The mostly male youth who turn to virtual realms find there a place to realize ambitions that are frustrated in real life, says Kimberly Young, a psychologist and Internet addiction expert who has advised Chinese therapists. "With the click of a button, they go from a 19-year-old with no social life to a great warrior in World of Warcraft," Young says. "Why bother doing things in the real world when they can be in this game and be fulfilled?" Burnt-out and overtaxed, even kids who did well on the gao kao turn into virtual dropouts, choosing the respite of computer games over the university spots they worked so hard to win. Without a parent to push them, many stop going to class. "In Chinese universities, so many just give up," says Howe, a college student from Chengdu.
Faced with bleak prospects, elite only children often don't know how to cope; they've been brought up to do only one thing: succeed. Indeed, in a 2007 survey on stress in young people by the Chinese Internet portal Sina.com, most respondents—56 percent—blamed their misery on the gap between China's developing-world reality and their own high expectations. "They have trouble adjusting to the idea that they're going to be working-class," says Fong.
For the frustrated, depressed, and anxious Chinese kids buckling under the constant pressure—the news agency Xinhua estimates there are 30 million Chinese under 17 with significant mental-health problems—finding someone to talk to can be tough. Taught to strive and achieve from an early age, they've never had the time for heart-to-heart chats. "It's not like American universities where you have many friends," says Yu Zeng. "At Chinese universities, you compete for limited resources and everyone is concerned about themselves. And if you wanted to talk to your parents, they wouldn't understand. When they were your age, they were reading Mao's little red book." Plus, the conversation would be strained even if you did find a sympathetic ear. "In the 20th century, the term 'depression' didn't even exist in China," Toni Falbo says. "It couldn't be talked about because there was no vocabulary for it yet."
Nor is professional help readily available. When Mao cracked down on intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, he decimated the nation's already thin psychological establishment. "Back then, every mental problem was seen as anti-socialist," says Kaiping Peng, a University of California Berkeley professor who was among the first generation of Chinese psychologists to receive formal clinical training, in the late 1970s. "If you were depressed, they thought you were politically impure and sent you to a labor camp." For decades, Chinese psychiatrists dealt exclusively in pills and electroshock, and until recently, China had just a handful of university psychology programs—which is why Peng believes there are only about 2,000 qualified therapists at work there today for a population of 1.3 billion.
But as universities work to churn out qualified psychologists and as teens and twentysomethings realize they need more help with their unrealistic expectations than with their grades, Peng grows optimistic. "People in China have more knowledge about mental health today," he says. "Now there are books and popular magazines about it, and the training infrastructure gets better all the time." Cities are also experimenting with crisis hotlines. China's inaugural suicide-prevention line debuted in 2003; it received more than 220,000 calls over its first two years.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials are taking steps to ease the pressure on young students. Schools no longer publicly announce each student's exam scores and class rank, for one, and the government is also asking parents to let their precious little emperors actually play every once in a while.
Besides, all of that studying can only take you so far. "On your resume, you can't put, '1988 to 2001: studied 10 hours every day,' " laughs Howe, the Chengdu student. "You have to actually do stuff."
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