Social Mobility and Stagnation

How the university entrance exam and residency permits structure life for in China.

By Susan Blumberg-KasonFebruary 16, 2026

• Cultural Studies

• Education

PROFESSOR HONGBIN LI was born into a poor family in China’s rural Jilin province in 1972, six years into the Cultural Revolution. He was a curious child and enjoyed school once the tumultuousness of the time began to subside, but his passion was Chinese chess (xiangqi). He didn’t think too much about his studies until he read the story of a Ming dynasty (1368–1644) peasant named Fan Jin, who started taking the treacherous imperial exams the year he turned 20 and was still trying to pass 34 years later. Li wondered why Fan would spend decades studying and how the exam would change his life—from peasant to imperial official—if he did pass. This story begins The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (2025), a captivating new book by Li and Ruixue Jia (writing with Claire Cousineau).

The gaokao, or university entrance examination, originated from the imperial exam and is the world’s oldest such test. Its lineage reaches back to the start of the seventh century, the time of the Sui Dynasty (581–618), with short interruptions to its use at various points, such as in the final years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and then again during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). As explored in this study of the complexities of the gaokao, the exam remains consequential in contemporary China: it is the sole determining factor for university admissions, since only students at the top universities have access to the most lucrative careers.

Li and Jia’s personal stories are captivating in part because each of them beat the odds and excelled in ways most of their childhood classmates could only dream of, and also because the dozen years that separate them in age mean that their experiences with the gaokao differed in significant and instructive ways. Born and raised in rural Shandong province to a family of modest means, Jia was fortunate to be able to attend a boarding high school in Beijing in the early 2000s. As her family knew, the quota of students from Shandong who could enter elite universities was tiny compared to those for cities like Beijing and Shanghai, so they pooled their resources to study in Beijing.

China’s sociopolitical landscape in those years was almost unrecognizable from the late 1980s, when Li sat for the test. When Li was coming of age, salaries for professionals were several hundred US dollars a year, and people were not allowed to own cars, limiting opportunities to travel within China, while travel outside the country was almost nonexistent. By the time Jia was the same age, China’s economy was one of the strongest in the world, salaries had skyrocketed, and transportation had become more efficient with the advent of high-speed railways and growing rates of car ownership. Independent travel abroad was now allowed, which provided more knowledge of life outside China.

Preparing for the exam, Jia assumed the gaokao system provided an equal chance to all students, since it was the same for everyone, but her ability to do well on the gaokao was more unusual than she perceived at the time. Because rural schools do not have the same resources as schools in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, students in poor areas take the exam at a disadvantage. On top of that, China opens more university spots to students from these high-population cities, so students from the Jilin countryside, like Li, are at an even greater disadvantage. As Li and Jia write, this city-country disparity has been in place for millennia, going back to the time of the imperial exams. It was and still is an institutionalized way to keep the educated class in the cities and the uneducated in the countryside. Li was able to enroll at China Agricultural University in Beijing, but it was very rare for someone with his background to make it to the big city in the late 1980s.

Because the central government is in Beijing and the children and grandchildren of the top officials live in the city, there is a hierarchical structure in Beijing’s schools, and competition between parents is fierce. The overall quality of education in Beijing is high relative to the rest of the country, yet parents fight to ensure that their children can attend the most elite schools from a young age, which will advantage them against their peers when they take the gaokao in their late teens, a decade later.

Jia was in for a surprise when a wealthy family hired her—still a high school student—to tutor their daughter in English for the exam. Although she could barely speak the language, Jia was proficient in English grammar from her high school studies and therefore a suitable tutor. In this tutoring job, she could see all the advantages wealthy families could provide their children in order to ensure they get ahead. The authors view the gaokao as a “tournament” to obtain the most tutoring and the greatest advantages to score well on the exam. This is not, of course, a contest in which everyone has an equal shot, since geography and wealth are greater determinants of success than merit. As wealth disparities in China have only grown since Jia was in school, it’s even more difficult now for students in the countryside to afford boarding school in a city like Beijing. For very poor families, even attendance at a university in a lower-tier city is impossible because they need their children to work in order to feed the household.

