Youthology on Double Reduction

Xiao Zeng, “88 Days after the End of After-School Classes, Helicopter Parents are still Anxious”[1]

​Introduction by David Ownby, Translation by Hannah Wang
 
Introduction
 
The text translated here is from Youthology/青年志, a private company, founded by Zhang Anding 张安定 in 2008 that does research on youth issues, at the same time helping brands to understand youth and youth to understand brands (click here for an interview with Zhang in Chinese).  My impression, based on Google research and the few texts that I have read on Youthology’s WeChat feed, is that they are genuinely interested in youth issues, and that their marketing work helps to pay the bills.  Youthology seems to have a considerable presence on Bilibili, for those whose curiosity might be piqued.
 
The issue Xiao Zeng (surely a pseudonym) addresses here is the central government's double reduction policy, or, to be more precise, the consequences of the policy.  “Double reduction” refers to reducing the burden on China’s school children both in and out of school (thus the “double"); the concern, which virtually everyone shares to some degree, is that educational competition in China has gotten completely out of hand, to the point that children’s lives are consumed by homework, test results, and after-school tutoring. 
 
The policy was implemented in late July of 2021, seemingly overnight, and took aim largely at the online educational industry which had exploded since the beginning of the pandemic.  Whatever Chinese authorities’ concerns about the mental and physical health of China’s youth, many commentators saw the move as part of the campaign against high tech and the platform economy, sectors which the Party-State feel are becoming too powerful.  If the text translated here is to be believed—and there is no reason it should not be—the amount of money involved is indeed staggering, with IPOs of online educational companies hauling in billions of dollars.
 
Xiao Zeng’s concern is neither the government’s ultimate intentions, nor the staggering sums of money, but rather the human consequences of double reduction for the online teachers who had flocked to the burgeoning industry, the helicopter parents whose concerns feed the industry, and the poor kids, who bear the brunt of all the pressure.  The online teachers are described as both idealistic and eager to cash in, which I find thoroughly believable.  They would like to strike a blow for educational equality through the power of online courses, but if they can pad their bank account at the same time, why not? 
 
The parents are described as in the throes of endless competition and anxiety, because getting a good job requires going to a top university, which requires a good score on the university entrance exam, which requires attending a key high school, which requires a high grade the high school entrance exam…and on and on and on, beginning virtually from kindergarten.  Everyone knows that this is crazy, and everyone suspects that things will come crashing down at some point, but until they finally do, well, what’s a mother to do besides nag and sign Junior up for more on-line tutoring?  In fact, one of Xiao Zeng’s findings was that even after double reduction, tutoring and online education simply went underground.
 
This kind of text might be described as “journalism lite,” but it does not claim to be anything more.  To my mind, the author tracked down some teachers and parents, did some interviews, and wrote up their findings in a readable package.  I like what it reveals about the texture of life in China—the speed with which young people take and leave jobs, sometimes making a fortune, the impulsiveness of government intervention, the poor parents and children left holding the bag (I was also struck by the mention of “middle-aged people in their thirties”…).  The author makes no pretense to “speak truth to power,” but nonetheless dares to look into the consequences of the double reduction policy, without offering even a half-hearted defense of how the Party-State went about trying to achieve its goals. 
 
Translation by Hannah Wang
 
In July 2021, when the "double reduction" policy was officially implemented, a large number of educational institutions and online learning platforms toppled like dominos. In September, when the schools launched their first post-double reduction semester, words like "training classes," "after-school courses," "advanced classes," and "tutoring" all but disappeared from public discourse.
 
The entire history of the rise and fall of the flourishing after-school education industry seems to have been wiped out peacefully in one fell swoop. We remain curious nonetheless about certain things:  What are the teachers who lost their jobs doing now? Have the helicopter parents[2] given up so easily? Do the children really feel that their burdens have been reduced? 
 
When we put together a timeline, looking at things before and after the implementation of double reduction from the perspectives of teachers and parents, we found that double reduction did not really alleviate the anxieties of the helicopter parents, and that the deeper source of this anxiety is the inequality of educational resources and the increasingly fierce educational competition.
 
