A high school from Madrid invites me to talk about the university to the students who are now finishing the high school diploma. While in the days before my lecture I am thinking about what I can tell them, I get my hands on a Sunday supplement of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, monographically dedicated to China. Within the pages dealing with Education meeting an interview with Cui Yue, a student of International Office and Economics at the elite Beijing University. Cui Yue is twenty years old and comes from the small town of Ziyang, Sichuan province, in the west of the country. His father is an anesthesiologist and his mother is a civil servant. With these parents, it is clear that she is an only child, in compliance with the law. As is well known, the educational system in China is extremely competitive and selective. Cui Yue stands out as a good student since she was a child, which allows her access to the best qualified schools. At the age of fifteen she leaves her family home and moves to the provincial capital, Chengdu, to finish high school teaching at a demanding boarding school, which will allow her to enter the most prestigious universities. Cui Yue has ambition, and is one of the 400,000 candidates from her province who take the Admissions Office exam at Beijing University each year. One hundred are admitted, and our student is ranked 40th in this exclusive ranking.

Being in is a triumph, but there is no time to get complacent and let your guard down. Cui Yue works fifteen hours a day, between classes, study and the time dedicated to AISEC, the international student association Economics , of whose delegation in Beijing he is a member. "work is pretty hard," she admits simply. But his life is not all about books, as he also cultivates personal hobbies. When asked where he finds the time for everything, he replies that he doesn't sleep nine hours a day, so there is room for other things. Her family finances the expenses involved in studying in Beijing, but there is no money to spare either and austerity is imposed: Cui Yue shares a ten-square-meter room with three roommates from programs of study, and travels home to be with her relatives once or twice a year at the most. The degree program of her daughter is the main goal of her parents, to which they subordinate everything else, but they have to limit themselves to follow it from a distance. Cui Yue is still not sure what she will do when she graduates. Above all, she wants to succeed, and at the moment she is attracted by the idea of working in international organizations and traveling the world.

What relevance does the biographical background of someone like Cui Yue have for our high school or university students? After reading a few paragraphs of the interview to these Madrid students, I show them the photograph of Cui Yue that accompanies the text: a pleasant, smiling young woman, with her student backpack on her back. -Look carefully, I tell them. It is quite possible that in a few years she will be your boss. This will only be avoided if you are able to work as hard or harder than she does. Do you see yourselves in a position to do so? The Madrilenian baccalaureate students remain silent, pensive. They consider it very difficult, almost impossible. Some even question whether this subject of existence is desirable: there are other things in life, apart from studying or working. Rather than living to work, it would be a matter of working to live. I grant them a good part of reason: it would be necessary to clarify with Cui Yue what exactly "succeeding in life" means; in his interview there is no space to go as deeply as necessary into this important question. But I try to make them see that without effort and persevering dedication they will not achieve their goals, even if they have them: reports on Spanish youth show that a considerable issue of young people are paralyzed, without special projects for their lives, pushed by inertia and installed in "presentism": carpe diem as an existential horizon, and not only for leisure time. It is most disturbing that the new category of "ni ni" (those who neither study nor work) includes between 500,000 and 700,000 young people, depending on the different programs of study. Adults are certainly behaving hypocritically when they flatter youth and, at the same time, do not provide them with access to decent housing and work , but young people could show more spirit of initiative. Quite a few of them are superbly prepared, almost as much as Cui Yue, and nothing prevents them from becoming managers of their own lives, without waiting for the State or society in general to solve their problems.