The Exam Cult Behind China’s Wealth — And Its Misery

追加: 2026-05-03

[00:00:00]You've probably seen the data. Young Chinese  students constantly rank at the top of global tests like PISA, outperforming many countries in  maths, reading, and science. At the highest level, they're solving problems that have puzzled  mathematicians for over a century. In 2026, two of the four winners of the New Horizons in  Mathematics Prize, often called the Oscars of the maths world, were trained at Peking University.  But at the same time, you're seeing something that doesn't match those results at all. Chinese  engineers charged with stealing AI secrets, widespread academic fraud, and increasingly  aggressive behaviour on the global stage. Both of these are inextricably linked to the exact  same education system centered around the Gaokao, China's notoriously difficult national college  entrance exam taken by tens of millions of students every year. And I know that because  I lived inside it. For years, I slept 5 hours a night, studying seven days a week for that single  exam. I aced it. I got into a top university. It gave me the discipline to build a career in  Shanghai during one of the fastest economic booms in history. The system works. But after  stepping outside it, I realised something else.

[00:01:11]Something you don't see in rankings, awards, or  GDP numbers. In this video, I'll break down how this exam system became one of the most powerful  engines of wealth creation in modern history and why that exact same system is also producing  distortion, resentment, and behaviors that are now showing up across the world. To understand  why this structure creates such realities, we have to go back much further into history. For  thousands of years, China was a vast agricultural civilisation. To maintain a massive empire, the  state required a highly sophisticated apparatus powered by the Keju, the imperial exam system  used to select competent officials. One of the reasons a standardised exam could be implemented  across such a vast territory was China's deeply cohesive writing system. Unlike the more  volatile alphabetic languages of the West, logoraphic Chinese characters prevented divergence  even as spoken dialects evolved. Furthermore, since the Song Dynasty, the introduction of  standard pronunciation through the book Guangyun removed spoken barriers entirely. Combined  with a widely shared and scalable writing system, it made the empire's control through elected  officials incredibly effective. Philosophically, for over a millennium, China operated on a shared  framework rooted in Confucianism. As the Analcts state, "When one excels in learning, let him take  office." And "Do not worry about having no position.

[00:02:35]worry about whether you are worthy to hold one." This meant that status anxiety was intended to be directed inward towards self-cultivation rather  than outward at circumstance. It created a social contract where your status was determined by the  demonstrated merit of the Keju exam rather than by birthright. You were convinced that your entire  future depended on how well you performed on a single test. However, after Mao established the  People's Republic of China in 1949 based on the Soviet model, that structure was completely  dismantled, climaxing during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Schools were shut down.  Intellectuals were persecuted. Mao dismissed all Confucian ideas of merit as a root cause of  China's failure to confront hostile imperialism, replacing them with illiberal utopian promises  of perpetual class war. There is a dark joke on the Chinese intranet about the biographies of  patriotic Chinese scientists who returned from abroad to build the nation during that period. The  bios often read "born 19XX – died in 1968". Everyone knows what that means. They were eliminated during  the peak of the cultural revolution in 1968. For three decades, an entire generation lost complete  access to education. Then everything flipped again. Deng Xiaoping and his pro-capitalism  allies waged a life-or-death struggle after surviving repeated purges, assassination attempts,  and public humiliations. When Mao died in 1976, Deng's faction quickly seized a narrow opening,  arresting Mao's radical team in a midnight coup.

[00:04:11]By 1978, the old meritocracy was restored by  establishing a standardised national exam system.

[00:04:19]With the crushing restrictions finally lifted, the  immense intelligence and resilience of the Chinese people were unleashed. My own family utilized this  1978 exam reform to earn degrees in medicine and engineering, achieving a level of advancement  that was previously unimaginable. This dramatic shift resulted in Chinese parents developing an  excessive obsession with exam-oriented education.

[00:04:43]Hoping the anti-merit nightmare would never  repeat itself, they strictly required their children to follow this proven path, giving rise  to the famous "tiger parents" phenomenon. But the system wasn't rebuilt on neutral ground. Although  meritocracy returned, the political structure that had previously destroyed it never disappeared.  After Deng's reform, the regime maintained a paradoxical admiration of Mao for his initial  founding of the country through autocratic rule.

[00:05:10]Even a global backlash against the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on pro-liberty citizens did not sway the elites. Having staged a life-or-death coup,  they believe they had finally kept the massive empire together by seizing the ultimate truth.  Embracing western capitalism through illiberal rule. There is a famous joke about this era. Deng  Xiaoping is in a car driven by the premier Li Peng. They reach a junction, Russia on the left,  America on the right. Li asks which way to go.

[00:05:38]Deng replies, "Turn the left blinker on, but drive  to the right." That contradiction still define the system today, and it's exactly what turns  meritocracy into something much more unstable.

