It’s almost impossible to read any work on meritocracy without being reminded that the word was first used in mid-20th-century Britain to portray a dystopian society, a rigid caste system in which a smug elite claimed power on the basis of superior effort and ability. But it was imperial China where meritocratic ideals were first brought to life. The keju, or imperial civil service examination, selected scholar-officials who had mastered the Confucian canon – after years, if not decades, of study – for entry into the ruling elite. The exams were initially restricted to nominees, but by the early seventh century eligibility had expanded to most free men. This was centuries before European leaders began to debate whether to extend the franchise beyond propertied males.
Some historians believe the keju represented a commitment to excellence among the ruling class; others argue that by uplifting commoners, it helped Chinese emperors to weaken their aristocratic rivals. It was never without its critics, and became a stimulus of dynastic crisis at several points during the 1300 years of its existence. Revolutionaries, more than anyone, resented the keju. Hong Xiuquan, the failed scholar who led the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, sat it four times without success before proclaiming himself the younger brother of Jesus, chosen by God to overthrow the corrupt dynasty bolstered by its travesty of an exam. He very nearly succeeded. A few decades later, in a bid to modernise and fend off Western encroachment, the Qing court abolished the keju altogether. Suddenly, millions of young men who would otherwise have been buried in the Four Books and Five Classics found themselves with nothing to do. Many joined the revolution that ended two millennia of imperial rule in 1911. Yet forty years later, only three years after the Communist Party came to power, the state restored a national examination system.
Mao, like Hong Xiuquan, hated exams. On the centenary of the fall of the Taiping Rebellion, a movement he admired, he railed against standardised testing: ‘Our method of conducting exams is a method for dealing with the enemy, not the people.’ A proper exam, he suggested, would publish the questions in advance and let students trade places and copy one another’s answers. ‘Too much studying is harmful,’ Mao insisted, noting that few top scorers in the keju had gone on to accomplish great things. Two years later, the education system collapsed in the Cultural Revolution. Urban students were sent to the countryside to ‘learn from peasants’ after China nearly fell into civil war. But even Mao couldn’t undo China’s exam culture. For centuries, exams had been not just the preferred but the only way to staff the governing class – a lasting, if not always happy, marriage between personal ambition and state purpose. As soon as Mao was gone, Deng Xiaoping brought exams back. The most significant returnee was the national college entrance exam, the gaokao.
Today, more than thirteen million teenagers (and some adults) take the gaokao each June. The tests are conducted over several days, under tightly controlled conditions. Universities in China don’t look at personal statements or hold interviews. Only test scores count: in history, geography and politics for the liberal arts track; physics, chemistry and biology for the science track; and Chinese, maths and English for everyone. The questions are strictly guarded and double anonymity is enforced between the candidates and markers. For weeks, the gaokao dominates the news.
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.
Why does such an unfair system endure? The authors argue that the answer is political: the exam empire serves its rulers. In the days of the keju, as now, the goal of the exam was ‘to develop the next batch of talented individuals working for and loyal to’ the government. A centralised education system makes it easier to mould faithful citizens. The regional quotas limit competition between provinces, and ethnic minorities are pacified with score boosts and preferential quotas. More important, the gaokao has maintained faith in social mobility. A perception of fairness, especially among the less fortunate, has lent legitimacy to the political order. The system will continue as long as the losers believe that they, and not the system, are to blame for their lack of success.
Throughout The Highest Exam, the authors compare the gaokao to the American college admission system. In doing so, they weigh American schools against Chinese schools and American values against Chinese values. Reflecting on his experience raising his daughter in Beijing’s Haidian district and Palo Alto, Li writes that Chinese schools instil discipline while American schools foster curiosity and social skills. ‘Eighth grade,’ he concludes, ‘is the ideal time for a move to the US. At that point, [children] have a solid foundation in maths and Chinese and disciplined working habits that will allow them to succeed in challenging courses in American high schools.’ Li’s family moved from China to the US, but in recent years many have made the opposite journey. For first-generation immigrants like Jia and Li, it is natural to measure home against the adopted country, but at times their book feels more like a comparison of Beijing and Palo Alto than of two diverse nations.
‘Which country’s education system do we favour most?’ the authors ask. Their focus is largely on Chinese weaknesses and American strengths. The American system, they argue, is less rigid, more holistic and more market-driven, while China’s ‘centralised hierarchical tournament’, with its emphasis on standardised testing and state-directed curricula, risks squandering unorthodox talent: ‘How many Chinese Einsteins is the system stifling?’ They doubt that China, in its current form, can prevail in its technological competition with the US, and are wary of Beijing’s massive investment in STEM education, not least because STEM has been siphoning students from economics, once a highly prestigious degree in both countries.