One:  The Six Months before the Implementation of Double Reduction:  Young People Rushing into Online Education
 
In 2019, the sudden arrival of the epidemic hit many industries hard, but the education industry not only survived, but thrived, and was booming by the spring of 2021. Money from everywhere began pouring into online education, advertisements for famous teachers were all over the place, and online education moved from first-tier cities into heretofore sleepy small-town markets. Tens of thousands of highly qualified young people were drawn to this industry, because in material terms, salaries were high, and in spiritual terms, they could strike a blow against educational inequality by working online. 
 
"I knew that I was not going to spend my life teaching. So if the salary had been only 300,000 or 400,000 RMB (47,400-63,200 US$) a year, I would not have been so motivated. But at the time, the company promised me a guaranteed annual salary of 650,000 RMB (102,700 US$). That meant that if I worked hard, I could even make a million (158,000 US$)."
 
In the spring of 2021, Lin Yi, who was about to finish his M.A., decided to become a language teacher in an online educational company. Before, entering the education industry was not the only option he was considering. On the eve of graduation, Lin Yi was preparing his application to do a doctorate in education abroad while also keeping an eye on consulting companies that he was interested in. What finally made up his mind was a five-day trip to Beijing: "Those online education institutions really have a lot of money to throw around. They invited me to visit their company and put us all up in a four-star hotel in Beijing for five days.  They paid for the food and everything."
 
Thus the company’s willingness to spend money convinced Lin Yi that they were truly looking for talent. He was lucky enough to enjoy the "springtime" of online education. In January and February of 2021, as the pandemic returned in fits and starts, many educational institutions began to launch online courses. Perhaps hearing the siren call of this unstoppable trend, Internet companies also jumped into the educational race, creating the next “windfall” that many young people were struggling to find at the time. 
 
The online education industry was like a tree that grew six feet overnight, and in the spring of 2021, many of the companies competed to go public. By June 30, the market value of the company Good Future (TAL) reached 105.104 billion RMB (16.6 billion US$) , followed by XDF (EDU), whose market value reached 90.692 billion RMB (14.3 billion US$). No one knows whether this was heading for a miracle or a catastrophe, because after all, "on the edge of a cliff, even pigs can fly."[3]
 
One of the key performance indicators for online teachers was how many students stayed with a particular teacher, either continuing in the sequences of courses in which they were enrolled or signing up for others. Throughout the spring, parents' worries about education continued to spread, and the renewal rate for Lin Yi’s classes reached as high as 98%. At the same time, more and more companies stopped worrying about building a genuine brand, and instead starting promoting “famous teachers” and introducing new selling points for their courses.
 
Promotional videos and posters found in bus stops and subway stations hawked "Top students from Tsinghua and Peking University!" "Experienced math teachers!" "Talented and beautiful teachers!"  
  
How to convince parents that he was a good teacher became the core challenge of Lin Yi's work. A few days after starting his job, a recently arrived older female colleague whose work station was next to his kindly gave him a bit of advice, saying: "Lin Yi, don’t think that you’re here to be a teacher, you are here to be an Internet celebrity. The way to make money is to think of yourself as an influencer."
 
Eschewing the functional divisions of traditional educational institutions, Lin Yi's company was exploring a new development model. From the very beginning, Lin Yi did not worry about communicating directly with parents and students, nor did he have to market the courses. His only responsibilities were to teach, and he was more at ease than ever before. 
 
With high salaries visible to the naked eye and capital flowing in from all sides, many young people decided to “migrate” to this industry.  Guo Qing, who had been working in “offline” education for six years, was one of this army of migrants.  In May of 2021, Guo started an online position.  But not all young people were able to catch that high-speed train, and those recruited by Guo’s company found themselves competing against the appeal of China’s “Ivy Leagues” (Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, Jiaotong University) and “graduate degrees”—having studied at a mere “key university” no longer cut the mustard. 
 
In addition to an individual’s experience and field of study, these institutions paid more attention to academic background, and the industry was attracting outstanding talent from various universities with a pull that defied everyone's imagination.  “On my very first day I could tell clearly that the people around me were completely different.  My educational background was obviously inadequate, and was particularly lacking in that context.”  At work, Guo Qing had much the same experience as Lin Yi, and Guo, who likes to fool around with TikTok in his spare time, said that when he gave his classes he felt like a “popular news anchor.”  When he sat down before his computer screen and readied the day’s materials, Guo had to prepare his expression, replacing his usual playful manner with a more serious demeanor.
 
