Summer camps feel the heat

"With a cool 10,000 kuai ($1,578), you can change your life in 10 days." The summer camp adverts certainly sound appealing. Each year, thousands of Chinese teenagers attend American summer camps to get a taste of life in a foreign country and broaden their horizons.

For 15-year-old Lü Qichao, now a junior student at Wardlaw-Hartridge High School, a private school located in New Jersey, told the Global Times that the summer camp he attended abroad two years ago was not really "life-changing," besides finding a girlfriend.

"It was a 15-day trip, but we only spent three days in school (the one he is attending now), the rest was just sightseeing, shopping and gaming," he said.

He said he could not remember what Hollywood and Disneyland were like, the only memory that has kept haunting him was that of a teacher asking him a question 14 times before he understood. "It was so embarrassing that I wished the ground could open and swallow me up," he said.

Summer camps abroad have become increasingly fashionable in China. Chinese parents pour money into sending their kids to become familiar with foreign countries, mainly the UK and the US.

The number of Chinese students studying abroad reached 1.42 million at the end of 2011, with the total growing at a fair clip of 23 percent over the last three years, according to the Ministry of Education. The idea behind these summer camps was to provide Chinese teenagers with a competitive edge at home, and prepare them for going to study in university overseas in later years.

With the growing middle class and rich families in the country, more and more parents can afford to send their children abroad for further study. Travel agents, study abroad firms and even high schools are all circling for a whiff of the high profits that can be reaped from these cash-rich and experience-hungry families.

Bang for their buck

Chinese parents are usually the ones pushing their children to go and they have high expectations for these summer camps. They worry their children are having too much fun or are spending too little time studying, while their peers spend their summers in extra classes or being tutored.

"I have to carefully weigh up the decision for my daughter, it matters if she can actually learn something from the experience," Lei Junling, a mother of a 12-year-old girl who just came back from a summer camp in Tibet, told the Global Times.

Ling Sheng, a high school teacher in Beijing, takes her students to summer camps abroad every year. She said she has to plan the trip carefully in order to determine just how much "fun" the students should have.

"Absolutely no shopping, that is for sure," she told the Global Times. "The goal is for the students to be motivated to study harder after the trip."

However, she added that outings such as Disneyland could have educational purposes, such as helping students practice their communication skills.

"For example, Disneyland staff will explain to the kids why they are not allowed to bring glass bottles inside, because some kids run barefoot and might get hurt. While at home, the Chinese staff don't even bother to explain these things," she said. Along with 15 around of her students, she joined a two-week summer camp in Europe in August.

Sheng Chongshan, 15, went along for the ride and came back envious of European students. "Many of them can dress casually and wear accessories in school, while we have to wear uniforms all the time," she said.

The prices for such summer camps abroad can vary from 10,000 to 40,000 yuan, much higher than a high-school student's annual tuition fee of 1,600 yuan. Teachers like Ling are targeted by some agents to drum up more students to attend and take a slice of the fee.

The Southern Weekly quoted an industry insider, as saying that teachers or headmasters can get commissions for "recommending" students for the summer camps.

"We used to throw money at headmasters or give commissions to teachers, now we help them to 'solve some problems' instead, such as helping them find better schools or jobs for their children," the insider said, mentioning that the commissions usually reach 3,000 yuan for every child successfully recommended.

"Therefore we can't really trust the agencies," Ling said. "I know some of them have camps that do nothing but give student English names and take them to the zoo."

Parents are now demanding more targeted and focused summer camp activities, such as touring the campuses of famous universities to motivate their children to study harder.

However, many campus tours of famous US institutions are organized by Chinese overseas travel agencies, which have no educational background, according to the newspaper.

Xia Qingqing, a student at the Renmin University of China who volunteered to work in a summer camp, told the Global Times that the kids and their parents were not on the same page.

"The so-called campus tours of famous universities are appealing to many parents, but kids easily get bored. Some asked me on the first day when we were going to go shopping," she said.

"They didn't seem very interested in the history and architecture on campus, I wasn't sure how motivated they were, but they were running out of patience."

Going into the wild

Frustrated by the high costs and low deliveries of agencies, some people like Yan Kai, editor of Guangdong-based Children magazine, have started their own summer camp.

"I am not sure how meaningful those summer camps abroad are, many parents just don't want their children to be left behind," Yang told the Global Times.

Yan's idea came four years ago when he met a college student in Tibet who said she wanted to travel with her parents instead of leaving them for camps. Yan felt touched and decided to combine both his teenage daughter's education needs and his desire to show her around the country.

Since 2011, Yan has organized 10 summer and winter camps for children around his daughter's age to travel around the country. This summer, he took 10 teenagers to see the Yalu Zangbu River in Tibet, including a two-day hike through a gorge.　

"About 98 percent of people will choose to take a bus to get there, we are the 2 percent. Only when the children learn how to rely on no one but themselves can they grow up," Yan said. "The kids learned how to help each other to overcome the challenges together."

He described himself as a "spiritual guide" for the kids. He planned the routes carefully to make sure these urban-dwelling children could discover things they had never seen in cities, which he sees as just as valuable as what they could learn in traditional summer camps. He offers up these manners of camps as competing with the more traditional classroom-driven offerings that most parents choose. Yan does not deny the utility of said camps, but believes he offers a way for young people to develop sides of themselves that are usually starved in the very exam-focused Chinese education system.

"When we were standing in front of the river, I told them to observe its rapid flow, I told them that as the river twists and turns, it never goes back but keeps moving forward, just like our lives," he said.

Yan was not sure if the teenagers could understand what he meant. At the time, spiritual reflections on the nature of existence did not seem like a priority.

"They looked at me and then asked if they could go down to swim," he said. "Well, I hope they can remember that moment later in their lives."

Learning to live

After they got back to the city, Yan held a seminar. All the children were asked to share their feelings about the trip.　

Chen Xinyue, 12, one of the two girls who joined the Tibet camp, told the Global Times that she enjoyed both the fun and hardship of the trip.

She found the living conditions horrible, with smelly bathrooms, no hot water and dirty bed-sheets. Kids slept with their clothes on for which Yan fielded calls from some unhappy parents.

But the children themselves seemed to bounce back. "We had a meeting every evening to talk about what we had shared together, before playing some games and telling ghost stories," said Chen. Yan lamented that some of the more spoiled kids took little out of the experience and returned very happily to their old ways and the generous wallets of their parents.

But Chen's mother, Lei Junling, noticed a change in her daughter after she got back.

"She used to ask to sleep in my room, now she says she doesn't need me anymore," she laughed. "I feel like she grew up overnight. I was also told that she took care of other kids on the road, and they became good friends. That is very comforting," she said.

Lei said her co-workers all thought she was crazy sending her daughter to a "wild" summer camp in Tibet, while other children went abroad.

Sun Yunxiao, a professor at China's Teenager Research Center, is calling for the creation of a regulatory commission to supervise summer camps.

"The kids go to a foreign country to stay in a luxury hotel, eat and shop, they are turning the teenagers' summer camp into one for adults," he told the Yangchen Evening News.

Yan said his personal summer camp is getting increasingly popular and that some travel agencies want to cooperate with him. However, he declined to team up with them, saying that these links are what put parents off summer camps. He prefers parents coming straight to him.

"We talk, we share parenting experiences and we plan the trip together," he said. "They know I will take good care of their children."