Gaokao

Description

Iza Ding:

“Performing well in the exam can be life-changing. The highest scorers become national celebrities, lauded in the press and given gifts – cash, cars, even flats – by eager patrons in the private sector. Top universities enter scholarship bidding wars to secure their enrolment. A degree from one of these universities offers entry to the upper rungs of Chinese society. The gaokao has been called a rite of passage, a great equaliser and a ritual of China’s secular religion, education. Its political weight and its status as a recurring spectacle of collective fervour have led to comparisons with the US presidential election. In a country plagued by corruption, the gaokao is remarkably clean. ‘Open and competitive’ are the watchwords of democratic elections, but they are also the defining features of China’s exam empire. Exams are its functional substitute for the ballot box. The gaokao is more than a test; it’s an enduring political institution.

Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, two of the authors of The Highest Exam, have taken the gaokao, and they combine their analysis with memoir. Jia, a professor of economics at UC San Diego, is from rural Shandong and had never been on a train or plane before university. Li, who taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing before moving to Stanford, grew up in a factory town in Jilin, northern China, in the 1970s, when the gaokao – along with most of the education system – had been dismantled by the Cultural Revolution. Both won places at universities in Beijing by excelling in the exam – Li after Deng restored it in 1977, Jia in 2000 with support from her adoptive family – and then went on to doctoral studies abroad. On the basis of their own careers, one might expect them to praise the gaokao. Yet the evidence they assemble exposes the hidden inequalities of the great equaliser.

The most important of these is the rural-urban divide maintained by the hukou or household registration system, which determines access to schooling and social services according to birthplace. According to Jia and Li, in 2003 only 7 per cent of children from the poorest rural counties entered any kind of college, against nearly half of their urban peers; six in a thousand rural high schoolers reached a top university. The figures have improved but remain stark: by 2015, 35 per cent of rural students were going to university, compared to 51 per cent of urban students.

Chinese children receive nine years of (compulsory) free education. The final three years of secondary school are subsidised by the state, but the amount parents spend on education varies widely. While working as a tutor to secondary school students in Beijing in the early 2000s, Jia realised that in affluent districts nearly every student was getting extra help. Urban students are four times as likely to receive private tutoring than their rural counterparts, and they get a further advantage from the regional quota system: each university fixes its own provincial allocation, with higher quotas for local students. Because the best universities are in major cities, their residents have an easier path to admission: 14 per cent of students from Beijing and Shanghai enter the highest-ranked universities, compared to only 3 or 4 per cent in Jia’s home province, Shandong. Families pay a fortune for property in coveted school districts. A 550-square-foot flat costs more than a million dollars in some parts of Beijing – more, the authors note, than an equivalent home in Palo Alto. Lower-income households devote almost two-thirds of their earnings to education; the authors call it ‘a tax on China’s poor’. Attempts to disentangle admissions from place of residence or expand quotas for poorer provinces have met with fierce resistance from middle-class urban parents. When the government banned private tutoring in 2021, the industry simply went underground (the ban is no longer rigorously enforced). The families that could afford one-to-one tuition, as opposed to group classes, suffered least.”

(https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n02/iza-ding/studying-is-harmful)

Hidden Inequalities

Despite its meritocratic appearance, the gaokao system contains significant inequalities:

"The most important of these is the rural-urban divide maintained by the hukou or household registration system, which determines access to schooling and social services according to birthplace. According to Jia and Li, in 2003 only 7 per cent of children from the poorest rural counties entered any kind of college, against nearly half of their urban peers; six in a thousand rural high schoolers reached a top university. The figures have improved but remain stark: by 2015, 35 per cent of rural students were going to university, compared to 51 per cent of urban students.

Urban students are four times as likely to receive private tutoring than their rural counterparts, and they get a further advantage from the regional quota system: each university fixes its own provincial allocation, with higher quotas for local students. Because the best universities are in major cities, their residents have an easier path to admission: 14 per cent of students from Beijing and Shanghai enter the highest-ranked universities, compared to only 3 or 4 per cent in Jia's home province, Shandong. Families pay a fortune for property in coveted school districts. A 550-square-foot flat costs more than a million dollars in some parts of Beijing – more, the authors note, than an equivalent home in Palo Alto. Lower-income households devote almost two-thirds of their earnings to education; the authors call it 'a tax on China's poor'."

More information

• Book: The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li with Claire Cousineau. Harvard, 256 pp., £24.95, September 2025.