A live class for thousands was about to start, and the students that Guo was connecting to were from first-tier to fourth- and fifth-tier cities, whose educational experiences had been quite different. He peered into their different lives through one camera after another. There was no lack of the typical Haidian[4] helicopter kids in his classroom, but since online classes are cheap, there were more students from fourth- and fifth-tier cities than from the first- and second-tier. Now and then, he heard the sound of an Alipay payment notification when a student had left their microphone on; someone whose family owns a corner shop was taking the class in his parents’ store. 
 
Guo Qing comes from a small mountain area in Yunnan province. In his senior year, his school invited a teacher from a famous English training institution to give a lecture. That was the first time he had met a teacher who spoke English so well, and he had never been so eager to get out of the mountains and get a better education.  At the time, he could never have imagined that seven or eight years later, he would become the teacher who was "preaching, teaching, and relieving doubts 传道授业解惑,”[5] facing millions of his former selves. 
 
One of the reasons that Guo Qing was so committed to online education was the strong sense of meaning he derived from his work.  The uneven level of education in China often weighed heavily on Guo Qing, but being an online teacher meant that he could provide the same learning platforms and opportunities to students from different regions. Unlike previous “offline” classes, there was no friction of distance, and without the offline brick-and-mortar costs, online classes had become more affordable, allowing children from families who do not have the money for high-level education to have the opportunity for tutoring outside the classroom.
 
When preparing for classes, Guo Qing would often look through the high school entrance exams of various provinces, thinking "lots of these are easier than the tests seventh graders have to take in Peking.  They’re doomed before they even get started.” But fortunately, many families with relatively low incomes could also now afford courses for their children, and for only 250 RMB (40 US$) a month. "If I could have taken a class like this when I was a kid, I would have been thrilled, because I would have at least known what those students in big cities were learning." 
 
The education industry was developing so rapidly and absorbing so many resources from prestigious schools that many people could not help but wonder when this wildly sprouting tree would be chopped down. Early in March, Lin Yi's parents, who are also in the education industry, had already expressed concerns about his job, because it seemed too easy and lucrative.
 
"I knew the day would come, but everything was just booming.”  Lin thought that even if a crackdown was on the way, he still had time left. After all, how is it possible to stop these big companies in a blink of an eye, especially given the number of employees they have? 
 
Guo Qing was not as relaxed as Lin Yi. Beginning in June, employees without a teacher qualification certificate were no longer allowed to teach in educational institutions, so Guo Qing's company dismissed a third of its teaching staff. From mid-June on, in addition to live classes, Guo Qing's group began to take the lead in recording lessons.
 
On work breaks, colleagues would talk about "rumors" they had heard. Some said that they would not be allowed to give make-up classes to students during the winter and summer holidays, some said that live classes would be completely banned, others said that there would be massive compulsory layoffs in the industry. These rumors hung over Guo Qing's head like a cloud.
 
Seeing how uneasy Guo Qing was, his section boss secretly approached him and told him privately that "there would some layoffs, but that I was safe." Guo’s constantly excellent work performance allowed him to relax a bit despite his worries. His section boss always gave him positive feedback, telling him he was doing well. Thus, Guo Qing completely dropped the idea of switching jobs.  Along with Guo Qing and Lin Yi, there were thousands of online teachers who were looking forward to the future. No one could have guessed that the day online education reached the summit would be the same day it came to an end... 
 
Two:  Double Reduction Arrives and Teachers Struggle to Find a Solution 
 
On July 24, the central authorities released a document entitled "Suggestions for Further Reducing the Burden of Homework and Off-Campus Training for Students in Compulsory Education," which was a heavy blow to the off-campus tutoring market. Even before the document was officially released, XDF's stock price had already plunged 54% on July 23, and then fell another 34% on the next trading day. The XDF stock price essentially foreshadowed what would happen to the rest of the market. 
 
"LMAO, I just got fired."
 
July 19 was a perfectly ordinary Monday. When Guo Qing's friends on his WeChat group saw this message, they didn't take it seriously and thought he was joking. 
 
The weekend before, Guo Qing had gone on a trip with this friends to Anaya [a coastal tourism resort in Heibei Province, China]. They had so much fun that Guo Qing only got home on Sunday night. Although he was exhausted, he decided to organize the photos from the trip and post them on WeChat Moments as a souvenir. He captioned his nine carefully-selected photos "I’m back and ready to go to work". 
 
