Abstract: The issue of excessive academic burden on students, as it has accompanied the development history of China’s education, is not just concerned with education itself. The first generation of China’s collective leadership, in building a high-quality education system, made arduous and worthy exploration. There was a shift on the roots to explore and the concept to adhere in their addressing the issue. In the early days, though the Party and the state leaders attached great importance to the growth of teenagers, young students enjoyed very serious poor health, a common phenomenon. The reasons, in addition to the heavy academic burden and too many social activities, mainly lied in the lack of nutrition supply and insufficient health care. To cope with it, the high-ranking made an exploration on the system, i.e. “an integration of health into all national policies”, and focused on reducing the academic burden of students. With an embarrassed outcome of “burden reduction”, a conclusion that such a dilemma was attributed to some political factors came out. Such an exploration was back on track around the beginning of China’s reform and opening-up (since 1978). The perspective of education and teaching process left aside, the excessive burden issue, it can be found, was the reflection of the transformation of the main social contradiction in the field of education at that time, that is, the contradiction between the upgrading of activated people’s educational expectations and the insufficient supply of higher-level and higher-quality educational opportunities. It is also a lesson that we should draw when establishing a high-quality education system today.

Key words: reduction, health education, excessive academic burden, education policy, educational governance, principal social contradiction, Mao Zedong Thought