[00:05:51]In a radical way, today's exam system was  heavily shaped by China's economic growth model, a "provincial tournament" where local officials  competed for promotions, mainly by delivering higher GDP. So, resources followed outcomes  ruthlessly. Funding went to elite urban schools in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Those schools  produced the highest Gaokao scores, raised China's universities in global rankings, and most  crucially educated the children of senior CCP officials. By contrast, educational infrastructure  in rural and inland provinces like Guizhou, where I grew up, was systematically underfunded,  not through malice, but through the cold logic of the regime's unchallenged reward system. On top  of this, students are required to attend school and take the Gaokao only in their registered home  province. If you grew up in Beijing or Shanghai, your chances of getting into a top university are  five times higher. For the country's most desired school, Peking University, the gap is stark.  The admission rate is about 1.02% for Beijing students, but only 0.035% for students in Guizhou. It  is roughly 30 times harder for a Guizhou student to win a place. That's not a small gap. It turns what  is supposed to be a national exam into a postcode lottery, fundamentally changing what merit actually means in practice. If this were in other countries with constitutional legal challenges  or vibrant independent media, this kind of gap wouldn't stay hidden for long. But in China, the  administrative apparatus ensures that the problem remains statistically invisible. Even though  exiled journalists constantly expose these problems overseas, they never receive enough attention  within the heavily censored Chinese intranet, allowing the central government to remain  indifferent. Because of this top-down structure, the Gaokao has become a brutal zero-sum game.  Combined with the pressures of tiger parenting and the isolating effects of the one child  policy, Chinese youth have become lone islands, adrift in an endless sea of exam sheets. In 2025,  the exiled Chinese pro-liberty influencer Teacher Li launched a crowdsourced GitHub project to  document the notorious 611 schedule prevalent in Chinese schools. Studying from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00  p.m., six or seven days a week. Collecting thousands of anonymous reports, the project illustrated  how Chinese students frequently endure longer, more oppressive hours and fewer rest days than  actual prison inmates, leading to widespread mental health breakdowns and self-harm. However,  when students anonymously submitted reports, state security officers intervened. They pressure school  administrators to crack down on "foreign influence", explicitly instructing them to stop those  "little treasonists" from assisting the foreign "big treasonist" referring directly to Teacher  Li. Valid workload grievances were reframed as national security threats that damage the Gaokao's  reputation. Because the system depends on one core belief, that it is fair and objective. If that  belief breaks, the pressure becomes harder to justify, so it's maintained. And that's where the  psychological shift happens. When everything is framed as fair, failure stops feeling situational.  It feels personal. A bad score feels like you didn't work hard enough, and that stays with you.  Moreover, the Confucian culture of "Face" turns a child's score into the public mirror of the entire  family's virtue. Parents pour massive fortunes into private tutoring because the system treats a  low score as a direct blow to the family's worth and status. This gave rise to a fanatical private  tutoring industry worth billions. It produced superstar tutors like Zhang Xuefeng whose recent sudden  death from overwork triggered tens of thousands of exam takers to attend his funeral. Everyone  tells you just get through the Gaokao and life will open up in college. So you endure it. You pass  the exam. You enter university. And suddenly no one is pushing you anymore. I lived this. After  I aced the Gaokao and entered the top university, the massive weight lifted. And I realised no one had  ever taught me how to think for myself. I started doing everything I was forbidden to do before the  exam. I skipped classes en masse, became a frantic performer in a metal band to vent my anger,  stayed up all night in nightclubs, and abused alcohol. It's not just personal. The data reflects  this systemic burnout. While 15year-old Chinese students dominate global PISA tests, research  shows their critical thinking skills actually decline during their college years. Unlike their  US peers. This partly explains why some overseas Chinese students behave in grotesque or resentful  ways once they step outside the Gaokao-oriented system. They were never taught how to deal with  a non-standardised world filled with nuance, nepotism, and corruption. They are rarely equipped  with the mindsets needed to navigate hierarchies drastically different from the one they were  programmed for. By the way, I actually made a video talking about how this lack of critical  thinking had a huge double-edged impact on how China built its tech power. Check out my previous  video here. With all that being said, this system doesn't operate insulated from the outside world.  Once integrated into the global economy, the exam system also became an engine of enormous wealth.  Opening up to the outside world provided an escape hatch. It allowed those disillusioned by the  exam system to find new opportunities elsewhere.

[00:11:18]Foreign Direct Investment and fascination with  western capitalism brought a new utilitarian mercantalist mindset. People trained in the  grueling galo system took their intense discipline and applied to tech and commerce. They didn't  have the "sales equals sleazy" mindset that holds many back in the west. Their audacity to make  money was fueled by the survival instincts honed in the exam matrix. You could feel the vibrant  momentum of rapidly booming startups everywhere, fuelled by western tech transfer. Famous Chinese  apps like Rednote were initially built by former employees from Google China and Uber China – people who were forced out after the foreign platforms were shut down for refusing to accept arbitrary  state rules. Despite political constraints, the scale of the globalized economy fostered a  more genuine merit-based system where competence determined employment. I saw this firsthand. Disillusioned with the initial path, I deviated from it.

