Originally published at: 对资产阶级学府“衡水模式”的揭露与批判 – 曙光
Revelation and Criticism of the Bourgeois “Hengshui Model”
Editorial Board of League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Proletariat
Under the reactionary rule of the Chinese revisionist government, the shadow of the "Hengshui system" has cast over vast areas of China. The reactionary bourgeois universities cater to the needs of the declining petty bourgeoisie to maintain their class status, playing both sides of the counterrevolution, not only directly using coercive means to control students' personal freedoms and destroy their health, but also employing spiritual "soft knives" to enslave students, attempting to shape them into high-value commodities and obedient slaves from all sides. The school I attend is a typical example.
Our school's management, restrictions, and repression are extremely brutal and perverse.
They first cut off almost all of the students' rest and entertainment time. Freshmen and sophomores stay at school for two weeks and only get one day off, while seniors about to take the college entrance exam are only allowed one day off after a month! The longest vacation I had in high school—the summer break between first and second year—was only thirteen days, and the summer break between second and third year was barbarically cut down to three days. Teachers even call the holiday "rest and adjustment," just like oiling machines to keep them running smoothly; the school treats vacations merely as lubricants and pressure valves for "learning machines." If it weren't to prevent students from developing mental issues, dissatisfaction, or rebellion due to long-term control, they would rather have students studying at their desks 365 days a year.
The school's schedule for students is also extremely unreasonable—students in their developmental stage are forced to wake up at around five in the morning and only allowed to return to their dorms after ten at night. By the end of the day, students' eyes are often sore and itchy, and physical and mental exhaustion is commonplace. Moreover, meal times are very short. Teachers believe that high school students only need three minutes for breakfast, just enough to eat a pancake. Many students come in healthy and leave with gastrointestinal issues. Despite squeezing students to the point of suffocation, confining them in classrooms all day and forcing them to study, many students sleep in class or daydream during self-study periods, simply not interested in learning the dull, impractical knowledge.
Many students start to indulge in reckless fun once they enter university, including those who got into Tsinghua but were expelled due to gaming addiction, skipping classes, or failing exams. Their prime years are wasted, and they are conditioned to parasitize and eat without working. A significant portion of them turn into useless individuals directly in university, which is an increasingly common phenomenon. The Chinese education system, by transforming the stick into a carrot, aims to let "highly educated" intellectuals indulge in eating, drinking, and pleasure, indoctrinating them with a refined bourgeois hedonist worldview, turning them into extreme individualists who only care about material enjoyment, ignore politics, and are disinterested in struggle—thus reinforcing bourgeois rule. Clearly, the college entrance examination is merely a system for the bourgeoisie to produce slaves who generate profit without disturbing their peace, not the talent selection exam claimed by the Chinese authorities. In fact, capitalism is the grave of people's geniuses, and the "Hengshui system" is a brutal destruction of the people's talents!
Parents not only demand that "commodities" have high value but also require them to be obedient and docile so they can firmly control this investment. In our school, the quantitative system is established to achieve this goal and has made "great contributions" to controlling students. We have both collective class quantification and individual quantification. The school forces us to obey various rules; any slight disobedience or resistance results in criticism letters and deduction of quantification points. Class quantification affects the quality of life for the entire class in the following week, such as whether there are "shower classes" and how long they can eat. Individual quantification is closely linked to class quantification and involves students' daily lives, such as whether they are called by class committee members or teachers to do chores. Most of my classmates hate this system.
Deduction of quantification points is mainly handled by duty teachers, class committee members, and the self-management committee.
The self-management committee is a major feature of our school. As the school increasingly seeks to strengthen monitoring and control over students, the self-management committee "came into being." Teachers assign students eager to serve as slaves to various departments and conduct so-called "improving handling ability" enslaving education. Since its establishment in 2015, the self-management committee has developed into a full-fledged, foul-smelling spy organization. This measure by the school is a three-pronged approach: the existence of the self-management committee not only enhances the school's control, restriction, and oppression of students but also greatly saves teachers' time and effort, and implements a malicious divide-and-conquer scheme. The school's establishment of the self-management committee is actually inspired by bourgeois methods of buying off worker aristocrats. Through this, the school helps the bankrupt petty bourgeoisie and proletariat's children to adapt early to the hierarchical system of capitalist society, making them accustomed to the repressive and controlling life under worker aristocrats, gradually becoming numb and indifferent. This aligns perfectly with bourgeois needs and helps consolidate bourgeois rule.
