Zhang Tianqi on Hengshui High School

Zhang Tianqi, “Hengshui High School:  The Story of a Dragon-Slaying Child that became an Evil Dragon”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction

The text translated here is a piece of critical journalism, published in The Intellectual, which takes aim at the “Hengshui system,” a popular educational model in China’s high schools and middle schools.  More specifically, the reference is to Hengshui High School, located in Hengshui, a prefecture-level city in southern Hebei.  Tired of losing out to better equipped high schools in the provincial capital, Hengshui High instituted a set of reforms in the early 1990s, stressing extreme discipline and hard work, setting up a closed, boot camp-like atmosphere in hopes of preparing students for the university entrance examination and thus getting more students into universities—especially, elite universities. Hengshui comes up frequently in the kind of material I read, so the author is indeed talking about something of national importance, and not just a personal preoccupation.
 
The journalist admits that hard work and strict discipline paid off in the short run, allowing Hengshui High to compete more effectively against the elite schools in the provincial capital of Shijiazhuang, who at the time were more or less resting on their laurels (superior resources, better teachers, better students).  But within a few years, Hengshui High reached the limits of what hard work and discipline could achieve on their own.  The problem was that Hengshui High’s recruitment basin was limited to the local area, which produced only a certain number of high-quality students, many of which were already being siphoned off by schools in Shijiazhuang.  It turns out that hard work and discipline works better if a school has excellent students and excellent teachers.  Talent matters.  I can train all day every day , but we know who will win if I go one-on-one against Lebron.
 
So Hengshui High began to scheme to increase its catchment area, among other things by opening a private high school with greater freedom to charge fees and recruit province-wide, eventually turning Hengshui High into a “super school,” and at the same time setting off something like an “arms race” in China’s educational system.  The goal of a super school is to attract the best teachers and the best students so that test scores and university entrance rates go ever upward, which works for a time,  attracting parents and students looking for a comparative advantage. 
 
The problem is that super schools aim for the success of an individual school, and care little about the quality of education system-wide.  Super schools work by siphoning off the very best students from throughout the province (and sometimes from outside the province), leaving average students or students without the resources to pay the fees in schools that are getting worse and worse.  This is especially true in rural areas, and it means that rural students, who never had much chance of getting into university, now even have a hard time getting access to a decent high school education, because the resources are no longer there and rural high schools are seen as places only for “losers.”
 
Some provinces have fought this trend, chiefly by prohibiting student recruitment outside the local catchment area, but most local authorities in China are eager to have a super school in their district, because it brings prestige and money, and the kind of parents that local authorities listen to are those who have the money to send their children to a super school.  Everyone wants their child to get ahead, even if this means leaving the neighbor’s child behind.  The result is a hollowing out of China’s educational system and a decreasing equality of opportunity for China’s children.
 
Such trends are not of course unique to China.  Americans complain frequently about the crisis in rural education and about gaming the increasingly test-based system, without knowing that their Chinese counterparts are living the same problems with Chinese characteristics.
 
Translation
 
Introduction
 
“A student who was tying his shoelaces got kicked in the face just for being a few minutes late.”
 
“A teacher made a student squat outside the classroom for an entire class period because the student stood up and stretched when the previous class let out.”
 
“We’re not allowed to wear coats when we run outside in the winter.”
 
--Complaints on social media from someone claiming to be a student from Hengshui Number Two High School.

Reading only these tweets, it's hard to tell whether the students are in school or in prison.  Only a few days after the 2023 Chinese New Year, the student protests at Hengshui Number Two High School made the top of Internet search lists.
 
Hengshui also has the more famous Hengshui High School, and the group of "super high schools" represented by the Hengshui system is often known for its strict discipline and meticulous management. Scolding, corporal punishment, physical restraint, and psychological pressure are the common hallmarks of virtually all of these schools. This environment has profound effects on the students’ mental state, and Hengshui Number Two High School, which came to public attention in 2023, had already experienced an incident in 2014 in which a number of seniors jumped off of a building and committed suicide.
 
When outsiders raise questions about the negative impact these schools are having on the mental health of their students, the super high schools often respond by pulling out a dazzling list of high test scores.  So their answer to the outsiders’ question is:  “Everything we are doing is so that village kids can go to a university, and even a good university.” 
 
However, is this really the case?
 
After sorting through the data and interviewing experts, we found that the myth of super high schools is attributable less to strict management, and more to the unconventional practice of "poaching" the best students across larger regions, outside their catchment area. In the county-level high schools that are hollowed out by the practices of the super high schools, the rural children from ordinary backgrounds don’t stand a chance in the college entrance examination. 
 
