BOOK REVIEW
The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China, by Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025. 256 pp. $29.95 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-674-29539-1
On a humid June morning in a county town in Henan, a father stands outside a sealed school gate, staring at his phone but not really reading it. Inside, his daughter is bent over a desk, answering questions that will decide not only which university she may enter, but also whether she will leave this town at all. The book recounts scenes like this without melodrama, noting how parents count the hours, police block roads, and silence settles over entire neighborhoods. For two days each year, China seems to hold its breath. The Gaokao is not just an exam taken by teenagers. It is a national ritual that concentrates hope, fear, and belief in fairness into a few sheets of paper. The Highest Exam grows out of this tension, asking why a single test has come to shape so many lives, and what that power reveals about the Chinese state and society.
The Highest Exam is written by Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau, scholars whose authority comes not from distance but from long engagement with China’s political economy and institutions. Jia is a professor of economics at the University of California San Diego and co-director of the China Data Lab, known for her work on historical and contemporary Chinese institutions. Li, a leading economist of education and labor markets, co-directs the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions and has taught at Tsinghua University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Cousineau brings a writer’s clarity and a researcher’s discipline, having worked at Stanford’s China center before pursuing an MBA at Duke. Together, they combine statistical rigor, policy insight, and narrative care, making the book credible both as scholarship and as social diagnosis.
The authors argue that the Gaokao is best understood as a state-designed sorting machine that has survived revolutions, reforms, and demographic change because it serves multiple purposes at once. It allocates scarce university seats, signals merit to employers, disciplines families, and anchors a shared belief that effort can overcome birth. The book traces how the exam was revived after the Cultural Revolution as a symbol of order and fairness, replacing political loyalty with academic performance as the main path to mobility. Over time, the Gaokao became embedded in household strategy, local governance, and national identity. Each chapter builds on the last, moving from history to mechanism, and from individual incentives to collective consequences.
Structurally, the book contains an introduction and nine chapters divided across three sections. The first section begins with the Gaokao’s return in the late 1970s and explains why leaders embraced a single national exam as a solution to chaos and favoritism. This section shows how standardization built trust in a vast country where personal connections once mattered more than rules. The second section shifts focus to how the exam operates in practice, examining cutoffs, quotas, and regional disparities. Here, the authors show how a system meant to equalize opportunity also reflects local power and fiscal capacity. The final section turns outward, exploring long-run effects on labor markets, migration, fertility choices, and political attitudes. The arc of the book moves from legitimacy, to inequality, to consequence, without losing sight of the exam’s moral appeal.
One of the book’s major contributions to China Studies lies in its careful linking of micro-level behavior to macro-level governance. Rather than treating the Gaokao as culture alone, the authors frame it as an institution that coordinates expectations between state and citizen. This perspective helps explain why the exam remains widely accepted even when its flaws are obvious. For international relations and geopolitics scholars, the argument matters because it shows how domestic legitimacy is built through mundane mechanisms like testing, not only through ideology or coercion. The Gaokao becomes a quiet pillar of stability, shaping how citizens interpret fairness, authority, and their own place in the nation.
The authors do not shy away from controversy. One implicit stance that invites debate is their suggestion that the Gaokao’s legitimacy outweighs its inequality costs, at least from the state’s point of view. Critics may argue that this view risks normalizing structural disadvantage faced by rural students and migrant families. Others may question whether faith in meritocracy can endure as returns to education become more uneven. The book presents evidence rather than slogans, but its calm tone may frustrate readers who expect stronger normative judgment. This restraint, however, is also a strength, allowing space for disagreement grounded in data rather than rhetoric.
Healthy debate runs through the book’s engagement with existing scholarship. Compared with Zhaohui Howlett’s (2021) Meritocracy and Its Discontents, which centers on anxiety, moral narratives, and emotional strain, The Highest Exam stays closer to institutions and incentives. Howlett’s work helps readers feel the pressure of exam life, while Jia, Li, and Cousineau explain why that pressure persists. Yunxiang Gong’s (2014) personal account of Gaokao culture offers vivid stories of family sacrifice and identity formation. The Highest Exam complements this narrative by providing the structural map behind those stories, showing how individual journeys fit into a national system.
