Every year, over 13 million students in China spend two full days taking the country’s university entrance exam, the Gaokao. It’s an event that most take years preparing for, starting in primary school, and the results determine not only where students will end up spending their university years, to a large extent it determines their entire life course.
Today my guest is Dr. Ruixue Jia, a professor of economics at UC San Diego, whose co-author of a new book called The Highest Exam, How The Gaokao Shapes China. It’s a fascinating little book, which mixes history, social science, and personal experience to explain how the system works, where it came from, how it came to look the way it does.
In the discussion that follows, we discuss the history of examinations in China, why the Chinese people are so prepared to accept a single set of exams regulating the life courses of its population, and how Chinese and American systems of hyper selectivity for top universities compare with one another.
I hope you’ll enjoy the discussion as much as I did. And now, over to Ruixue.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.8 | Inside the Gaokao: China’s Defining Test with Ruixue Jia
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Ruixue, you make the point in your book that exams have a very long history in China, going back 1,500 years to the Tang Dynasty. That’s when the Chinese state invented the concept of exams and of distributing top civil service jobs based on merit. But it also defined merit in a very specific way — what we would now call academic merit — things like how to structure a particular type of poem. There are a lot of questions there about Confucian philosophy and poetry. How did academic merit, as opposed to military merit or something else, become such a defining feature of the Chinese state? And why did this policy endure for so long?
Ruixue Jia (RJ): I think to understand this, it’s useful to think about the counterfactual or what happened before this system. Before, the emperor relied on aristocratic families, many of whom gained their status through military power. So, if you think of yourself as a Chinese emperor, you’d ask: who would be more loyal to you? The exam was a very clever institution to recruit talented people from commoner families, whose loyalty would belong to the emperor rather than their own powerful families.
Over Chinese history, the content of the exams changed a lot. As you said, it was poetry at one point, then later became very restricted, formatted essays, and today it’s about science and technology in some sense. So the specific content may not be crucial — the point was to have something that could identify intelligent people. That’s the design.
In fact, similar ideas appeared elsewhere. I’m not a European historian, but if you think about powerful rulers like Louis XIV in France or Frederick II in Prussia, they also tried to reform the civil service. What they did wasn’t so different from the Chinese emperor’s approach. But because of fundamental differences in social power structures, they couldn’t sustain it. So the logic of buying loyalty from commoner families is quite widespread across societies — it’s just that China managed to sustain it where others didn’t.
AU: Let’s go back to the start of the 20th century, because two big things happen. The first is that Western-style universities started appearing — Peking and Tsinghua are both founded around that time. And of course, the empire itself is replaced by a republic. So, huge changes: the sponsor of the old exam system disappears, and the Imperial Academies — where the exams were studied for — also disappear. But the exams themselves survive. Why?
RJ: Yes, as you said, the system was abolished in 1905. That was a time when China had lost many wars, and both intellectuals and politicians were asking: what’s the reason for China’s underdevelopment? Some realized that education was part of the problem — the old exam system didn’t manage to select the right people in an age of global competition. So, it was abolished.
But the reform wasn’t entirely successful. In fact, in one of our research papers, we show that after the abolition, people from regions that had a higher chance of success in the old exams were actually more likely to join revolutionary activities. And the leaders noticed this. So, when the Republic was founded, Sun Yat-sen decided to establish a branch of government specifically for examinations.
In the U.S., of course, there are three branches of government, but in the Republic of China — and even today in Taiwan — there’s a fourth: the Examination Branch. The logic is that it’s a very useful institution for governance — for selecting talented individuals who are loyal to the state. So it’s a natural choice. Even though the content changed — no more poems or rigid essays — as a governance mechanism, it survived.
For individuals, though, it was something different. They saw it as a channel for social mobility. They didn’t think of it as a governance tool; they saw it as a way to climb the social ladder and invested heavily in it.
AU: Let’s move on to talk about exams under the early years of the Chinese Communist Party — under Mao. Reading your book, it struck me that Mao was really the only person in Chinese history who managed to convince people that academic merit, on its own, was not a reason to promote someone to top jobs. I guess he kept the exams for the first 15 or 16 years, then abolished them in 1965. How did he view merit? What happens to the idea of merit and of exams between 1949 and 1976?
RJ: He may not have been the only one skeptical of the exams — there were other historical figures who failed them multiple times and became revolutionary leaders who wanted to change the system. But coming back to Mao himself, as you may know, when he was young, he actually admired intellectuals. He wrote for a leading intellectual magazine called The New Youth, and because of that he got connected to the intellectual circles at Peking University, where he worked as a librarian.
