Introduction

This article provides a critical review of the social impact of National Large-Scale Assessments (NLSAs) by taking Gaokao, the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in China, as an example. We conceptualise “impact” from the perspective of language testing and assessment by relating it to the concept of “washback” to refer to test consequences (Schissel, 2018; Taylor, 2005; Wall, 1997). While washback effects are restricted to teaching and the classroom, impact travels beyond this context, as it refers to “any of the effects that a test may have on individuals, policies or practices, within the classroom, the school, the educational system or society as a whole” (Wall, 1997, p. 291). We use "social impact" in a more holistic sense to refer to both educational and social contexts. This impact assessment is based on a review of available literature which tries to synthesise findings from relevant studies to provide a holistic picture of the societal consequences of the Chinese test.

As one of the unique and most influential national testing systems in the world, the Chinese Gaokao affects millions of students and teachers year by year and has, therefore, attracted interest from researchers from various fields. Gaokao is a unique manifestation of the “global testing culture” (Smith, 2016). An examination of the test in the world’s second-largest economy and an authoritarian political system can provide critical insights into testing-society relationships. Considering this potential, we seek to connect local Gaokao to the global context and development in testing. With the reform and opening up of its economic and political system in 1978, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began to be deeply influenced by neoliberalism, which laid the foundation for privatisation and commodification of core public services, in which public education is most noteworthy (Ball, 2003). The focus of education in China has also shifted to serve the purpose of modernisation and economic development (Yeoh & Chu, 2015).

NLSAs are used as essential instruments to monitor standardised curriculum delivery and to hold schools and teachers accountable for student performance (Smith, 2016; Verger et al., 2019) by transforming the complicated social process of education into easily measurable data for evaluation. By examining the Gaokao-centric education regime in China, this article seeks to generate insights into how such exam-oriented education shapes Chinese society. We argue that rather than viewing it as a local phenomenon, Gaokao needs to be rooted in globalisation and the global education community, which can offer lessons for education and society in China and beyond.

Gaokao and Chinese education

Examination has been an essential component of education in Chinese society. Around 600 AD, the Sui Dynasty invented keju or the imperial examination, which served as the main vehicle for accessing the bureaucracy until 1905, when the Guangxu Emperor abolished it (Yu et al., 2018). During this long period of 1300 years, the status discrepancy between ordinary citizens and the shidafu (scholar-officials) was attached to and consolidated by learning and examination (Yu et al., 2018). Although the education system and the purpose of education have changed multiple times during this period, high-stakes testing as part of an exam-oriented culture has persisted in Chinese society, creating a highly stressful exam-oriented education environment. Under the current education environment, a high proportion of students live a “three-point life”, which represents their daily routine of moving between home, school and canteen (Kristofk, 2011). With a heavy burden of tests and long school days, Chinese education has imposed a toxic level of stress upon students, causing serious negative impacts of varying kinds. After surveying 2,191 9–12 years old Chinese students from urban and rural areas, Hesketh et al. (2010) reported that 81% of children worried ‘a lot’ about exams, of which 63% were afraid of being punished by teachers. Seventy-three percent of students claimed to have been physically punished by their parents due to a low-level of academic achievement, and over a third of students reported experiencing psychosomatic symptoms at least once a week. Another investigation involving 2400 students from different cities and provinces showed that over 76% of them were in a bad mood due to academic stress, while over 9% reported feeling desperate (Zhao et al., 2015). Other large-scale studies have also indicated that Chinese students are at higher risks of suicidal ideation and attempts (e.g. Cheng et al., 2009a; Cui et al., 2011; Unger et al., 2001) and even homicides on academic grounds (Roberts, 2014).

At the centre of this exam-pressured education system sits Gaokao, which is arguably one of the most difficult exams in the world (Pires, 2019). The word ‘difficult’ does not simply refer to the difficulty of the exam itself, but rather to the high stakes attached to it, making it a major source of stress and a crucial turning point in the lives of Chinese students (Jin & Cortazzi, 2006). Emler et al (2019) pointed out that NLSAs usually serve three purposes: accountability, selection, and comparison. Gaokao serves the purpose of selection and comparison for college entrance and regional education. It also serves the purpose of accountability in monitoring the outcomes of regional curricula at various levels, such as regions, schools, teachers, and students. However, differing from other NLSAs in other countries (e.g., the Australian NAPLAN) or international contexts (e.g., the OECD’s PISA), the scale of Gaokao is enormous. Every year, around 10 million students take Gaokao (Emler et al., 2019), but only 40% of them can enrol in colleges and just over 1.6% of them in top-tier universities (Wangyi, 2023), which makes the test more competitive than any job recruitment.

