王鵬凱
摘要：
本文基于对中国湖南省一所县域中学的民族志材料，探讨当代中国青少年的脆弱与不安的内在世界。文章从校园中的一系列意外事件切入，思考为何教育体制在许诺 “美好未来” 的同时，也造成生命力的消耗。不同于既有的青年研究，本文尝试从日常情感的维度入手，将青少年视为 “情感主体”，把情感经验理解为一种道德回应与伦理领域的一部分，考察其在建构自我主体性的同时如何与外部世界互动。进一步地，本文主张，这种情感经验已在当下教育空间中成为治理的对象；在此种权力关系中，青少年缺乏具体的情感出口，呈现出心理内向化的倾向。作者据此认为，这一现象折射出青少年被压抑却不断涌现的强烈自我意识，而正是这种强烈的自我意识加剧了其内在的脆弱与痛感，构成其主体性经验中的最大张力。
https://doi.org/10.64053/ZEJC7596
一、三连跳
抵达陵水县 的第一天，我就听说了 “三连跳” 这个有些耸人的传闻。那是 2024 年底，我以支教志愿者的身份来到陵水县第一中学（ 下文简称陵水一中 ），正准备开始为期半年的驻校田野调查，尤其关注青少年的心理状况及问题，这样的事件很快引起了我的注意。这是怎么一回事？我向遇到的学生提问。他们激动地围住我，掰着手指，你一言我一语地讲述起对此的记忆。
具体而言，“三连跳” 指的是陵水一中在短时间内连续发生了三起学生意外死亡事件，相邻很近，就发生在一个月里。比较多人提及的是去年发生在教学楼的一起坠楼事件，一个男生积极地挤到我面前说，尽管没有亲眼目睹，但那天他经过时救护车刚开走，现场已经围了很多人，“我看见地上那一滩血”。死去的是一位高三女生，从五楼的天桥跳下，有人说她刚分手伤心过度，有人说是因为跟父母吵架，也有人认为是月考没考好。一位女生向我讲述了一个更戏剧性的场景：
“天桥在高三和高一的教学楼之间，高一（9）班在教学楼最北面，紧邻高三的教学楼。那天正在上数学课，忽然全班都往窗外看，那个女生正坐在栏杆上，数学老师看见后，赶忙跑出教室，但被天桥的门拦住 —— 为了防止高一学生去打扰高三，学校通常会把高一这侧的门锁上。他站在门前，喊那个女生不要跳，但她转头看向老师，笑了一下，然后跳了下去。”
这让我想起曾读到的一篇报道，一位重点高中副校长讲述了一起类似的校园坠楼事件：
事发在一次月考当天，班主任巡查早读时，发现有名学生用 MP3 看网络小说。这在学校是不允许的，班主任就走过去跟学生说，7 点半要考试了，建议先把 MP3 交给老师保管。那位班主任平时为人温和，也没有批评学生，说完这么一句话，学生也没有讲什么，交了 MP3，就安安静静在那里等待考试。
刚好学校新建了教学楼，走廊上的监控设施都很完备。我们后来从监控视频里看到，早读结束之后，那名学生和同学说说笑笑，走到了 5 楼考场。他们先在走廊上站了一会儿，但等同学进了教室，他毫不犹豫地纵身跳了下去。在场同学一下子都惊呆了，有的同学甚至才刚刚转身离开他，完全无法理解那一瞬间发生了什么。
这些描述带给我强烈的震撼，我惊讶于生命的脆弱与无常，这样的生死瞬间就发生在极为日常、平静、无人察觉的情境里，而这一切的目击者、承受者，都只是未成年的学生。在这里，我引用亲历者的表述并不是为了提供某种 “事实” 或 “真相”，而是试图指出这些事件是如何在当下被记忆和叙述的，这往往反映了更广泛的心理结构与困境。
日后，我从陵水一中心理中心的谢老师处得知了 “三连跳” 的具体始末。她拿出手机，从微信记录里翻出清晰的时间线： 4 月 14 日，一名男生在宿舍里猝死，警方排除自杀和他杀；4月16日，一名高三女生跳楼；4月28日，又一起坠楼事件。短短半个月时间。谢老师回忆，就在第一起意外发生的几天前，她已经有所察觉，“我感到不对劲，当时学校的气氛已经很压抑了。” 有很多学生来做咨询，“过程中表达的都是愤怒，对老师，对学校，” 她说，“我觉得这不正常。”
种种现象共同揭示出当代中国青少年脆弱不安的内心世界。据国家卫健委发布的《 中国卫生统计年鉴 》，全国城市居民中 15-19 岁人群的自杀率从 2018 年的 1.8 / 10 万人上升至 2021 年的 3.34 / 10 万人。2023 年发布的《 国民抑郁症蓝皮书 》显示，全国 50% 的抑郁症患者为在校学生，18 岁以下占比 30.28%，即 2850 万人。如《 娇惯的心灵 》一书所写，年轻人如今正承受着巨大的压力，他们不仅要在学业上表现优异，还要充实课外成绩的冗长清单，与此同时，他们在社交媒体空间里也面临着前所未有的骚扰、侮辱和社会竞争，于是，他们渐渐形成了一种脆弱的自我人设（ 卢金诺夫，海特，2020）。人们不禁发问：当代青年为什么越来越 “不高兴”？ 它也进一步关联到项飙新近对于 “生命力捕获” 的讨论，他指出，当下的教育系统正在造成青少年生命力的消耗，年轻人感到生命力萎缩、崩塌、干枯，这指向一种更普遍的生命形式（form of life）。
这似乎将问题指向了当代中国教育最常被提及、又最难以言说的问题：高压应试教学模式给学生带来的身心伤害。这种状况在当下的县域教育场景尤为突出，并与特定的地方政治经济处境相关联。以陵水县为例，它位于湖南省西北部，曾为国家级贫困县，2020 年正式脱贫摘帽。但与此相反的是，作为陵水县内最好的高中，陵水一中每年高考的本科升学率能达到 90% 以上，在全市名列前茅，对于学生而言，进入一中几乎就意味着得到大学本科的录取凭证。在陵水一中，成绩好一点的学生都会想考出湖南，去到发达地区，至少也要去长沙，不论学生个体还是行政机构，都将此视为美好未来的象征，校园里挂着一句形象的标语：“登岳麓，跨长江，过黄河，进北京”。类似的话语在当下的县域教育场景十分普遍（ 林小英，2023），在过去很长一段时间，“贫穷” 与 “高升学率” 是不少县域中学的常见标签，这进一步形成了一种争相模仿的办学思路 —— 实行高强度的教学模式，推广 “状元县”，并将优异的高考成绩作为当地政府向中央寻求扶助的筹码，这些话语共同反映出地方空间时至今日仍然强大的教育欲望（Kipnis, 2011）。
为了实现这样的目标，陵水一中采取了极为严苛的管理制度。学校实行每月三天的月假制，平日仅有周六下午的半天假期。校园时刻处在紧张的节奏里，每幢楼前都有一块电子屏，上面是一行红色的字体：“2024 年高考 / 学考 / 期末联考倒计时，xx 天 xx 小时 xx 分 xx 秒”，数字一直在走，提醒每个年级临近大考的时间。填充其间的是接续进行的随堂考、周考、月考。在具体的教学安排上，学校实施每学期流动的 “快慢班” 分层教学，这一模式已经在全国各地的中学得到广泛运用（Howlett, 2021: 77-131），它一方面以制造更多区隔的方式给学生带去教育不平等的感知，另一方面又在最日常、微观的层面向学生传递了依靠个人努力不断晋升、改变命运的希望。
随后的半年时间里，我与多位学生、教师进行了长期的相处、交流与访谈，也亲身参与了学校组织的部分活动。在很多场合里，我发现学生们常常展现出一种抱怨的姿态：抱怨落后、封闭的县城，抱怨压抑的校园生活，抱怨写不完的作业，抱怨对自己不公正的规章制度，也抱怨冲突频发的人际关系，这种愤怒有时又会转变为戏谑、自嘲，又或是对自身处境的麻木。
这些现象促使我们思考，为什么教育系统在向青少年承诺幸福未来的同时也在造成生命力损耗？是什么样的文化结构导致了这种处境？它如何具体表现在日常生活中，并由哪些力量主导？青少年如何理解这一处境，并建立起自身的主体性？本文将结合具体的民族志材料，试图回应这样的问题。具体思路上，我将结合情感与情动理论，从一个新的视角深入考察当代青少年的主体性经验，以及地方性语境中围绕这一主体展开的一系列力量关系，并反思这些关系如何反过来影响乃至塑造青少年的自我意识。
二、成为情动主体
在传统的青少年研究中，青春期往往被视为通往成年的人类发展阶段，青少年要通过学习以应对未来的挑战，而非独立生成文化的主体，换言之，青少年的文化能动性被低估了，他们更多被视为 “不完全的成年人” （incomplete adults），只是 “部分文化的” （partially cultural）。近年来，越来越多人对此提出批评，并开始主张将青少年视为新的族群，认为其身份不再局限于静止、本质化的族群类别，而是混合的、在地的，其中揭示了丰富的社会过程（Bucholtz, 2002）。也有研究者将青少年视为积极的能动者，认为只有通过对 “文化” 这一概念的批判性思考，才能看见青少年作为能动主体对于自身社会生活和意义世界的介入，进而理解其主体的复杂性（Wulff, 2022; Caputo, 2022）。
在陵水一中，学生们时常向我诉说自己的烦恼，并流露出复杂的情感 —— 比如愤怒、怨恨、悲伤、恐惧、嫉妒等，这些情感吸引了我的注意，如玛莎·努斯鲍姆（Martha Nussbaum, 1990）所说，日常生活中的情感体验具有双重意义：它是一种反应方式，也是一种感知方式。在情感人类学的理论传统中，情感被认为是社会建构的文化脚本，作为一种 “自我的语言”，情感是关于意图、行为和社会关系的声明，应该被解释为 “在社会生活之中、并且关于社会生活，而非对内在状态的直观反映” （Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1990:11）。例如莉拉·阿布-卢赫德（Lila Abu-Lughod, 1986）在对贝都因女性诗歌艺术的研究中发现，贝都因女性会通过吟诵诗歌片段来宣泄因听从长辈命令带来的伤痛，而这背后反映的是她们对个体独立性的追求，她们渴望成为能够创造性地掌握多种强烈情感的个体。
与此同时，近年来随着情动理论的引入，更多人开始超越情感由社会文化建构这一假定，反思情感经验与身体的关系。与指涉情绪状态或表达的 “情感” （emotion）不同，“情动” （affect）更强调一种情感之力的连续变化过程，其本身是流变的、动态的，既包括内在情感的变化，更指向身体强度的变化，在这一理论的代表人物吉尔·德勒兹（Gilles Deleuze）看来，情动是 “一种穿过人体的强度，但不一定从人体中产生” （ 转引自Navaro-Yashin, 2009）。由此，情感和主体性的发展开始被视为一个生理-社会心理过程（bio-psychosocial process, Ozawa-de Silva, 2021: 16），它不仅涉及个体的文化认知，也关系到这些情感如何存在于身体内部并通过身体被感受到，并涌现为一种敏感性（susceptibility）—— 即打动他人和被打动的能力。这为个体的日常互动提供了动力，它使日常生活具有一种在关系、场景和偶然事件中持续运动的能力（Stewart, 2007）。通过分析情动，我们能够更好地对那些弥散的、表达粗略的、难以归入任何情感类别的欲望和经验进行理论化，在一些民族志叙述中，情动并不是理论框架，而是作为一种描述，但这些描述蕴含着重新解读（re-reading）情感的丰富意义（Kuan, 2023）。
如何在青少年的日常生活中考察这些情感与情动，以及由此牵引出的主体性经验？以下将以学生在 “三连跳” 发生后的日常互动为例，展开具体说明和讨论。
