In the old Peking opera training troupes, keban (科班), beatings were part of the training. The actor Tan Xiaozeng recalled that his grandfather described seven years in the troupe as seven years in prison. A beating was usually ten or twenty strokes, “until blood showed.” Yet he also said: “Our beatings were not corporal punishment. They were spurring on.” (我们的挨打不是体罚，是鞭策) “In this trade, without beating, no talent comes out.”
Not every school kept the practice. The director Jiao Juyin abolished corporal punishment at the Chinese opera school he led.