China is becoming more and more confident that it has beaten the coronavirus (COVID-19), and authorities have increasingly signaled momentum towards reopening schools around the country. Education authorities want to avoid further disruption to students’ studies, and economic authorities wish to encourage parents to return to work rather than babysitting children as they do online classes from home. As new cases of COVID-19 remain rare throughout the country, and as spring comes on, schools in China are slowly resuming operations. The process of reopening China’s many schools must be carefully managed to ensure that there are no outbreaks among gatherings of students. Analyzing the process of China’s reopening provides many useful and interesting insights into life in recovery from the coronavirus, what it looks like, and what will happen as it takes its course.

The first important characteristic of China’s reopening is that, while it is certainly happening and happening more and more quickly, it is haphazard and piecemeal. Different provinces and groups of schools are opening at different paces and times. In some provinces, schools are getting close to restoring normal operations, at least among a grade 9 and 12 students who must prepare for high-stakes exams like the gaokao and zhongkao which govern admission to China’s high schools and colleges. Other students may return this school year or have their return postponed until the fall. In every case, the schools are working hard to maintain the sense of community and educational mission in their school, though results can be mixed.

Here’s our roundup of some of the most noticeable changes in everyday school life in China’s reopened schools:

When students enter campus in the morning, their temperatures are taken. Those with normal readings will follow blue arrows pasted on the ground, while high temperatures will follow red arrows to the school clinic. Students are sometimes required to show a green QR health code reading to enter.
Universities have allowed students to enter campus, but students are not not permitted to leave campus thereafter.
Social distancing in schools is enforced, with bathroom breaks carefully orchestrated and distancing floor markers ubiquitous on campus.
Masks remain a must, and some primary students even have to wear large hats to make it more clear when a classmate is getting too close.
Large scale gatherings on campus, including many student activities, remain curtailed.
To preserve distancing, some schools are staggering classes so that students alternate between coming to school and taking online classes.
Schools have taken to opening in phases, almost always beginning with grade 9 and 12 students. Each province has the ability to set its own start dates and arrangements, meaning that the answer to the question “when is school starting” is a patchwork of 34 different answers, often with vague pronouncements like “school will not open before May 4.”
International schools and English departments face unprecedented challenges with staffing as many foreign teachers are still unable to enter China.
As student activities including college fairs remain curtailed and overseas universities reckon with the implications for recruiting Chinese students, many have turned to online alternatives like student recruitment webcasts and online portals such as the China Test Optional Initiative.

Students at Beijing No. 161 High School line up to get temperature checks. Photo: Xinhua

Students at High School Affiliated to China Agricultural University in Beijing must show a green health QR code to enter campus.

There have been reports in many schools that life is disrupted in strange and different ways. Lunchtime is, in the eyes of school health authorities, a dangerous time when there is much risk of the virus spreading. In an effort to counter this spread, students in some schools are being required to sit separated far away from each other, so that a lunchroom looks more like an examination room. To make the comparison even more accurate, some Chinese schools have put up barriers covered with academic material around lunching students so that they can study during lunch too!

The bizarre alignment of lunch and study time.

The pressure to maintain social distancing among primary school students has resulted in some amusing if creative solutions: .5 meter radius-sized inflatable hats that resemble those that were fashionable in the Song dynasty!

Primary students in Hangzhou wearing balloon hats. Photo: SCMP

Other schools have decided to innovate and combine in-person and virtual education sections so that not all students have to return to school at the same time. In some schools, for example, grade eight students attend school together on some days while not doing so on others, when other class years can attend school, thus reducing the number of students on campus at any one time.

Perhaps the biggest change has been the increasing focus on long-distance asynchronous learning. Even as some students return to campus, their administrations have decided to continue to record and present lessons online to make sure that those who can’t come back still have access. There are other benefits to this too. If a student misses part of a lecture or doesn’t understand material, they can easily go back over the confused material and cover it again from the video recording. Some colleges and universities, on the other hand, have just decided to bring students inside and shut the door behind them, following a government proclamation which forbids students at university to leave campus until the virus has abated. Questions remain about the fate of students with off-campus housing or internships.

International schools and schools with faculty from overseas have struggled with the challenges of reopening, since flights to China have been heavily curtailed and the border has been closed to the overwhelming majority of foreign citizens since March 28. Many have preserved online distance learning, while others have introduced staggered schedules where foriegn teachers present on campus split class loads with those still abroad. Yet some parents feel that an online education does not justify the often high tuition fees charged by international schools in China. Many international schools are considered blended learning models, where students attend classes together but with the teacher conducting lessons remotely. Hiring for fall 2020 is deeply uncertain: contract renewals have become a series of nested conditional statements about the ability to return to China, and many schools that emphasized their foreign teachers will need to pivot to hiring Chinese citizens who have an overseas education. The impact of COVID-19 on international schools in China is deeply ambivalent: some Chinese students studying at overseas high schools may return to China and enroll in a Mainland international school, but newly founded schools recruiting their first few graduating classes will face profound recruitment pressures.

The reality is that the current process of reopening is still confused and many people are unsure what will happen. This is inevitable with something like the coronavirus. However, as time passes, China and other countries are learning more and more about how to reopen effectively, and we can hope that soon reopening will be able to proceed effectively and safely.

By Nicholas Caputo and David Weeks

China’s Surreal School Reopenings