This year’s Mid-Autumn Festival falls a few days after China’s National Day, which was on Wednesday, giving most people a longer-than-usual weeklong break from work. But many students in their final year of secondary school will spend much of the week studying, conscious that every hour counts as they prepare for next summer’s final exam, the gaokao.
For three days next June, roads around exam venues all over China will be closed, construction work nearby will stop and noisy outdoor entertainment will be suspended. Parents keep vigil outside, waiting for the students to emerge at the end of each exam session, starting with maths and Chinese on the first day with science or arts and English or another foreign language on the second day and oral tests or other subjects on the third.
The students sitting the gaokao, which literally means “the highest exam”, will already have taken numerous exams to determine everything from which subjects they study to which high school they attend. But the gaokao is the most important because it determines which third-level institution they will attend in a system where one point in the exam score can make all the difference.
Somebody who goes to college in China can expect to earn on average 40 per cent more than someone who does not. And if you get into one of the top universities you can earn another 40 per cent more than those who go to nonelite colleges.
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“We do find that if you are one point above, you are more likely to go to an elite college, let’s say the top 100 colleges in China. After graduation, we found that you do get also a better first job,” says Jia Ruixue, a professor of economics at the University of California San Diego.
Jia has written, along with Li Hongbin, an economist at Stanford University, The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. The book places the exam at the heart of an education system the authors describe as a “centralised, hierarchical tournament” deeply rooted in Chinese history and culture.
The gaokao is the latest iteration of a centralised exam system in China stretching back 1,300 years, when the first imperial examination was held. Abolished by the Qing dynasty shortly before it fell in 1911, the system was revived as the gaokao by Mao Zedong in 1952, halted during the Cultural Revolution and restored again in 1977.
Throughout Chinese history, the exam was a means of social mobility, and, up to the beginning of the 20th century, passing it was a gateway into the top tier of society. Successive Chinese rulers have found it to be an effective means of governance.
“This is a sophisticated and cleverly designed and revised system. It provides hope to everyone in some sense, historically to every male, nowadays, including every female,” says Jia.
“The chance of success, which means going to Tsinghua University or even one of the top 100 colleges, is very low. But in principle, everyone has hope, and that’s critical. In this system, if you fail the system, you don’t blame the system.”
The playing field is not entirely level and the government sets quotas for how many students in each province will pass the exam, a system that privileges Beijing and Shanghai but also Tibet and Xinjiang. Each province sets its own exam under the guidance of the central authorities, which prioritise the study of subjects deemed to be in the national interest.
China, which had almost no university graduates in 1977 and about a million a year in the late 1990s, now has 10 million each year, the biggest college enrolment in the world. About half of those who started in college in China this year are studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) subjects, compared with about 20 per cent in the US.
China’s primary and secondary students perform well by international measures such as the Pisa study, and long hours of study over years help to build cognitive endurance. But Jia and Li suggest that, once they get into college, Chinese students are often let down by the university education they worked so hard to earn.
In a society where official corruption remains widespread despite Xi Jinping’s decade-long campaign against it, the gaokao represents an objective measure where merit can trump privilege. Jia sees in this respect for meritocracy one reason why most Chinese people are sceptical about the idea of a European-style welfare state.
“Education reflects society, but on the other hand, it influences society,” she says. “If you believe so much in such a meritocracy and a tournament, then you tend to respect winners a lot and have very limited sympathy for losers.”