I think those experiences shaped his later attitude. He was an intelligent, talented young man, but he wasn’t respected by the so-called “meritocratic” intellectual elites. Maybe there was some element of revenge in that later on — you can sometimes see it in his personal experiences and in the stories of other major leaders as well.
It’s difficult for social scientists to study this systematically, but I think understanding Mao, and even today’s leaders, requires some political psychology — to ask why they make the kinds of choices and policies they do.
AU: That’s very true. But let’s talk about the political side of this. You make the point that it’s a political issue — when Mao dies, almost the first thing the Communist Party does is reinstate exams. This happens even before Deng Xiaoping fully returns to power. In 1977, they brought back the gaokao. Why was that so urgent? Why were exams — and, by extension, the definition of merit — the first of Mao’s policies the Party felt it needed to change?
RJ: As I said, it’s not just about the exam itself. The exam is a mechanism — not only for governance, but also for economic development, because you need human capital. You need talented individuals to rebuild the country. After the Cultural Revolution, there was a dire shortage of capable people.
Before that, college admissions were based largely on family background, often favoring people from peasant or military families. But many of those admitted weren’t necessarily the right fit for driving economic growth. So, on the eve of the reform and opening-up period, the question became: how do you find talented people? And the exam naturally came to mind as the best mechanism.
So, in 1977, they restored the gaokao in its modern form — and that first cohort was remarkable. It included people as young as 16 and as old as 40, because so many had lost their chance at education during the Cultural Revolution. That year, the admission rate was about 4% among exam takers — even more competitive than Harvard or Stanford today. Of course, it’s a very different world now.
AU: Let’s talk about today. Obviously, a lot has happened in the last 50 years. What have been the major changes in the gaokao system since 1977?
RJ: I think the most important change is scale. In 1977, the admission rate was about 4%. Guess what it is today? It’s around 80%. And it’s not just that — about 10 million students take the exam each year, and roughly 8 million go on to some form of college.
So being a college student or a college graduate means something very different now. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was extremely valuable; today, it’s so common that it’s no longer as distinctive. What has become truly valuable is admission to an elite college.
One element we emphasize in the book is the hierarchical structure of Chinese society, which is reflected in the education system. It’s not that hard anymore to attend a college — most families can send their children to one. But they still invest heavily because what they really want is for their children to get into an elite institution. And the admission rate for those elite universities is still only around 4 or 5%.
So in that sense, the nature of competition hasn’t changed — even though the scale and scope of the system have expanded dramatically.
AU: Earlier you described the gaokao as a national competition. But actually, these exams are provincial, aren’t they? It’s a national institution, but the exams themselves are run at the provincial level.
Universities recruit on a provincial basis too, right? So there isn’t a single national score that can get me into, say, Fudan University or Tsinghua University. The ability to use good test results to access top institutions varies quite a bit. Why isn’t the gaokao truly a national system?
RJ: Yes, this relates to a long-standing institutional feature called the quota system. Different provinces receive different quotas. It’s still centralized in one sense — as we highlight in the book, the quotas are set by the Ministry of Education at the national level — but they’re then distributed to each province.
Each province runs its own exam, held on the same day nationwide, but with its own test content, grading, and admissions processes. Students are effectively competing within their own province for university placements.
And the quotas are distributed very unequally. To give you an example: I mentioned earlier that, on average, about 5% of students are admitted to elite universities — the top 100 institutions. But if you’re from Beijing or Shanghai, that rate is around 16%. If you’re from my home province, Shandong, it’s closer to 3%.
So there’s a huge variation. And the reason, again, lies in political economy. From the perspective of the central government, some regions are more politically important — metropolitan cities like Beijing and Shanghai, or provinces with large minority populations such as Tibet and Xinjiang. The provinces that lose out in this distribution tend to be the central ones, like Shandong, Henan, or Hunan.
AU: Around the world, it’s generally acknowledged now that exam results are, to a large extent, shaped by socioeconomic background. Richer families can invest more — they can hire tutors, live in the right neighborhoods, and get their kids into the best middle or senior high schools.
In 1977, when China was poor but relatively equal, an exam like the gaokao might have made a lot of sense — a strong, academically oriented exam could be seen as fair. But now China is both rich and unequal, and wealthier families can clearly provide much more support for their children.