Geographically, Gaokao takes place in every region in China; socially, it is an annual event that affects various levels of society; and in terms of time, its influence extends as early as the primary school (Zhao et al., 2015). Gaokao has changed the lives of many students, but, at the same time, it has stopped many others from changing their lives. Therefore, rather than solely focusing on how it influences students, it is imperative to examine Gaokao in a comprehensive way focusing on teachers, parents, the education system, and society at large together with students. They are the key stakeholders who are directly impacted by Gaokao and Chinese education.

The local and the global features of Gaokao from a historical perspective

In order to understand how Gaokao came to be so important in Chinese society, it is necessary to review its history and connect it to global developments in educational testing and evaluation. After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, education was taken as the core mission of the new government, as the illiteracy rate at that time was around 80% and only 20% of school-age children were enrolled in schools (Hui et al., 1996). To address inequality and poverty in the new country and to cultivate human capital with higher education qualifications for the economy, Gaokao was introduced in 1952 as a unified higher education admission system (Sun, 2023). Until the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Gaokao was discontinued, the test operated only ideologically (Liu, 2016a). For example, in the selection of Gaokao, political screening was embodied in the forms of “health check” and “birth origin” (Huang, 2005). Individuals were categorised as “red” or “black” based on their family of birth (Bian, 2002), with “red” indicating property-less peasants and working class, while “black” indicating the opposite, the anti-revolutionary (Unger, 1982). The egalitarian development of higher education was encouraged by the preference for the “red” classes (Liu, 2016a). The proportion of students from workers’ and peasants’ backgrounds increased over the years, from 20.5% in 1952 to 36.4% in 1957 (Beijing Review, 1958) and peaked at 71% in 1965 (China Education Yearbook Editorial, 1984).

At the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Deng Xiao Ping took the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and reformed the country to focus on modernisation and economic development (Yeoh & Chu, 2015). As part of this process, Gaokao was restored in 1977. However, unlike the pre-revolution time, Deng’s era demanded that: “Education should be geared to the needs of modernisation, of the world and of the future” (Message written for Jingshan School by Deng Xiaoping on 1 October 1983, cited in Yeoh & Chu, 2015, p. 88). The ‘Nine-Year Compulsory Education’ policy was introduced in 1986, providing free basic education to all school-age children (Yeoh & Chu, 2015). During this period, there was also a baby boom due to an improvement in the quality of life, which resulted in an increase of 124 million people in China (Liu, 2016a). With the increase in student population and the introduction of “market socialism”, which promoted education for economic productivity (Davies & Bansel, 2007), neoliberalism began to shape Chinese education with competition being intensified both between students and education institutions.

As the largest socialist country in the world today, the PRC is usually viewed as the antithesis of neoliberalism, with the state controlling most of the major means of production. However, since the 1980s, with the introduction of the reform and opening up policy, the Chinese government started to move towards promoting more neoliberal-looking and market-oriented economic and social policies (Wang & Hamid, 2024). Although the Chinese party-state still owns large enterprises in key sectors of the country's economy and production, privatisation of public enterprises, encouragement of private enterprise, marketisation of social services, reduction of capital controls, the introduction of free trade agreements and joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001 have created the environment of a relatively free market economy with its own characteristics (Duckett, 2020; Wang & Hamid, 2024). It is argued that China has developed a “particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralised control”, that is, neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics (Harvey, 2005, p.120).

