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Herald Correspondent
A recurrent dream of mine, and many people I know, is about sitting China’s National College Entrance Exam, known as gaokao in the country.

The sheer intensity! Either my admission ticket is nowhere to be found, or I’m held up in hopeless traffic, or the questions are too hard and too many. As a matter of fact, I did quite well in the exam and should not be considered to be in any way traumatised. But still, gaokao is one of the most strained periods in my life.

This last month, over 10 million in China just tackled this challenge. One would be hugely mistaken to think gaokao is only a special date on school calender. In fact, it is a national event.

If you put together the 10 million examinees and their parents and the extended family, you will easily have at least 100 million in China paying close attention. Not to mention the teachers, players in the education industry, and those who have been through the test and would love to reminisce about their own industrious days.

In a country of 1.4 billion people, it would be fair to say half of China is talking about gaokao in this season.

During the two to three days, social media is awash with personal stories; around exam halls “no horn zones” are created and speed limits imposed; police motorcycles are ready to run the red light to take students late for the exams right to their venues or help pick up admission cards accidentally left at home; some taxi drivers would offer free rides to students.

Parents and relatives crane their necks outside schools, some of them sporting a Nike outfit for its swoosh logo, which is believed to be a lucky sign.

All the attention is justified. Gaokao is a high-stakes, highly competitive exam. Getting a spot in the more prestigious universities is tough. And gaokao has long been the lone criterion for admission.

But in the past 69 years since its inception, the system has also been undergoing constant change as part of the larger education reform in the country: standardised test papers are being replaced with localised versions to reflect the different educational strengths of provinces; more options on test subjects are made available to examinees; admission rate has been raised to almost 90 percent in 2019; and more channels in addition to gaokao are opened for students to get into universities.

This evolution speaks to a larger shift in China’s education landscape towards developing well-rounded individuals. Spoon-feeding facts has fallen out of mode. Learning to learn is the new focus. Critical thinking, innovation, creative power, and technology proficiency are increasingly prized.

The young Chinese  today are much better positioned than my generation was to succeed in life. In December 2019, the OECD’s PISA survey (Programme for International Student Assessment) found that students from four Chinese provinces sampled outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating systems.

Angel Gurria, the OECD’s secretary-general, noted, “What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average.”

Based on my personal observation, more Chinese kids who can afford overseas education are choosing to stay in China for compulsory education. The lustre of a Western degree has also been fading, especially considering its high cost.

Unless you graduate from an Ivy League, you will not find yourself more competitive than Chinese university graduates on the job market; sometimes you could even be in an unfavourable position because employers trust more the candidates who have gone through the rigour of gaokao.

Pursuing a Western degree used to be the way to start a life abroad; then it became a ticket to success back home in China; now it is seen as an unwise educational investment decision. The brain drain has reversed its flow.

I found a great similarity between China and Zimbabwe in our commitment to education.

In China, parents often encourage their kids to go as far as they can in education by vowing to “smash the iron pots and pans into pieces and sell them as scrapped iron to pay for school fees”.

There are also stories about the Zimbabwean diaspora working hard to pay for the education of kids at home. Investment in the young will pay off. With their dreams coming true, the dream of the whole nation will be taking off.

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