You point out in the book just how unequal exam results have become based on family income. But despite that, it doesn’t seem to have dented most people’s belief that the gaokao is still a fair measure of merit. Why is that?
RJ: I completely agree that the gaokao worked very well in the 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s. I took the exam myself in 2000, and at that time it still functioned well as a tool for social mobility. But as you said, now almost every family has at least some resources to invest in their children — and some have far more than others. The system has become more unequal, and for many families, it’s also become a burden.
So why do people still support it? It’s not that they’re naïve and think exam scores perfectly reflect merit. The key is the counterfactual — what would be the alternative? As you and many listeners know, China is a society where corruption, personal networks, and power can play a big role in opportunities.
People don’t necessarily trust other institutions to make fair decisions. So out of fear that personal connections and influence would dominate without the exam, they prefer to keep it. The gaokao may not be perfectly fair, but it’s seen as more objective and transparent than any other method of selecting students for university.
AU: I think transparency is an interesting word there. I was going to say that the United States now has an admissions system for its top universities that’s just as selective as China’s, but it uses different measures and it’s more multidimensional, right? It’s not just about how you perform on an exam. But as you said, those other elements aren’t necessarily transparent. So is that really why China hasn’t gone that route? Are Chinese people simply not interested in multidimensional evaluations of merit? Or is it something deeper — maybe cultural? Because I think there are Confucian ideas about goodness and virtue being tied to studying. Is that why there’s less emphasis on things like athletics or debate clubs or extracurriculars?
RJ: I think that’s a really interesting question, and it connects to what we’ve seen in the U.S. — like the lawsuits brought by Asian parents against Harvard over admissions transparency and possible discrimination. I see three reasons behind this.
First, as you mentioned, there’s cultural transmission. Growing up in China, people are constantly aware of the possibility of being disadvantaged by those with more power or connections. That creates a deep preference for systems that feel objective and insulated from influence. When Chinese people move to the U.S., they bring that mindset with them.
Second, being immigrants actually reinforces that preference. Immigrants often have limited social capital — fewer personal networks or institutional ties — so they’re even more likely to want objective and transparent systems.
And third, many of the Chinese immigrants who hold this view are people who themselves succeeded through the exam system.
AU: So it must be the right system!
RJ: Exactly. They’re proud of their learning and see academic success as something deeply respected in Chinese society. That reinforces the belief that this is a fair and honorable way to achieve mobility.
All of these factors work together. But I still think the fundamental issue is the lack of a better alternative. If China had institutions with stronger checks on power and higher public trust, people might be more open to multidimensional admissions. People do complain about the gaokao — about “teaching to the test” and how it can stifle creativity — they’re very aware of its limitations. It’s just that, given the alternatives, they see this system as the least bad option.
AU: I guess that also helps explain why the Chinese government recently tried to ban or at least greatly restrict tutoring schools. Let me ask you a final question, because your answer points to a potentially interesting future for China.
As you’ve said, exams have historically been used when you have a vast population and a very limited number of opportunities — so you need a highly effective screening mechanism. But now, the university system is expanding, the number of good universities is increasing, and the youth population is shrinking rapidly.
This combination of economic and demographic change — greater material abundance and fewer young people — might affect the need for the kinds of exams China uses. So if we were having this conversation 25 years from now, say in 2050, how different do you think the situation might be?
RJ: Great question. Twenty-five years sounds like a long time, but in the context of a thousand years of Chinese history, it’s actually quite short.
Part of me hopes there will be big changes — especially with new technologies like AI and major demographic shifts. But part of me is skeptical, because education in China has always served as a mechanism of social stratification. One of the key points we make in the book is that Chinese society has, for over a millennium, been centralized and hierarchical — what we call a “tournament” system. To succeed in that kind of structure, you have to work extremely hard within whatever the dominant form of merit looks like.
In the past, that meant mastering poetry. Today, it means excelling in STEM. The form changes, but the logic stays the same — the exams are tools, not the foundation. To see real change, the underlying social structure would have to shift. If Chinese society became less hierarchical and less centralized, then we might see a fundamental transformation.
So, if I had to guess — and I could be completely wrong — I’d say that despite technological and demographic changes, the fundamental nature of the system might only change in minor ways.
AU: Ruixue, thank you so much for joining us today.
RJ: Thank you.
AU: And that just leaves me to thank our producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek — and you, our listeners and readers. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for the podcast, you can reach us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week, when our guest will be Debbie McVitty from WonkHE, here to talk about the new white paper released by the UK government on education and skills.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