As can be noted from the brief historical overview, Gaokao has served different purposes before and after the reform and opening-up, when PRC began to reinsert itself into the global scene (De Freitas, 2019). China’s opening-up has been crucial in driving global economic growth and improving economic development (Li et al., 2021). Meanwhile, Chinese education has also been significantly impacted by the combined forces of globalisation and its traditional exam-oriented culture, in which neoliberalism has played a crucial role by introducing market principles. Chiang (2020) examines the power of neoliberalism and the process by which it is transforming education: Neoliberalism cleverly resolves the conflict between social justice and efficiency in the name of public interest, linking individual interests in the free market to the discourse of the public good. This discourse relocates civic power in the individual domain to be determined by rational calculation, thereby granting the government legitimate authority to implement market-oriented reforms. The public managerialism underpinning neoliberalism then pushes towards fiercer competition, where self-accountability is central, which emphasises the evaluation and monitoring of performance, which not only highlights individual capabilities but also reflects the competitiveness of each unit, that is, performativity. This intensifies inequality in education, although neoliberal discourses define such inequality as related to individual rather than structural factors such as class, race, or gender. In this process of neoliberalising, NLSAs are treated as effective tools for holding educators accountable, collecting and presenting information for policy making, and sorting and selecting students for competitive opportunities, for example, places in prestigious colleges (Emler et al., 2019). In order to meet the new demands and to ensure the quality of education, many education systems have developed learning standards for their national curricula that are aligned with the implementation of NLSAs (Smith, 2016), which then lead to the creation of exam-oriented national education systems. In the Chinese context, Gaokao has been playing the role of NLSAs in promoting neoliberalism and performativity.

Neoliberalism, performativity, and NLSAs are relatively new concepts in China, where exam-oriented education has had a long history dating back to keju in 600 AD. Although they share similarities in terms of standardisation and governance, Gaokao is different from keju as the former serves as one of the first steps towards market reforms (Liu, 2016a). When Gaokao was restored in 1977, it aimed to reverse the failure of higher education in China, where social selection was accomplished by political affiliation (Huang, 2005). Gaokao became the monopoly to ‘meritocratically’ distribute education opportunities to students from different social origins. As a result, it retriggered social interest in meritocratic social selection in Chinese culture (Liu, 2016a), which was first associated with keju and was maintained for 1300 years. On the other hand, since the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, which was also the reason for the restoration of Gaokao, education turned to focus on modernisation and globalisation (Yeoh & Chu, 2015). Therefore, neoliberal ideologies such as performativity successfully penetrated Chinese education during this period. Combined with traditional Chinese culture, Gaokao became firmly rooted in the fertile ground as a unique exam-oriented education culture.

In meeting their avowed goals, the high-stakes of NLSAs often generate unintended consequences or “collateral damage” (Nichols & Berliner, 2007), which are usually grouped into five categories. First, NLSAs can distort education at several levels, such as promoting a false belief in performativity and forcing teachers to “teach to the test”. Second, it may lead to demoralisation and psychological damage to its stakeholders including teachers. Third, it may lead to high levels of corruption and cheating. Fourth, it may exacerbate inequality and injustice in education. Finally, it can stifle innovation in education (Emler et al., 2019).

Gaokao as an example of NLSAs is geared towards the primary purpose of student selection to determine their eligibility for enrolment in colleges and universities, while also functioning as an important tool for assessing regional disparities in education quality and informing policy decisions. Furthermore, its accountability aspect requires more attention when discussing its “collateral damage”. The reputation of schools and teachers is usually closely linked to students’ performance on Gaokao, which has a direct impact on teachers’ economic well-being, as it is an important part of their performance appraisal for bonuses and other welfare benefits. Such a chain of accountability forces local governments, schools, and teachers to reshape education around Gaokao. Local governments introduce policies that can benefit schools to practise their autonomy in improving students’ Gaokao performance; schools modify course schedules to focus only on Gaokao content, provide extracurricular courses to improve students’ test performance, and rank students and classes to enhance their competitiveness (Zhao et al., 2015); and teachers reduce their teaching content based on the scope of Gaokao ignoring other learning areas. These are typical consequences of NLSAs in developed and developing countries (Ali & Hamid, 2020; Hardy, 2015; Menken, 2006).

