Writing a good essay is not easy, especially when it has the power to change your life. Like every year at this time, Chinese people are chatting about the essay topics that have come up in the college entrance exams that began on Thursday.

 

"The topic in Fujian this year is Seasons. It's pretty vague. We can write in any style we choose, an argument, an essay, a poem," said Zheng Yanghua, one of 9.5 million Chinese students that took part in the national college entrance exam, the largest of its kind in the world.

 

"I compared human life to the four seasons," he said at the gate of Fuzhou Luoyuan First Middle School in east China's Fujian Province.

 

Essay topics in China's college entrance exams mirror the changes that have taken place in Chinese society over the past 30 years since the exams were reinstated in 1977.

 

Huang Shangjin, who was only 20 in 1977, remembered the essay topic that year was The Most Exciting Moment.

 

He wrote what he saw and felt after hearing that the "Gang of Four" had been arrested in October 1976, marking the end of the Cultural Revolution.

 

"On the night of 6 October no one in my city could sleep. Every family was out celebrating. If the Gang of Four hadn't been stopped we could never have gone to college," said 50-year-old Huang, who is now a senior engineer.

 

In 1977 the topic for Beijing students was My Past Year of Combat.

 

"It wasn't a test of Chinese literature but a political exam," Huang said.

 

He was a worker in a printing factory in east China's Jiangxi Province before the exam and thought that he might never have a chance to do anything else.

 

In 1985 candidate Ma Lin'e was challenged to "write a letter to a newspaper to call for a clean-up of environmental pollution." Ma wrote well enough to realize his dream to be able to enter a military college and then join the army.

 

Ma said pollution was already a problem in some areas in the 1980s due to industrial development.

 

"The essay topic reflected the preoccupations of the period. In the 1980s, rapid development of industry started to affect the environment, and people got alarmed," Ma said.

 

As the end of the century drew near, China shifted its attention to creativity.

 

In 1999, the topic was Transplanting Memories, which caused a nationwide discussion because science magazine Science Fiction World had solicited essays on the same topic before the examination.

 

"The science fiction-flavored topic was not a coincidence but a reflection of the age," said Yao Haijun, chief editor of Science Fiction World.

 

Yao said rapid economic development had drawn attention to science and technical know-how. Science fiction became very popular, especially among young people, at that time.

 

"The topic focused the attention of the nation's youth, and indeed the whole country, on science and the future," Yao said.

 

The 2003 exam asked students to write an essay discussing how people's relationships determine their views, recalled Zhang Ke, a graduate of Xi'an International Studies University.

 

"It gave us much more room to express our ideas," said Zhang Ke, who has just returned from the US as an exchange student.

 

To summarize, college entrance examination topics were political in the 1970s, more exploratory in the 1980s, and more imaginative in the 1990s, said Lin Yuanda, a middle school teacher from Fujian Province who took the college entrance exam in 1997.

 

The college entrance exam is a key event in Chinese young people's lives which can radically affect their future in a fiercely competitive society.

 

(Xinhua News Agency June 8, 2007)