From 2004 to 2015, the number of Chinese students enrolled in US high schools spiked, rising from 433 to 43,000. This has led to more demand for host families that will take in these students, usually younger than 18, and serve as their legal guardians in return for a monthly stipend.

But even as the numbers continue to swell, many Chinese students are finding that their stay abroad isn’t quite what they are looking for as lifestyle and cultural differences are causing conflicts between themselves and their host families.

Chloe Cai, 16, has stayed with three host families over three years. Cai complained that her first two host families wouldn’t meet her requirements for meals to be served punctually and her need for privacy. As Global Times reported, Cai preferred to stay by herself in her own room instead of spending time with her host family, a preference of a majority of Chinese students.

“I guess one reason we could not get along was they thought I did not like them and hated communicating with them,” said Cai, who accepted the awkwardness of staying with a host family as part of the experience of studying abroad. “Most of my friends, like me, did not enjoy their life with their host families because we could not understand but have to live with some of their habits,” she said.

Kathy, 15, complained she “always felt hungry” because her host family didn’t properly feed her. “The lunch I take to school is two pieces of bread with one hotdog, one apple, one tin of juice, and several crackers,” she said. “It has never changed for a hundred years! And the vegetable I have had for the past two months is forever cauliflower!”

Complaints from Chinese students about their host families go back years. In 2007, 20 to 30 percent of students were dissatisfied with their host families, according to one agency that placed Chinese students. Most of the complaints are about distance to school, food and cultural barriers.

On the other hand, host families also have complaints about Chinese students. Christina James, who has hosted three Chinese students, said Chinese students don’t say “thank you” often, usually stay in their rooms, and did not make the first move when communicating. “They are more introverted compared with our kids. Maybe it’s because they are raised in a more reserved culture,” she said.

Just last year, one host family in South Carolina initiated a backlash against Chinese overseas students by calling them “very difficult to serve” and “little kings”. The exchange students were described as having poor living habits such as not washing their own dishes after having meals, not sweeping their own mess on the floor, not keeping an eye on their food when cooking, and not greeting people.

One popular option is for Chinese students to seek out Chinese host families so that cultural differences can be reduced.

However, the trend of younger Chinese students heading overseas to study is also seeing them more at risk for health and crime issues.

Chinese students are prone to suffer from insomnia and clinical depression when they encounter culture shock, academic pressure and communication difficulties in a different country, said Qiu Yan, a US-based lawyer who has handled a number of suicide cases involving Chinese exchange students.

A Chinese student who went abroad to study at the age of 15, Gao Ran, said, “I think that everybody is going abroad at too young an age, just at that delicate time during maturity when they need the discipline and restrictions of a mother and father. People my age will sometimes engage in copycat behavior that is not healthy.”

Exacerbating the conflict between students and their host families is that homestay services largely operates without oversight. A significant number of students who find homestay families do so without going through certified school boards or agencies.

“There’s nobody who oversees it,” says Geoff Best, director of the Ottawa International Student Program of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. Meanwhile, Brenda St. Jean, a senior executive officer from Canada Homestay International, called it “an unregulated industry.”

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Since 2003, the Ministry of Education has enrolled minority students from underprivileged areas in West China as a way to redistribute educational resources to poorer regions. Students who take the gaokao in larger urban centers are generally believed to have an advantage over applicants from other parts of the country, due to better educational resources.

Protests against the gaokao affirmative action have also been taking place in Jiangsu, Hubei, and Beijing, where one school has gone online to announce they were deeply “disappointed” with the “irrational behaviors” of parents who “misunderstood the admission policy”.

The High School affiliated with the Minzu University of China announced its minority students would continue to share the ethnic minority quota for the gaokao until 2018.

Han majority parents are angered by the preferential treatment, alleging that their children are missing out. Xiong Kunxin, an ethnic studies professor at Minzu University, said Han majority protesters don’t understand the disadvantages minority students face, citing a lack of teachers and English classes that aren’t provided until high school.

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The brawl took place last week at Fanji middle school in Mengcheng County, Anhui. A male student is seen facing off against a substitute teacher during English class. The student, defiantly unwilling to hand in his test paper, approaches the teacher. The teacher grabs the student’s throat, forcing him back when all hell breaks loose.

A number of male students rush the teacher, pushing him back into a corner and proceed to punch and kick him. When the short flurry of attacks subside, the teacher again confronts the student who refused to hand in his paper, and slaps him.

