This episode explores themes of exam pressure, the one child policy, new entrepreneurialism, pollution & the legacy of Chairman Mao.
In a country where it's rare to have a sibling, the pressure on school-age children is immense and never more so than at exam time. It's May and the heat of summer is setting in. In this episode the senior students face the all-important Gao Kao exams. Their results can mean the difference between poverty and prosperity for their entire extended family. For star pupil Wu Yufei the stakes are extremely high. Her School – Xiuning Senior School - expects her to come in the top ten in the entire province – over half a million students. The bustling town falls quiet, even building sites are closed down, so that everyone can concentrate on exam success.
Meanwhile at Ping Min primary school 8 year old Cheng Chao is looking forward to becoming a Young Communist Pioneer. China’s one child policy sets Cheng Chao apart from his classmates – he’s one of only 5 pupils at the school who have an elder brother, something his parents risked everything for.
We meet Wu Lin whose concern about the future of her country sees her researching the polluted river near her school and striving to win an English speech contest in the process. Son of migrant worker parents Wang Jianwen is over the moon when a broken arm brings a surprise from the city. Wang Lingqi is too cool for school and is more interested in hanging out with his girlfriend, but he knows if he doesn’t knuckle down he’ll end up working in his Dad’s motorcycle component factory and not fulfilling his dream to be a designer in the city.
LEARN MORE:
Visit the BBC/Open University Chinese School Series Website
Visit Link's Chinese School Website
About Chinese School
There are 350 million children enrolled in further education across China, but ‘Chinese Schools’ takes as its subject one small town in rural Anhui, and focuses on the lives of a group of families, teachers and children during the course of a single academic year.
They are schools like many thousands of others across this vast nation, but through the individual stories of hardship, joy and success, an extraordinary portrait emerges of a Nation, a town and a group of children in the midst of enormous change.
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