What Do China’s Best & Brightest Drink, Coffee or Tea?

The following blog contribution comes from our friend in the north, Alec Ash. Alec is based in Beijing, studying at the country’s most prestigious university, Beida (Peking University). Mr. Ash has been kind enough to take time out from his own blog to help give us a better insight as to how the Chinese student population consume tea and coffee.

This is Li Ziyin, a fourth year law student at Peking University (Beida), swotting for her mid-terms. She is easy to talk with and quick to smile, delighted that I know well the area of Beijing in which her family lives. She enjoys dressing prettily and will pay extra for it, and likes Western food more than her mother’s cooking – “yesterday, I had a sandwich for lunch” she tells me proudly. But today I’m on a mission, and not to be distracted. I’m to ask her a simple question: coffee or tea?

“Coffee” is the resounding answer from Ziyin. I might have guessed this from the two coffe cups in front of her (one sit in, the other take away – a one for the road affair?). “But my parents’ generation can’t stand the taste, they only drink tea.” Behind Ziyin, I notice another Beida student who has been eavesdropping and ask her opinion. “I also like tea better. In fact, I think most Chinese don’t like the taste of coffee.”

This was what I had been expecting to hear. In my experience, students at my old university Beida were much more likely to be clutching a thermos of tea in the library or lecture-hall than a cup of coffee, which is famously scarce in China. But it seems that some campus necessities transcend cross-oceanic palettes. Both Ziyin, her neighbour, and a variety of other contacts I put this question to at Beida agreed on one thing: most Chinese students drink coffee for its caffeine benefits more than for its taste.

“Ao ye” (熬夜) is a Chinese phrase often heard on campus. It translates literally as “boil the night”, or more correctly as “stew [oneself] through the night”. The pressure on students to perform at China’s top university is intense: it is not an exaggeration to say that many if not most students work well over ten hours a day. To sustain (or ‘stew’) themselves through those all-nighters, coffee is a popular solution. For the large part, this means instant coffee packets (generally one yuan a pop) or chilled coffee bought in cans from vending machines on campus.

This isn’t to say that there is no ‘coffee culture’ among students, besides this starkly utilitarian approach to caffeine. I chatted with Ziyin in a popular undergoround coffee house on a central location on campus, right next to Beida’s main auditorium. ‘Café Paradiso’ was established in 2006, and obviously fills a gap in the student market. It is pointedly Western: its walls plastered with movie posters (‘Cinema Paradiso’ their flagship), 50s jazz simpering out from the stereo system. Ziyin loves it for all these reasons, and for its tasty coffee (cheapest cup: ‘Daily Coffee’ for 5 yuan; most expensive: ‘Ice Caramel Macchiato’ for 25).

But Ziyin admits she is an exception. A large proportion of the patrons at ‘Café Paradiso’ are foreign students, or Chinese meeting them for language exchange. The majority of Beida’s Chinese student population will meet each other in dorms or restaurants and not in these expensive, copy-cat coffee houses (whose appeal as ‘fashionable’ on merit of their looking Western has been fading ever since the 80s). Outside of the ‘ao ye’ culture, when Chinese students are drinking non-alchoholic beverages purely to relax, tea or ice tea is still King.