China’s higher education system is distinctive not just because the gaokao has such a long pedigree, but also because that exam is the sole criterion for university admission. It is held over several days and consists of multiple-choice, fill in the blank, and essay questions on the subjects of Chinese, math, and a foreign language. Extracurricular activities are not accounted for, or encouraged, and applications don’t call for student essays or teacher recommendations as in the United States. However, as much as the gaokao privileges students from affluent families, the US system is far more unequal. The authors explain:

In China, children from the richest 20 percent of families […] are 2.3 times more likely to go to an elite college than those from the poorest 20 percent […] Meanwhile, in the United States, students from wealthy families are fully eleven times more likely to attend elite institutions than those from poor families.

Li and Jia draw on their experiences as parents, how they and their partners have navigated the choice between these two systems—China’s or the United States’—for their own children. From research and experience, they conclude that while Chinese students excel in primary school, they fall behind their peers in the West once they enter university, especially when it comes to critical thinking. The United States, they believe, provides a superior university education: the ideal situation, they write, would be to have their children in Chinese primary schools until eighth grade and then move to the United States.

One of the key contributors to unequal educational outcomes between students from urban and rural areas is the hukou, or Chinese residency permit, which ties citizens to specific locations and determines their access to social services, employment opportunities, and government benefits. Students in urban areas, especially Shanghai and Beijing, enjoy an abundance of resources thanks to their urban hukou, while students with a rural hukou have traditionally been shut out of the opportunities that, for example, Jia was able to enjoy only when she went to Beijing for high school. But only students whose families can afford the high living expenses of Beijing are able to make this big move.

The hukou system is the subject of Samantha A. Vortherms’s carefully researched 2024 book Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China. Based on careful assessments of documentary evidence as well as interviews she conducted between 2012 and 2017, with government officials and others, the work sheds light on hukou reforms over the last few decades and what they mean for Chinese citizens. Vortherms usefully encapsulates the system:

Right to a particular hukou follows jus sanguinis lines: hukou is registered at birth and hukou identity is hereditary; children inherit their status from either one of their parents. Unequal citizenships are not only defined at birth but also carry on generationally, and children receive the same privileged or nonprivileged status as their parents, regardless of where they are born or what their parents do. Because of this birthright citizenship, there are no automatic ways to change hukou status.

Like the gaokao, hukou has a history that reaches back millennia, dating to the household registration system used during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE). By the first years of Mao’s rule (1949–1976), the hukou was connected to the danwei, or work unit, in urban areas, and to agricultural communes in rural ones. For decades, it was very difficult to leave one’s danwei or to move from the countryside to the city. While the central government was aware this system reeked of feudalism, they didn’t see any other option for upholding their command economy. The government also used the hukou system as a form of social control, dictating who could live where.

Vortherms shows how the hukou can function as a form of discrimination, recounting an interview with a young woman named Xiao Han, whose family left Henan province for the far-western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region during the Cultural Revolution. Her family’s hukou changed from Henan to Xinjiang, an area the central government views as less desirable because of its remoteness and its large population of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. Han gained entrance to a university on China’s coast, but when she arrived, her Xinjiang hukou prevented her from being able to check into a hotel, and although her classmates changed their hukou, she was unable to do so. Han felt her hukou alone kept her from the opportunities her classmates enjoyed.

That’s not to say that there can never be any mobility. With the rapid development of the cities, the Chinese government enacted reforms in the late 1990s that gave local governments more jurisdiction over the hukou. Vortherms uses the term “local naturalization” to describe the process of legally transferring a hukou from one area to another. One can transfer a hukou under a number of circumstances—mainly for family reasons or when moving to a place without desirable hukous, and certain high-skilled workers or people with investments in a particular area also frequently qualify. Most of these circumstances apply to people with money, but sometimes peasants and low-skilled workers who have been displaced from their rural homes due to new housing developments are given a hukou in an urban area. Although hukou reforms have been taking place over the last 35 years or so, huge disparities still exist and there’s still a desire by the central government to limit migration from the countryside to the big cities, which affects access to a good education.

Together, the two books provide a comprehensive look at a pair of interrelated and deeply entrenched institutions that bolster China’s authoritarian system. While Vortherms’s book relies more on interviews and quantitative data, Li and Jia’s book involves a mix of argument and storytelling, combining the presentation of research findings with compelling personal narratives. These books make clear that if China is to reform one system, it has to address the other. Given the longevity of both and how deep their roots are sunk, this may be a tall order.