In Zunhua City, Hebei Province, a boarding school faced a large-scale student protest late last week. Hundreds of students were dissatisfied with the school’s decision to adjust the holidays to once a month and request voluntary stay on campus, leading to a collective action. The protest lasted for nearly two hours and ended after the school authorities compromised. Similar incidents have occurred in various parts of China in the first half of this year.
On the night of September 11, the dormitory building of Yizhong Middle School in Zunhua City remained illuminated, with shouts echoing in the corridors. In the darkness, windows were pushed open, and the flashes of mobile phone flashlights flickered. On the dark student playground, students were shouting in unison, and according to video footage, some even toppled the railings.
Videos and comments circulating on an overseas social media platform, X, showed that around 10:30 pm that night, some male and female students quickly organized a spontaneous demonstration after meeting in the school’s public restroom. Internet users revealed that the protest began in the boys’ dormitory. In multiple videos, students shouted slogans such as “X your school,” “Yizhong,” and “settling personal scores in public,” with the chants echoing across the campus, occasionally punctuated by applause.
According to social media reports, around 11:18 pm, the dormitory supervisors urgently convened a meeting with the dormitory leaders but failed to quell the situation. Shortly after, male students rushed into the school’s assembly hall, and under student pressure, the doors were forced open, allowing students to enter for a “meeting.” At the same time, the students’ protest gradually subsided, and the campus gradually returned to calmness around midnight.
In the social media comment section, students mentioned that the school agreed to retract the “one holiday per month” policy and promised to resume the arrangement of “one break every two weeks” after a dialogue with the students the next morning. A staff member who answered the phone at the office of Yizhong Middle School in Zunhua City on September 17 confirmed that the school had reinstated the system but refused to disclose their name and position.
Ms. Shen, a retired teacher from Baoding, Hebei, expressed that such incidents involving students were not isolated but a long-overdue overall release of dissatisfaction with the school’s arrangements. “When I was a homeroom teacher, I witnessed many boarding schools suppressing students with ‘closed management.’ The emotional buildup over time was bound to erupt one day. The fact that students dare to protest indicates that the school’s system has severely deviated from the original educational intent.”
She further stated that recent protests by boarding students in other provinces and cities, such as the ban on bringing mobile phones at a vocational school in Bijie, Guizhou, reflected systemic contradictions in boarding education. Shen highlighted the need for students to have normal channels of expression, and collective protests became an extreme but effective means. Yizhong Middle School, a well-known private boarding school in the area with strict management, witnessed the culmination of years of pent-up emotions in this protest.
On the other hand, Mr. Wang, a parent of a student from Chengde, Hebei, strongly opposed sending children to boarding primary or secondary schools. “I am staunchly against it, especially during the formative period of primary school students, their experiences have a significant influence on their future. These children need to be with their parents, laying on the sofa watching TV, snacking, thinking freely, enjoying their childhood, not entering a cold dormitory after school; what’s the difference from being imprisoned?”
Similar student protest incidents have occurred in the first half of this year. On the evening of September 7, at Weining Vocational and Technical School in Bijie, Guizhou, where some students protested the school’s mandatory phone retrieval, hundreds of students protested inside the dormitories, leading to a large number of police officers entering the school to restore order. On March 8, at the First Senior High School in Ruzhou, Henan, students protested and tore up a request form for “voluntary make-up classes” by the school. On March 2, in Shantou Second High School in Guangdong, some high school seniors protested against strict school rules by pulling open the school gates. And on January 18, in Xinghua City, Taizhou, Jiangsu, thousands of students protested, forcing authorities to cancel the winter break makeup class plan at three high schools.