We have invested huge resources and sacrificed our children's youth, but the results we are obtaining are increasingly distant from our original goals.  Maybe it’s time to sort out the "super high school" problem. 
 
One:  Hengshui in the Early Days was a "Victory for the Common People"
 
The story of super high schools always starts with Hengshui High School, but many people are not aware that the story of Hengshui High is actually the story of a dragon-slaying warrior who eventually becomes an evil dragon.
 
Because China’s education system promotes the idea of key high schools, by the early 1990s, these key high schools, especially those located in provincial capitals, were ahead of ordinary high schools in terms of resources, and attracted the best students and teachers from county schools through administrative and market means:  high-scoring candidates from rural areas were poached by key high schools, and outstanding teachers left the villages for the towns, and small cities for bigger cities.
 
In a commentary written some years ago, Yang Dongping 杨东平, honorary director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute and a member of the National Education Advisory Committee, referred to key secondary schools as "harvesters" for high-scoring students and "blood pumps 抽血机" for outstanding teachers. The Matthew effect, where the strong get ever stronger, had already begun to show its power.
 
This "blood pumping" appears at first glance to be about differences between urban and rural, key and non-key schools, but in fact it relies on power, as those on top extract what they need from lower levels.   Based on fieldwork conducted over the past few years, Sun Ningxiang 孙凝翔, who holds an M.A. in sociology from Peking University, has come to call this pattern "extraction-based stratification 汲取型分层.” 
 
Within this power system, the high schools in the provincial capitals effortlessly attract the best students throughout the province; the prefecture-level cities lose some of their best students to the prefectural capital, and direct their blood pumping to lower levels; county-level high schools are even worse off, and can only look within the county, and because they are already at the lowest level, there is not much “blood” to “pump.”   The only way to maintain performance at the county level is by strengthening management and putting pressure on the schools.
 
In the early 1990s, Hengshui High School, a county-level high school, was exploited as a weak player in this system.
 
At the time, Hengshui High School was often ranked toward the bottom of the eleven counties in the Hengshui region, even if it was located in the same place as the Hengshui district administrative offices.
 
A school that fails to send its students to the next level[2] is like a poor student who has fallen behind, and everything is a complete mess:  the teachers openly take tables, chairs, and bedframes home from school, and make furniture out of the stolen wood;  the principal calls a meeting and the students yell “let’s get out of here” and get up and go; there are even thieves who go into student dormitories and leave with the bedframes without anyone batting an eye.
 
It was against this backdrop that Li Jinchi 李金池, the 37-year-old principal who redefined the ecology of Hengshui High School and, indeed, of China's "super high schools," arrived at Hengshui High School in 1992.  
 
After Li Jinchi arrived, he decided to close the Hengshui campus. All students were required live on campus and to submit to a semi-military style of management. 
 
Hengshui runs on a tight schedule, regulated down to the minute, and from the time the students get up at 5:30 in the morning to run laps, until they go to bed at 10:10 at night, they have almost no free time. 
 
Yang Dongping told The Intellectual that he most was impressed by one senior girl who never took her clothes off, thus saving more time for sleep. 
 
The quantitative reward and punishment system is so detailed that it regulates the students' every action.  During self-study periods, staring into space or even raising your head is prohibited, and there are even rules about whether students can wear shorts to bed.  The teachers are also targets of quantitative management, and the academic performance, discipline, and neatness of the dormitories of the different student groups will affect their assessment and thus their salary. 
 
In Li Jinchi’s own summary description:  "The management of Hengshui High School is, in the final analysis, about closed management and quantitative assessment, which are the two sides of the same coin."
 
Within three years, Hengshui High School's college entrance exam success rate tripled, ranking first among the city's eleven county key high schools, and in 2002, Hengshui High School's success rate reached a record 98%.
 
On the basis of this strict management, Hengshui High School became a nationally known high school practically overnight, and high schools from all over the country came to Hengshui to learn from their experience, which later even developed into a tourism industry. Hengshui High also came to be hard to get into, as top students from cities and counties throughout Hebei flocked to the school. 
 
Hengshui is not a unique case. Yang Dongping told us that even before Hengshui became famous, the model of a county high school that stressed working hard and piling on the homework had already become popular in poorer areas with few educational resources. 
 