[00:12:13]Through relentlessly learning from globally  renowned industry figures in Shanghai, I established a tech-oriented music production career  there. My hard work paid off. My work was featured in blockbuster films and video games released  worldwide. Outside the Gaokao-oriented system, performance matters more than exam scores.  Furthermore, if the training backgrounds from the two systems blend organically, you get the  astonishing results I mentioned at the beginning.

[00:12:38]Two Gaokao winners, Wang Hong and Tang Yunqing, further  their education and academic careers in America's system, ultimately contributing to a historical  mathematical breakthrough. And the work they are doing isn't abstract. It underpins industries like  wireless communication, medical imaging, and data transmission – fields worth trillions. It proves that  the same discipline that drives test performance can drive sustainable innovation if it's placed in  a system that allows experimentation and rewards initiative. That's part of how China built so  much wealth so quickly. But this path isn't evenly available. To gain access, you must have  experience in global markets and environments where different rules apply. Without that, most  people remain inside the original structure.

[00:13:21]So you end up with a split outcome. Some people  adapt, expand, and build across systems. Others remain optimised for a system that doesn't fully  translate outside of it. And that difference becomes much more visible over time. For those  who stay within the state system, the incentives change fundamentally. In that context, loyalty  is just as important as performance, if not more so.

[00:13:45]Some people who fail the Gaokao are absorbed into  state-run businesses, such as Censor-on-demand firms. There is a stark irony in an interview  where a Chinese sensor discussed how he failed academically yet was given enormous state power to  censor dissenting articles written by academically successful writers. Others move into more elite  tracks through institutions funded directly by Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Public Security.  They enter the heart of the state apparatus where indoctrination is exponentially harsher. They  face crueller standardised exams and more rigorous scrutiny of their political opinions. They are  heavily trained in anti-imperialist ideology and revanchist patriotism. Those who finally survive  and prevail in that closed system become China's dogmatic elites and ideologues. When they  operate internationally, the differences in their programming become highly visible. We see  the theft of advanced AI technologies by Chinese talents embedded in Western firms, exemplified  by Linwei Ding's recent exfiltration of over 2,000 pages of Google's confidential secrets to  launch a Beijing startup. We see industrial-scale model distillation attacks on US platforms  conducted by Chinese AI firms like Deepseek and MiniMax using millions of proxy queries to  replicate proprietary AI models at low cost.

[00:15:06]These issues reflect that when they enter  open systems, they often prioritise winning at any cost rather than collaboration. But they  don't represent everyone trained in the system.

[00:15:16]There are also many individuals who move in the  opposite direction. Students, professionals, and insiders who gain exposure to open environments,  often reassess the systems they came from. Many speak openly about it, sometimes at immense  risk. Many overseas Chinese students bravely speak out against China's aggressive policies, its unsustainable models and the abuse of ethnic minority rights. Despite facing imprisonment for  their views, they continue exercising free speech, building on the courage that force the regime  to ease its harsh 2022 lockdowns. However, the balance between these two forces is tilting  alarmingly. China's state-sponsored actors are increasingly exploiting the western open  society's internal malaise and nihilism.

[00:16:01]Open systems thrive on accountability, debate,  and genuine meritocracy. But when institutions chase short-term gains, these foundations  weaken. For example, top universities like Cambridge quietly discouraged talks on the  misery created by China's system. Their policies favoring "widening participation" and  contextual offers have prioritised full-fee Chinese enrolments over meritocracy Cambridge receives tens of millions in funding  from Chinese entities and around 25% of its tuition revenue from Chinese students. So it  chooses short-term harmony over free speech.

[00:16:37]Similarly, executives at major western  tech firms keep sourcing cheap lithium and cobalt from supply chains tied to Chinese  firms' labour abuses and environmental damage, because confronting it would raise costs and slow  their green targets. US companies like IBM, Dell, and Cisco have sold billions of dollars worth of  computing hardware and analytics tools directly to Chinese police, enabling the surveillance and  detention of prisoners of conscience. Under such global conditions, the bitter irony is that the  ideologues trained in China's pathological exam system don't feel the pathology anymore. Many  Western elites contribute to the repression that silences the conscientious Chinese voices the  West claims to champion. And that's the real danger.

[00:17:26]An exam system that trains people to optimise  for one narrow definition of success doesn't just stay inside its borders. It scales through  global markets, institutions, and incentives. I lived inside that system. I benefited from it. But  I've also seen what it leaves behind – in people, in dignity, and in the way it reshapes the definition  of freedom globally. And if we don't recognise how it works, we don't just misunderstand  China. We start repeating the same logic ourselves. If you found this analysis helpful in  understanding China's education system and would like a deeper dive into what freedom actually  means for us and how Chinese citizens preserve freedom on the ground, check out my previous  video here. Thank you for watching. Stay well.