Where has this exam-oriented culture also influenced by neoliberal globalisation taken modern Chinese education? As an education context which emphasises performance, we may start with China’s education performance in comparison with other countries or regions. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international large-scale assessment, has been widely used around the world to determine the quality of education in different countries (Tucker, 2011). As reported, in the past 20 years, Shanghai-China topped the PISA ranking in 2009, 2012, and 2018Footnote 1 (Schleicher, 2019). Such a dominant performance has been criticised for being unrepresentative of student performance for all regions in China (Yu et al., 2018). It has also been reported that 30% of Chinese people interviewed believed that these results did not reflect the true competence of Chinese students, but only the outcome of over-investment in exercise and study (Zhang, 2013). Nevertheless, this reflects the importance of exams in Chinese education showing the extent to which people would invest their efforts and time. The Chinese performance on PISA put pressure on other countries such as Sweden, which was previously considered to be less exam-oriented, to the extent that the Swedish Ministry of Education decided to reduce the use of technology in the classroom because of its recent drop in PISA rankings in reading (Pele, 2023).

However, this high level of academic performance by Chinese students comes at a significant cost. As reported by Zhao et al. (2015), toxic levels of stress in the education system have been attributed to Gaokao, and to date, top-down reform policies to mitigate such problems have not been effective. Additionally, a competition mindset has been introduced to teachers as a major theme of education discourses (Zhao, 2011). Teachers’ stress is also greatly magnified due to the close association between their financial well-being and students’ examination performance. Furthermore, in such a fiercely competitive context, parents also participate and invest heavily in their children due to the high anxiety of being outperformed by other students (Li & Yu, 2022). Parents’ higher expectations of their children’s test performance also lead to increased stress for students. Yet, although it is natural to expect a decline in academic performance in such a stressful education context, students in China tend to show strong academic resilience (Li, 2017), which allows them to resolve stress to some extent and protect their academic performance from its negative effects.

Exam-oriented education under neoliberalism does not exist exclusively in China; it is part of the global trend (Smith, 2016) which did not even originate in China. However, the case of China is special and has been discussed extensively in the literature since it is intertwined with Chinese culture and local education policies. At the same time, Gaokao should not be demonised either (Zhao et al., 2015). While Gaokao has strong influences on Chinese students, it does not make them inherently different from students in other countries. As Pires (2019) noted after observing high school students playing in the school playground across the street: “after all, they are just like young people in so many other parts of the world” (p. 182). Therefore, in the following section, we present how the impact of neoliberalism and performativity underpinning Gaokao is perceived by the major stakeholders based on the literature.

Social impact of Gaokao

On students

Under the influence of neoliberalism, competition in the Chinese education system has intensified over the years. Gaokao has been recognised as the most crucial point in this cumulative competition process. The academic stress resulting from such competition has led to a large number of students developing psychological disorders, self-hatred, and suppressed personalities (Kirkpatrick & Zang, 2011). A comparative study showed that China ranked lowest among the US, Belgium, Peru, and China in terms of adolescents’ psychological need satisfaction, while scoring the highest in terms of need frustration (Chen et al., 2015). In addition, it not only damages students’ psychological health and provokes higher risks of suicide among students (Zhao et al., 2015), but also almost inevitably leads to the growth of jealousy, distrust, and hostility among peers (Pires, 2019). It has been argued that students’ aptitude for development is decided solely by scores in Chinese education, often leading to the marginalisation of underachieving students (Kirkpatrick & Zang, 2011). These students are usually seen as threats to the “honour” of the class since they decrease the average class scores (Yu et al., 2018). In such normalised academic competition, close friends are usually considered each other's rivals and enemies (Zhao et al., 2015). In an interview, a Grade 11 girl reported that a friend of hers, who was similarly ranked to her, would secretly watch her answers in exercises and she would stare back angrily (Zhao, 2011). Another girl in the same grade also reported a set of social rules that seemed to have been internalised by students in relation to academic competition:

I don’t think I trust anybody completely and anybody trusts me completely. Trusting another person is very difficult. I trust others in small things. But to be honest, when it is related to self-interest, I will hesitate and won’t be too trusting ... [what issues involve self-interest?] Academic competition is the most important issue. When you know some important mathematic problems, you wonder if you should share them with your friends, and to what extent you help them. (Zhao, 2011, p. 109)

Such representations of social relations in academic competition have led older adolescents to show significantly higher levels of disinterest in almost all social questions (Zhao et al., 2012). Interviews and focus groups with Chinese students have revealed that this indifference is strongly associated with a sense of civic powerlessness and deep cynicism (Li et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2017). Although these were reported for all schools and year levels studied, there was a strong correlation between an increase in such civic attitudes and moral reasoning and an increase in academic stress as school years progressed (Zhao et al., 2013). On the other hand, students also alienate themselves from friends and parents to prepare for the test, locking themselves in their rooms after school for a year, which could lead to a lifelong sense of isolation, helplessness, and misery (Muthanna & Sang, 2016).