在持续的相处中，我发现 “三连跳” 在学生之间构成了一种漫长的余震，让我惊讶的是，这种影响并不只是想象中的恐惧与悲伤，跳楼有时也会成为一种玩笑的媒介。某天午饭时，一个高一女生问另一个高三男生，今年你们高三怎么没人跳？我说，你怎么还盼着别人跳？她说，跳了我们就能放三天假。边上有人抢着说，“去年就没放，还把我们关在教室里不让出来。” 高三男生告诉我，现在学校已经不敢太严厉地管高三学生。我问为什么，他们露出会心的笑容说，因为有 “空对地导弹” —— 就是跳楼。过去有关青少年暴力的研究中，不少研究者试图指出，暴力语境中的情感不只有人们通常认为的恐惧、震惊、悲伤和哀痛，也可能有玩笑式的一面（Das, 2008）。有一次，我看见两个女生在聊天时开玩笑说，“你去跳楼”，“我可以跳啊，我有医院的证明，我可以跳。” 在对话中，跳楼好像是一个危险的隐喻，用他们流行的话说，是一种 “口嗨”，或是讲八卦的语气和态度，仿佛跳下的人对他们并没有构成什么情感或观念上的冲击。
另一次，我亲眼目睹了一位女生情绪失控的情形。她叫胜男，是一位高二女生，曾确诊双向情感障碍 。那天傍晚她披着头发走进办公室，当时我正坐着跟高二男生李阳聊天，她走到李阳身边，问他：“怎么样可以在学校里制造意外死亡事件？” 李阳回她说：“去教学楼五楼。” 我察觉到胜男的状态不对，她的眼眶湿湿的，我试图用手轻轻拍她的右肩，她迅速挥动右手，“滚开！” 李阳面不改色地说：“你又犯病了是吧？” 她坐到一旁的椅子上，背对着我们。我试着走近，看到她开始流泪。我没敢接近问她，就回去跟李阳说话。过了一会儿她走到我的座位前，问我，“能借我一把刀吗？”—— 实际桌上的纸盒里就有剪刀，但她选择问我而不是自己直接去拿。我说，不能给你。她气冲冲地走了出去。我向李阳表达了担忧，他仍然一脸平静地告诉我，这很常见，他自己有时候也会这样。
这些现象揭示出一种复杂的个体处境。一方面，类似 “三连跳” 的危机一直潜伏于学生之间，表现为普遍存在的脆弱、不稳定的心理状态，但另一方面，作为旁观者的学生又时常对此表现出一种冷漠或玩笑式的态度，好像这并不是什么悲伤或残酷的事情。我试图指出，不论是存在心理危机的人，还是旁观者、谈笑者，他们都共享着这一处境。它促使我们反思移情（empathy）这一人类经验，在克尔凯郭尔（Kierkegaard）的论述中，它指的是感知他人的悲伤，并将别人的现实理解为自身的可能性，即一种交互的共情体验（Davies, 2016）。列维纳斯在对于 “面孔” 的论述中同样指出了移情的重要性，即 “面孔” 作为一种“他者”，是存在于一系列的移情置换（displacements）之中，并体现为对他者脆弱性的感知（巴特勒，2016: 206-232），这种感知有时并非意识层面的推己及人，而是更接近一种超越语言的、无意识的情动。
因此，在学生们有关 “三连跳” 的隐喻和反应中，我看到的并不是疏离和漠不关心，恰恰相反，我认为这反映的是对同辈命运的移情，它更像是一种 “沉默的关怀”，换言之，在这些极端事件当中，他们看到的是自己的潜在命运，所以他们选择用幽默或冷淡的方式来缓和冲击，并掩盖内心的脆弱不安。在我看来，这在他们的生活中变得很寻常，也很重要，像是一种脱离现状的手段。
在这里，我们看到的是一种 “情动主体” （affective subject），它展现了情动理论对主体这一概念的再阐释，不同于传统视角下理性、自主、稳定的主体想象，情动转向倡导的是一种关怀的道德行为者，它 “热情参与行动领域而非冷漠疏离、脆弱而非理性自控” （Kuan, 2023）。我认为，青少年对于 “三连跳” 的情感反应展现的正是这一新的主体想象，这一视角在当代青春期经验中十分重要，它促使我们思考青少年在日常生活中的敏感性 —— 如何感知自我生存处境的不安，又如何能够或不能感知他人的不安定，并采取行动（Allison, 2013: 14-15）。此时，情感体验显然被视为一种道德反应，并被纳入伦理论域的一部分。换言之，这些日常生活中的情感，乃至所谓的崩溃时刻，其实也是主体性时刻，我们可以由此看到青少年如何与外部世界进行互动，同时建构起自身的主体意识。
这进一步延伸向社会维度，任柯安（Andrew Kipnis, 2012）曾指出，中国社会的个体化并不是纯粹的社会事实，而更应该被视作一种心理问题化（psychological problematic），个体心灵成为了社会矛盾显现的场所，各种话语、情感和冲动共同构成了一种感觉结构（structures of feeling）。与之相对的是，个体心灵也由此成为了治理行为的重要对象，特别是在地方空间中，我们能看到围绕心灵和情感发生的一系列力量关系。
三、治理情动
在《 治理教育欲望 》（Governing Educational Desire）一书中，任柯安试图论证，福柯理论传统中的治理可以用来探究中国教育治理的文化特征：重点在于治理如何发生，而不是明确地指谁来治理（Kipnis, 2011: 5）。我想进一步指出的是，任柯安更多聚焦于对个体行为规范与伦理观念的治理，而忽略了福柯理论的另一个核心面向 —— 身体，以及由身体活动所引起的情动经验。这一点的重要性不断被强调，不少学者指出，身体正在教育空间中扮演着重要角色，使物理、社会和精神文化这三个层面在其中相互交织（Cook & Hemming, 2011）。
情动如何在当下的教育空间被治理？在这一节，我将围绕这一问题展开讨论，并结合发生在校园内的不同事件与活动，考察青少年的身体与情动能量如何在这些活动中被唤起或压抑。受启发于萨拉·艾哈迈德（Sara Ahmed）的论述（2004: 72），我试图指出这种治理背后复杂的力量关系：情感政治不只是治理工具或症候，还与身体相关联，指向情感的强化（intensification），这不仅实现了治理这一行为，也创造出个体之间的认知差异。
进入陵水一中的第一天，我就见到了传说中的跑操。十点零五下课铃一响，广播便响起运动员进行曲，学生从各幢教学楼陆续走出，每人手里都拿着一本书，有的是课本，有的是口袋本大小的单词册。所有学生按照班级找到各自的位置，在校园的道路上排成一条环线。广播开始讲话，“队伍最后一排的同学要盯紧前排，如果有空位就往前补，这样队伍才整齐好看，外面来的人都会说我们跑得好。” “立正 —— 向右看齐！” 数千人的队伍并不是那么容易指挥，视线所及，学生多数都低着头翻看手中的书本，并没有参与整队，班主任也站在一旁默许。随后跑操开始，广播重复播放着 “一二一” 的口令，数千人的队伍运动起来。班主任也跟在队伍边上跑，时刻关注着队伍的情况。学生们边跑边喊口号，由队伍的排头或是队中某个嗓门大的人领头，为了队列整齐，整体跑得并不快，也有人仍在边跑边看书，队伍保持着一定间距，但跑着跑着便挤到了一起。大约十五分钟后，音乐结束，队伍停下来，广播里开始依次播报今天跑得好和差的班级，分别点名表扬和批评。
跑操已经成为当下中国高中必备的一项活动，尤其是衡水中学的办学模式引发大量讨论与推广以来 ，不少中学都以跑操文化作为校园建设的一部分。这体现了当下中国校园的生命政治，跑操一方面是为了培植身体素质，养成更强壮、健康的青少年 —— 这背后是过去几十年中国素质教育的重要意识形态（Greenhalgh, 2010）；但在这里，跑操背后的文化意涵更为复杂，它不仅是对规则与集体性的训练（ 跑出整齐的队形 ），对一种时间伦理的强调（ 在等候间隙读书，甚至边跑边读书，不浪费片刻学习时间 ），更是对生命活力 —— 葛苏珊（Susan Greenhalgh）称之为 “活力政治” （vital politics）—— 的强调。关宜馨（Teresa Kuan, 2015）在讨论中国青少年养育中的 “人力资本” （human capital）时指出，青少年的动力、情感和智力在当下总是会被作为养育投资的内容，在这个意义上，生命活力成为了一种可以被治理的有限资源。对于跑操的实践告诉我们，中国需要的不仅是成绩优异、身体健康的青少年，同时还希望青少年能拥有积极向上的精神面貌，例如跑操时高昂的口号，换言之，学校试图通过跑操这一活动重新调动起青少年在繁重课业压抑下的生命能量，不论是主动或是被动的，这也可以进一步被理解为一种道德情感，即个体需要学习调动自己的身体能量与情绪，融入到更大的集体情感之中，并将这些能量投入到更漫长的日常学习之中。
这种治理也指向心理层面，尤其是面对当下青少年越发脆弱不安的心灵。“三连跳” 发生后，陵水一中的校方开始对学生的心理状况极为敏感：立刻请第三方进入校园辅导，开展筛查，并组织人手对高危学生进行关注和干预；校领导也安排心理老师参加全校班主任的定期例会，并在会上对班主任做培训。然而，学生视角的讲述与此有所不同。在他们看来，这些措施更像是一种监管。有学生回忆，坠楼事件发生后的一段时间里，年级组会让每个班长下课以后去看监控，记录有没有人趴在门口的走廊，或是有其他异常状况。这有时会变成敏感过度，一位女生说，班主任把她的校牌都给收走了 —— 怕她用校牌的别针自残，她有一次被学校书记抓住，问她怎么没戴校牌，还好边上有同学帮她解释，不然又要被批评扣分。这揭示了学校两种不同的治理维度：一方面仍在实施严格的日常治理，比如对课堂纪律和学生言行的管理，另一方面又不希望 “三连跳” 这样的事情再次发生，所以试图从 “根源” 断绝学生发生意外事件的可能性。两者在某种意义上遵循着同样的逻辑，却也在学生的生活中发生着剧烈的摩擦。
胜男向我讲述另一次经历：“那天下午第一节课，我忽然情绪失控了，在教室里大哭，把试卷什么的都撕掉，同学们吓了一跳，当时是历史课，我哭了一节课，历史老师知道我的情况，就当作什么状况也没发生，正常在那上课。” 这个场景让我感到惊讶，它似乎是难以想象的，当一个人在课堂上爆发出如此强烈的情感，甚至存在危险行为，这种强大的能量触及了班内的其他人，但老师什么也没有做，她克制了自己的情感回应，只是继续上课。因为在课堂环境下，前述的两种治理逻辑存在冲突，而维持课堂纪律和授课进度在这时是唯一具有合法性的事情，从集体主义的框架来看也是如此，个人情感并不应该左右集体进程，换句话说，这揭示了两种治理之间的力量关系，在那个时刻的力量斗争里，个体的忧郁情动被抑制了。
以上状况似乎都印证了关宜馨的观察，即在中国，针对青少年心理病痛的反应更多是教育性的，而不是医疗性的（Kuan, 2015: 5）。这呼应了有关当代中国社会 “心理热” （Psycho-boom）的讨论：校方强调的问题层面，恰恰是可以采取行动的那一部分，当教育系统的压力和结构暂时无法改变 —— 尽管它很可能是导致青少年痛苦的重要原因 —— 只好去处理那些可以解决的问题，即改变青少年的接受和调整能力。
学期中的一个周六上午，学校按计划在操场举行高二年级的家长会。不同的是，这次家长会的形式是一次 “家庭教育励志报告会”，由校外请来的专家主持。在活动现场，学生和家长两两并排，几乎坐满了三分之二个操场。开场由校长致辞，他指出，这次励志报告会有三项目的：第一，共商发展大计，共谋成长蓝图，大家即将进入一轮复习，届时就是准高三学生了；第二，感恩父母、感恩老师、感恩学校、感恩国家；第三，高考是没有硝烟的战争，要统一思想，他最后大声说道：“成功不能等待，孝心不能等待，感恩不能等待！”