Thus one hand focuses on strict management, getting the students to work hard, and the other hand is out there looking for the best students, meaning the school sends a lot of students on to college, which in turn attracts more students, the path followed by the early Hengshui-style high schools. 
 
Looking back at Hengshui High School in this early period, its enrollment basin was limited to a population of some 300,000 plus, like other city- and county-level schools, all of which were severely disadvantaged compared with the stronger schools in the provincial capital.   Although he rejects the management model and ideas embodied in Hengshui, Yang Dongping still acknowledges that Li Jinchi turned the school around. 

As one of the few local high schools to be known at the national level, Hengshui has undoubtedly become a benchmark for local high schools in their competition with stronger schools in the provincial capitals. Although its management model has been criticized all along, since it gradually won its battle against these stronger schools more than ten years ago, Hengshui is often portrayed positively by the mainstream media, presented as an almost perfect model of test-based education, where the diligence and hard work of children from poor families were finally recognized, a kind of "victory for the common people."
 
If things had stopped there, this might have been more or less true, but as time moved on, the story changed its tune.

Two:  The Birth of a Super High School
 
It was at the beginning of the 21st century, at a moment when China's annual GDP growth was still hovering around the double digits and all industries were growing by leaps and bounds, that Hengshui High School, which had been a model for only a few years, found that it had hit a bottleneck and was not moving forward.
 
The problem was that part of what determines student performance is the quality of the student population, and Hengshui’s enrollment basin was limited.
 
According to a 2012 Southern Weekend report, Hengshui High School's original enrollment basin was limited solely to Hengshui city, with most students coming from the Taocheng area (formerly a county-level city in Hengshui), and Hengshui High had already mined this area to the point of exhaustion. One Hebei educator argued that "if Hengshui high school gets ten or twenty of its students into Tsinghua or Peking University in a year, then it has already reached its limit."
 
Hengshui’s recruitment efforts were pretty effective. As early as 2004, right before the high school entrance examination, Hengshui would have their teachers take off work and visit the families of top middle school students in Xingtai one by one, having learned their names through personal connections.  Promising to take these top students without considering their results on the exam, they recruited more than twenty year after year. 
 
But this was not enough to compete with other famous schools in the provincial capital that know how to game the system. Those schools recruit province-wide as a basic policy, and have many privileges helping them to do so.
 
A principal in Yichang, Hubei, once complained in a 2012 interview with China Education News: "Every year, many of our top students are poached by model provincial schools like Huashi First Affiliated High School and Wuhan Foreign Language School. Some schools run training courses in our counties and cities as soon as the Spring Festival is over to hunt for top students."
 
Hubei province once promoted a plan called “Let’s Take Flight 飞翔计划,” where all provincial model high schools would offer fifty places to students from rural middle schools, in order to target rural households and students who had completed three years in rural areas. "This program was originally conceived of as a way to shift quality resources toward rural areas, based on the low percentage of rural children attending college, but in fact it added a reason for provincial model high schools to blatantly poach top students from across the province."

This privilege is the natural result of the common interests of the government and the schools. The government provides special enrollment policies for these schools, and if the schools become famous, this not only brings economic benefits such as rewards for graduation rates, first-tier rates, and increasing housing prices in the area where the school is located, but having a place in a famous school is a good way to make friends and influence people. 

Hengshui High School, which is located in a prefecture-level city, is a minor player in the competition for provincial recruitment, despite receiving the support of the local government. But in the competition to create a monopoly, if you don’t go forward, you are likely to slide back.
 
A study based on 2007-2013 enrollment data from two elite universities illustrates that if high schools are divided into three categories, the top group consisting of the 10% of high schools that send the most students to university, the second group made up of the 50% high schools that send fewer, and the last group of the 40% of high schools that send the fewest, then 70% of the first category of high schools are located in municipalities, provincial capitals, and sub-provincial cities, and the percentage located at the county level has never been more than 5%.
 
Even more frightening is the increasing polarization occurring over the seven-year period, as the number of students entering the elite universities from the top two groups increased, while those from the lowest group declined by almost 30%. 
 
This situation is related to the basic logic of resource allocation in Chinese high school education.  Given that the single shared goal is the rate of success in the university entrance examination, schools at all levels must concentrate resources to strengthen themselves, while these resources—excellent students and teachers—can only be obtained by expropriating them from lower levels.  The strong getting stronger and creating monopolies becomes the rules of the game, which is how the Mathew effect kicks in.

Before too many years, Hengshui found the resources to get ahead.
 
