necessarily a bad thing if a person chooses to be "comfortable" and gives up "success".
 
I also recently ran across an interesting idea:  In the past when we talked about people on welfare, we all felt that they were a burden to society, especially the lazy ones, and more or less looked down on them. But in fact, lazy people also contribute a lot to society, and welfare is actually a reward for this contribution. What do lazy people contribute to society?  In a word, they greatly reduce the intensity of social competition. Think about it. We are all out of breath already, and if we all set out sights on reaching the summit just think how tired we will be! So, in a highly competitive era, society needs lazy people and society should be grateful to lazy people. They sacrifice themselves to save countless people from the brink of collapse.
 
So, what is my view of education? In a nutshell, it is two things: know yourself and accept yourself. This is not just to take the pressure off of the children. I believe that this kind of education adapted to individual needs will do more good than harm to what education actually produces, to the best allocation of social resources and to the peace and stability of thousands of families. Only when everyone is beautiful in their own way will a society be vibrant.

Notes

[1] 刘瑜, “我的女儿正势不可挡地成为一个普通人,” from a talk given on November 1, 2020, published online on November 30, 2020. 

[2] Translator’s note:  Suzhi education aims at something like “well-roundedness,” and has different meanings in different contexts.  In academic literature in the West, it most often refers to teaching rural children the skills they will need to cope with modern, urban life (i.e., raising their “quality”), and thus has a taint of elitism (see here for example).  Liu Yu is obviously talking about something quite different, i.e., education that will help urban, elite children escape from the educational arms race.

[3] Translator’s note:  Liu Yu has inverted Dante’s famous dictum:  “Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le gente” (Follow your own path and let people talk).