Students are even forced to obey leadership instructions for physical training, with morning runs requiring close contact. As the name suggests, students run with almost no space between them, with the toes of the one behind almost touching the sole of the one in front. Class sports officials shout commands, lead slogans, and hold the class flag. Along the track, self-management committee members check slogans, class sizes, team discipline, and whether the field is scattered... Clearly, the school requires students to run in close contact not for physical exercise but to constantly increase their obedience through penalties for unruly formations or unenthusiastic slogans. Running in close contact damages students' knees, and the dense formation greatly increases the risk of falls and trampling, severely harming their health.
[1] Close-contact running also gives teachers a good opportunity to demonstrate their control over students. Many visiting schools admire our school's close-contact running, actually envying how obedient and compliant our students are.Before daily morning exercises, there is also a routine morning meeting for the entire grade, during which the bright moon still hangs high over the Western Mountain. Teachers conduct criticism and "ideological guidance," indoctrinating students with rotten ideas from their decayed brains, such as some leaders promoting Confucian moderation as the way of life, and teaching students to become slick and experienced. Called "moderation," it is actually cowardice, further strengthening the students' enslaved mentality, making them dare not oppose the unjust and unreasonable systems in real life. Students have voices too; some disagree with teachers, but behind each class team stands a self-management committee member who records "restlessness," and these classes face extra running penalties. Students are not allowed to oppose teachers' words at school, just as they are not allowed to voice opposition to bureaucratic bourgeois rule under reactionary rule outside school. The so-called freedom of speech in the old society is unthinkable under the reactionary rule of Zhongxiu!
Moreover, students are not allowed to decide their hairstyles. Our school mandates that girls' hair must not cover their collars, and boys' hair must not be higher than their fingers when inserted. After holidays, self-management committee members check and register hairstyles; those who do not meet the standards are punished by grade and class. The barbaric institution claims this is to help students focus on studies and not pay too much attention to appearance. In reality, petty bourgeois students' vanity and love for dressing are not simply solved by hairstyle rules—our class's girls are the best proof. Most girls in our liberal arts class have mirrors and check themselves constantly after class; many skip dinner at night to maintain their figure. The strict hairstyle restrictions are merely a way to force students to live ascetic lives, focusing on improving grades to satisfy parents' hopes for stock appreciation, and to make the school's academic performance look better for more government funding and parental money.
Since our enrollment, teachers have been indoctrinating us with reactionary ideas like "Endure three years of high school, enjoy a lifetime of happiness, and build a glorious family"—a deceitful and tempting slogan that appeals to petty bourgeois students' opportunism—and using it as a pretext for control, restriction, and repression. Teachers not only preach daily but also invite a few successful students, admissions officers from prestigious universities, and motivational speakers to brainwash us. Our school also "practically" conveys the idea that "the college entrance exam determines life." For example, last year, our school sent students, teachers, and a drum team to deliver congratulatory messages to students admitted to Tsinghua and to the local government, receiving donations from various sectors, while teachers loudly promoted the "college entrance exam decides destiny" theory. In reality, under the dark capitalist system, even the children of the bankrupt petty bourgeoisie and proletariat who endure three years of high school are ultimately destined to join the proletariat, suffering from society; even those who "luckily" get into famous universities often face unemployment risks, with only a few getting "high-paying" jobs—servants to their masters, obediently sharing scraps. As China's economic crisis deepens, unemployment soars. According to official data, in April 2023, the urban surveyed unemployment rate was 5.2%, with youth (16-24) unemployment at 20.4%.[2] The number of college graduates in 2023 is expected to reach 11.58 million, an increase of 820,000 from last year.[3] In economically developed and relatively more employment-rich Shanghai, the average employment rate for graduates is only 32.8%. The overall employment rate for graduates of Shanghai Ocean University, a "Double First-Class" university, is only 14.83%, with undergraduates at 13.64% and postgraduates at 17.27%.[4] Clearly, the idea that "as long as a person is honest and diligent, they will succeed" is just bourgeois lies to deceive the poor into accepting oppression and exploitation!
