Hi, I’m @BCFeather , a college student from Anhui, China.

I'm thinking about social issues in China and around the world. Hopefully, by tackling them, we can make the world a better place.

Education in China is always banging on about reform. You hear it everywhere, on the evening news, in the slogans painted on school walls, in the hushed tones of parents at parent-teacher meetings. It is a constant, low-frequency hum. But the funny thing about noise is that it hits differently depending on where you're standing. The volume, the pitch, even the meaning of the word 'change' warps based on your postcode.

In those elite private schools in Shanghai, tucked away in the leafy lanes of Pudong or the refurbished villas of the former French Concession, reform sounds like a suggestion. It’s a soft-spoken consultant suggesting 'holistic growth' or 'global perspectives.' It is a gentle nudge, nothing more. The kids there wear uniforms that don't fit quite right because they spend more time in debate clubs than in morning exercises. They worry about their 'personal statements' and whether their volunteer trip to Kenya will look good on their Ivy League applications. To them, the system is a concierge service. It opens doors before they even reach for the handle.

Over in Haidian, Beijing, it is a different beast entirely. There is no suggestion, only a mandate. It is just noise—the white noise of rote memorization, the rhythmic, frantic tapping of mechanical pencils against desks, the sound of thousands of young hearts beating in sync under the pressure of the clock. It's a drumbeat forcing the students to march without knowing the destination, only knowing that stopping means death. Education there has been stripped of any pretence of 'learning.' It is a sorting mechanism, a vast industrial centrifuge spinning at maximum speed to separate the wheat from the chaff, or the high- from the low-quality. The air smells of printer toner and anxiety. The kids don't read for pleasure. Instead they decode for survival.

And then you come back home. Back to Anhui. And here, that call for change sounds like a question. A very quiet, very lonely question.

People from the coast love to talk about 'background.' They say it with a mix of pity and dismissal. Kids from my part of the world get labelled 'ordinary,' which is just a polite way of saying 'disposable.' Translation: we lack the polish, the connections, the invisible safety net woven from guanxi and cash that catches you when you fall. No one here wants a handout. We just need the ground to stop shaking beneath our feet. We deserve to be seen as more than just a poverty statistic in a government report or a cautionary tale about what happens if you don't 'strive.'

I call Anhui an 'embarrassing' province. It is a place defined by what it lacks. We aren't dirt poor like Tibet or Qinghai, so the central government's heavy subsidies skip us over. We don't get the 'special zone' treatment. But we aren't rich like Jiangsu or Zhejiang either. We are the middle child, the one nobody pays serious attention to at the family dinner table. I've seen that look on a Shanghai native's face—that slight curl of the lip, that micro-expression of distaste when I tell them where I'm from. To them, we are country bumpkins. They think poverty is a character flaw, accompanying us, a choice we made through laziness or stupidity.

Sure, highways cut through the hills now. The University of Science and Technology stands tall, a gleaming monument to what we could be. But drive ten minutes out of the city centre, past the new developments with their fake Roman columns and glass walls, and the old story picks back up. Crumbling farmhouses. Fields lying fallow. Young men loitering outside pool halls because the factories have moved to Vietnam and Cambodia. We are stuck in the middle. Too poor to be proud, too developed to be pitied. Things are technically 'getting better,' they say. New campuses rise. But this grudging, half-hearted improvement, this trickle-down crumb of the coastal miracle—it can't possibly be the final destination for millions of us.

Complaining solves nothing. Everyone knows that. Absolute equality is a fairy tale for preschoolers. But I've spent three years of high school outworking many privileged people from the east. I don't have their fancy accents or their curated extracurriculars, but my brain moves just as fast. I am not that hard-working, but I shall say I'm quite satisfied about myself.

University awaits, but the major remains a mystery. Computer science? Biology? Engineering? Something I haven't even heard of yet. I'm eighteen. How am I supposed to know what I want to do with the rest of my life? But whatever it is, I'm picking it because it feels like a weapon. These fields belong to the elite, or so they say. Kids raised on private tutors and MacBooks. Jargon designed to shut people like me out before we even open our mouths.

But here's the thing they don't teach you in those fancy prep schools. Formulas don't check your postcode. A poem doesn't care if your father is a farmer or a factory boss. Code, physics, history—the truth stays cold, hard, and indifferent. Work harder. Stay up later. Bleed more ink. Match them. That’s the only fairness left in a world that is otherwise rigged.

The world sells us a narrative: success means leaving. You leave Anhui for Shanghai, then you leave China for America or Europe. Shed your accent, bury your history, forget the taste of the food you grew up with, and become a 'global citizen.' I hate that story. It's a betrayal. The strongest roots grow in the poorest soil. My roots tangle deep in the red clay of Anhui.

