They wore large headphones over their ears, eyes to the ceiling during study hours, while the rest of us hunched over our desks. They concealed themselves in the back of the classroom, with Japanese manga or video-gaming manuals tucked inside textbooks as teachers held forth from the lecterns. They were not many, though we all knew who they were. Looking back, I see they were the first victims of what the school was doing to us-and what the state is doing to us now. At the time, they made little sense to me. But some of my classmates seemed to have already cottoned on to the reality of what lay ahead.
It was well before the term “lying flat” was coined to describe opting out of the unwinnable race of Chinese academic and career competition. From 2003 to 2005, I was a student at rendafuzhong (the High School Affiliated to People’s University) a notoriously cutthroat institution in the Chinese capital.
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