Apart from stress and problematic peer relationships, students’ self-determination in learning is distorted by this exam-oriented education. First, the high stakes associated with Gaokao may push students to study for reasons that are not autonomous or self-determined (Yu et al., 2018). It was reported that the proportion of students studying to pass exams increased as they grew older and exceeded one-third in the third year of high school (Shen, 2008). Another report found that just over 30% of children and young adolescents between the ages of 6 and 14 studied out of interest, while 46.5% studied to please their parents, and close to 60% studied to secure good jobs in the future (Sun, 2007). However, although the students reported that they were studying for future employment, by the time they took Gaokao and had to choose a major for their university, over 71% of high school seniors did not know their true interests, and about 66% did not know which major or career matched their potential (Liu & Liu, 2002). This may explain why Gaokao often leads to students losing their imagination and creativity (Schmitz, 2011), because they learn in a very controlled pattern of self-determination, where they cannot fully develop their intrinsic motivation, but only focus on the required content of Gaokao and other exams. Second, while higher education may not be suitable for everyone, as it demands high aptitude and intelligence, Gaokao still pushes all students to set it as their goal, leading to increased frustration among students (Yu et al., 2018). Specifically, over 34% of students felt almost no sense of achievement, only frustration and failure, and 52% of students reported feeling ‘very tired’ (Shen, 2008). On the other hand, it has also been argued that such controlled motivation could lead to higher behavioural engagement of students in learning (Yu et al., 2018). As suggested by Pomerantz and Wang (2009), Chinese students showed higher learning engagement than US students, and they also perceived schoolwork to be more important.

The impact of Gaokao on students can continue for years after the exam, affecting their university lives as well. Their efforts to get into universities are usually considered glorious in their minds, and in order to increase the likelihood of entering better universities, students sometimes apply for less popular majors, even if they are not interested in them (Heger, 2017). As a result, students could be trapped in these majors if they could not achieve the top 10% in their major to apply for a major swap. Gaokao is also seen by students as a turning point in their lives. Life before Gaokao is filled with stress and competition, or the “hell of exams” (Jin & Cortazzi, 1998), while college life is seen as offering tranquillity and leisure. As students’ self-determination is controlled by Gaokao and grades, once such regulatory measures are removed, they may be expected to enjoy more freedom (Niemiec & Ryan, 2009). However, with their undeveloped identities and psychological compasses, Chinese students entering universities tend to show much lower levels of engagement (Ross et al., 2011), as Gaokao would have already shaped their controlled personalities. The pervasive materialism, the increasing tendency to join the bureaucracy, and blind conformity in their search for business and management majors (Yu & Levesque-Bristol, 2018) are some of the consequences of the controlled orientation in Chinese education.

On parents

Children’s education is considered the most important commitment for Chinese parents. This is inscribed in Confucianism, as education was the only major route to the civil service (Yu et al., 2018). In fact, the extent to which Chinese parents are willing to sacrifice for their children’s education, regardless of the return, is unique (Liu, 2016b). It is common for mothers to quit their jobs to provide full-time support for their children in the final stages of their preparation for Gaokao (Pires, 2019). Parents are willing to work much harder to purchase expensive properties in the district of the best public schools in order to admit their children to study there (Liu, 2016b). However, this high level of parental involvement may in turn put more stress on children. It could also, in a way, damage the autonomous personality of the students, leading them to follow the developmental blueprint that their parents may have designed for them (Pires, 2019).