That 'embarrassment' of being from nowhere, of having no background, is my edge. Having nothing taught me how to hustle. Being invisible showed me exactly how the system cheats people. Climbing the ladder isn't enough. I want to kick the whole thing over and build a wider one. I want to be the guy who designs the new ladder.

Change doesn't start with a government policy or a new curriculum. It starts with a kid in a dark room, scratching notes onto scrap paper because he ran out of notebooks. It starts with the realization that 'ordinary' is just a trick they play on you to keep you quiet, to keep you in your place.

I don't need sympathy. I don't want your pity. I just want a chair at the table. A chance to prove that the smartest kids in the country aren't all in Beijing or Shanghai. They're in the places you forgot to look. They're in the internet cafés, in the fields, in the back rows of underfunded classrooms, waiting for someone to just throw them the ball.

Education in China is calling.

We are answering.

Bringing my whole self. My exhaustion, which is just another word for determination. My refusal to disappear into the statistical noise. One day, the 'embarrassing provinces' will be known for what we built.

I think about the future a lot. Not only the future of 'China' or the 'Nation,' but more realistically my own future. The blank space after the Gaokao. I imagine myself in a lecture hall, somewhere big. The seats are comfortable. The projector is sharp. The professor is saying words I've only read in books. And for a second, I might feel like I don't belong. Like I'm an imposter who snuck in through the back door.

But then I'll remember the high school life. The rented house. Bike travels between school and home. I feel my strength; it's coming back. That's the change I'm here to make. I still have no idea what I'll study. Maybe I'll figure it out tomorrow, or next week. But I know exactly what I'm fighting for: the right to be complicated. To be more than just a number on a score sheet. To be a person with a history, a grudge, a hope, and a brain that refuses to quit.

The call is echoing. It's not a gentle nudge anymore. It's a shout. And we are shouting back.

Anhui is a mosaic of Chinese dialects. The spectrum ranges widely: Zhongyuan Mandarin, Jianghuai Mandarin, Gan, Wu, and Hui are common across the province, while Min, Hakka, and Shehua persist in isolated pockets. To outsiders, this variety sounds like a chaotic mess of accents. Linguists might call it a living museum. But to me, it is simply the sound of home—a complex, layered, and frequently misunderstood symphony.

These dialects do not exist in isolation. They bleed into one another. Random distribution across the province means the degree of mutual influence creates remarkable diversity. Take my city, Chizhou. Here, you hear Gan, Jianghuai Mandarin, and Wu in the same streets. It is perfectly normal to find three generations at a single dinner table where the grandfather speaks pure Hui dialect, the father speaks a hybrid of Gan and Mandarin, and the child speaks school-standard Mandarin tinged with a local cadence.

This phenomenon is not unique to Anhui. Look at Guangdong. Its Cantonese dialect is so distinct it borders on being a separate language. Yet within Guangzhou itself, natives from different districts pronounce words differently and use varied vocabulary. The Cantonese-speaking world extends beyond Guangdong into Guangxi, Hainan, and the Hong Kong and Macao SARs. And even within Guangdong, numerous other dialects exist. China is a vast nation of 56 peoples. Expecting everyone to speak like a television host delivering 'standard' Mandarin is unrealistic. I advocate for Mandarin proficiency, but advocacy does not require abandoning a dialect that is unique to this world.

Speaking standard Mandarin allows me to navigate the country and explain where I come from. Understanding my dialect allows me to remember who I am when I return. Language functions as a map of identity. When a child in Chizhou says 吃夜饭 (chī yè fàn) instead of 吃晚饭 (chī wǎn fàn), or pronounces 家 (home) as gā instead of jiā, they are not committing a linguistic error. They are inheriting a rhythm of life passed down through generations. When an old man in Huangshan hums a folk song in the Hui dialect, he preserves a melody that exists nowhere else on earth.

The story extends beyond mere words. The dialects of Anhui are inextricably linked to the region's customs, its food, and its very soil. Losing the dialect means losing the context for the traditions that thrive within it.

Consider the topography. Anhui presents stark contrasts: the floodplains of Huaibei, the rolling hills of the Jianghuai, and the peaks of the Dabie Mountains. Each geographical zone breeds a distinct way of life, preserved through ritual. In northern Anhui, where the plains are wide and wheat is the staple, life follows the tempo of the harvest. The dialect here is blunt, direct, and loud—reflecting farmers shouting across the fields. The customs are robust and communal. During the Spring Festival, the air fills with smoke from burning mugwort and the roar of firecrackers. The Huaibei Flower-Drum Lamps (Huagudeng) are explosive, rhythmic declarations of vitality performed in the local tongue, a language that resists the softness of the south.