A particularly strong chapter examines how the Gaokao promises fairness while nudging citizens to interpret success and failure as personal outcomes. Drawing on examples from elite university cutoffs, the authors show how students just above a threshold gain access to top institutions, while those just below are diverted to less prestigious paths. This logic echoes Jia and Li’s (2021) earlier study on cutoff scores and wages, which demonstrates how marginal differences translate into significant income gaps. The book situates such findings within a broader moral economy, where belief in merit reduces attention to inherited advantage. Li and Zhang’s (2023) work on migrant children and Gaokao reform further illustrates how eligibility rules shape family migration decisions. The Highest Exam weaves these studies into a narrative about state design and household response, showing how policy details ripple through lives.
The downstream effects of the exam extend into labor markets, a point reinforced by Ren’s study of elite professional service firms. Ren (2022) shows that recruiters treat Gaokao success as a signal of learning ability, often more important than detailed grades. The Highest Exam provides the institutional backstory for this practice, explaining why employers trust the exam as a national signal. Together, the book and Ren’s interviews reveal how selection turns into valuation, and how a test taken at eighteen continues to shape opportunity decades later. This insight is crucial for understanding inequality in transitional economies, where credentials carry heavy symbolic weight.
Beyond China, the book has begun to resonate in debates about education in the United States. As American policymakers revisit standardized testing, charter schools, and merit-based admissions, the Gaokao offers a cautionary mirror. The authors note how a single exam can unify standards while deepening stratification, a tension familiar to readers following controversies over SATs and college access. By presenting China not as an outlier but as an extreme case of a global dilemma, the book invites comparative reflection rather than easy judgment.
The question of mental wellbeing runs quietly through the narrative. While not a psychological study, the book acknowledges the stress placed on students, families, and communities. This matters for geopolitics and soft power because domestic wellbeing shapes a nation’s external confidence. A society that believes in fair competition, even under strain, projects stability. At the same time, the authors hint that rising anxiety, and burnout could erode trust over time. Community building around the Gaokao, with shared rituals and sacrifices, binds citizens together, but it also risks narrowing definitions of worth.
For scholars of international relations, diplomacy, and social issues in management, The Highest Exam offers a rare look at how soft power begins at home. Educational institutions shape narratives of competence and fairness that travel outward through students, migrants, and global rankings. Policymakers concerned with national image can learn from how China has leveraged a domestic exam to signal seriousness about merit, even as critics question its equity. The book’s clear prose and careful evidence make it valuable for readers beyond economics, including political scientists and practitioners.
As a professional assessment, The Highest Exam stands as a sober, necessary addition to the literature. It does not romanticize the Gaokao, nor does it dismiss it as mere oppression. Instead, it shows how a single exam became a shared language between state and citizen, linking effort to hope. When read alongside Howlett’s exploration of anxiety and Gong’s personal narrative, the book completes a triangle of feeling, story, and system. Its achievement lies in making readers see the Gaokao not only as China’s highest exam, but as one of its most revealing institutions.
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
References
Gong, Y. (2014). Gaokao: A Personal Journey Behind China's Examination Culture. China Books.
Howlett, Z. M. (2021). Meritocracy and its discontents: Anxiety and the national college entrance exam in China. Cornell University Press.
Jia, R., & Li, H. (2021). Just above the exam cutoff score: Elite college admission and wages in China. Journal of Public Economics, 196, 104371.
Li, X., & Zhang, J. (2023). Educational opportunity and children’s migration: Evidence from China’s Gaokao reform for children of migrant families. Journal of Comparative Economics.
Ren, R. (2022). Educational success in transitional China: The Gaokao and learning capital in elite professional service firms. The China Quarterly, 252, 1277–1298.
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Reviewed by:
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive Doctoral Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Indore
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