接着便是本次的主讲人刘教授出场，在一系列引入环节过后，刘教授请所有班主任走到班级队伍前，对学生们说：“老师平时的辛苦，在教室窗外看，都是为了你们好，现在听我指挥，用你们最大的声音说，老师您辛苦了，十遍，来！” 操场上空响起学生们的声音，喊完后，刘教授接着说：“下面，向老师鞠躬，九十度，等我说好了才可以起来。同学们，虽然我们的头低下，但我们的灵魂高尚了起来！” 学生们又齐刷刷地弯下腰。随后活动进入高潮，刘教授先后请学生和家长自愿上台，学生感恩父母，后者则发表 “优秀父母宣言”，在煽情的音乐里，不论长幼，上台的学生和家长都流着泪激动地高喊 “爸爸妈妈我爱你”、“孩子我爱你”。
我坐在台下，以 “刘教授，励志报告会” 为关键词在手机里检索，发现这类活动在湖南当地极为普遍，几乎每所重点中学都会举办，从通稿的内容来看，流程也几乎相同。这一集体行动可以被纳入前述的治理手段来讨论：学校试图通过这样的活动，让学生产生所谓的 “感恩意识” —— 它有时表现为对老师和家长的忍让与服从 —— 从而化解在学校和家庭中的种种矛盾和不满。具体而言，这样的活动通过一系列极具煽动性的环节唤起了学生与家长的强烈情动，并将这种情动能量转化为报答恩情、努力学习的话语，它从亲属关系出发，在某种程度上构成了一种欲望生产模式：成为好孩子，成为好家长，而这一切的最终目的仍是让学生以更好的精神状态投入到高考的 “备战” 中。
本节展示的种种活动让我们看到，当下中国教育场景中的不同力量如何实现对青少年情动的治理，沿着情动理论对身体的考察，这种治理进一步指向个体的心理状况和生命活力。在开篇所引述对于当下中国学生 “生命力捕获” 的观察中，项飙有意强调自己的论述并不是生命政治，他认为，生命力是不可以对象化的，外界权力难以直接触及，因此并不指向具体的统治形态。作为回应，我在这里并不想具体区分青少年是主动还是被动陷入这种状态，而是试图回到朱迪斯·巴特勒（Judith Butler）对于身体和操演性（performativity）的论述来指出权力对生命力的触及。在《 身体之重 》（Bodies That Matter）中，巴特勒（2011）指出，权力的建构并不只是话语的产物，它也是物质性的，并由此在当代语言中被无意中重复，权力塑造身体的过程，正是所谓 “物质化” 的过程，在巴特勒的理论中，个体的能动性随着身体化（bodily）而暴露于风险中，当身体变得可渗透、相互依存和脆弱不安，就潜在地将自身从能动性的剧场转向了暴力的剧场（Zaharijević, 2021）。在这个意义上，身体成为了情动、生命力与治理行为之间的桥梁，使整个过程得以完成。
另一方面，以上论述仍然离不开对主体的考察和观照。即使我并没有指出这种治理过程是由某个特定的主体来实施，但主体性问题仍然存在，即青少年主体在这样的力量关系中是如何自处的，这些情动力量的变化和斗争如何影响乃至塑造他们的自我意识？这是下一节将讨论的问题。
四、心理内向化
一次聊天时，谢老师向我描述她在心理咨询时的观察，比如咨询前后学生的肢体、表情和情绪状态，有的学生来到心理中心就在哭，有的会讲着讲着开始流泪，他们会说：“我从来没有讲过这么多”、“我从来没有向别人讲过这些”。种种现象表明，当下的青少年似乎普遍缺少一种情绪出口，这是为什么？前述时空关系里唤起、积累的情动能量最后去了哪里？
我在本节指出的是，部分青少年选择将这些外部压力不断内收至自己的心里，试图通过自己的力量来解决。我将这种心理结构和动态称为 “心理内向化” —— 很多时候它既是结果，也是原因。
一方面，这一趋势是由缺乏情绪出口的现状导致的。面对日常生活的矛盾和烦恼，学生们其实并没有什么可靠的倾诉对象，谢老师向我分析，学校老师可能并不了解具体情况，跟同学说也会有各种顾虑，“高中生的关系并没有我们想象的持久、稳固，那些看起来关系很好的学生，可能也就是一起吃饭，打球，聊聊天，但他们并不敢在朋友面前暴露自己的真心和脆弱。” 为什么？按理说同龄人是最了解彼此的啊。她说，他们担心朋友不愿意听，会引来嘲笑、同情、怜悯，害怕失去朋友，而且，很多时候同龄人也没有能力去接住他们的问题，小问题或许可以，但一些大问题，像是父母离异或是家暴，就很难解决了。但另一方面，这些烦恼又恰恰来自心理内向化。谢老师认为，来咨询的很多学生倾诉的人际烦恼，很多问题在于“藏在心里不说”，导致双方都不知道矛盾究竟在哪里。在家庭中也是这样，很多学生不愿意跟家长讲自己的想法，或是讲完之后觉得自己不被理解，久而久之就放弃沟通。
这种心理内向化的倾向进一步形成了一种道德观，并影响着学生日常生活的许多判断。例如遇到欺凌事件时，在相对高压的学习环境下，很多学生会将关系中的被孤立归因于自己，或是将其重要性置后，认为不能影响到自己备考，就算了。一位女生曾向我举过很形象的比喻：你的手里有一碗水，你正在爬山，想等到了山顶再喝，那你这一路上只能小心地拿碗，不要让水洒出来。这种观念在当地十分流行，我参加过一次学校举行的高考誓师大会，在会上师生都喜欢说这样的话：真正的英雄是认清现实后依然热爱生活；我们吃了这么多苦，我们都是英雄。这一系列的 “吃苦” 叙事在陵水一中被视作一种值得追求的哲学价值 —— 即使规则可能不合理，但你仍然能通过自我努力去克服这些不公平。这不仅指代残酷的高考制度，也包括校园内的种种规则，以及地方政治经济弱势。这些力量之间也在相互强化：在他们眼中，正因为陵水落后的政治经济地位，才更需要努力摆脱它，而眼下最现实、也几乎是唯一的方式，就是在高考中取得好成绩，考去经济发达地区。
为什么会产生这样的倾向？我在这里试图提出的观点是，透过这些表述，我们可以看到青少年群体涌现的强烈自我意识，这种自我意识的形成过程很复杂，不仅来自个体的成长经验和校园环境，也与更大的地方权力关系乃至流行文化有关，但与此同时，这种自我在当下、在地方空间中时常是被压抑的，二者之间持续发生着张力。
在一次交谈中，心理中心的另一位老师，金老师向我分析学生涌现的自我意识。她说，当下的学生们似乎迫切想要获得更多的掌控感，掌控自己的学习，掌控自己的生活，但他们在这个年龄或许还不具备这样的能力，于是他们理解的自由和独立就变得相对简单：“好像独立就是不听老师的话，不听家长的话，不听别人的话，那样我就保持了一个独立的思想”，当他们抱着这样的一种态度去与人相处，关系很难深入，所以他们之间的关系就很脆弱、容易破裂。
在与学生的相处中，我发现这种自我意识并非简单的追寻独立，或是成年人眼中的 “叛逆”，而是存在更复杂的文化语境。流行文化在其中扮演着重要角色，我时常惊讶于日本二次元文化对这一代青少年的影响，他们几乎每个人都看动漫，并能熟练讲出某段情节或台词。这背后反映了一种共享的现实动态，宇野常宽（2024: 44-57）在分析日本九〇年代社会心理时指出了一种“家里蹲 / 心理主义”的倾向，他发现，当时代表性的文化作品传递的观念是：出问题的时候，不要改变世界，而要说服自己，不要指望凭借自己的力量将这个 “无聊的世界” 变得有趣。有人对此提出过两种替代方案，分别是药物和自杀，宇野常宽认为，这两者只是比喻要解决心理层面的问题，即当世界愈发无聊时，人们不通过改变世界而通过改变自己的内心去克服。这与我在校园里看到的青少年心理存在着相似性，尤其是在枯燥、重复的应试训练中，世界对他们来说更显得无聊，动漫提供了出口，但这一出口反过来也在以一种文化话语强化他们对现实的认知。
在学期中，我举办了一次写作活动，由学生自愿参与，书写关于自己生命经验的不同主题。我发现，不少人都在文本中表达出一种对掌控自己命运的渴望，例如 “我就是我”、“我是天选”、“我是独一无二的” 这样的表述，但与此同时，他们往往又意识到，当下的自己是受压抑的，被外部世界限制的，这其中既包括考试制度，也包括社会阶层，这时他们会选择将自我暂时向内收，并期待通过努力，在未来实现自我。但与此同时，这种写作本身也是自我的出口。高一女生陈依依是写作活动的踊跃参与者，她每次都会写满满数页，她说，自己经常在写作时自问自答，思考一些平时感兴趣的问题，天马行空的什么都写，有时候老师看向她，她就把头抬起来看老师，手上不停接着写，有时甚至是无意识的。
这些日常书写呈现出更复杂的主体处境。我渐渐发现，与内向化趋势相对的是，学生也会在写作中主动夸大自己的不幸遭遇。在某种程度上，他们都很期待、需要被他人关注，所以他们很容易把某件事的程度或情感夸大，比如与朋友的某次矛盾，或是在学校受到的不公正对待。金老师在一次聊天时向我抱怨，“不能相信学生的一面之词，他们真的能把黑的说成白的。” 我在这里并不是想讨论个体表述的真实与否，而是试图指出这种夸大本身作为一种行为动作也有特定意涵，可能是为了获取关注，而这反映出，尽管不断被压抑，学生的个体性仍然在其中涌现。
学生的抱怨行为在日常生活中十分普遍。实际上，在平日的相处中，很多时候我都在扮演那个倾听抱怨的角色 —— 当你被认为是愿意倾听抱怨的人，就会有越来越多的人来向你抱怨。我想指出的是，抱怨在这里不仅是青少年在日常生活中的情感反应，也构成了巴特勒（Butler, 2005）所说的，一种对自身的说明（giving an account of oneself）：当一个人努力去展示、抱怨，意味着这部分经验已经属于你，它对于你可以做什么、你可以成为谁，都很重要。艾哈迈德（Ahmed, 2024）对此提出了进一步反思，她强调自我说明是一个从自我（out of）到他人（to）的过程，因此它不只关乎自我，更是一种关系性的伦理联结。所以，这样的抱怨也意味着脆弱性，它不仅是一种本体论层面的易感性，同时也反映了人类处境的不平等，以及人与人之间的相互依存关系：我们在表述中将自我叙述，并在这个过程中看见彼此。这进一步回到我们对主体性的认识，如克拉拉·韩（Clara Han, 2012: 143）所说，主体性并不是主体的初始属性，而是一种关系的独特编织。也就是说，从青少年的日常表述中，我们不仅能看到他们涌现的自我意识，也能看到影响、塑造这一自我的社会关系，这呼应了前文对于青少年同辈关系和治理力量的讨论。
另一方面，这些写作中还存在一种倾向，就是回避直接书写个人的具体生活故事和经验，而是用大量的比喻，将自己抽象出来进行表述，这里的书写依然关于个人感受，但会存在一种书写上的距离。这促使我们反思青少年主体性的另一个面向：对于自身脆弱性的隐藏在某种程度上构成了一种自我保护。近年来出现了许多有关自我关怀（self-care）的讨论（Rosenbaum & Talmor, 2024），其中有研究者指出拒绝作为自我关怀的意义，即一种 “需要被看见，但又拒绝被看透” 的心理，这与青少年在写作中的拒绝自我表露存在着相似性。对此的一类批评是，有人会将这些日常实践解释为新自由主义的后果：个体没有得到足够的保障，只好试着自我关怀。换言之，这里的 “自我” 仍然是一种承诺，是被问题化的。这引出了进一步的问题：心理内向化有没有改变青少年的脆弱处境？或者说，他们理想中的美好生活是否真的能够实现？
