The Little Red Podcast · Graeme Smith and Louisa Lim

Education Nation: China’s Exam Fetish

December 8, 2025·48 min·3 clips

Ruixue Xia says the expected answer is ideological, not personal.

1. The Little Red Podcast episode "Education Nation: China’s Exam Fetish" focuses on the gaokao, China’s college entrance exam, and its role in sorting students and shaping opportunity. 2. Graeme Swift hosts with Louisa Lin, while Edward Vickers, Karen Huang, and Ruixue Xia contribute as a professor of education, a recent gaokao taker, and an economist who co-authored The Highest Exam. 3. The episode asks what the gaokao is for: selecting intelligence and hard work, reproducing state priorities, or filtering students through a system of unequal schooling. 4. Ruixue Xia traces China’s exam tradition back to the imperial civil service system, dating it to 600 AD and the Song Dynasty around 1000. 5. She contrasts earlier tests of poetry and restrictive essays with today’s English, math, and STEM subjects. 6. Xia says the underlying logic remains a selection mechanism for intelligent and hardworking people, even though the test content has changed. 7. Edward Vickers explains that the gaokao revived in 1978 after the Cultural Revolution and stayed broadly similar in tested subjects. 8. He highlights the change in scale, noting that the 1977 cohort included people aged 16 to 40 and had a 4.8% admission rate. 9. Vickers contrasts that with today’s roughly 80% admission rate among about 10 million exam takers. 10. He also points to the Zhongkao, the senior high school entrance exam, as the earlier cutoff that channels around half of students into vocational education. 11. Ruixue Xia says the government wants a 50-50 split, but families push back because they do not want their children assigned to the vocational stream. 12. She says urban hukou holders usually keep their children in academic schools, while rural students and children of migrant workers are more likely to be diverted away. 13. Karen Huang describes life at Foshan No. 1 High School, with wake-ups at six in the morning, dormitory living, and study until ten at night. 14. She says she returned home only every two weeks for one day, while some students also stayed on campus through weekends. 15. Xia adds that she grew up in rural Shandong, where college quotas were lower than in Beijing, Shanghai, and some minority regions. 16. She says richer families can hire private tutors, while poorer families rely on tutoring classes, which increases inequality. 17. The panel links double reduction and cram schooling to symptoms of competition rather than its cause. 18. They describe Suzhi Jiao Yu as holistic quality education that, in practice, depends heavily on family money and access to resources. 19. The episode has a conversational interview style, with back-and-forth questioning, direct disagreement, and an informal gaokao essay exercise near the end. 20. Listeners interested in Chinese education, exams, and inequality will find it useful; people wanting light entertainment or a short recap may skip it.

As heard by us

A sharp, grounded look at China's gaokao as exam, social ladder, and national ritual.

The Little Red Podcast treats China's gaokao less as a school test than as a national ritual, with consequences large enough to quiet traffic, postpone concerts, and put 13 million students on edge for two days.

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A sharp, interview-led look at the gaokao, China’s college entrance exam, and the pressure it can put on a future.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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