With the rapid development of the market economy and the rise of neoliberalism since the 1990s, the stratification of Chinese society has become more pronounced. Class inequality has shaped parental involvement in education, and, consequently, children’s educational outcomes (Wu et al., 2017). A large proportion of the current middle-class Chinese parents come from peasant backgrounds, who may have a clear awareness of the terror of falling from the class ladder compared to working-class parents (Huang & Lin, 2019). In response, they tend to be even more actively involved in their children’s education to maintain their social positions (Tsang & Lee, 2016). Although education is seen as a gateway to a better life, it is usually considered the responsibility of schools by working-class parents (Cheng et al., 2009b). Instead of increasing education investment, which is not in their full control, working-class parents may reluctantly commit to more affordable approaches such as retaking Gaokao by their children (Ye, 2022). Parental involvement in children’s education has become a manifestation of class privilege and strategies for middle-class parents, who have more resources compared to working-class parents. They utilise different types of capital to accelerate achievement in their children’s education (Huang & Lin, 2019). As a result, students’ winning or losing in education competition has become a competition for their parents as well. Perhaps what is more concerning is that parents control their children to compete against their will in the righteous commitment to their children’s education that traditional Confucianism-based Chinese culture has assigned to them.

On teachers

Teachers in China have enjoyed higher social status for thousands of years. However, with the introduction of market ideology in education since the reform and opening-up policy, “modern” education in China has become a complex amalgamation in which teachers fulfil the traditional role of educators while simultaneously serving as passive gatekeepers of standardised tests such as Gaokao that determine students' career prospects and social status (Lo & Ye, 2017). Under this exam-oriented education system, teachers experience a significant reduction in their autonomy, concurrently facing heightened accountability for students’ academic performance, both from the school system and from anxious parents. They are expected to become “teaching machines” capable of consistently improving students’ scores, ultimately rendering them vulnerable to ‘performativity’. Teachers are usually judged as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ through a series of processes of datafication, primarily determined by their quantifiable achievements in improving students’ performance on Gaokao (Meng et al., 2021). Rather than focusing on teaching content, teachers would follow strategies such as repetitive mock exams, homework, and in-class exercises to ensure that their students are sufficiently prepared for Gaokao. In this way, their professional knowledge of the subject seems to be marginalised and replaced by accountability for students’ test skills and performance. They are also required to become the model for students to achieve high results in Gaokao (Pires, 2019) as if they were all successful candidates for it. This could lead to teachers’ professionalism being questioned once their students perform less well than expected. More directly, this could also affect the economic well-being of teachers, as their bonuses and benefits are closely associated with students’ performance on Gaokao (Emler et al., 2019). Therefore, teachers are under considerable pressure both from the authority above, where they are expected to adhere to teaching, curriculum, and examination standards and from students below, who often lack self-determination (Pelletier et al., 2002).

The emphasis on measurable performance outcomes ultimately exteriorises knowledge from its intrinsic value and meaning (Lyotard, 1984), as the neoliberal principle of efficiency dominates educational reform, shifting the focus of professional content from individual autonomy to student performance (Chiang, 2018). As a result, the commitment associated with ‘educational services’ loses their intrinsic value and meaning. In this scenario, the professional judgements of educators and other relevant professionals are relegated to a subordinate role, driven by the imperative of performativity and market needs (Ball, 2003).

The education system

The Chinese education system has also been greatly transformed by Gaokao and related exams. Essentially, tests have an impact on teaching and learning referred to as “washback” (Taylor, 2005; Wall, 1997) which can be negative or positive (Kirkpatrick & Zang, 2011). High-stakes tests are the most notable context where washback can magnify their effects within and beyond learning. Gaokao has profound effects on curriculum and teaching. Taking English education as an example, it has been shown that despite receiving more than 12 years of English education in the school system, many Chinese students are still unable to speak English fluently when they graduate (Snow et al., 2017). This ‘dummy English’ phenomenon in China has been attributed to the fact that Chinese students mostly learn English only to cope with exams rather than to communicate and that their learning content is more focused on exam-taking skills than on developing communicative competence (Meng et al., 2021). This phenomenon of teaching content exclusively for Gaokao is not limited to the English subject; in some schools, the curriculum could even be modified to leave only Gaokao-related subjects, while excluding non-compulsory subjects such as music and art, which are not tested in Gaokao for normal high school students. Schools and teachers often look down on these subjects and call them zake, meaning redundant subjects.