After posting the pictures to Moments, Guo Qing fell fast asleep. He could never have imagined that six hours later, he would become a member of the "unemployed youth army," no longer a “working stiff.”
 
On July 20, double-reduction was implemented. On the eve of the implementation, the storm of layoffs began silently and unexpectedly, and the terrible thing about it was not "who’s next," but the fact that the layoffs were completely indiscriminate. 
 
"Whoever’s salary is lower will be laid off first" was what they heard.  Employees like Guo Qing, who joined the company not long ago, along with other fresh graduates, regardless of their performance level and educational background, were the first casualties.  Even if some people escaped the first round of layoffs, in Guo Qing's eyes, they were just "waiting to die," and in August, during the second round of layoffs, mid-level leaders with less experience, once star teachers, were also let go.
 
When Guo Qing walked out of the HR office, he couldn't even find words to describe his feelings. Should he laugh at himself for being unemployed at such a young age? Or should he shed a few mournful tears? 
 
After a few minutes, Guo Qing recovered from his shock. When he thought of the annual vacation time that he had been saving up, he felt a wave of anger. "Damn it!  Those seven days off are only equal to two days’ salary when they let me go. Those five days are a total loss.”
 
Lin Yi, who was attending a friend’s wedding in Sanya, was experiencing similar up and down feelings. As he made his way to Sanya, the double reduction policy was already being rolled out, and he had long since lost the confidence he had when he first started the job, "All I can do is have a good time in Sanya and stop thinking about this." 
 
“What a shame” was Lin Yi's strongest feeling, "I thought I could at least make a million (158,000 US$) this year. Without this job, my situation is very different. I didn’t have to worry about money before, but now I have to rethink things. "
 
A child from an ordinary family might work many years and still not make a million RMB.  Who knows when the next windfall might come?  Lin Yi's future plans were completely up in the air. 
 
He had no choice but to re-contact his friends in the consulting industry and the older classmates he had been in touch with when he was first looking for a job, asking if they had any leads for jobs at their companies. Lin Yi spent the last two weeks of July revising his resume and doing interviews. On August 10, Lin received the notice from his company that all employees recently recruited from university campuses had been let go. At the same time, he also received an offer from a well-known consulting firm.
 
“I’ll get my severance and then I’ll change careers” was all he could think about. Although his official length of employment was only 40 days, Lin Yi still got a considerable amount in severance pay, which, in his words, "is already worth a year’s salary in many industries."
 
For him, this compensation was the silver lining in a sea of clouds. 
 
Half a month after being fired, Guo Qing went back his hometown for a while. He needed time to unwind.
 
"I pretended to put in for some jobs.  I tried other educational institutions, but did not hear anything back. After that, I did interviews for sales and real estate, but they weren’t really up my alley."
 
For young people like Guo Qing with a long history in the education industry, or for a middle-aged people in their thirties, "re-employment" has become a dilemma. With the recurring pandemic and the overall economic downturn, it is difficult to find a job as lucrative as what they had in the education industry. Many teachers who lost their jobs switched to sales, selling insurance and houses, but Guo found it hard to get the same sense of meaning in such professions as he did in teaching. 
 
Guo Qing was not under pressure to find a job in a hurry because of his severance package and the savings he had in the bank. After taking some time off, he suddenly realized that perhaps this was his opportunity to search for another path in life.
 
Guo Qing still wanted to work in education, but he felt that continuing to choose the after-school education industry would not be a sustainable path at the present moment, and that being a teacher in the public school system might be a better choice. 
 
The intense competition over educational credentials in his former company made Guo Qing consider going to graduate school. "In fact, I had always wanted to go to grad school. But my previous job was so lucrative that I really didn't want to waste my time.” But everything is different now, and whoever wants to work in the public education system will need a graduate degree to even get their foot in the door. 
 
Guo Qing had a hard time accepting what double reduction had cost him. After getting fired, he and his former colleagues got together on several occasions to talk things over. This is when he learned that even large institutions, some of which had been in business for more than twenty years and which had long since gone public, also collapsed after double reduction. There were also publicly traded companies whose stock price fell dramatically, and they wound up in a huge number of labor disputes because they could not pay the severance packages for the people they had to let go. 
 