Our school also cunningly influences students' thoughts through various subtle means. First, there is a rare two-week, one-lesson music class, but it teaches no musical theory. The music teacher promotes the latest policies of the Chinese revisionist government, flatters leaders, and in the second half of each class, sings praises of the Chinese revisionist government and "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," "the new era and new journey"... Every day, we have a "song before class," with patriotic and revolutionary songs from Monday to Friday, and students are free to choose on weekends. Compared to the rigid indoctrination of the Chinese revisionist system, petty bourgeois students prefer romantic, love-themed, and seemingly artistic bourgeois music. One promotes loyalty and obedience, the other celebrates bourgeois licentiousness or idyllic fantasies of freedom. The school combines slavery and bourgeois individualism and hedonism, promising students that if they work hard now, they will enjoy a good life in the future—an illusion to deceive, numb, and poison them.
Additionally, the school uses classroom decorations to instill hierarchical ideas, making students numb and accepting of inequality. The most prominent is the "Dragon and Tiger List" outside our classroom, which ranks students' names according to their overall exam scores. After each exam, students' names are tagged with labels like "Tsinghua/Peking/985/211/First Tier/Second Tier," with higher-ranked students receiving both spiritual and material "rewards," while lower-ranked students face criticism and parental punishment. The score sheets with exam scores and rankings almost fill every wall that can be pasted. Only during sudden inspections by the provincial education bureau does the school quickly tear down this "Dragon and Tiger List," knowing well that it is extremely barbaric. Of course, this does not mean that "the original intention was good, but the implementation was poor"; on the contrary, the Ministry of Education's ban on publishing students' scores and rankings aims to cover up this savage system. The school is well aware of this and routinely divides students into tiers, only revealing the list during inspections to maintain the "Province Civilized Unit" title. After inspections, the new list reappears on the wall shortly after.
The school's curriculum content is also a collection of decadent, reactionary rubbish retrieved from the historical garbage heap. For example, since Xi Jinping took office, the proportion of classical Chinese in textbooks and exams has sharply increased. The bourgeoisie reintroduces the long-rejected Confucian classics like the Analects and the Great Learning as mandatory texts, requiring students to memorize them thoroughly. Most of the Chinese language class time is spent on classical Chinese.
Students are also required to write essays in the new era's eight-legged essays: the entire structure, paragraph length, and argumentation materials (our school shows "Moving China" every year) are strictly regulated. While these essays are ornate, they are impractical and hollow.
The history textbooks claim to be materialist, but are actually idealist—for example, subtly implying that the imperial examination system was fair and rational, selecting the best through public competition, to deceive petty bourgeois students aspiring to "leap over the dragon gate" into capitalism. The so-called "merit-based admission" is merely a way for the bourgeoisie to select the elite. Because "those who control the means of material production also control the means of spiritual production"[5] in a society with private property, culture and education are monopolized by the exploiting class, and workers have no right to education (at least not equal rights with the exploiting class). This is evident in today's China: the wealthy bourgeoisie can obtain high scores through various means—attending cram schools, good schools... or even buying high scores and degrees directly. The myth of "everyone is equal before the scores" is just lies. The current Chinese college entrance system is inherently unequal, with different exam difficulty levels across provinces, and varying admission quotas and cutoff scores for universities in different regions...
In the most "developed" provinces of Henan and Hebei, with their militarized "Hengshui model," rooted in economic, political, and cultural factors, the situation is even worse. Currently, China’s college admission system mainly includes three types: direct enrollment by central "key universities" nationwide, regional universities recruiting locally, and regional universities recruiting nationally. This system results in more universities in more economically developed regions. However, the construction of universities in China is not based on actual regional needs but on economic conditions, leading to more universities in wealthier areas. Conversely, less developed regions like Henan and Hebei have only one or two "key" universities, with fewer undergraduate institutions. The national enrollment policies, formulated based on data from the 1980s to mid-1990s, have created distorted figures, further reducing the quota for Henan and Hebei.[6] To compete for the limited spots, high schools in these regions impose strict control, restriction, and repression. Moreover, culturally, these provinces are heavily poisoned by Confucian ideas, making their education system the most savage in China.
The barbaric Chinese education system aligns with other superstructure parts and the entire fascist regime. However, just as fascism does not demonstrate the strength of the bourgeoisie but reveals their extreme weakness—showing they can no longer deceive the masses with bourgeois democracy or maintain rule (of course, bourgeois democracy has never been implemented in imperialist China)—the bourgeoisie keeps students locked in schools because they fear students' exposure to increasingly intense class struggles in society, their dissatisfaction, and sympathy for revolution. The bourgeoisie employs coercive measures and revives the most reactionary Confucian spiritual weapons because, in the face of brutal social realities, bourgeois ideas are no longer effective in deceiving students. Therefore, our student comrades should never be frightened by this paper tiger with its false bravado, nor be blinded by threats and temptations, but should resolutely and tirelessly fight back.