Yang Dongping points out in one of his essays that in 2013, Hengshui High School and real estate company Hebei Taihua Jinye jointly funded the establishment of the privately run Hengshui Number One High School, also called Hengshui High School South Campus. Although one is a private school and one is a public school, the two schools are virtually the same.
 
As a public school, there are limitations on what Hengshui High can do in terms of the scale and scope of recruitment, but once Hengshui Number One was up and running, as a private school it could do what the public school could not and recruit province-wide. As early as 1999, Hengshui had established the private Busan High School, which mainly enrolled extra-provincial students and those repeating grades, although the scale was smaller compared to Hengshui Number One.
 
By roughly 2015, Hengshui High was enrolling more than 1,000 students in each grade, while Hengshui Number One had some 3,200 students. Counting all three years plus repeat students, the Hengshui High School complex became a super school with some 10,000 students. Together with the old Busan High School, these schools make up the Hengshui super high school system. 
 
In an exclusive interview with Education Today, Xiong Bingqi 熊丙奇, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, said, "The core problem with super high schools is actually that they are run in violation of the rules. Public high schools set up private schools, and then use the fact that they are private to poach students across provinces and regions, charging fees and expanding enrollment the way that private schools do. This kind of mixture of public and private education is itself a violation of the Law to Promote Private Education.”
 
Behind the scenes there is also is the support of local governments. Chi Fulin 迟福林, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, pointed out in an interview with Xinhua News Agency at the 2013 CPPCC meeting that local governments are the originators of the super high school phenomenon. Many local leaders are proud to have super high schools in their districts, and some education bureaus even impose enrollment and examination success targets on secondary school principals, and if they cannot meet the targets they find themselves out of a job. 

The era of super high schools had begun.

Three:  Super High Schools Storm the Country, and even Hengshui has to Up its Game

Hengshui High School was already a nationally renowned school, and after setting up the private Hengshui Number One, allowing it to recruit province-wide and to enlarge the scale of the school, Hengshui became a well-oiled machine, poaching excellent students and teachers throughout Hebei. At this point, Hengshui left its days as a "county high school" behind, becoming a super high school.

The Hengshui system pushes the logic of pooling resources and creating monopolies to the extreme. Sun Ningxiang told The Intellectual that for quite some time, Hengshui has been able to siphon off the top ten performers—or even more—on the high school entrance exam from each testing unit throughout the province.[3] This is unthinkable in the strong schools found in the provincial capitals of Hunan and Zhejiang, first because the policy does not exist, and second because the schools there do not have the same scale as Hengshui. 

According to a report in the First Financial News, high-scoring students in Cangzhou, those who score 570 points or more in the high school entrance examination, are poached by Hengshui in large numbers year after year, and the number of Cangzhou students testing into Tsinghua and Peking University can in no way compare to Hengshui. This has clearly intensified the impetus for students throughout Hebei to gravitate toward Hengshui, leaving education in cities and counties elsewhere in a vicious cycle of declining performance and declining student numbers. And although Hebei has explicitly banned Hengshui’s irregular recruitment practices, Hengshui frequently violates the ban.

Poaching creates meaningless competition.  University admission is based on the entrance examination, and before the super high school era, the best students were distributed among any number of schools, and also went on to university. Now everyone is concentrated in the super high schools, which means that if other schools want to avoid falling further behind they have to think of something new, be it increased investment, poaching students from other regions or even sending students to study elsewhere.[4] The threshold of competition is getting higher and higher, and the whole educational environment is a case study in involution.

Hengshui’s powerful vacuum effect has created an "arms race" throughout Hebei. In order to make up for lost "blood" and to maintain local educational performance, Hebei began to use the Hengshui model as a template for reform, and the pressure on teachers and students alike has increased considerably. As involution intensifies, even the strongest schools in the provincial capital, which had been resting on their laurels, have had to step up their management efforts. Yang Dongping told The Intellectual with the spread of the Hengshui model throughout the province, the number of Hebei students going to Tsinghua and Peking University has increased.

Even Hengshui High School was forced to up its game. The more strictly managed Hengshui Number Two High School, whose students were originally weaker, carried out a Hengshui-style reform in 2004, and became a perennial rival of Hengshui High in the following years due to its even stricter management.

The super high school model launched by the Hengshui-system has spread to the entire country. Whenever a super high school appears in a region, the educational ecology of a region is disrupted. Xiong Bingqi told The Intellectual that super high schools are found all over the country, although to different degrees.
 