 “Education is really what made many of us, but now it’s all gone with the wind.”
 
Three:  Three Months after Double Reduction--Parents with No Way Out 
 
As soon as a child is born, they find themselves in a long-term competitive environment. To put it bluntly, the sole purpose of those parents who push their children toward educational achievement is to “give them a competitive advantage.” But not all parents think this way, and the double reduction policy brought a sense of relief to some. The mother of Xiaojuan, who is in the second year of junior high school, had this to say about her views on educational competition: "We all took the college entrance exams. We all firmly believe and have no choice but to hope that our children can change their future through education. But we also know that a lot of what they learn will not be useful once they are out of school, and the competition today involves many things outside of the text book and the class syllabus.  So is this competition really necessary? It really pains me to see my child so exhausted." Unfortunately, Mrs. Li is an isolated case in an army of anxious parents. 
 
For teachers in educational institutions who lost out, there are still other avenues to explore.  Believe it or not, the people who really found themselves with no way out after double reduction were the parents who had long since fallen into the trap of education anxiety. 
 
It is noon on Saturday, and a boarding school for middle-school students in Chengdu has just let out for the week.  There is a traffic jam as the cars line up to pick up their children. I stood at the school gate with Li, looking out into the crowd, trying to find her child, Xiaojuan, among all the children streaming out. 
 
Before we even spied Xiaojuan, the parent standing next to us was already all worked up. He waved toward his child, cupping his other hand around his mouth, and yelled, "Hurry up! Run!" The child hurried over. Li rolled her eyes at me and pulled me aside, quietly whispering in my ear, "They are in a rush to get to their after-school classes.” 
 
In September, schools launched their first semesters after double reduction. The sensational layoffs and closing of education institutions of the previous few weeks meant that, during this semester, “after-school classes''  became the equivalent of "the emperor's new clothes" for teachers, parents, and students. Although terms like "advanced classes", "after-school tutoring", "small group classes", "online live classes," etc., had disappeared from public conversations, in private, however, after-school tutoring is still the norm for many children, even if it happens in a more furtive way. 
 
Since Xiaojuan was in fifth grade, Mrs. Li began signing her up for extra classes to ease her transition from elementary school to middle school. Even after a series of Olympiad courses and English tutoring, Xiaojuan barely made it into the key local middle school. Xiaojuan had trouble with math beginning in junior high school, perhaps because they had not started extra courses early enough back in primary school. Mrs. Li didn’t dare take a chance, and immediately signed her daughter up for an advanced math class.
 
Since she goes to boarding school, Xiaojuan only has one day off on the weekends, and still has to spend half a day in her extra math class. The pressure of all of this often makes Mrs. Li anxious. "She is only in eighth grade and is already so busy.  Won’t she be overwhelmed if she is still doing this in high school?" 
 
So double reduction was a relief for Mrs. Li. The old educational companies were gone, and the people handing out flyers at the school gates had disappeared. Which meant that children could finally do what they wanted on the weekends.
 
The peace lasted only about two weeks, until Xiaojuan came home from school one day and told her, "Mom, some of my classmates are still watching recorded classes during the week, and some of them are still secretly having extra classes on the weekend.” 
 
This random remark from her daughter brought Mrs. Li’s anxiety back.  She felt like she was in the back row of a movie theater, and that she could never sit down as long as the people those in front of her kept standing up. 
 
Guo Qing is no stranger to this kind of parental educational anxiety. There is a widespread saying in the industry: “If there is no demand, then make some!” He believes that, to a great extent, the key to selling education is to play on the parents ‘anxiety.
 
Lin Yi has a similar perspective, noting that "Parents believe that there is no way to control their children's grades, but they keep trying." For most parents, tutoring is the way to do that. 
 
Many parents complained to Lin Yi that their child's grades never got better no matter what they did. These days, parents always seem more anxious than their children, worrying that "many children with poor grades in school simply cannot get the teachers’ attention.  It’s like they are invisible. Eventually,  the children themselves wind up not believing that they can get good grades.”
 
Minyi's child is in third grade in Haidian district, which is known to be the hardest hit area for helicopter-parents anxiety.  Her child has been in the lowest quintile of her class for a long time. Minyi laughs at herself, because her child gets more criticism for bad grades than Minyi did was when she was in school.
 