Today, China has nearly 300 million students, including about 27 million high school students (and about 40 million including vocational students).[8] Despite their backwardness caused by class practice, living environment, and reactionary ideology, they are still oppressed by the reactionary education system (mainly the education system for them), and thus have the potential for revolutionary sympathy. If some of them (or part of them) lean toward revolution, they can help strengthen the social forces to overthrow the reactionary regime. Of course, as Flame said in "The Road of Future Revolution in China," due to the extreme decay of China's political system and cultural ideology, the struggle against petty bourgeois revolutionary extremism, weakness, individualism, and liberalism requires even greater effort than ever before.
That is my brief analysis of China's "Hengshui system." The fundamental issue in education is what kind of people to cultivate and for which class. Under China's rotten current education system, the bourgeoisie keeps oppressed workers' children in study rooms, disconnecting them from social reality, making them ignorant of the five grains and obedient slaves, exploited to the bone. To cultivate socialist successors, "Our educational policy should enable learners to develop morally, intellectually, and physically, becoming culturally educated workers with socialist consciousness"[9]. Under the socialist education system, students must learn not only productive struggles but also class struggles; not only cultural knowledge but also Marxism. To deepen understanding, indirect experience is not enough; direct experience through practical work is necessary, so classes should not only be in classrooms but also in farms and factories. To cultivate class consciousness, students must interact not only with classmates and teachers[10] but also closely with workers, poor peasants, and revolutionary fighters, undergoing re-education by them... Therefore, we must not believe the shameless lies of the Chinese revisionists about "getting into top universities and leading a high-class life." Only by overthrowing the reactionary rule can we achieve a thorough transformation of the exploitative education system and establish a vibrant, energetic society., a socialist education system that promotes the comprehensive development of people's health.
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The perverted bourgeois education system in China has caused far more damage to students' physical health than the above. According to the "2022 China National Health Sleep White Paper," the average sleep duration for Chinese high school students is only 6.5 hours. In reality, high school students sleep even less than this. Surveys show that from 2013 to 2018, the average sleep time in China shortened from 8.8 hours to 6.5 hours. As the main victims of sleep deprivation, high school students' sleep duration is obviously below the average. According to the "China Eye Health White Paper" released by the National Health Commission, in 2018, the overall myopia rate among children and adolescents nationwide was 53.6%. Among them, high school students had a staggering 81.0%. In addition to sleep deprivation and poor eyesight, irritable bowel syndrome, cervical spondylosis, depression, gastric ulcers, and other common diseases among high school students are also prevalent. ↑
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https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/fggz/fgzh/gnjjjc/jyqk/202305/t20230525_1356377.html ↑
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http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xwfb/xw_zt/moe_357/jjyzt_2022/2022_zt18/2022_zt18/mtbd/202211/t202 21116_992995.html ↑
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https://www.sinchew.com.my/news/20230416/international/4614794 ↑
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Mao Zedong: "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," "Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Type A)," Second Edition, People's Publishing House, 1966. ↑
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During this period, there were three types of enrollment systems in China: the college entrance examination, entrusted training, and self-funded education. Entrusted training meant state-owned enterprises delegated universities to train students, and self-funded education meant students paid for their own university studies. In fact, the latter two are means for capitalists to pave the way for themselves. The more developed the economy, the more students in self-funded and entrusted training programs. ↑
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In 2019, the proportion of candidates in Henan admitted to "985" and "211" universities was 5.297%, in Hebei 5.972%, while in Beijing it was 18.287%, and in Shanghai 18.917%. ↑
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According to the Ministry of Education of China’s 2022 statistics, there are 293 million students enrolled in various educational levels nationwide, including 46.2755 million in preschool education, 107 million elementary school students, 51.206 million junior high students, 27.1387 million high school students, 13.3929 million vocational students, 46.55 million in various forms of higher education, and 3.6536 million graduate students. ↑
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Mao Zedong: "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," "Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Type A)," Second Edition, People's Publishing House, 1966. ↑
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The relationships within schools under socialism are also completely different. Students are no longer competitors, teachers are no longer omnipotent authorities, and between revolutionary teachers and students, a relationship of comradeship based on learning, helping each other, and mutual concern has been formed. ↑