Cross the Yangtze southward, and the landscape shifts again. In the mountainous regions of southern Anhui, particularly in the ancient villages of Xidi and Hongcun, life moves to a different beat. This is the heartland of Huizhou culture. The dialect here is softer, more melodic, its tones rising and falling like mist over the peaks. The architecture—the horse-head walls (Matouqiang) and intricate wood carvings—speaks of a people who valued education, commerce, and filial piety.

In these villages, customs are subtle, refined, and tied to the land. The tradition of Worshipping the Kitchen God (Baoshen) involves specific incantations recited in the local Hui dialect. The custom of drinking Huizhou tea uses tiny cups and a strict etiquette governing how to hold the cup and tap the table in thanks. These rituals form the operating system of a society that maintained ecological balance and social harmony for centuries. Houses built according to Feng Shui principles, using local materials, were designed to last hundreds of years. Modern urban planning is only now beginning to rediscover this sophisticated form of sustainable living.

Then there is the food—the ultimate expression of cultural identity. Anhui cuisine (Hui Cai) ranks among the Eight Great Cuisines of China, yet it remains the least understood. It focuses on the alchemy of fire and time. Dishes like Li Hongzhang Hotchpotch or Stewed Soft-shelled Turtle with Ham arose from the necessity of preserving food in a mountainous, humid climate. Smoking, salting, braising—these techniques passed down through families, taught not via Mandarin cookbooks, but in kitchens, through the spoken word, through the dialect.

The tragedy of modern development lies in forgetting the old while learning the new. In the age of artificial intelligence, we train machines to understand hundreds of languages, yet we allow human tongues to fall silent. If an algorithm can recognize Cantonese, Wu, or Shehua, then surely a society can afford to let its people speak them without shame.

This brings us to the field of Artificial Intelligence. We live in an era obsessed with optimisation, efficiency, and standardisation. We train AI models to write essays, diagnose diseases, and drive cars. But examine the data we feed these machines. It consists mostly of English, sometimes Mandarin, generally reflecting the dominant narratives of the global north and coastal elites. The dataset for a farmer's dialect in Fuyang is missing. The folk songs of the She people are absent from the training sets. There is no algorithm that understands why a village in Anhui chooses to orient its houses toward a specific direction.

If we are not careful, AI will become the ultimate tool of homogenisation. It will speak perfect Mandarin, but it will fail to grasp why a Chizhou native might hesitate before saying 'I love you' directly, preferring instead to show affection through a bowl of soup.

China's strength has never come from uniformity. It stems from its vastness—its capacity to hold contradictions, differences, and local truths within a single civilisation. Speaking only one kind of 'correct' language flattens a mountain range into a parking lot. Protecting dialects is not an act of resisting progress; it ensures that when we arrive at the future, we do not arrive alone, having forgotten the roads that brought us here.

Consider the students from underdeveloped places, the ones waiting for opportunities. Their value is not limited to their potential to become standardized cogs in the national economy. A student who grew up listening to Huaiguo opera in the north possesses a different sense of rhythm and narrative structure than a student raised on classical poetry in Hefei. The student who helped harvest tea leaves in the misty mountains of Huangshan understands patience and the relationship between labour and reward in a way no textbook can replicate.

Discussions about 'education reform' or 'bridging the gap' often focus on providing these students with the same textbooks, the same exams, the same opportunities to become 'standard.' But what if the goal should not be standardisation? What if the real opportunity is to bring these non-standard experiences into the centre of the conversation?

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), one of the biggest challenges involves understanding context, sarcasm, and cultural nuance. A machine can translate 'It's raining cats and dogs' literally and miss the point. Likewise, it can read a Chinese poem about 'missing home' but fail to comprehend the visceral homesickness that strikes a migrant worker from Anhui upon hearing his village dialect over a crackly phone line. A background rooted in dialect and custom is not a disadvantage to overcome. It is a dataset, or a feature.

So yes, let us promote Mandarin. Let us build high-speed rails and 5G networks. Let us train AI to solve climate change and cure diseases.

But we must leave room for the sounds that do not fit the broadcast standard.

Sometimes, the most important things are not said in perfect Mandarin.

They are whispered in dialects, in kitchens, in villages, in accents that refuse to disappear. They are encoded in the way a grandmother folds a dumpling, in how a farmer predicts the weather by observing the shape of a cloud, in the way a community repairs a bridge after a storm. These are the algorithms of resilience. These are the codes that have kept civilisations alive through famine, war, and revolution.

