Here’s an excerpt describing the typical day in a Chinese high school. Contrast his description with life in your own high school.

I have to say that high school is a monastery and an army boot camp combined. Eleven classes every day. We had to rise before dawn and went to bed after 11. After the last class, we were encouraged to use any bit of extra time for study. There was one student who would go to read his lessons every night in the toilet, because that was the only place where the light would be kept on 24 hours. Everyone hated him, because his breach of a delicate equilibrium that is vital for us to live in peace with each other — he studied just a little too hard. The school encouraged us to be frugal with our time. It had a slogan hanging from the main building: “Time is like water in sponge; if you squeeze harder, there is always more.”

And contemplate this paragraph about the possible consequences of tying teacher pay to students’ performance on standardized tests.

It was not only the students dealing with a lot of stress, but the teachers as well. A teacher’s salary was determined by how many of the students that they were responsible for went to university. Even the school principal would be evaluated on such statistics. At my junior year, a girl committed suicide. Not a big surprise. There are always weak ones who just can’t make it. That is how natural selection works. The cause of the suicide was that the girl’s head teacher asked her to forgo the college entrance exam. Not that he hated her personally. He simply talked to all the students who were deemed hopeless and would only dilute the average results of the class. The girl refused. The teacher told the girl something that must have been very humiliating, and she drowned herself in the sea that afternoon.

It’s a different world here for students, folks. College is a picnic in comparison to the final three years of secondary education.

The student dorms here do not have water heaters providing hot water from the taps, so students usually use hot water pots or immersion heaters to get some hot water for drinking, washing, etc. Otherwise, they have to go downstairs to hot water dispensers outside the dorms, drop in some coins and fill their oversized Thermos jugs. Considering some dorms have eight floors, you can see why having an electric teapot might be desirable.

Unfortunately, the wiring in some dorms is perhaps a little dodgy and at least 30 years old (I bet), so early Sunday morning there was an electrical fire in one of the women’s dorms. No big deal — no one was hurt and there was little damage — but the university responded with a typically quick bureaucratic response.

Ban all electric heaters. No teapots. No immersion coils. No hotplates. Nada.

This announcement came later that evening, and the students did not take to it kindly. In fact, they took to the campus, yelling, blowing whistles, banging metal lids together, around 11 pm, demanding the uni reverse its unilateral ban on hot water appliances. They kept it up well past 1 am Monday.

Someone even posted a video on one of China’s video-sharing sites, showing the announcements, a queue of girls getting hot water from the dispensers, and a gaggle of vacuum bottles waiting to be filled, while the audio played the students’ Sunday night protests.

As protest causes go, it may seem pretty minor, particularly if your own university in the States also had similar bans. (I know Princeton did. Who knows how old some of the wiring in the dorms from the 1920s are?) But we are in Hunan, where few buildings have central heating, and none of our student dorms have heat pumps to keep things warm in the winter or cool in the summer. So, you can imagine why students living in unheated dormitories when the overnight temperatures outside are just barely above freezing would like to heat up some water once in a while.

I am not sure if the problem has been resolved. Either the students have accepted the decision with typical Asian resignation, or the university has relented. If I hear loud mobs down campus tonight again, I’ll have my answer.

In a similar vein, I have learned that Chinese parents and secondary schools are generally far less liberal about their children’s social connections, especially dating, than most Western parents. This parental control can extend into the child’s university years, as well, to an extent that would drive most Western students batty.

Whether the added supervision of teenagers and young adults is a good thing, I cannot and should not say. It’s not my culture, after all. On one level, I can understand the motivation for such tight control of youngsters. A child here is a precious investment in a family’s future, and because of national birth-control laws, an extremely limited resource.

Most Chinese families can legally have only one child; if they live in a rural area, they can legally have two. There can be dire consequences for couples who have a little oopsie, and produce an additional child above the legal limit. Those consequences include hefty fines, additional taxes and job demotions or barriers.

Chinese culture is more conservative than Western culture, so there is already a cultural reluctance to grant young people a lot of freedom. If you also consider that any child is a one-time-only gift to a couple, parents probably want to protect their children from harm and from potentially dishonoring the family. Thus, parents keep a close, draconian eye on their teenagers’ social life.

The emphasis on education is another big factor in sheltering children from what most Westerners consider normal rites of passage into adulthood. Middle- and high-school students spend their time in a pressure cooker of study, study, study, test, study, study, study, test, culminating in the critical college entrance examination. The scores on that examination determine a student’s future; poor scores doom the student to a life without a college education or perhaps a decent income. In China, children are expected to support, even house, their parents until they die. So, the results of the Chinese college entrance examination have far-reaching consequences, much more than shoddy scores on the SAT or ACT might have.

My evidence is pretty anecdotal, but I am living in a socially more conservative area than say, the cosmopolitan cities of Beijing or Shanghai, so I am reasonably sure that the generalizations that follow are accurate. My students will see this post on my Qzone page, so I hope they will comment on it.

It is fair to say that Chinese children stay children longer than in the USA. That is to say, parents and society prevent them from interacting with the outside world in the ways American teens can. They cannot drive a car until age 18, so their mobility (and privacy) is restricted. There are really no part-time jobs available for them to work, so they have no real opportunity to work alongside other youngsters or adults, apart from their own family members.

