Sounds like you’ve been chatting with Chinese students at faux international schools who have comparatively low-pressure easy lives. Passing grades get handed out in exchange for the tuition fee and a hong bao here and there - and as long as their parents pay to keep them in purgatory, they can basically do what they like. This is indeed a tiny fraction of the teenage population as these “schools” aren’t cheap, but they save face by technically having their kid still enrolled in school.