In Henan province, the number of students and teachers at the Henan Experimental High School and its branches has reached nearly 10,000; Linchuan Number One High School in Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province, was once a local school, but has since become a huge school of some 10,000 students. These schools pay high prices to poach top students from across the region while charging school choice fees in the tens of thousands of RMB.

Super high schools have grown to the point that they have long ago ceased to be a story of local schools fighting back against the strong schools in the provincial capitals. The dragon-slaying warrior has become the evil dragon.

As Yang Dongping told The Intellectual: "I believe that at the outset Hengshui High School did play a role in helping rural children, and that this once relied entirely on students' hard work and study, because at the time, students were all equal before the examinations. But later on Hengshui became a strong school, recruiting large numbers of ready-made high-scoring students, and the situation changed."
 
Four:  Rising Super High Schools, Declining County High Schools 
 
In 2021, when a Hengshui student gave a speech saying "I am a rural pig digging up a big city cabbage,"[5] it triggered a lively debate. 

The line comes from a speech given by a student named Zhang from Hengshui High School on the television show “Variety.” He said that he came from an ordinary family in the countryside, and after studying in the city came to understand the huge gap between urban and rural areas, which made him determined to leave the countryside. He said that Hengshui students are "all children from ordinary families in the villages," who pour everything into their studies and compete day and night for the opportunity to "change their lives."

This is a "public persona" that super high schools have always insisted on for themselves: providing a platform and the resources for children from ordinary rural families to compete with urban students, which is a kind of "fairness."

However, according to the Times, the student who gave the speech left the entrance exam in the pedicab provided by the school, but quickly switched vehicles for his family’s car.  Taocheng High School, where Zhang attended middle school, costs 32,000 RMB a year (approx. 4700US$) for tuition and boarding alone, a price that is not affordable for the average rural family.

While super high schools claim to provide opportunities for rural students, most rural students do not benefit from them.
 
Publicly available data from the Ministry of Education illustrate that in 2020, there were 6,821 county, township, and village high schools nationwide, accounting for about 48% of the total number of ordinary high schools. There are more than 2,800 counties in China, and the 12,585,600 students enrolled in county, township, and village high schools, make up more than 50% of the country's students. These county, township, and village high schools are the choice of most average rural families.
 
And behind every rising super high school, there is a county high school on the decline. Given the uncontrolled pulling power of the super high schools, the decline of county high schools with relatively weak educational resources is inevitable.

Lin Xiaoying 林小英, an associate professor at Peking University's School of Education, went to a county high school few years ago to do fieldwork. The school in question was once a model high school at the provincial level, but in less than ten years, it declined to the point that almost every family in the area had desks and chairs from the school at home, because people were stealing the school blind. Eighty-five of the top hundred students in the county had left, and the teachers could no longer bring themselves to give their classes.

In the course of their research, Lin Xiaoying found that "83% of those who stay in the county are children from the surrounding countryside, mostly left-behind children [i.e., their parents are migrant workers in the cities who left the children with relatives] with difficult family situations and low parental literacy." By contrast, few children of county government officials stay in the county, which is also true of a large number of high school teachers.   Some have the wherewithal to leave, while others have no choice but to stay.

Even hope for county high schools is disappearing; parents see those who study in county high schools as losers, and the left-behind children do not score well, which means that the schools and the education administration dislike them.  In other words, rural children from ordinary backgrounds are not only not competitive in the university entrance examinations, but have even lost their right to a decent high school education. 
 
According to a report in China Youth Daily, in Fengshan County, Guangxi, a county of 215,000 people, not a single student tested into a first-tier school in 2016. Only ten percent of students achieved the basic undergraduate admission score of 300 plus points. 
 
In the past few years, the disappearance of excellent students and teachers in Fengshan has become the norm. According to the results of high school examinations, some 70 "A+" and 200 "A" candidates leave Fengshan every year, and you cannot pay them to stay.  Parents start to take children out of local schools beginning in elementary and middle school, meaning that these students early on become “immigrants” in the context of university entrance examinations. 
 
County high schools have not always been in decline. In an interview with Education Today, Xiong Bingqi describes the phenomenon of what were known as number one county high schools in the 1990s. At the time, almost every county had a number one high school with good teachers, and every year a few students could test into Peking University and Tsinghua University. This situation still exists in Jiangsu, because Jiangsu has taken clear measures to prohibit the emergence of super high schools, and does not allow the large-scale poaching of students from across the province. 
 