Parents and schools tightly constrain youngsters’ leisure time. Students have lessons on weekends, and free time at home (or in the dormitory for boarders)is usually for doing sports, homework and further study. If the child is allowed TV access, Chinese TV is nowhere near as racy or provocative as even American network TV (not to mention US cable or European TV) is, so there is less chance for them to see the adult (mis)behaviors American parents dread their children seeing on the tube.

[The Internet, despite the Great Firewall of China, is a mitigating factor, however. Like teens everywhere, Chinese students are tech-savvy, and manage to watch what they want when they want either on their computers, or on their MP4 devices. So, some of my students have acquired American ways of thinking that sometimes puts them at loggerheads with their parents.]

Most parents actively discourage (and prevent) their high school age children from dating or even from having boy- or girlfriends. For the majority of students, then, their first real opportunity to have relationships — sexual or romantic — usually has to wait until they enter university. Even there, their free time is restricted in many ways.

One college senior told me her mother still periodically checks the girl’s cellphone message and Internet email queues to see if there is evidence of any boyfriends in her life. Her mother has kept this vigilance up since the girl was in middle school. A freshmen confided in me recently that she has fallen in love with a classmate, but fears telling her mother since mom has strictly forbidden the girl from having a boyfriend in college, so that her grades do not suffer. (Honestly, even as a parent, I cannot see how anyone can realistically expect to enforce such a ban. Chinese hormones are the same as American hormones. Love is universal.)

At this university, and I suppose elsewhere in China, the dormitories lock up for the night at 10:30, or sometimes at 11 pm. Spending time with students in the evening requires us all to keep a careful eye on the time, as students may not be able to re-enter their dorms if we stay out too late. (Though, of course there are “secret” methods of re-entering after curfew — another universal human behavior.) Dormitories are single-sex only; girls may visit the boys’ dormitories, but boys are not permitted entry to the girl’s dorms, or even to their quads. With as many as 10 students to a room, the chances for couples to have some private time together in a dorm room are virtually non-existent in any event.

Unescorted visits to members of the opposite sex seem to be frowned upon, anyway. They are Just Not Done. This is a poor generalization, however. One of my student female friends, aged 20, is notably reluctant to visit my apartment without someone else in tow, despite our spending time alone together shopping and eating elsewhere. On the other hand, another girl the same age cheerfully visits with me, sometimes for an entire afternoon, with no supervision. [At this point, I hasten to add that there is a stipulation in my contract that I have no "love relationships" with students. I confess to being a little hazy as to what that exactly means, and whether it applies to all students or just the ones I teach. So, in some ways I appreciate the caution of my female guests, not to get rumours floating around. I rather like my job here, thank you.]

Couples do manage to acquire some quality time. The trees around Fengyu Lake provide excellent cover for kissing and whatnot; and there are several hotels near the university that willingly rent out rooms, no questions asked. Some couples go so far as renting apartments in town, to facilitate their trysts. While there are cultural taboos against premarital sex, and potential problems for would-be brides who are not virgins, sexual mores are changing here, albeit slowly.

Other social activities remind me of the images we have of the quintessential American high school of the 1950s. We don’t have sockhops here, but group activities — like the end-of-term college parties I attended — are just as chaste and alcohol free. The games at the parties were just clean fun, but for someone accustomed to the often drunken mayhem of American university life, they were more like the activities at an American pre-teen’s birthday party than games for 20-somethings.

Which, I must say, is not a bad thing. American uni students seem bent on spending as much time as feasibly possible in chemically altered states, despite being under less academic pressure — typically — than Chinese kids are. There is no apparent restriction on alcohol sales here; the campus supermarket sells (admittedly watery) beer and the more potent rice wine, but there are cultural taboos against public drunkenness. Men are more likely to drink (and smoke) than women, so an American-style coeducational kegger would be a pretty unlikely event.

On the academic side, class schedules for most students resemble American high school than American university schedules. On some days of the week, students might have six to eight hours of classes. They might also have required study sessions early in the mornings, or late in the evenings, and additional meeting times on weekends. Attendance is monitored, though not to the degree that it is in secondary schools. Teaching for most subjects depends almost exclusively on lecture and recitation, with little of the give-and-take class discussion even US middle school students enjoy. And there are the ever-present examinations (with attendant long-term consequences) looming in the not-to-distant future: finals, English mastery tests, postgraduate exams, etc., etc.

That their behavior seems more innocent than American university students’ does not imply Chinese students are childish in mind or beliefs. While most seem to possess an infectious, childlike optimism, the students I have spent time with are thoughtful, mature young adults, with serious concerns both for their futures and for the future of their homeland. They — especially the older students — recognize the corruption and foot-dragging of the central government, and chafe under the infuriatingly conservative restrictions of home and school. The younger students seem more “westernized” in some ways than even the seniors, a tendency that one of my senior friends has also noted, which leads me to suspect that China’s “opening up” thirty years ago will in another two or three decades result in a China that will be in many ways unrecognizable to people now.

Perhaps my students’ children then will enjoy freedoms their parents now only wish for.