五、残酷的乐观主义
2025 年初，广西百色一名女学生被老师性侵后自杀的事件在网络引发热议，人们找到女孩的更多文字，发现除了这段遭遇，她还经历了更漫长、更复杂的纠纷与创伤，比如父母离异，家庭的经济压力，她后来考入名校，但最终退学。女孩的一篇知乎回答 让我印象深刻，她这样写道：
现在的感觉是觉得生活很充实幸福，充满光与爱。每天上班八个小时，上班时没事干闲的时候也可以拿出书来学习，还可以在店里放自己喜欢的歌，下班之后就继续学习自己喜欢的东西，练习画画。虽然一个月只有两千多，但我觉得很好很好啦，我没有很强的物质欲，对衣服化妆品等都没有很感兴趣，以后也不会结婚不会生孩子，需要用钱的地方只是想着挣学费学习新的东西。可能也只是我现在年龄尚浅，还没有太多养老方面的负担，但现在先过好当下就好啦。现在也不想着伤害自己了，我活一世就是为了完成我的人生课题，走向更高的灵性觉醒的道路，物质层面的所有东西生不带来，死不带去，无须在意。我也相信当自己的能量频率提高了，丰盛美好的事物就会越容易吸引与显化。
她的许多表述都让我想起田野中遇到的学生，尽管经历了这么多残酷、伤痛的时刻，她们仍然以一种沉静、轻盈的口吻讲述着自己向往的美好生活，从中我们能看到对生活的信心。这里的美好生活不一定指的是升学，也指向伦理上的好生活，比如追求公正待遇，维护自己的尊严和敏感性，及时回应朋友的情感需求，以及在持续的动荡中尽力守护自己的内心。但现实又一次次告诉我们，这种状态是如此脆弱，随时可能崩塌，百色的那位女孩就已经永远离开了这个世界。
过去二十年里，学界曾出现过所谓的 “幸福转向” （the happiness turn），其中以积极心理学为代表，围绕如何使人变得更幸福而进行了大量知识生产，但另一方面，如萨拉·艾哈迈德（Ahmed, 2010: 6-7）所说，这些美好生活的概念本身也是矛盾的场所，它既包括困惑，也包括区分好与坏的感受，于是理解幸福也就意味着理解这一矛盾的语法。幸福的危机不只是幸福理想的失败，也是试图追随这一理想的行为本身的失败。它指向当代伦理人类学围绕脆弱性展开的核心议题 —— 人要如何在自己无法掌控的环境中良好地生活。这促使我们再次反思 “残酷的乐观主义” 的意义。劳伦·贝兰特（Lauren Berlant）指出，所有的依恋都是乐观主义的，当我们谈论欲望的对象时，我们实际上是在谈论某人或某事对我们做出和实现的一系列承诺，这使我们看到依恋中那些不连贯的、难以理解的东西，并引出核心的问题：我们为何忍耐我们依恋的对象（贝兰特，2023: 33）。
贝兰特指出了一种 “忍耐的技术”，即当代人常常通过一种“以后”的概念悬置对此刻的残酷性的质问，这意味着仍然相信他们习以为常的依恋系统，保持在一种互惠、和解或顺从的关系中，这可能伴随着麻木。在学校里，我经常能听到学生们转述自己与家长、老师的对话，其中有一种很常见的回答：“等你考上大学，随便你怎么玩。” 我认为这句话十分精准地传递了教育系统对青少年的承诺，它承载了应试教育与个体愿望之间的强烈张力，即使当下的流行文化和社会心理都开始强调多元选择，但高考仍然在县域教育系统中占据了绝对压倒性的力量优势，因此，青少年对于多元、自主生活的想象仍然被寄托于考试系统。在这种情况下，考试既是青少年压力与痛苦的来源，也是他们对未来生活的希望。
本文试图指出的是，这种乐观主义仍是脆弱而残酷的。当青少年选择了用内向化的方式消化自身的脆弱不安，并寄希望于自己难以适应的系统本身，反过来也会被这种依恋反复折磨。听他们讲述种种痛苦处境时，我总是会想起贝兰特所提到的 “磨损” 这个词 —— 人们的幻想和共同期待的美好生活正在被消耗磨损。如她所说：“在残酷的乐观主义运作的情况下，正是欲望对象 / 场景启发性和赋予生命力的潜质，反过来带来了对这种生命力的磨损和消耗，而这种生命力正是一开始这种依恋关系所承诺的。”（贝兰特，2023: 34）
更进一步，这种残酷不仅存在于激烈的考试系统，那些退出考试系统的青少年也面临着同样的处境。不少学生告诉我，他们不在乎自己能不能考上重点大学，能上本科就好，读专科也可以，至少拿到高中文凭，也有人像那位百色女孩一样，打算直接退学。但这并没有消除他们的痛苦，对于留下的人而言，你需要跟上班级的学习节奏，跟上学校的管理节奏，而这一系列行为的目的，仍然是前面所谈到的，追求高考的成功；像百色女孩那样离开的人，也会陷入更深的追问，当下这个社会对于没有文凭的个体能够包容到什么程度？人生的意义又是什么呢？在这个维度上，或许没有真正的退出可言，反而是那些试图退出的人，他们可能需要经历更多的落差。
我认为这一切所揭示的问题是，教育系统在某种程度上其实在代替更大的社会经济结构来对青少年施加影响，而后者同样没有兑现所谓的许诺，这也可以引申向更大的背景，阿兰·埃伦伯格（Alain Ehrenberg）曾指出现代个体陷入抑郁与内在冲突背后的重要张力：无限可能的想法对抗着无法掌握的现实（2025: 295），现代社会对于自由和能动性的强调实际上也侵蚀了稳定和确定性，人们被许诺了个体解放的愿景，却在现实中缺乏真正实现它的能力，于是，种种病症提醒我们，做自己的主人并非意味着一切皆有可能。这揭示了青少年主体性经验中的最大张力：正是这种强烈的自我意识在加剧他们内心的脆弱与痛苦。这是现代性留给我们的难题。
结语
本研究试图提出或者连接这样一种新的理论视角：当我们从情感与情动的维度重新考察当代中国青少年的青春期经验，会看到过往青少年研究中常被忽视的视野，它指向的是一种具有能动性，又脆弱、松动、易受影响的主体性经验。这种经验无疑来自个体所处的生活之网和权力关系，当情动这样一种动态的生命经验也被纳入治理范畴，它进一步促使我们反思当代中国教育对青少年个体的想象和塑造。本研究想要提醒的是，这里反思的对象不仅包括教育系统自身的承诺和实践，更需要指向青少年的内心，因为是这些个体在对此的回应中承受着所有的责任和重量。
[1] 本文出现的具体地名与人名均已照惯例作模糊处理。
[1] “一所重点高中的心理自救”，人物，2024-10-12，
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/E-55wY-mBwoStE8yn8lxkQ
[1] “当代青年为什么越来越‘不高兴’？”，探索与争鸣，2020-11-10，
https://user.guancha.cn/main/content?id=410036
[1] “对谈项飙：教育系统正在批量生产炮灰”，青年志Youthology，2024-11-6，
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/HJohU8oEhJpiNqHdkqihvQ
[1] 根据世界卫生组织介绍，双向情感障碍（bipolar disorder）是一种精神健康疾患，其特点是躁狂（ 或轻躁狂 ）和抑郁发作，使情绪从一个极端波动到另一个极端，在躁狂发作期间，患者情绪极度亢奋，精力充沛，相反，在抑郁发作期间，患者会经历抑郁情绪，详见
https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/bipolar-disorder
[1] “高考在那儿，衡水二中就是性价比问题”，三联生活周刊，2015 年第18期。 [1] 知乎问题 “辍学的00后都在做什么？” 下的回答，
https://www.zhihu.com/question/527366558/answer/3329411730
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Fragile and Insecure Youth: The Affective Politics of a County-Level High School
Pengkai Wang
Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic material from a county-level high school in Hunan Province, China, this article explores the fragile and insecure inner world of contemporary Chinese adolescents. Beginning with a series of unexpected incidents on campus, the article considers why the education system, while promising a happy future, is also causing a depletion of life force. Diverging from previous youth studies, this paper attempts to approach the issue from the dimension of everyday emotions, examining adolescents as “affective subjects.” It treats emotional experience as a moral response and part of the ethical domain, investigating how adolescents interact with the external world while constructing their own subjectivity. This article further argues that this affective experience has become an object of governance in today’s educational spaces. Within these power relations, adolescents lack specific emotional outlets, leading to a tendency toward psychological introversion. I contend that this reflects a repressed yet constantly emerging strong sense of self-awareness among adolescents, which reveals the greatest tension in their subjective experience: it is precisely this strong self-awareness that exacerbates their inner fragility and pain.
