Logos Review · Issue 1 (Spring 2026) · Special Topic: Education
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
This is the English version of an article published in Chinese in Logos Review (汉语学志). Read the Chinese original (中文原文) · All English articles
