Millions of Chinese students sat for notoriously tough college entrance exams yesterday, the first since the country lifted zero-COVID rules that forced classes online for months on end.
China’s education ministry says nearly 13 million students, a record, are registered to take the gaokao exams — billed by state media as the “world’s toughest” — this year.
“I’ve been waking up at 4am every day, except on Sundays, to study for the past four years,” said Jesse Rao, a 17-year-old high school senior in Shenzhen.
Photo: AFP
“I’ve done everything I can, but I still feel a bit nervous.”
In Beijing, anxious parents gathered around exam halls as their children knuckled down, many wearing red for good luck.
Zhang Jing, a mother in her forties, compared herself to Bai Suzhen, a character in Chinese folklore who is locked in a tower until her son passes an important test.
“My son is quite relaxed, I think I am more nervous than him,” said Zhang, wearing a red qipao, a traditional Chinese dress.
“I have been accompanying my son and instructing his study from the first grade of elementary school to the first year of high school,” she said.
Another mother, Fang Hong, said she had prepared a simple breakfast of bread and eggs for her son.
“My son is a bit nervous, I told him we can accept any results of the gaokao and not put any pressure on him,” she said.
‘I STRUGGLED’
Testing high school students on their Chinese, English, mathematics and other science or humanities subjects of their choice, the exams are critical to landing coveted spots at China’s top universities.
Many parents shell out hundreds of dollars a month on cram schools or hire graduate students to sit with their children while they study late into the night.
Exams are notorious for testing the ability to compose essays in response to oblique prompts, with sample questions published yesterday by the People’s Daily newspaper requiring students to contemplate the effect of technology on time management and the impact of a good story.
Another sample question asked them to muse on two aphorisms by President Xi Jinping (習近平), adding that they would be marked in part on whether they write from the “correct angle.”
Adding to the stress, this year’s exam-takers have spent the bulk of their high school years under pandemic restrictions, which ended abruptly in December.
“I struggled to follow online lessons last year,” said Katherina Wang, a high school student from Shanghai who has been through two snap lockdowns in the past two years.
“Our teachers held extra classes in the evenings and on the weekend.” The high stakes have led to elaborate attempts at cheating.
Several provinces this year have installed scanners with facial-recognition capabilities to ensure that candidates do not hire proxies to take the test on their behalf, the state-run Global Times reported.
‘I WILL TRY AGAIN’
Exams can last up to four days, depending on the province, taking between an hour and 150 minutes per subject.
The maximum score is 750, with over 600 required for a place at top-tier universities — for years a ticket to personal and professional success in China.
Very few make the cut. Last year, only three percent of exam-takers in Guangdong, China’s most populous province, scored over 600.
And for students with more modest ambitions, scores still play a critical role in securing spots in universities and what subjects can be taken.
For those that do not get the results they need, there is always next year. In 2021, 17 percent of students nationwide retook their gaokao.
“If I don’t get the results I want, I will try again,” said Benjamin Zhu, a high school senior from Guangzhou.
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50
Few scenes are more representative of rural Taiwan than a mountain slope covered in row upon row of carefully manicured tea plants. Like staring at the raked sand in a Zen garden, seeing these natural features in an unnaturally perfect arrangement of parallel lines has a certain calming effect. Snapping photos of the tea plantations blanketing Taiwan’s mountain is a favorite activity among tourists but, unfortunately, the experience is often rather superficial. As these tea fields are part of working farms, it’s not usually possible to walk amongst them or sample the teas they are producing, much less understand how the