https://doi.org/10.64053/ZEJC7596
I. The Three Consecutive Jumps
On my first day in Lingshui County, [①] I heard the somewhat sensational rumor of the “three consecutive jumps.” It was late 2024, and I had arrived at Lingshui County No. 1 High School (hereafter Lingshui No. 1 High School) as a volunteer teacher, preparing to begin a six-month residential fieldwork study with a particular focus on the psychological state and problems of adolescents. Such an event quickly caught my attention. What happened? I asked the students I met. They excitedly gathered around me, counting on their fingers, each chiming in to recount their memories of it.
Specifically, the “three consecutive jumps” referred to three successive student deaths that occurred at Lingshui No. 1 High School in a short period, all within a single month. The most frequently mentioned was a fall from a building that happened last year. A boy eagerly pushed his way to the front and told me that although he didn’t witness it himself, the ambulance had just left when he passed by, and a large crowd had already gathered. “I saw that pool of blood on the ground.” The deceased was a final-year (Grade 12) female student who had jumped from the fifth-floor sky bridge. Some said she was heartbroken after a recent breakup, others said it was because of a fight with her parents, and still others believed it was due to a poor monthly exam result. One female student described a more dramatic scene to me:
“The sky bridge is between the buildings for the final-year and first-year students. Class 1-9 is at the northernmost end of the building, right next to the final-year building. We were in math class when suddenly the whole class started looking out the window. That girl was sitting on the railing. When our math teacher saw her, he rushed out of the classroom but was blocked by the sky bridge door—the school usually locks the door on the first-year side to prevent them from disturbing the final-year students. He stood at the door, shouting at her not to jump, but she turned to look at the teacher, smiled, and then jumped.”
This reminded me of a report I had read, in which the vice-principal of a key high school recounted a similar campus fall:
It happened on the day of a monthly exam. During the morning reading session, the head teacher on patrol found a student using an MP3 player to read an online novel. This was not allowed in the school, so the teacher went over and said to the student that the exam would start at 7:30 and suggested he hand over the MP3 player for safekeeping. That teacher was usually gentle and didn’t criticize the student. After saying that, the student said nothing, handed over the MP3, and quietly waited for the exam.
The school had just built a new teaching block, and the surveillance system in the corridors was very comprehensive. We later saw from the surveillance video that after the morning reading session ended, that student was talking and laughing with his classmates as he walked to the 5th-floor exam room. They stood in the corridor for a while, but as soon as his classmates entered the classroom, he jumped without a moment’s hesitation. The students present were stunned. Some had just turned away from him a moment before and couldn’t comprehend what had happened in that instant. [②]
These descriptions struck me with great force. I was astonished by the fragility and impermanence of life, with such life-and-death moments occurring in extremely ordinary, calm, and unnoticed situations. And the witnesses, the ones bearing all of this, were just underage students. My purpose in quoting the firsthand accounts here is not to provide a certain “fact” or “truth,” but to show how these events are remembered and narrated in the present, which often reflects a broader psychological structure and predicament.
Later, I learned the full story of the “three consecutive jumps” from Ms. Xie at the Lingshui No. 1 High School Psychological Counseling Center. She took out her phone and found a clear timeline from her WeChat records: April 14, a male student died suddenly in his dormitory, with police ruling out suicide and homicide; April 16, a final-year female student jumped from a building; April 28, another fall from a building. All in just half a month. Ms. Xie recalled that a few days before the first incident, she had already sensed something. “I felt something was wrong; the atmosphere in the school was already very oppressive.” Many students came for counseling. “What they expressed during the sessions was all anger—at the teachers, at the school,” she said. “I felt this was not normal.”
These phenomena collectively reveal the fragile and insecure inner world of contemporary Chinese adolescents. According to the China Health Statistical Yearbook released by the National Health Commission, the suicide rate for the 15-19 age group in urban areas nationwide rose from 1.8 per 100,000 in 2018 to 3.34 per 100,000 in 2021. The National Blue Book of Depression released in 2023 showed that 50% of depression patients nationwide are students, with those under 18 accounting for 30.28%, or 28.5 million people. As written in The Coddling of the American Mind, young people today are under enormous pressure. They not only have to excel academically but also fill a long list of extracurricular achievements. At the same time, they face unprecedented harassment, insults, and social competition in the social media space, and thus they have gradually formed a fragile self-persona (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2020). One cannot help but ask: why are contemporary youth increasingly “unhappy”? [③] This is also related to Xiang Biao’s recent discussion of the “capture of life force,” [④] in which he points out that the current education system is causing a depletion of adolescents’ vitality; young people feel their life force is shrinking, collapsing, and withering, which points to a more general form of life.
This seems to point the problem towards the most frequently mentioned, yet most unspeakable, issue in contemporary Chinese education: the physical and mental harm caused to students by the high-pressure, exam-oriented teaching model. This situation is particularly prominent in the current county-level education scene and is related to specific local political and economic circumstances. Take Lingshui County for example. Located in the northwest of Hunan Province, it was once a national-level poverty-stricken county and officially lifted itself out of poverty in 2020. In contrast, as the best high school in Lingshui County, Lingshui No. 1 High School achieves a university undergraduate admission rate of over 90% each year in the gaokao, ranking among the top in the city. For students, entering this school almost means receiving an admission ticket to a university. At Lingshui No. 1, students with slightly better grades all want to test out of Hunan, go to developed regions, or at least to Changsha. This is seen as a symbol of a bright future by both individual students and administrative bodies. A vivid slogan hangs on campus: “Ascend Mount Yuelu, cross the Yangtze River, pass the Yellow River, enter Beijing.” Similar discourse is very common in the county-level education scene today (Lin Xiaoying, 2023). For a long time, “poverty” and “high university admission rates” were common labels for many county-level high schools. This further formed a competitive and emulative educational approach—implementing high-intensity teaching models, promoting the “county of gaokao champions,” and using excellent gaokao results as a bargaining chip for local governments to seek assistance from the central government. This discourse collectively reflects the still-powerful educational desire in local spaces today (Kipnis, 2011).
To achieve this goal, Lingshui No. 1 High School has adopted an extremely strict management system. The school operates on a monthly holiday system of three days, with only Saturday afternoon off on weekdays. The campus is always in a state of tension. In front of each building is an electronic screen displaying a line of red text: “Countdown to the 2024 Gaokao/Academic Proficiency Test/Final Joint Exam, xx days xx hours xx minutes xx seconds.” The numbers are constantly ticking, reminding each grade of the approaching major exams. This is filled in with continuous in-class tests, weekly tests, and monthly tests. In terms of teaching arrangements, the school implements a “fast/slow class” tracking system that is fluid each semester. This model has been widely adopted in high schools across the country (Howlett, 2021: 77-131). On the one hand, it creates a sense of educational inequality for students by creating more divisions. On the other hand, it conveys the hope of continuous promotion and changing one’s destiny through personal effort at the most everyday, micro level.
Over the following six months, I spent a long time interacting with and interviewing multiple students and teachers, and personally participated in some school-organized activities. On many occasions, I found that students often displayed a complaining attitude: complaining about the backward, closed-off county town, the oppressive campus life, the endless homework, the unfair rules and regulations, and the frequent interpersonal conflicts. This anger would sometimes turn into jesting, self-mockery, or numbness towards their own situation.
These phenomena compel us to think: why does the education system cause a depletion of life force while promising a happy future to adolescents? What kind of cultural structure leads to this situation? How does it manifest specifically in daily life, and by which forces is it dominated? How do adolescents understand this situation and establish their own subjectivity? This article will attempt to respond to these questions by combining specific ethnographic materials. My approach will be to integrate theories of emotion and affect, to deeply examine the subjective experience of contemporary adolescents from a new perspective, as well as the series of power relations surrounding this subjectivity in the local context, and to reflect on how these relations, in turn, influence and even shape the self-awareness of adolescents.
II. Becoming Affective Subjects
In traditional youth studies, adolescence is often seen as a developmental stage on the way to adulthood, where adolescents must learn to cope with future challenges, rather than being subjects who independently generate culture. In other words, the cultural agency of adolescents is underestimated; they are more often seen as “incomplete adults,” only “partially cultural.” In recent years, more and more people have criticized this view and begun to advocate for seeing adolescents as a new ethnic group, whose identity is no longer confined to static, essentialized ethnic categories, but is hybrid and localized, revealing a rich social process (Bucholtz, 2002). Some researchers also view adolescents as active agents, arguing that only through a critical examination of the concept of “culture” can we see how adolescents, as agentive subjects, intervene in their own social lives and worlds of meaning, and thus understand the complexity of their subjectivity (Wulff, 222; Caputo, 2022).
At Lingshui No. 1 High School, students often told me about their troubles, expressing complex emotions—such as anger, resentment, sadness, fear, jealousy, etc. These emotions caught my attention. As Martha Nussbaum (1990) has said, emotional experience in daily life has a dual meaning: it is a way of reacting and a way of perceiving. In the theoretical tradition of the anthropology of emotion, emotion is considered a socially constructed cultural script. As a “language of the self,” emotion is a statement about intentions, actions, and social relationships, and should be interpreted as being “in and about social life, rather than as a direct reflection of an inner state” (Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1990:11). For example, in her study of the poetic art of Bedouin women, Lila Abu-Lughod (1986) found that Bedouin women would recite fragments of poetry to vent the pain brought by obeying the commands of their elders, which reflected their pursuit of individual independence and their desire to become individuals who could creatively master a variety of strong emotions.
