It can be difficult to conduct normal academic research in contemporary China.  The country is a Communist dictatorship, even more so under Xi Jinping than under his immediate predecessors.  Information is tightly controlled.  The rising tensions with the West, and especially with the United States, make people both suspicious of and suspect from close contact with Westerners. 

            As a result, much of the most insightful work relies upon personal experience or interviews with a few people willing to talk in some depth about their own experiences.[1]  Such personal experience and observation can cast light upon larger institutions.  Thus, two recent books agree that China’s educational system remains as it was in the 1990s: “competitive, repetitive, [and] test-focused,” requiring “intense powers of focus…to succeed.”  The exams begin early in elementary school and continue through high school.  Then there are the exams for college admission.  All the exams open—or close—the paths to success in many areas.  Parents worry that their children will fall by the wayside.  Often, they pay for supplemental instruction, either in-person or on-line to buff up their children’s chances of success.  That makes for long hours of hard work for both parents (to earn the money for the courses) and the children (who grind through the lessons).[2]  Failure traditionally means a life of blue-collar industrial work.  Sewing pants and shirts in a sweat-shop for the American market, for example. 

            Is such a system “good” for Chinese society in general and for the students themselves in particular?  Well, it gives China a lot of highly qualified human capital in whatever areas the government values.  If it is engineers, scientists, and economists, then it serves the needs of a society in the course of economic development.  China’s economic performance over the last half century has been remarkable.  People who perform poorly on the exams provide some of the less-skilled labor to man the factories. 

            It is more of an open question about how well the system fills the needs of the students.  Part of the difficulty in assessment is that most American students don’t work as do elite Chinese students.  So it is natural to respond “Yikes!”  Then, American education isn’t very well attuned to the “needs of society” being more important than the desires of students.  That isn’t the same thing as students not being well attuned.  They generally want good jobs and are alert to signals from the market.  Hence, there are a lot of business majors and nurses in training.  The colleges and universities fall into line in the desperate struggle to stay afloat and avoid being yelled at by parents, donors, and Senators grabbing a sound-bite.  Yet the United States seems to fall behind at producing engineers and scientists, while over-producing lawyers. 

            Education is one area in which Communist Party control remains clear.  There is always the possibility that rigid institutions will generate resentment and resistance.  Keeping the lid on works.  Until the temperature inside rises enough to cause a boiling over. 

[1] See Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, “China’s Education Grind,” WSJ, 13-14 July 2024.  Cunningham reviews Peter Hessler, Other Rivers, and Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions. 

[2] Many recent immigrants from the Far East to the United States, mostly Chinese and Vietnamese, pursue the same strategy in their new country.  The success rate of such Asian-American students in gaining admission to the selective, exam-based elite high schools in New York City has spawned an ugly backlash.  Parent-of-Other-Color complain about the small numbers of Black and Hispanic students who win admission.