This prompts another wave of attacks by the students, some of them wielding impromptu weapons, while the student that was choked hits the teacher with a small stool. Again, the teacher confronts the student, and gives him another slap.

This causes another wave of attacks by the students. When the barrage concludes, the teacher emerges with his shirt torn and attempts to regain control of the class when the video abruptly ends.

The principal of the middle school has been suspended. No word on what happened to the teacher. Local police and education officials are cooperating in a joint investigation.

Here’s the video:

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During the recent cold snap that sent temperatures plummeting throughout China, five men went streaking at Wuhan’s Huazhong Agricultural University as a way to “cleanse their souls”.

The men ran a two kilometer stretch down a main road in Wuhan. The streakers explained their motives in a Weibo post:

We hope that by doing this we can commemorate our youth. By running through the falling snow, we are able to cleanse our souls.

The streak was organized by 30 year-old Liu Jiusi, who first went streaking as a 20 year-old university student. When asked about exposing himself in public, Liu said that his motives were “completely pure”. In fact, Liu said they were more afraid of meeting a woman during the run. “If a woman should appear on the road, we would hide in the two cars  following us,” further adding that the streakers “don’t want to offend public morals.”

As seen in the photographs, at least one of the streakers was not fully naked, opting to wear shorts.

University streaking has become a traditional rite of passage for many Chinese students in recent years. Streaking in China is different than in Western cultures, in that it typically happens in public places during times when there are no people around to offend, and the participants are predominantly male.

In 2014, graduating students from Nanchang University went streaking in the middle of traffic the night before graduation, while a number of onlookers gathered in support.

Despite support for university streaking, public obscenity is still a crime in China, and is punishable by administrative detention of between five and ten days.

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Did they, or didn’t they have plastic surgery? That’s the question being asked at Wanli University in Zhejiang as ten former students’ grad photos were substantially different from the photos from their third year of high school.

There are many reasons that could explain the radical change: a loss of weight, make-up, a change of clothes or hairstyle. And yet, despite the implausibility of a university having the time and money to withdraw from their studies, another possible explanation is plastic surgery. One the one hand, that may sound insulting, but on the other hand that could be a roundabout way of explaining the unbelievable transformation by which adolescence blossoms into adulthood.

Here are the transformations so that you can judge for yourself. Is it just growing up, or is it plastic surgery? We’re not sure, but we think longer hair with bangs and turning up the contrast on Photoshop may have to do with it:

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Prompted by an anonymous tip to police alleging that a number of 18 to 20 year old students at Beijing’s Midi School of Music were routinely smoking marijuana, police raided the school and took urine samples from the students in question.

According to media reports, between two and three hundred students, all male, were tested. Of the 16 arrested, most returned to school the following day, however Shanghai Daily reported that three students were detained for three days.

In a letter released late last week, the school apologized for failing to adequately supervise the students. The letter advised that local police are treating students leniently as they are first-time drug offenders who are all “sincere in their regret over the incident”. The letter went on to say that, “Students taking marijuana is definitely not good, but we have to give them chances to rectify their mistakes … music is a good cure”.

The Beijing Midi School of Music is China’s first music school devoted to modern music styles like rock and jazz. Founded in 1993, the school later spawned the popular annual Midi Music Festival held in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.

Zhang said the raid would not affect the festival as drugs are strictly forbidden at the event.

China has undergone a strict crackdown on illegal drug use that has hit the entertainment industry hard, culminating in the arrests of several celebrities, the latest of which is 46 year-old singer Yin Xiangjie who was arrested for the second time two weeks ago for illegally possessing and taking drugs.

Wu Xin, head of the drug control bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, said there are more than 38,000 drug addicts under the age of 18 in China and nearly 1.9 million between 18 and 35.

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At Wednesday’s press conference, the Commission did not address what it was doing to encourage high risk groups to be tested, or what plans it had to increase awareness of HIV and AIDS among the general public.

The raise in HIV is not unique to Shanghai. According to the China Association of STD and AIDS Prevention and Control, last year HIV cases across China rose 15 percent, to 104,000.

Meanwhile, the rate of HIV transmission has continued to spread at an alarming rate among students in Guangzhou, according to the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Students made up almost four percent of all new cases last year, while they only accounted for 0.74 percent back in 2002.