Meanwhile, with the recent introduction of affect theory, more people have begun to move beyond the assumption that emotion is socially and culturally constructed, and to reflect on the relationship between emotional experience and the body. Unlike “emotion,” which refers to an emotional state or expression, “affect” emphasizes a continuous process of change in the force of emotion. It is fluid and dynamic, including not only changes in inner feelings but also, more importantly, changes in bodily intensity. For Gilles Deleuze, a key figure in this theory, affect is “an intensity that passes through the body, but does not necessarily originate from the body” (cited in Navaro-Yashin, 2009). Thus, the development of emotion and subjectivity has come to be seen as a bio-psychosocial process (Ozawa-de Silva, 2021: 16). It involves not only the individual’s cultural cognition but also how these emotions exist within and are felt through the body, emerging as a susceptibility—the ability to affect others and to be affected. This provides the impetus for daily interactions, giving everyday life a capacity for continuous movement in relationships, scenes, and contingent events (Stewart, 2007). By analyzing affect, we can better theorize those diffuse, roughly expressed desires and experiences that are difficult to categorize into any emotional category. In some ethnographic narratives, affect is not a theoretical framework but a form of description, yet these descriptions contain rich meanings for re-reading emotion (Kuan, 2023).
How can we examine these emotions and affects in the daily lives of adolescents, and the subjective experiences they entail? The following will use the daily interactions of students after the “three consecutive jumps” as an example for specific explanation and discussion.
Through continuous interaction, I found that the “three consecutive jumps” created a long-lasting aftershock among the students. What surprised me was that this impact was not just the expected fear and sadness; jumping from a building sometimes also became a medium for jokes. One day at lunch, a first-year girl asked a final-year boy, “How come no one from your year has jumped yet?” I said, “Why are you hoping for someone to jump?” She replied, “If someone jumps, we get a three-day holiday.” Someone next to her quickly interjected, “We didn’t get one last year. They just locked us in the classrooms and wouldn’t let us out.” The final-year boy told me that the school no longer dares to manage the final-year students too strictly. I asked why. They smiled knowingly and said, “Because of the ‘air-to-ground missiles’—that is, jumping.” In past research on youth violence, many researchers have tried to point out that the emotions in the context of violence are not only the commonly assumed fear, shock, sadness, and grief, but can also have a jocular side (Das, 2008). On another occasion, I saw two girls joking while chatting, “You go jump off a building.” “I can jump, you know. I have a certificate from the hospital, I’m allowed to jump.” In their conversation, jumping seemed to be a dangerous metaphor, or in their popular slang, a form of “trash talk” (kǒuhāi), or a gossipy tone and attitude, as if the person who jumped had not made any emotional or conceptual impact on them.
Another time, I witnessed a girl lose control of her emotions. Her name was Sheng Nan, a second-year (Grade 11) student who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. [⑤] That evening, she walked into the office with her hair down. I was sitting and chatting with a second-year boy, Li Yang. She walked up to Li Yang and asked him, “How can I create an accidental death at school?” Li Yang replied, “Go to the fifth floor of the teaching building.” I noticed something was wrong with Sheng Nan’s state; her eyes were wet. I tried to gently pat her on the right shoulder, but she quickly swatted my hand away, “Get lost!” Li Yang, unfazed, said, “You’re having an episode again, aren’t you?” She sat down in a nearby chair with her back to us. I tried to approach her and saw she had started to cry. I didn’t dare to get close and ask her anything, so I went back to talking with Li Yang. After a while, she walked up to my desk and asked, “Can I borrow a knife?”—there were actually scissors in a paper box on the table, but she chose to ask me instead of just taking them herself. I said, “I can’t give you one.” She stormed out angrily. I expressed my concern to Li Yang, but he, still with a calm face, told me that this was very common, and that he himself sometimes felt that way.
These phenomena reveal a complex individual situation. On the one hand, crises like the “three consecutive jumps” are always lurking among the students, manifested as a widespread fragile and unstable psychological state. But on the other hand, the students who are bystanders often show a cold or jocular attitude, as if it were not something sad or cruel. I want to argue that whether it’s the person in psychological crisis, the bystander, or the one making jokes, they all share this situation. It prompts us to reflect on empathy as a human experience. In Kierkegaard’s discourse, it refers to perceiving the sorrow of others and understanding their reality as a possibility for oneself, a kind of interactive, empathic experience (Davies, 2016). Levinas also pointed out the importance of empathy in his discussion of the “face,” where the “face” as an “other” exists in a series of empathic displacements and is manifested in the perception of the other’s vulnerability (Butler, 2016: 206-232). This perception is sometimes not a conscious act of putting oneself in another’s shoes, but closer to a non-linguistic, unconscious affect.
Therefore, in the students’ metaphors and reactions concerning the “three consecutive jumps,” what I see is not alienation or indifference. On the contrary, I believe it reflects an empathy for the fate of their peers. It is more like a “silent care.” In other words, in these extreme events, they see their own potential destiny, so they choose to use humor or indifference to soften the impact and conceal their inner fragility and insecurity. In my view, this has become very common and important in their lives, like a means of escaping the current situation.
Here, we see an “affective subject.” It demonstrates how affect theory reinterprets the concept of the subject. Unlike the traditional view of a rational, autonomous, and stable subject, the affective turn advocates for a caring moral agent that is “passionately engaged in the field of action rather than coolly detached, and vulnerable rather than rationally self-possessed” (Kuan, 2023). I believe that the emotional response of adolescents to the “three consecutive jumps” demonstrates precisely this new imagination of the subject. This perspective is very important in the contemporary experience of adolescence. It prompts us to think about the susceptibility of adolescents in their daily lives—how they perceive the insecurity of their own existence, and how they are able or unable to perceive the instability of others and take action (Allison, 2013: 14-15). At this point, emotional experience is clearly seen as a moral response and is incorporated into the domain of ethics. In other words, these everyday emotions, even the so-called breakdown moments, are also moments of subjectivity. From them, we can see how adolescents interact with the external world while constructing their own sense of self.
This extends further to the social dimension. Andrew Kipnis (2012) once pointed out that individualization in Chinese society is not purely a social fact but should be seen more as a psychological problematic. The individual psyche becomes the site where social contradictions manifest, and various discourses, emotions, and impulses together constitute a structure of feeling. Correspondingly, the individual psyche has thus become an important object of governance, especially in local spaces, where we can see a series of power relations occurring around the mind and emotions.
III. Governing Affect
In Governing Educational Desire, Andrew Kipnis seeks to demonstrate that the Foucauldian tradition of governance can be used to explore the cultural characteristics of educational governance in China: the focus is on how governance happens, rather than explicitly who governs (Kipnis, 2011: 5). I want to further point out that Kipnis focuses more on the governance of individual behavior norms and ethical concepts, while neglecting another core aspect of Foucault’s theory—the body, and the affective experience caused by bodily activities. The importance of this has been increasingly emphasized, with many scholars pointing out that the body is playing an important role in educational spaces, where the physical, social, and spiritual-cultural levels are intertwined (Cook & Hemming, 2011).
How is affect governed in today’s educational spaces? In this section, I will discuss this issue, and combining different events and activities on campus, examine how the bodily and affective energy of adolescents is evoked or suppressed in these activities. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s discourse (2004: 72), I attempt to point out the complex power relations behind this governance: affective politics is not just a tool or symptom of governance, but is also related to the body, pointing to the intensification of emotion. This not only accomplishes the act of governance but also creates cognitive differences among individuals.
On my first day at Lingshui No. 1 High School, I witnessed the legendary group run (pǎocāo). As soon as the bell rang at 10:05, the “Athletes’ March” began to play over the broadcast. Students emerged from the various teaching buildings, each holding a book—some were textbooks, others were pocket-sized vocabulary booklets. All students found their respective places by class, forming a circular line on the campus roads. The broadcast began to speak, “Students in the last row of the line, keep a close eye on the row in front. If there’s a gap, fill it. This way the line will be neat and look good. Visitors will say we run well.” “Attention—eyes right!” A line of several thousand people is not so easy to command. As far as the eye could see, most students had their heads down, flipping through their books, not participating in the formation. The head teachers also stood by, tacitly approving. Then the run began. The broadcast repeated the command “One-two-one,” and the line of several thousand people started moving. The head teachers also ran alongside the line, constantly monitoring the situation. The students shouted slogans as they ran, led by someone at the front of the line or someone with a loud voice in the middle. To keep the formation neat, the overall pace was not fast. Some were still reading as they ran. The line maintained a certain distance, but as they ran, they began to bunch up. About fifteen minutes later, the music ended, the line stopped, and the broadcast began to announce, one by one, the classes that ran well and poorly today, giving praise and criticism respectively.
The group run has become a mandatory activity in high schools across China today, especially since the educational model of Hengshui High School sparked extensive discussion and promotion. [⑥] Many high schools have made the group run culture a part of their campus construction. This reflects the biopolitics of contemporary Chinese campuses. On the one hand, the run is to cultivate physical fitness and develop stronger, healthier adolescents—this is behind the important ideology of quality-oriented education in China over the past few decades (Greenhalgh, 2010). But here, the cultural meaning behind the run is more complex. It is not only a training of rules and collectivity (running in neat formations), an emphasis on a certain time ethic (reading during waiting periods, even while running, not wasting a moment of study time), but also an emphasis on vitality—what Susan Greenhalgh calls “vital politics.” Teresa Kuan (2015), in her discussion of “human capital” in Chinese youth upbringing, points out that the motivation, emotions, and intellect of adolescents are now always considered content for parental investment. In this sense, vitality has become a finite resource that can be governed. The practice of the group run tells us that China needs not only academically excellent and physically healthy adolescents, but also hopes that adolescents can have a positive and upward spiritual outlook, such as the loud slogans during the run. In other words, the school attempts to re-mobilize the life energy of adolescents, suppressed by heavy academic pressure, through the activity of the group run. Whether active or passive, this can also be further understood as a moral emotion, where the individual needs to learn to mobilize their own bodily energy and emotions, integrate into a larger collective emotion, and invest this energy into the longer-term daily study.
This governance also points to the psychological level, especially in the face of the increasingly fragile and insecure minds of today’s adolescents. After the “three consecutive jumps,” the school authorities at Lingshui No. 1 became extremely sensitive to the students’ psychological state: they immediately invited a third party to provide campus counseling, conducted screenings, and organized staff to monitor and intervene with high-risk students. The school leadership also arranged for psychology teachers to attend the regular meetings of all head teachers and to provide training for them at these meetings. However, the students’ perspective tells a different story. In their view, these measures are more like a form of surveillance. Some students recalled that for a period after the fall incident, the grade-level management would have each class monitor watch the surveillance footage after class to record whether anyone was loitering in the corridor by the door or showing other abnormal behavior. This sometimes turned into oversensitivity. One girl said her head teacher even confiscated her school ID card—afraid she would use the pin on it to self-harm. She was once caught by the school’s party secretary, who asked her why she wasn’t wearing her ID. Fortunately, a classmate nearby helped explain, otherwise she would have been criticized and had points deducted again. This reveals two different dimensions of governance in the school: on the one hand, it still implements strict daily governance, such as managing classroom discipline and student behavior; on the other hand, it does not want things like the “three consecutive jumps” to happen again, so it tries to eliminate the possibility of such incidents from the “root.” The two, in a sense, follow the same logic, yet they also create intense friction in the students’ lives.
