Other Rivers

The system’s schizophrenic qualities—increased educational and economic opportunities on one hand, narrowing political space on the other—produced young people who were themselves a study in contradictions: the George Orwell fan who dreams of Chinese tech, the Gabriel García Márquez magical realist who hopes to work in automotive engineering.

At the end of the nineteenth century, John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, had pioneered the concept of the experimental, or laboratory, school. For most of his career, Dewey had no special interest in China, but in the spring of 1919 he was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Japan. When Dewey was in Tokyo, a delegation of Chi

The numbers 985 refer to a date: the fifth month of 1998, when Jiang Zemin, the leader at the time, had delivered a speech about Chinese education at Peking University.

Despite the claims of the honor code—“freedom of thought and expression are valued”—the University of Pittsburgh could not establish its own political guidelines for the Chengdu program.

China needed, in Dewey’s opinion, “a new culture, in which what is best in western thought is to be freely adopted—but adapted to Chinese conditions.”

The rules didn’t mention individuality, self-motivated study, or other virtues that had been extolled by Hu Yanli, the John Dewey acolyte.

But people in China rarely speak of generations in this manner. The country’s direction can be shaped by individual leaders—those godlike figures—but they aren’t representatives of a specific era or age cohort.

In Serena’s essay on the gay bar, she cited a 2016 report based on surveys by Peking University sociologists, who noted that less than 15 percent of gay Chinese were fully open to their families.

In 1905, after the Qing dynasty had been weakened by the Opium Wars and other conflicts with Western powers, the examination system was abruptly abolished. Intellectuals were left with an existential question: What should be the purpose of schooling in a modern China?