The dominance of Gaokao has also created a hierarchy of tests. Compared to the high stakes of Gaokao, the Academic Proficiency Test, huikao, which covers basic academic requirements of Chinese high schools and determines whether students are qualified to graduate with a high school diploma (Sun, 2023), seems to be less important. In some schools, teachers do not even discourage students from cheating during huikao, as they know that some subjects are not taught in their preferred stream since they choose their streams of study in the second year of high school. In the meantime, countless drills, weekly and monthly exams, and school-level and city-wide mock exams are designed to serve as indicators of students’ potential Gaokao performance and to familiarise them with the forms and administration of Gaokao (Li, 2020). The High School Entrance Examination, zhongkao, is also an important milestone in which students compete fiercely with one another, as getting into a better high school would provide a much more solid foundation for their performance on Gaokao. In 2023, it was reported that in a central city called Xi’an, due to the lax management of household registration by the local government, a large number of students who had studied in more developed areas were returning to Xi’an to take zhongkao. These students were later called huiliusheng or returning students (BBC, 2023). This allowed them to get into the best local high schools more easily and take advantage of the lower local Gaokao cut-off scores. This provoked widespread opposition from other parents, as this was clearly unfair and would damage their children’s rankings.

If zhongkao is seen as an important milestone of Gaokao, this incident can demonstrate the fierce social competition around Gaokao, although the actual competition is even fiercer. Although Gaokao is usually described as a one-off affair, in reality, students are permitted to retake Gaokao (fudu) without restrictions, but they must wait until the following year. The retake policy allows students to prepare for Gaokao for an extra year, but they would still be ranked with the new students, so retake students are usually more competitive since they do not need to learn new content but only focus on reviewing during the year. In some more competitive provinces, it is much more difficult to get into a satisfying university without retaking the exam, because in Gaokao it is not the scores but the rankings that determine a student’s qualification, and the scores are merely more comprehensive references for the rankings. Since 1999, along with the expansion of higher education, there has been a sharp rise in the number of retake students (Wang, 2008). Between 2002 and 2006, the number of students retaking Gaokao increased by an average of 240,000 annually, reaching 2.8 million in 2006, which accounted for 29.7% of the total 9.5 million candidates (Mi & Xu, 2006). Since then, retake students have consistently made up around 30% of Gaokao candidates (Ye, 2022). In 2024, out of 13.42 million registered candidates, 4.13 million were retake students (Wangyi, 2024). Moreover, the success rate of retake students has typically been higher than that of first-time candidates and has steadily increased, reaching nearly 70% in 2019, compared to the 44% advancement rate of current-year students, creating significant competitive pressure (Ye, 2022). It has been reported that students who retake Gaokao can improve their scores by 0.47 standard deviations and their rankings by 11%, so the response to failure in Gaokao, especially if they have to retake it, has critical consequences for their university access and future prospects in labour markets (Kang et al., 2021). For schools, retake students represent a valuable opportunity to increase their advancement rates, thereby attracting more students and market resources for institutional development and strengthening their competitive position with other schools. As a result, schools tend to allocate more resources to retake students and actively enrol more of them to increase overall advancement rates. Such neoliberal practices have also raised concerns about the fairness of the distribution of educational resources across society (Tian, 2009). However, although some provinces have begun to prohibit retakes in public high schools (Ministry of Education, 2020), a significant number of students still flock to them.

Chinese education reforms and Gaokao

While the competitiveness, stress and social problems in the Chinese education system examined in this article have continued to intensify, there have also been many education reforms. After the introduction of competitive mechanisms in Chinese education following the reform and the opening-up policy, the ‘competitive consciousness’ has become the main theme in education discourses (Zhao, 2011). Schools hang banners with competitive discourses to motivate students, such as Ti Gao Yi Fen, Gan Diao Qian Ren, meaning that by increasing one score you can eliminate thousands of others (Yu et al., 2018). While the central government still controls the goals of education, curriculum, textbooks and system reforms, the management of schools has been decentralised and subjected to market forces (Ngok, 2007). Such competitiveness has had a massive social impact on various aspects of Chinese society. At the same time, Chinese education has also attempted to reform itself to manage its social impact in a more positive direction.