China’s National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention last year estimated that as many as 810,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS in the country, including those who have not yet been diagnosed.

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The announcement comes after a successful pilot program held at ten of the province’s universities and colleges this past March.

At least one condom machine will be installed at each of the 128 post-secondary schools in Zhejiang over the next year. Students will be able to get a free box of condoms by swiping their student ID card on the machine, which presumably will make their identity known. As such, it’s unclear how many will use the free condoms.

Zhejiang health and family planning official Li Danhe admitted that it wasn’t easy trying to persuade parents to go along with the plan. “Some colleges said they were concerned such a move would encourage sex and would incur opposition and complaints from students’ parents,” said Li.

Further south, the rate of HIV infection is skyrocketing among university students in Guangzhou, growing at an annual rate of 46 percent. This increase is reflected in the national rate, especially in cases involving “male-to-male” sexual transmission.

Meanwhile, China’s younger generation have shown themselves to be considerably less prudish than their parents when it comes to pre-marital sex. A Ministry of Education survey from this past June shows that some 60 percent of respondents say they approve of sex before marriage, while only 16 percent are against.

However, sex education and awareness programs in Chinese universities have faced resistance for some time now. In 2004, Peking University called off plans to hand out free condoms on World AIDS Day because school administrators feared it would encourage students to have sex.

Despite this progressive plan, educational institutions in China still don’t appear to be reforming their conservative attitudes towards sex. Recently, a Xi’an, Shaanxi college has face controversy online for forcing its female students to sign a chastity pledge to refrain from pre-marital sex, while a Jilin school was reported to ban students from public displays of affection such as feeding each other in the school cafeteria.

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On September 19, test results of 357 Chinese students writing the Upper Level Secondary School Admission Test were rejected. Similarly, Chinese students writing the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) in August and September were informed last month by the British Council that their scores would be “withheld indefinitely”.

Reports have shown that Chinese students taking these, and other tests like it, consistently score extremely high, with some students even attaining perfect scores.

Although the Secondary School Admission Test Board (SSATB) and the British Council are reluctant to release specific details for the refusal to accept the test scores, Chinese tutoring experts suspect the decision is a result of the common Chinese practice of rote memorization of test answers in advance.

Yanding US-China Education founder, Gao Yanding, said Chinese students normally prepare for tests by memorizing answers shared online by students who have already taken the test.

“In Western countries, such practice is seen as strongly breaching test rules and challenging the integrity of tests, because it’s unfair to those who don’t have related resources,” Gao said. “But in China, nobody thinks it’s illegal or immoral because Chinese students also deploy this approach to prepare for gaokao, or the national college entrance exams.”

Hu Min, the president of an English-language tutorial agency in China, said that Chinese students memorize test answers to gain a competitive advantage when applying to prestigious schools abroad: “…some tutorial classes in China, in order to gain publicity and profit, help students to spot test questions,” said Hu.

David Payne, Vice-President and COO of the American based Educational Testing Service’s Higher Education Division, admits the company is well aware of the practice of Chinese students to share exam questions.

Ma Xiaoming, director of Beijing Language and Culture University’s Pre-departure Training Department, said the incidents should serve as a wake-up call. “They should prepare international tests in a correct way – sharpening their language and learning skills, rather than spotting or memorizing questions,” said Ma.

Gao also warned of the downsides of a Chinese student who is able to successfully gain admittance to an international school using these techniques. “If they pass the tests and gain admission to their dream schools using such improper approaches, they won’t be able to survive if they are academically incapable,” he said.

An estimated three percent of Chinese foreign exchange students enrolled at US schools – or about 8,000 – were dismissed from their studies last year, according to a report released in June by WholeRen Education.

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Taken by 357 students on September 19 in Shanghai and Beijing, the Secondary School Admission Test Board (SSATB) cancelled all scores because “there are reasonable grounds to question the validity of the test scores from this administration”. The SSATB does not explain the reason for cancelling the scores, but parents’ of the students have revealed their children have gotten extremely high marks that include flawless scores.

Seventy percent of a training class from Shenzhen that took part in the test received the full 2400 points. One person said “Out of 10 people I know, the lowest was 2,292, the highest was 2,400, and eight people got over 2300.”

According to Beijing Times, Chinese students’ scores are frequently under suspicion because they perform much better than their American counterparts.

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