Fuddland

With half a billion or so potential reserves, China really has no need for a national service, but a couple of high-school-teacher friends of mine still had a week off work recently thanks to their students all taking part in boot camp: all senior high-school and first-year university students must take part in between a week and a month’s worth of military training, which has been the nationwide policy since a certain student up-rising in 1989.

I talked to a number of my adult students to find out what goes on, and what they thought about it, and the answers have all been generally the same. Some, but not all, had taken part in basic combat training, but for everyone it was nothing more than a lot of marching or standing in formation [more than one person told me they had to stand in the full glare of the sun for up to three hours, without protection], being yelled at, and no messing around whatsoever, in order to instill a sense of discipline, order and good old patriotism. And pretty much everyone—male and female alike—agreed that it did them good to go through it.

I suppose it’s purpose is to counter the much more relaxed pace of Chinese university life when compared to the high school system: in the latter, the students gradually build up to twelve- to fourteen-hour days of study, in which the parents and grandparents literally wait hand and foot on their single offspring in order to allow them maximum learning time, all leading up to the notoriously difficult and stressful university entrance exam. In contrast, the university system is much like that of the West, with much less classroom-time [depending on the chosen field of study] and more opportunities for—shudder—socialising, which is of course a worry for the powers that be, hence the effort to instill a bit of social order into them from the get-go.