Chinese education in the past 50 years can be divided into two stages: the stage of giving priority to effectiveness, and the stage of giving equal consideration to effectiveness and fairness. After the opening-up policy, Gaokao focused on improving effectiveness in admitting qualified students to higher education to meet the demand for human capital with higher education qualifications and skills. This emphasis on efficiency shaped the dominant position of Gaokao in education, as it is the only route to higher education and social mobility. In the twentieth century, the rising academic pressure attracted the government’s attention and therefore education reform shifted its focus from “exam-oriented” to “quality-oriented” priority which equally emphasised effectiveness and fairness, results and processes, intellectual and non-intellectual development, and students’ academic ability and creative qualities (Meng et al., 2021). Meanwhile, alternative higher education admission policies such as autonomous admission, college entrance expansion, spring Gaokao and internet admission have also been proposed to give more consideration to fairness (Sun, 2023). However, such rearrangements of the education system did not meet the needs of the rigid examination system and were proven to be ineffective. Under the need for examination training, schools found alternative ways to circumvent the rules, and this in fact further enhanced the popularity of extracurricular tutoring institutions (Tang, 2006). Some of the alternative admission strategies were even deliberately used by the privileged groups as a way to get into elite colleges while avoiding Gaokao.

In 2010, the then-Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao proposed the Long-Term National Education Reform and Development Plan, which provided guidelines for the direction of Chinese education until 2020. It emphasised reducing students’ academic stress, easing competitiveness of primary and secondary school enrolment by narrowing the resource gap between schools and prohibiting schools from selecting students based on exam scores (Zhao et al., 2015), and prioritising educational equality as the basis for social equality (Sun, 2023). Despite significant efforts from the central government to discourage extracurricular tutoring, parents continued to enrol their children in these lessons, and schools persisted in evaluating students based on their test scores and burdening them with homework. As a result, there remained little to no time for students to engage in physical or social activities within schools (Zhao, 2011). Recently in 2021, the Double Reduction policy brought more coercive measures, including reducing students’ academic workload within school and transforming all off-campus tutoring institutions into non-profit organisations. This suggests renewed and direct government intervention in the education sector (Li & Yu, 2022). While it faced many criticisms for its underlying goal of lowering the costs associated with raising children and thereby addressing the declining birth rate in China (Wu, 2021), the policy has had some success in curbing extracurricular tutoring with its rigorous enforcement. It has also partially eased academic pressure on students (Wang & Hamid, 2024).

From these reforms, it can be seen that in order to provide universal, holistic, and student-centred “quality education”, the structural rearrangement of education is far from sufficient (Zhao et al., 2015). What is important in such processes is that there should be targeted long-term research and continuous intervention, taking into account the protective factors and developmental aspects in the traditional Chinese culture and social environment (Wang & Byram, 2011). Educational reform can only be effective under such considerations, and the Double Reduction policy has taken an important step in this regard (Wang & Hamid, 2024).

Conclusion

In this paper, we have discussed the exam-oriented educational context of China, the influence of Gaokao on people, the education system and society, and Chinese education reforms. We would emphasise how Gaokao is a special case of NLSAs, which has developed under the influence of traditional Confucianism and changing policy directions since the founding of the PRC. These local features of Gaokao have created a unique educational context that also shares many aspects of neoliberalism and the trend towards performativity in the global education context. Our examination of Gaokao demonstrates how the test embodies both Chinese traditions and dominant global norms including neoliberalism and addresses Chinese policy and societal needs by impacting key stakeholders and education processes. Based on the reported impact of the test, we would argue that language or education tests are not just education tools; they work as authoritative public policy mechanisms affecting society and people in critical ways. Gaokao works as a tool for political governance and control operating from the education domain but shaping society beyond its jurisdiction. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the article is demonstrating this education-society nexus through the mediation of Gaokao as the most impactful test in China and the world.

The knowledge of Gaokao gained from the current paper and how it shapes the lives and society of millions of Chinese people cannot be ignored. Gaokao is also linked to globalisation and global educational movements and trends, as the article has illustrated. As can be seen from our discussion, Gaokao aims to develop human capital that is able to create more value in the process of globalisation and modernisation of China under the reform and opening-up policy. Therefore, it can be noted that the local questions around Gaokao and Chinese education are also fundamentally rooted in globalisation and profoundly shaped by it. In a way, Gaokao also affects globalisation in its turn, as China has been one of the most important forces of globalisation.