Jia and Li believe that the Chinese state, unlike the US, misallocates resources and steers talent from efficient private enterprises into the public sector. Their argument that innovation is the province of free-market, free-thinking entrepreneurs is still in some quarters the orthodoxy (it is made by last year’s Nobel laureates in economics, Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson, in their book Why Nations Fail). But less so than a few decades ago; it has for some time been under siege. Mariana Mazzucato points out in The Entrepreneurial State (2011) that many of the most important recent technologies – including the internet, GPS, touchscreens and the microchip – were underwritten by government investment. Postwar Japan, South Korea and Taiwan owed their economic miracles not to laissez-faire politics but to entrepreneurial states that marshalled credit, protected infant industries and subsidised research. Silicon Valley relies on state largesse in the form of Pentagon contracts, Nasa spending and grants from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. In China, private firms such as Alibaba and DeepSeek have benefited from local government support such as tax subsidies and policies designed to attract talent. Tu Youyou, China’s Nobel laureate in medicine, discovered artemisinin, a chemical now used widely to treat malaria, while working as a state employee on a government project.
National competitiveness may not be the best way to conceive of what an education is for. For all their differences, China and the US share a utilitarian impulse to treat education as an investment and to measure their citizens’ worth by their contributions to corporate profit or GDP. Jia and Li don’t spend much time on the emotional or psychological experience of students, parents and teachers preparing for the gaokao, though this aspect of the exam is as consequential for Chinese society as its economic dividends. Hengshui High School in Hebei province is an extreme case; it operates like a military camp, with physical punishments and emotional abuse that have reportedly driven several students to suicide. Yet anxious parents continue to send their children there, in the hope that, once the scores are posted, the ordeal will have been worth it. In spite of its flaws, the gaokao’s equalising power outstrips the admissions machinery of American universities by a wide margin. In China, children from the wealthiest families are 2.3 times more likely than the poorest to attend top universities; in the US, the gap is nearly elevenfold.
The US route to success, though less heavy on exams than its Chinese counterpart, is often just as demanding. American teenagers have to participate in a range of extracurricular activities and ‘leadership experiences’ to get into the best colleges. In his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014), William Deresiewicz writes of his students at Yale: ‘Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today’s elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation.’
China’s gaokao factories and America’s college-industrial complex are not accidents. They are the logical outcome of a global system that has mistaken education for investment and human life for capital. Michael Young’s warning about a new educated elite in The Rise of the Meritocracy, the satirical novel that popularised the word, was in fact embraced as an ideal. While astute social commentators understood that achievement can’t be dissociated from varieties of privilege, meritocracy became – over the second half of the 20th century – democracy’s operating principle, furnishing it with a ruling class. Today’s democratic leaders, almost without exception, have degrees from elite institutions – including self-styled populist ‘outsiders’ such as Donald Trump (University of Pennsylvania), J.D. Vance (Yale), Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) and Marine Le Pen (Paris 2).
The global populist wave has exposed the failure of meritocracy, whether democratic or authoritarian, to honour its promises. In China, the backlash can’t be expressed at the ballot box, but it permeates public discourse. The Highest Exam cites surveys showing that in the 2000s, Chinese citizens were more likely than their counterparts in Japan, Europe or the US to believe that success is a consequence of ability and effort, with Americans trailing only slightly behind. More recent surveys, however, register a sharp decline in such beliefs. Were China to embrace multi-party elections tomorrow, it is not hard to imagine a right-wing populist party attracting much support in rural, inland provinces – leaving the CCP, a more urban, elitist party, as China’s Democrats. When meritocracy struggles to fulfil its promises, the claims of those in positions of power inevitably seem suspect.
Last year’s Harvard commencement ceremony showed how deep the suspicion now runs. Yurong Jiang, a Chinese graduate of the Kennedy School of Government, delivered an address on global poverty and women’s rights that earned applause from her classmates but caused outrage at home. Her critics paid less attention to her words than to her pedigree: boarding school in the UK, Duke, then Harvard. Others dismissed the speech as vapid and self-indulgent, contrasting her with Megha Vemuri, an Indian American student who had made a pro-Palestine speech at MIT’s commencement ceremony. (Vemuri was barred from the degree ceremony and hounded online by Hindu nationalists.) Jiang defended herself on Weibo, insisting that her achievements were down to hard work. Chinese netizens bristled: how could someone whose parents could afford to send her abroad present herself as having overcome adversity? Jia and Li disavow the idea that their accomplishments are fully deserved, even though neither comes from a privileged background, but many other members of the elite cling to the naive belief they’ve earned their place by effort alone.
A system that promises social mobility and civic cohesion instead delivers an entrenched hierarchy, humiliation for the excluded and anxiety – sometimes even despair – for the successful. Steering education onto a corrective course, in both China and America, will require economists and philosophers to think in concert. It isn’t enough to debate the way to choose the ‘best and brightest’ for Stanford or Tsinghua – whether by means of an exam or a cocktail of extracurricular activities, athletic ability, community service and personality tests. As long as so few students win admission, and as long as admission is one of the only reliable paths to a decent future, parents and students will do whatever they can to get ahead, at whatever cost.