When her child was in the second term of second grade, Minyi took her friends’ advice and managed to "score" a place for her child in a bridging class at TAL. However, the day after the placement test, the teacher called and asked Minyi to withdraw him from the class because "his level was too poor to keep up with the curriculum." 
 
It came as a big shock to Minyi that her child’s performance was so bad that even the tutoring institution didn't accept him, given that her child was only in second grade. Minyi laughed a sort of helpless laugh. Her child’s reactions are somewhat slow, and she has rarely heard him talk with other children about what they are learning. Even in third grade, her child still thought the name of Mr. Zhao, her English teacher, was Mr. Ying [the Chinese word for English is yingwen].   Minyi has always said that the important thing is for her child to be happy, and has never had any strong feelings about forcing her child to take extra lessons. Watching her child grow up happy every day was often satisfaction enough for Minyi.
 
However, surprisingly, after the double reduction policy was launched, Minyi secretly contacted a teacher who left an institution and signed up for her child for one-on-one after-school tutoring.
 
"Everyone is doing extra classes, taking them on the sly." Once she realized this,  Minyi perhaps felt the urgency to pay for these classes. 
 
"If all children were starting from the same place,  if they were all like blank sheets of paper, then I could accept that he is not as good as the others. But now no one starts from the same place." During the summer between second and third grade, Minyi bought her son a book to help make the transition. When her child's classmates came over to play and saw the book, they were very surprised and asked, "you’re still doing problems from third grade?" 
 
Minyi was shocked, but her child's classmates told her that it was perfectly normal and that everybody was already learning fourth grade materials. This incident made a deep impression on Minyi, and she couldn't help but ask herself, "What if my child is just one home tutor away from learning well?"
 
If this is really the case, Minyi is willing to fix this "gap", whether by secretly having extra lessons or urging him to do endless exercises. After all, who wants to gamble with their child's future?
 
In this sense, it may be that we can’t talk about the after-school education industry openly, but it will never disappear and we won’t allow it to disappear.
 
Conclusion
 
Double reduction has happened, the soaring educational institutions have fallen, and companies, employees, parents, and children are all looking for a way out. In the face of these changes, those affected do what they can:  some look for another way to “survive,” others try to get around the rules, still hostage to their education anxiety.  
 
The absurdity of these scenes is also the naked reality, because the people standing in the front rows of the theater never sat down.  The policy may not be able to alleviate the burden of parents and children, and after-school education practitioners are also stumbling in the wake of the industry turmoil. The anxiety continues, and when the tsunami comes, no swimmers dare to lie flat.[6]
 
Notes

[1]小曾, “培训班消失88天后，鸡娃焦虑还在继续,” published on the Youthology/青年志 Wechat feed on October 20, 2021. 

[2]Translator’s note:  In China, it is more common to talk about the children who are the victims of what we call "helicopter parents," children who are referred to as “chicken babies 鸡娃.”  The Chinese term derives from a Chinese “health fad” of uncertain vintage:  the idea that injecting chicken (rooster) blood into the human body will make the person stronger and more aggressive.  See here for more information.  The term presumably combines humor with exasperation; when you google the term in Chinese, the first response that pops up includes the sentence “It is said that the typical Chinese family is made up of a burnt-out father, an anxious mother, and a broken child.”

[3]Translator’s note: This quote is attributed to Xiaomi founder Lei Jun 雷军 (b. 1969), who says he drew inspiration from Sunzi’s The Art of War.  The idea is that the entrepreneur must be constantly alert for opportunities and ready to “jump off a cliff” at the right moment.  Click here for more discussion of the “flying pig theory” (in Chinese).  

[4]Translator’s note:  Haidian is the part of Beijing with the greatest concentration of universities, and is generally considered the most competitive part of the country in terms of K through 12 education.  For more on Haidian children and education see here (in Chinese).

[5]Translator’s note.  This expression comes from a famous essay by Han Yu 韩愈（768—824), the famous Tang dynasty Confucian, known above all for championing a “Confucian revival” against the largely Buddhist establishment.  One of his favorite personas was that of a teacher, and modern educators still cite him.

[6]Translator’s note: “Lying flat” is a direct translation of the Chinese term tangping/躺平, which means to keep one’s head down and stay out of the way.  It is a way to resist intense competition.  See here for further discussion.