Let the dialects live. Let the customs breathe. Let the 'embarrassing provinces' speak. Within their voices, we may hear not just echoes of the past, but solutions to the problems of tomorrow.

East Asia is famous for its overpopulation. There is, of course, no denial that a larger population boosts business, but too many people bring about intense competitions. Job markets become fiercely cutthroat, as countless graduates chase a limited number of desirable positions, forcing young people to invest excessive time and energy in endless academic and vocational training merely to stand out. Meanwhile, resources ranging from high-quality educational institutions to affordable housing fall short of public demand, pushing living costs to a soaring level and weighing heavy pressure on ordinary families. What’s worse, cutthroat rivalry often breeds impetuous social mindsets: many individuals fixate on immediate success rather than long-term self-development, ignoring personal well-being and inner peace amid the rat race.

Growing up in a densely populated region, every individual is born into an unspoken, perpetual rivalry that penetrates every stage of growth. No one is exempt from the race, and no one can afford prolonged slackness. Long-term immersion in such an environment fosters a unique collective mindset: we grow accustomed to constant self-improvement, yet also carry lingering weariness from endless comparison. We understand that diligence is not a personal choice, but a social norm woven into the fabric of East Asian life, where surplus population turns every ordinary progress into a hard-won breakthrough.

Critics often simplify East Asia’s social anxiety as a direct product of large population size, arguing that dense crowds inevitably breed fierce competition and widespread involution. This judgement, however, is overly one-sided. Population density itself is never a flaw. It fuels bustling commerce, robust cultural exchange, sufficient labour supply, and vibrant social vitality—all of which have underpinned East Asia’s long-standing economic prosperity. The real root of excessive competition lies not in population quantity, but in the saturation of development tracks and the homogenized growth path that the whole society follows. When countless individuals chase the same limited goals under a unified developmental logic, population advantage naturally transforms into competitive pressure. East Asian societies have long fallen into a paradox of unified, single-dimensional competition. Influenced by demographic saturation, most people follow identical life trajectories: excel in academic examinations, secure stable and high-quality careers, and pursue standardized life success. This singular evaluation system leaves little room for diversified growth and personalized development. Every year, a huge number of young people step onto the same competitive track, striving for similar resources and opportunities. The sheer volume of participants continuously raises the threshold of success, making ordinary progress increasingly difficult and turning daily efforts into repetitive, exhaustive internal consumption.

What makes East Asia’s competitive atmosphere most thought-provoking is its universal, inescapable nature. It is a collective rhythm that envelops every member of society. The whole society advocates diligence, perseverance and self-struggle, conveying a consistent belief that progress comes from unremitting effort. Yet under the pressure of population saturation, even consistent effort can only maintain one’s original position, rather than bringing tangible breakthroughs. Everyone keeps running, working harder, and sacrificing more time and energy, but the overall competitive landscape never improves. This is the core of East Asian involution—a tireless race with no real finish line.

Still, this rigorous, high-pressure competitive environment also forges the unique spiritual temperament of East Asian youth. Sustained rivalry teaches us to be disciplined, persistent and self-aware. We learn to resist inertia, embrace steady progress, and tolerate long-term hardship in the process of growing up. Unlike the casual growth mode in sparsely populated regions, our growth is accompanied by constant self-polishing and iterative improvement. Population pressure does not crush us; it shapes our resilience, cultivates our rigorous mindset, and lets us understand that all valuable progress requires long-term accumulation and unremitting persistence.

We do not deny the intensity of population-driven competition, nor do we reject the positive value brought by such a social atmosphere. What we pursue is to break free from blind, homogeneous involution and embrace a more diverse, rational competitive ecology. A dense population should not be a source of endless internal friction, but a driving force for diversified social progress. When society opens up more developmental paths, respects multiple forms of success, and encourages personalized growth, massive population resources can be transformed into innovative vitality, rather than mere competitive pressure.

The future of East Asian society does not have to be a zero-sum game driven by population saturation and blind competition. It can be an inclusive field where diverse growth and mutual progress coexist. Population density is an inherent feature of East Asian society, carrying both historical prosperity and contemporary challenges. Fierce competition is not an inevitable dead end, but a transitional state of social development. As society gradually optimizes its developmental structure, expands diverse growth channels, and abandons single-dimensional evaluation standards, the intense competition brought by dense population will eventually shift from internal consumption to mutual motivation. In the end, every persistent effort will be meaningful, every personalized pursuit will be respected, and the huge demographic vitality of East Asia will fully burst forth to fuel more sustainable and inclusive social progress.

Disclaimer: These pieces were drafted originally by the author in English and subsequently polished with the help of AI.

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