Updated, 4:48 a.m. ET| While American high school freshmen are busy stocking up on backpacks and binders to prepare for the new school year, their Chinese counterparts are in the midst of a very different sort of back-to-school ritual: mandatory military training.
Students at a high school in the central province of Hunan, however, saw more action than intended when they and their instructors got into a violent clash that left 42 people injured. This and other recent reports of training exercises gone awry, including some that have even resulted in student deaths, have caused outrage online, where the phrase “Is military training necessary?” is trending and many commenters are arguing that the tradition does more harm than good.
“Honestly, other than helping new students get to know each other quickly, military training is pointless,” wrote a commenter named Bevis on Sina Weibo. Many agreed with the sentiment expressed by a writer using the handle “That Innocent Era”: “The purpose of military training is to instill in children the concept of absolute obedience — it has no other use.”
Incoming Chinese freshmen, the equivalent of American 10th-graders, are required to submit to a week of military drills led by army reservist instructors before their school year officially begins. Students typically practice marching, run laps and sing patriotic songs in a rite of passage that is meant to teach them the meaning of hard work and to foster a sense of collectivism. Actual combat training is rare — the emphasis is more on learning to walk in unison than on taking out the enemy.
The incident at Huangcang Secondary School in Longshan County, Hunan Province, began during a break in drills last Sunday afternoon, when a female student got into an argument with a drill instructor that ended with him threatening to beat her palm with a stick, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the Longshan County Propaganda Department. Things escalated when the head teacher of the class demanded that 10 or so male students intervene, which they did by surrounding the instructor and tackling him. The encounter finished seemingly amicably, with an apology from the students and a handshake between the instructor and the head teacher. It was all of bit of horsing around.
But about an hour and a half later, according to the statement, a cohort of drill instructors returned to the scene and began ever more forcefully correcting students’ postures and disciplining them, which the head teacher interpreted as a form of revenge. Seeing the situation getting out of hand, the head teacher called the police, causing the instructors to turn on him as well.
In the ensuing fracas, a drill instructor, the teacher and 40 students suffered bruises and cuts, some severe because students reportedly took to punching out classroom windows to vent their anger. As of Tuesday night, 22 remained hospitalized, The Beijing News reported. Pictures of students crying, holding out their bloody hands or being bandaged by doctors have circulated widely on social media.
The propaganda department’s statement also said that drill instructors involved in the fighting had been ordered off the school premises, and that a number of drill instructors as well as teachers and government officials had been suspended.
Students have protested this official version of events, saying that it placed too much blame on the head teacher, who they said was more a victim than an instigator, and did not take into account the violence of the drill instructors’ retaliation or the fact that they had been drinking. On Wednesday evening, the deputy director of the Longshan County Public Security Bureau admitted that the instructors had indeed consumed 16 bottles of beer and other alcoholic beverages before carrying out their assault, according to The Beijing News.
This was hardly the only instance of students coming to harm during military training this season. Last week, a girl in the northeastern province of Liaoning who was reprimanded for her inability to stand properly at attention committed suicide by jumping from her window that evening, according to China Youth Daily.
Wednesday afternoon, a boy in Xian collapsed during training and was pronounced dead en route to the hospital, China News reported. Although the exact cause of death is still under investigation, there may have been underlying health problems, prompting the Xian Education Bureau to issue an emergency notification reminding schools that only students who have been medically certified as fit should be allowed to participate in military exercises.
Even those students pronounced healthy are sometimes not up to working out in hot weather. This week in Wuhan, a city dubbed one of China’s “three furnaces” because of its torrid summers, five of the 252 freshmen training at Qingzhi Secondary School fainted within a session’s first 20 minutes, according to Chutian Metropolis Daily.
At a routine news conference on Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense said the appropriate departments were taking measures to strengthen the training and management skills of drill instructors and to ensure better monitoring of student training.
Mandatory military training for incoming high school and college students was established under the Military Service Law of 1955, and given greater emphasis after the 1989 military crackdown on student-led demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Some parents have reported feeling powerless as they send their children off to training with no means of checking in. “They don’t allow parents to visit, so if your child’s been wronged, what can you do?” a Ms. Yang said in an interview with the news site Yunnan Online. Several schools have responded to parental concerns by having teachers accompany students throughout their training, 24 hours a day.
Recent events also prompted comments on the broader social implications of military training. The painter Chen Danqing wrote via Sina Weibo: “Student military training has no use whatsoever. It’s an education in how to be a slave, of a kind that should only exist in totalitarian countries like North Korea. Are we trying to cultivate a healthy, independent and freethinking populace or a bunch of obedient machines?”
Responding to the Internet firestorm, a China Youth Daily editorial on Wednesday argued that it would be a mistake to abolish the military training system because of a few unfortunate incidents. At a time when so many students, especially only children, are overindulged, it said, there is more need than ever for young people to learn discipline and teamwork. The editorial compared China’s military training to the Boy and Girl Scouts in the United States, the “cradle” in which one in four Americans is raised. Scouts also employ “military training methods,” it said.