Sheng Nan told me about another experience: “In the first class that afternoon, I suddenly lost control of my emotions. I was crying loudly in the classroom, tearing up my test papers and everything. My classmates were startled. It was history class. I cried for the whole period. The history teacher knew my situation, so she acted as if nothing had happened and just continued teaching normally.” This scene surprised me. It seemed unimaginable. When someone has such a strong emotional outburst in a classroom, even with potentially dangerous behavior, this powerful energy affects everyone else in the class, but the teacher does nothing. She restrains her emotional response and just continues the lesson. Because in the classroom environment, the two aforementioned governance logics are in conflict, and maintaining classroom discipline and teaching progress is the only legitimate thing to do at that moment. From a collectivist framework, this is also the case; personal emotions should not interfere with the collective process. In other words, this reveals the power relations between the two types of governance. In the power struggle of that moment, the individual’s melancholic affect was suppressed.
The situations above all seem to confirm Teresa Kuan’s observation that in China, the response to adolescent psychological distress is more educational than medical (Kuan, 2015: 5). This echoes the discussion of the “Psycho-boom” in contemporary Chinese society: the level of the problem emphasized by the school is precisely the part where action can be taken. When the pressures and structures of the education system cannot be changed for the time being—although they are very likely a major cause of adolescent suffering—the only option is to deal with the problems that can be solved, namely, changing the adolescents’ ability to accept and adjust.
On a Saturday morning during the semester, the school held a parents’ meeting for the second-year students on the sports field as planned. What was different was that this parents’ meeting took the form of a “Family Education Inspirational Report Meeting,” hosted by an expert invited from outside the school. At the event, students and parents sat in pairs, filling nearly two-thirds of the sports field. The event began with a speech from the principal. He pointed out that this inspirational report had three goals: first, to jointly discuss development plans and map out a blueprint for growth, as everyone was about to enter the first round of review and would soon be quasi-final-year students; second, to be grateful to parents, teachers, the school, and the country; third, the gaokao is a war without smoke, and everyone must be of one mind. He ended by shouting, “Success cannot wait! Filial piety cannot wait! Gratitude cannot wait!”
Next, the main speaker, Professor Liu, took the stage. After a series of introductory segments, Professor Liu asked all the head teachers to walk to the front of their class lines and said to the students, “The hard work of your teachers, watching you from the classroom windows, is all for your own good. Now, listen to my command, and with your loudest voice, say, ‘Teacher, you’ve worked hard!’ ten times, go!” The students’ voices echoed across the sports field. After shouting, Professor Liu continued, “Now, bow to your teachers, ninety degrees, and don’t get up until I say so. Classmates, although our heads are bowed, our souls have been uplifted!” The students all bent down in unison. Then the event reached its climax. Professor Liu invited students and parents to voluntarily come on stage. Students expressed gratitude to their parents, who in turn delivered a “Declaration of Excellent Parents.” To the sound of sentimental music, both young and old, the students and parents who went on stage were in tears, excitedly shouting, “Dad, Mom, I love you!” and “My child, I love you!”
I sat in the audience and searched on my phone with the keywords “Professor Liu, inspirational report meeting.” I found that such events are extremely common in the local area of Hunan; almost every key high school holds them, and judging from the content of the press releases, the procedure is almost identical. This collective action can be discussed as part of the aforementioned governance methods: the school attempts to use such activities to make students develop a so-called “sense of gratitude”—which sometimes manifests as tolerance and obedience towards teachers and parents—in order to resolve various conflicts and dissatisfactions at school and at home. Specifically, such an activity evokes strong affect in students and parents through a series of highly inflammatory segments and transforms this affective energy into the discourse of repaying kindness and studying hard. It starts from kinship relations and, to some extent, constitutes a mode of desire production: to be a good child, to be a good parent. And the ultimate goal of all this is still to get students to enter the “battle preparation” for the gaokao in a better mental state.
The various activities presented in this section show us how different forces in the current Chinese educational scene achieve the governance of adolescent affect. Following the examination of the body in affect theory, this governance further points to the individual’s psychological state and vitality. In the observation of the “capture of life force” among Chinese students cited at the beginning, Xiang Biao intentionally emphasizes that his discourse is not about biopolitics. He believes that vitality cannot be objectified, and external power can hardly touch it directly, so it does not point to a specific form of domination. In response, I do not want to specifically distinguish whether adolescents are actively or passively caught in this state here. Instead, I want to return to Judith Butler’s discourse on the body and performativity to point out how power touches upon vitality. In Bodies That Matter, Butler (2011) points out that the construction of power is not just a product of discourse; it is also material, and is thus unintentionally repeated in contemporary language. The process by which power shapes the body is precisely the so-called process of “materialization.” In Butler’s theory, the agency of the individual is exposed to risk with bodily-ness. When the body becomes permeable, interdependent, and vulnerable, it potentially shifts itself from the theater of agency to the theater of violence (Zaharijević, 2021). In this sense, the body becomes the bridge between affect, vitality, and the act of governance, allowing the entire process to be completed.
On the other hand, the above discussion still cannot be separated from the examination and consideration of the subject. Even if I have not pointed out that this process of governance is carried out by a specific subject, the problem of subjectivity still exists, namely, how do adolescent subjects position themselves within these power relations, and how do the changes and struggles of these affective forces influence and even shape their self-awareness? This is the question that the next section will discuss.
IV. Psychological Introversion
During a chat, Ms. Xie described her observations from psychological counseling sessions, such as the students’ body language, facial expressions, and emotional states before and after counseling. Some students cry as soon as they arrive at the counseling center; others start to cry as they talk. They would say, “I’ve never talked this much before,” or “I’ve never told anyone these things.” These phenomena suggest that contemporary adolescents generally seem to lack an emotional outlet. Why is this? Where does the affective energy evoked and accumulated in the aforementioned time-space relations end up?
What I am pointing out in this section is that some adolescents choose to continuously internalize these external pressures, trying to solve them through their own strength. I call this psychological structure and dynamic “psychological introversion”—in many cases, it is both the result and the cause.
On the one hand, this trend is caused by the lack of emotional outlets. When facing conflicts and troubles in daily life, students do not really have any reliable person to confide in. Ms. Xie analyzed that school teachers may not understand the specific situation, and there are various concerns about telling classmates. “The relationships of high school students are not as lasting and stable as we imagine. Those students who seem to have a good relationship might just eat together, play ball, and chat, but they don’t dare to show their true feelings and vulnerability in front of their friends.” Why? Logically, peers should understand each other best. She said they worry their friends won’t want to listen, that it will invite ridicule, sympathy, or pity, and they are afraid of losing friends. Moreover, in many cases, peers do not have the ability to handle their problems. Small problems might be okay, but some big problems, like parents’ divorce or domestic violence, are very difficult to solve. But on the other hand, these troubles are precisely caused by psychological introversion. Ms. Xie believes that many of the interpersonal troubles that students complain about in counseling are due to “keeping it inside and not saying anything,” which leads to both parties not knowing where the conflict actually lies. It’s the same in the family. Many students are unwilling to tell their parents their thoughts, or after telling them, feel they are not understood, and over time they give up on communication.
This tendency toward psychological introversion further forms a moral view and affects many judgments in students’ daily lives. For example, when encountering bullying, in a relatively high-pressure learning environment, many students will attribute being isolated in relationships to themselves, or will postpone its importance, believing it should not affect their preparation for exams, so they just let it go. One girl once gave me a very vivid metaphor: You have a bowl of water in your hand, and you are climbing a mountain. You want to drink it when you reach the top, so you can only hold the bowl carefully all the way, so that the water doesn’t spill. This concept is very popular in the local area. I once participated in a gaokao oath-taking rally held by the school, where teachers and students all liked to say things like: “A true hero is one who still loves life after recognizing reality; we have suffered so much, we are all heroes.” This series of “enduring hardship” narratives is regarded as a philosophical value worth pursuing at Lingshui No. 1 High School—even if the rules may be unreasonable, you can still overcome these injustices through your own efforts. This refers not only to the cruel gaokao system but also to the various rules on campus, as well as the local political and economic disadvantages. These forces also reinforce each other: in their eyes, it is precisely because of Lingshui’s backward political and economic status that they need to work harder to escape it, and the most realistic, and almost the only, way at present is to achieve good results in the gaokao and get into a university in an economically developed region.
Why does such a tendency arise? The point I am trying to make here is that through these expressions, we can see the strong sense of self-awareness emerging in the adolescent group. The formation of this self-awareness is very complex, stemming not only from individual growth experiences and the campus environment but also from broader local power relations and even popular culture. But at the same time, this self is often suppressed in the present, in the local space, and there is a continuous tension between the two.
In one conversation, another teacher at the psychological center, Ms. Jin, analyzed the emerging self-awareness of the students. She said that current students seem eager to gain more control—control over their studies, control over their lives—but at their age, they may not yet have this ability. So their understanding of freedom and independence becomes relatively simple: “It seems that independence means not listening to teachers, not listening to parents, not listening to others, so that I maintain an independent mind.” When they interact with people with this attitude, their relationships can hardly be deep, so their relationships are very fragile and easy to break.
In my interactions with the students, I found that this self-awareness is not simply a pursuit of independence or what adults see as “rebellion,” but exists in a more complex cultural context. Popular culture plays an important role. I was often surprised by the influence of Japanese ACGN culture on this generation of adolescents. Almost every one of them watches anime and can fluently recite a certain plot or line. This reflects a shared reality. Uno Tsunehiro (2024: 44-57), in his analysis of the social psychology of 1990s Japan, pointed out a tendency toward “hikikomori/psychologism.” He found that the representative cultural works of that time conveyed the idea that when problems arise, one should not change the world but convince oneself; one should not expect to make this “boring world” interesting through one’s own efforts. Some have proposed two alternative solutions: drugs and suicide. Uno argues that these are just metaphors for solving problems at the psychological level, that is, when the world becomes increasingly boring, people overcome it not by changing the world but by changing their own minds. This has similarities with the psychology of the adolescents I saw on campus, especially in the tedious, repetitive exam-oriented training, where the world seems even more boring to them. Anime provides an outlet, but this outlet, in turn, reinforces their perception of reality with a cultural discourse.