In his exclusive interview with Education Today, Xiong said, "The root of the problem in county high schools has appeared in the past decade or so, when basic education in all areas has shown signs of disturbing trends.  In some areas, authorities have condoned the provincial poaching practices of super high schools in the hopes of creating well-known schools.  The result has been that quality students are concentrated in a few super high schools, and the best teachers at the county level also siphoned off, ultimately leading to serious dilemmas in school management at the county level." 
 
Five:  Is the only Solution for County High Schools to Become Little Hengshuis? 
 
Some county high schools have not yet given up, and are looking for solutions.  However, the most common solution is to copy Hengshui.

In Henan, many parents from Zhoukou, Zhumadian, Zhengzhou and even other provinces send their children to school at Dancheng Number One High School in Dancheng County, Zhoukou City. In recent years, Dancheng Number One has created the myth of a county high school with university entrance examination prowess, with 30 or 40 students getting into Tsinghua and Peking University almost every year.
 
According to Caixin, the myth began in 2008 when Liu Chengzhang 刘成章, the new principal of Dancheng Number One, took up his job and carried out a complete overhaul, following the Hengshui model. There was a sense of déjà vu, as Dancheng Number One implemented the same down-to-the-minute schedules, student surveillance by camera, and strict discipline. The school's leaders openly said that Dancheng Number One was "a second Hengshui."

Dancheng was formerly a poverty-stricken county in Henan, and the economic and educational performance of Dancheng Number One brought the government and the high school closer together. The government allowed Dancheng Number One to open a private school to expand its student population, and it is estimated that Dancheng Number One has earned more than 60 million RMB (approx. 8.8 million US$) in 2019 on school choice fees and tuition fees.

The education industry in Dancheng has also become part of the region’s political track record in terms of "education poverty alleviation," with the county's annual investment in education accounting for more than 30% of the county's fiscal expenditure, 12 percentage points higher than the average in Henan Province.

Dancheng Number One is just one outstanding example of many "little Hengshuis," and there are any  number of county high schools that have replicated the model. In fact, over the past few years, Hengshui High School has frequently announced that it wants to ease up, which has incited a flurry of opposition from parents. Hengshui’s pronouncements surely have to do with policy pressure and public image considerations, but the school that launched the super high schools may indeed be getting worn out.

In 2022, Hengshui won 25 golds, 34 silvers and 4 bronzes in the five-subject Academic Olympics [the subjects are math, physics, chemistry, computer science, and biology], more golds than any other high school in China. Eleven students were admitted to Tsinghua and Peking University without having to take the entrance exams, and 50 qualified for the Tsinghua-Peking University Strong Foundation Program. Hengshui is classed together with strong schools like Renmin University Affiliated High School and Chengdu Number Seven High School. The Hengshui super high school, which has a large concentration of resources and privileges, no longer has to rely solely on the university entrance examination scores of its graduates for recruitment.

The story seems to have circled back around to its starting point. An economically underdeveloped county builds a benchmark school with a set of strict management practices, a monopoly on local students, and the dedicated support of the local government against the strong high schools that dominate resources and privileges. This time, though, there are more predators at the top and fewer resources to expropriate from the bottom.
 
But seeing how the story played out the last time, we already know how it will end.

Notes

[1]张天祁,  “衡水中学: 一个屠龙少年终成恶龙的故事,” published on the online platform of The Intellectual/知识分子, on February 7, 2023. 

[2]Translator’s note:  The expression in Chinese is 升学成绩.  Shengxue/升学 means to continue to study at the next level of the educational system, and in a system like China’s, where advancement at every level is determined by testing, schools are rated by what percentage of their students continue--middle schools on how many continue to high school, high schools on how many continue to university.  There are presumably similar measures applied to schools outside of China, but in systems where tests play a less important role in allocating student destinations, the measure does not have the same overweening importance.

[3]Translator’s note:  The author clearly means ten for each group taking the test at any level—counties, county towns, cities, etc.—thus amounting to hundreds of students, I assume.

[4]Translator’s note:  I confess that I cannot see the logic of sending students elsewhere, which simply means that I don’t understand the system well enough.

[5]Translator’s note:  The expression is 土猪拱白菜, which can mean something like “pearls before swine,” i.e., wasting quality resources on someone who is undeserving of them, and in China the expression is often used to describe marriages in which the man is unworthy of the woman.  Here, the student is depicting himself as completely unworthy, and promising to work until he succeeds in the big city.  For a discussion of the speech, see here.