Online classes and closed campuses: What was life like for Chinese university students during the past three years?
Ji Yunfei has not left his university campus for four months. For the first two he washed himself with a basin of water, as students were confined to their dorm rooms for fear of cross-infections; an experience he describes over WeChat to TWOC stoically as “self-sacrifice for [society’s] greater happiness.”
In response to an outbreak in the surrounding city of Changchun early this March, Jilin University, where Ji has been studying for his Master’s degree since late 2019, ramped up Covid restrictions that had been present since January 2020. Elevators were disconnected, classes put online, and students were told not to leave their dormitory floor. Each day, they filled out a form declaring their temperature and took a self-administered covid test, but were also woken up at 8:30 each morning by medical staff to do another test.
Ji was relatively lucky—the four years of his bachelor’s degree were Covid-free, filled with travel and dining out with friends. But for those who entered university for the first time at the end of 2019, the experiences of online learning, intermittently closed campuses, and routine health checks have been constant inconveniences during a period that traditionally offered young people their first taste of adult freedoms.
Given the constant disruption and restrictions to their university experience, “I think [students who entered after 2019] are really in a bad mood right now,” says Qian Dashu, a 23-year-old postgraduate student who wishes to use a pseudonym, pursuing a master’s degree at a major university in Beijing he doesn’t want to name (as his teachers has told him he needed the university’s permission to participate in interviews).
Alex Colville is the former culture editor at The World of Chinese. Blown to China by the tides of curiosity, then marooned here by the squalls of Covid, Alex used to write for 1843, The Economist, and the Spectator from the confines of a cold London flat. When he’s not writing for TWOC, he can be found researching his bi-weekly column for SupChina from the confines of his freezing Beijing hutong.
