For two days each year in June, China comes to a standstill. Unusual sights abound: men put on qipaos, traditional dresses typically worn by women, as a symbol of luck ; police stand on street corners, silencing drivers to ensure minimal disturbance ; temples overflow with relatives sending out final prayers ; crowds, unusually quiet, gather in hushed vigils outside thousands of schools. State media in all forms zero in on the one event affecting millions of students and their many family members who have invested time, money and, above all, hope in the outcome of these two days. The gaokao, China’s national college exam, grips the country.
This description of the one-shot, high-stakes exam that will, each year, shape the lives of 13 million students in China, opens “The Highest Exam” by authors Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, two Chinese economists and academics now living in the USA. While the book will be of great interest to Sinophiles, it has a much wider relevance in the way it centres high-stakes examinations as ciphers of social values and political tensions in any country.
The picture the authors paint is both well researched and deeply personal. They are products of this highly competitive system, but have both lived, studied and worked abroad long enough to come to the subject with a dispassionate eye.
Don’t be misled by the title - “The Highest Exam” is not a dull book about a national exam, it’s a book about a power struggle, between a State that wants to shape the productive forces that drive its economy and power, and families who want to improve or consolidate their access to future wealth and power. Sometimes these forces are in alignment, sometimes in tension.
Commenting on how one of Deng Xiaoping’s first acts as leader was to restore the gaokao, abolished by Chairman Mao, the authors note :
Mao took issue with the system’s maintenance of China’s social hierarchy. But whereas the Qing dynasty doubled down and refused to reinstate a channel for social mobility, Deng reneged on Mao’s promise, recognizing the power the education system exerted over the masses and reinstating the gaokao. Along with it, he reinstated China’s hierarchy.
That hierarchy includes the institutions of the state – the military, social services, business - which all follow a similar “tournament” process when selecting or promoting personnel : a competitive, apparently meritocratic system, which often ranks people against each other in uncomfortable ways (to Western eyes).
The lowest-level employees in the warehouses of a Chinese grocery store chain, who likely never finished high school, have their packing efficiency ranked and displayed on TV screens.
How does this square with China’s well-known reputation for “guanxi” (important social connections) and high levels of corruption ?
Guanxi and corruption are examples of the weaknesses of institutions, institutional rules and the rule of law, the authors state. They suggest that ranking, exams, tests and “meritocracy”, are all responses to these weaknesses. “Scores” they argue, due to their quantitative nature, are more “objective” and harder to game.
Thanks to their transparency and objectivity, scores have become the best tool that Chinese people have to fight against the inevitable corruption and abuse of connections they encounter with existing institutions. Through this lens, it is China’s education system that allows average citizens to even the playing field. A single metric – the gaokao - minimizes the avenues through which corruption can occur and heightens the sense of transparency.
This is not the same as saying the gaokao is “fair”. The book looks in some detail at the biased quota system (against rural areas), the influence of shadow tutoring and the advantages (sometimes) of minority status.
Nonetheless, this theme of trust in “scores” in a low trust environment recurs. And it largely explains why attempts to reform the gaokao have failed. Hongbin Li was involved in a project to replace the gaokao with a series of tests like the Advance Placement (AP) system in the USA, where the stress of one major test could be replaced with several tests taken at different times in the year. After several years of work the project was abruptly stopped without explanation. His conclusion was :
…China’s people have relied on one test for their whole lives. They trust the gaokao. Reforming the gaokao is the equivalent of reforming the entire education system.
Reforming high-stakes exams is politically fraught in any society, so the fact that even in an autocracy it’s nearly impossible to achieve, says a great deal about where power lies. Not always, as is commonly thought, in government, but as far as education is concerned, in the aspirational middle class parents (and grandparents) who view high-stakes exams as a tournament whose rules are known, which can be gamed by money and tutoring, and which is as “fair” as can be expected in an unfair world. Change that at your peril. Even Mao did not try to reform the gaokao, he abolished it and sent the youth to the countryside.
As an analysis of China’s gaokao, its historical antecedents (from the original imperial exams to the present) and its function in Chinese society as a gateway to betterment that is both hated for its pressure, but strongly trusted, this book, with its broad sweep, complemented by real stories and detail, is a highly perceptive and entertaining read.
It would have been interesting to learn more about the impact of the gaokao within the education system itself - the “washback” on teachers and schools (what is taught and how), though this does come out when they make comparisons to the US education system where both authors have schooled their children (for a good example of this see my review of Other Rivers).
Equally, the book was written just a little too early to give much space to the potential impact of AI on the gaokao. China’s enthusiastic embrace of AI, and AI’s potential to provide individualised assessment, will surely challenge the dominance of the gaokao in the future.
To understand any education system, how students pass through the system and into higher education or employment is a pretty good way to assess what the system values. In China, as in many other education systems, it is memorisation, obedience to rules and diligence that is highly rewarded. Entrance to higher education is a sorting stage, privileging the most advantaged.
That is not new and has been true of exams since they first appeared. Where “The Highest Exam” has broadened the canvas is in mapping in great detail how high-stakes exams are both a product of their societies and influence them.
The gaokao may be the most extreme example of this. It both shapes, and is shaped by, the forces of change in Chinese society. It holds a mirror up to Chinese families, State and society. The reflection that comes back shows intense personal competitive forces, driving national development goals, and a disregard for those who don’t fit. A reflection both beautiful and flawed.
Andy Brock - May 2026