During the semester, I held a writing activity where students voluntarily participated, writing about different themes from their life experiences. I found that many people expressed a desire to control their own destiny in their texts, with expressions like “I am who I am,” “I am the chosen one,” “I am unique.” But at the same time, they were often aware that their current self is suppressed, limited by the external world, which includes both the examination system and social class. At this point, they would choose to temporarily turn their self inward and hope to realize their self in the future through effort. But at the same time, this writing itself is also an outlet for the self. Chen Yiyi, a first-year girl, was an enthusiastic participant in the writing activity. She would write several pages each time. She said she often asked and answered her own questions while writing, thinking about whatever interested her, writing about anything and everything. Sometimes the teacher would look at her, and she would lift her head to look at the teacher, but her hand would keep writing, sometimes even unconsciously.
These daily writings present a more complex subjective situation. I gradually discovered that, in contrast to the trend of introversion, students would also actively exaggerate their unfortunate experiences in their writing. To some extent, they are all eager for and in need of attention from others, so they easily exaggerate the degree or emotion of a certain event, such as a conflict with a friend or an unfair treatment at school. Ms. Jin once complained to me during a chat, “You can’t believe a student’s one-sided story; they can really turn black into white.” I am not trying to discuss the truthfulness of individual expressions here, but to point out that this exaggeration itself, as an act, also has a specific meaning, possibly to gain attention, which reflects that despite being constantly suppressed, the individuality of the students is still emerging.
The act of complaining is very common in the daily lives of students. In fact, in my daily interactions, I often played the role of the one who listens to complaints—when you are considered someone willing to listen to complaints, more and more people will come to complain to you. I want to point out that complaining here is not only an emotional response of adolescents in their daily lives but also constitutes what Butler (2005) calls “giving an account of oneself.” When a person strives to present, to complain, it means that this part of the experience already belongs to you; it is important for what you can do and who you can become. Ahmed (2024) offers a further reflection on this, emphasizing that giving an account of oneself is a process from the self (out of) to the other (to), so it is not just about the self but is a relational, ethical connection. Therefore, such complaining also implies vulnerability. It is not only an ontological susceptibility but also reflects the inequality of the human condition and the interdependence between people: we narrate ourselves in our expressions, and in this process, we see each other. This further brings us back to our understanding of subjectivity. As Clara Han (2012: 143) says, subjectivity is not an initial attribute of the subject but a unique weaving of relationships. That is to say, from the daily expressions of adolescents, we can not only see their emerging self-awareness but also the social relations that influence and shape this self, which echoes the previous discussion of adolescent peer relations and the forces of governance.
On the other hand, there is another tendency in these writings, which is to avoid directly writing about personal, concrete life stories and experiences, and instead to use a large number of metaphors to abstract oneself for expression. The writing is still about personal feelings, but there is a certain distance in the writing. This prompts us to reflect on another aspect of adolescent subjectivity: hiding one’s own vulnerability, to some extent, constitutes a form of self-protection. In recent years, there have been many discussions about self-care (Rosenbaum & Talmor, 2024), among which some researchers have pointed out the meaning of refusal as self-care, that is, a psychological state of “needing to be seen, but refusing to be seen through.” This has similarities with the refusal of self-disclosure in the writing of adolescents. One criticism of this is that some people will interpret these daily practices as a consequence of neoliberalism: the individual is not sufficiently protected, so they have to try to care for themselves. In other words, the “self” here is still a promise, one that is problematized. This raises a further question: has psychological introversion changed the fragile situation of adolescents? Or rather, can their ideal of a good life really be realized?
V. Cruel Optimism
In early 2025, the case of a female student in Baise, Guangxi, who committed suicide after being sexually assaulted by a teacher, sparked heated debate online. People found more of the girl’s writings and discovered that besides this incident, she had experienced a longer, more complex series of disputes and traumas, such as her parents’ divorce and the family’s financial pressure. She was later admitted to a prestigious university but eventually dropped out. One of the girl’s answers on Zhihu [a Chinese Q&A platform] [⑦] left a deep impression on me. She wrote:
The feeling now is that life is very fulfilling and happy, full of light and love. I work eight hours a day, and when I have nothing to do at work, I can take out a book to study. I can also play my favorite songs in the shop. After work, I continue to study what I like and practice drawing. Although I only earn a little over two thousand a month, I think it’s very, very good. I don’t have strong material desires, I’m not very interested in clothes or cosmetics, and I won’t get married or have children in the future. The only place I need money is to earn tuition to learn new things. Maybe it’s just that I’m still young and don’t have too many burdens of caring for the elderly, but for now, it’s enough to live well in the present. I don’t think about hurting myself anymore. I live this life to complete my life’s lessons and walk the path of higher spiritual awakening. All material things, you can’t bring them with you when you’re born, and you can’t take them with you when you die, so there’s no need to care. I also believe that when my own energy frequency increases, abundant and beautiful things will be more easily attracted and manifested.
Many of her expressions reminded me of the students I met in the field. Despite having experienced so many cruel and painful moments, they still spoke of the good life they longed for in a calm, light tone. From this, we can see their confidence in life. The good life here does not necessarily refer to getting into a better school, but also points to an ethical good life, such as pursuing fair treatment, maintaining one’s dignity and sensitivity, responding to the emotional needs of friends in a timely manner, and trying one’s best to protect one’s inner self amidst constant turmoil. But reality has told us time and again that this state is so fragile and can collapse at any time. The girl from Baise has already left this world forever.
Over the past two decades, there has been a “happiness turn” in academia, represented by positive psychology, which has produced a large amount of knowledge about how to make people happier. But on the other hand, as Sara Ahmed (2010: 6-7) says, the concept of a good life is itself a site of contradiction. It includes both confusion and the feeling of distinguishing between good and bad. Thus, understanding happiness also means understanding the grammar of this contradiction. The crisis of happiness is not just the failure of the ideal of happiness, but also the failure of the very act of trying to follow this ideal. It points to the core issue in contemporary ethical anthropology surrounding vulnerability—how can a person live well in an environment they cannot control? This prompts us to reflect again on the meaning of “cruel optimism.” Lauren Berlant points out that all attachments are optimistic. When we talk about an object of desire, we are actually talking about a series of promises that someone or something makes and fulfills for us. This allows us to see the incoherent, incomprehensible things in an attachment and leads to the core question: why do we endure the objects of our attachment? (Berlant, 2023: 33)
Berlant points out a “technology of endurance,” where contemporary people often suspend their questioning of the cruelty of the present moment with a concept of “later.” This means still believing in the attachment systems they are accustomed to, remaining in a relationship of reciprocity, reconciliation, or submission, which may be accompanied by numbness. In school, I often hear students relay their conversations with their parents and teachers, and there is a very common response: “Once you get into university, you can play however you want.” I think this sentence very accurately conveys the promise that the education system makes to adolescents. It carries the intense tension between the exam-oriented education and individual desires. Even though current popular culture and social psychology are beginning to emphasize diverse choices, the gaokao still holds an absolutely overwhelming power advantage in the county-level education system. Therefore, the adolescent imagination of a diverse, autonomous life is still pinned on the examination system. In this situation, the exam is both the source of adolescent pressure and pain and their hope for a future life.
What this article seeks to point out is that this optimism is still fragile and cruel. When adolescents choose to digest their own fragility and insecurity through introversion and place their hopes in the very system they can hardly adapt to, they will, in turn, be repeatedly tormented by this attachment. Listening to them talk about their various painful situations, I am always reminded of the word “attrition” that Berlant mentions—people’s fantasies and the shared expectation of a good life are being worn down. As she says: “In the state of cruel optimism, it is the aspirational and life-giving potential of the object/scene of desire that, in turn, brings about the attrition of that vitality, the very vitality that this attachment relationship initially promised.” (Berlant, 2023: 34, translation adapted)
Furthermore, this cruelty exists not only in the intense examination system; those adolescents who withdraw from the examination system also face the same situation. Many students told me they don’t care if they can get into a key university; it’s fine as long as they can get into an undergraduate program. Vocational college is also an option, as long as they get a high school diploma. Some, like the girl from Baise, plan to drop out directly. But this has not eliminated their pain. For those who stay, you need to keep up with the learning pace of the class, the management rhythm of the school, and the purpose of all these actions is still, as discussed earlier, the pursuit of success in the gaokao. For those who leave, like the Baise girl, they will fall into deeper questioning. To what extent can this society tolerate an individual without a diploma? What is the meaning of life? In this dimension, there may be no real exit. On the contrary, those who try to exit may have to experience an even greater gap.
I believe the problem all this reveals is that the education system, to some extent, is actually acting on behalf of the larger socio-economic structure to influence adolescents, and the latter has also failed to deliver on its promises. This can also be extended to a larger context. Alain Ehrenberg once pointed out the important tension behind the depression and internal conflicts of the modern individual: the idea of infinite possibilities versus the reality that cannot be mastered (2025: 295). The emphasis on freedom and agency in modern society has actually eroded stability and certainty. People are promised the vision of individual liberation but lack the real ability to achieve it in reality. Thus, various ailments remind us that being the master of oneself does not mean that everything is possible. This reveals the greatest tension in the subjective experience of adolescents: it is precisely this strong self-awareness that is exacerbating their inner fragility and pain. This is the problem that modernity has left us.
Conclusion
This study attempts to propose or connect to a new theoretical perspective: when we re-examine the adolescent experience of contemporary Chinese youth from the dimension of emotion and affect, we see a perspective often overlooked in past youth studies. It points to a subjective experience that is agentive, yet fragile, fluid, and susceptible to influence. This experience undoubtedly comes from the web of life and power relations in which the individual is situated. When affect, as a dynamic life experience, is also brought into the scope of governance, it further prompts us to reflect on the imagination and shaping of the adolescent individual in contemporary Chinese education. What this study wants to remind us is that the object of reflection here includes not only the promises and practices of the education system itself but also needs to point to the inner world of the adolescents, because it is these individuals who bear all the responsibility and weight in their response to it.
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Footnotes
[①] All specific place names and personal names in this article have been anonymized according to standard practice.
[②] “The Psychological Self-Rescue of a Key High School,” Renwu (人物), October 12, 2024, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/E-55wY-mBwoStE8yn8lxkQ
[③] “Why Are Contemporary Youth Increasingly ‘Unhappy’?”, Tansuo yu Zhengming (探索与争鸣), November 10, 2020, https://user.guancha.cn/main/content?id=410036
[④] “A Conversation with Xiang Biao: The Education System is Mass-Producing Cannon Fodder,” Youthology, November 6, 2024, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/HJohU8oEhJpiNqHdkqihvQ
[⑤] According to the World Health Organization, bipolar disorder is a mental health condition characterized by manic (or hypomanic) and depressive episodes, causing moods to swing from one extreme to the other. During a manic episode, the person experiences elevated mood and increased energy, whereas during a depressive episode, the person experiences a depressed mood. For details, see https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/bipolar-disorder
[⑥] “With the Gaokao There, Hengshui No. 2 High School is a Matter of Cost-Effectiveness,” Sanlian Life Weekly, 2015, Issue 18.
[⑦] An answer to the Zhihu question “What are the post-2000s dropouts doing?”, https://www.zhihu.com/question/527366558/answer/3329411730
