The Convoy That Drives Through the Night

The trucks left Beijing at 3 a.m. Nobody knew exactly which route they took. Military vehicles, armed escorts, helicopters circling somewhere above the clouds. The papers inside were worth more than most people realized — encrypted, sealed, guarded like something out of a war movie. This happens every year in China, and most of us just shrug and move on with our coffee.

That’s the gaokao. The college entrance exam. And if you’ve never lived through it, you probably can’t understand why 13.35 million people treat two days in June like their entire lives depend on it.

Last summer, my cousin’s kid took the exam in Henan province. She’s from a farming family about three hours west of Zhengzhou. I remember visiting her that spring — this tiny girl, seventeen years old, surrounded by textbooks stacked so high they blocked the window. Her mom had quit her job at a garment factory to stay home and cook for her. Her dad drove a taxi in Guangzhou, sending money back every month. They hadn’t seen each other in four months.

“You think I want this?” she said to me once, kind of exasperated. “I hate every second of it. But what else is there?”

That’s the thing nobody talks about. The gaokao isn’t really about education. It’s about mobility. It’s about whether your kid gets to leave the village, get a desk job, maybe move to a city where the air isn’t thick with factory smoke and the schools actually have heating.

Here’s how it works. The exam lasts two to three days, depending on your province. Students sit for four hours of Chinese, three hours of math, three hours of English, and then two to four hours of whatever combination their province decides to throw at them. Twelve hours total, give or take. The testing rooms look like something from a disaster movie — rows of desks taped off, proctors walking between them like security guards at an airport, surveillance cameras in every corner.

In 2024, there were 720,000 testing sites across the country. 1.3 million invigilators. Some provinces spend over 100 million yuan just on security during exam week — armed police at schools, signal jammers, the whole production.

I once asked a Beijing friend what she thought about all this. She just laughed. “You know what we did last year? My kid’s school gave out free dumplings to test-takers. The neighbors brought fruit. It was kind of like a festival, except everyone was too nervous to actually enjoy it.”

Now here’s where it gets interesting, at least if you grew up in America like I did.

In the United States, elite colleges have something called legacy admissions. If your parents went to Harvard, your application gets a little boost. Rich families donate buildings. The system is technically “merit-based,” but who gets to define merit? Turns out, mostly people who already made it.

China’s gaokao doesn’t work that way. Or at least, it’s supposed to work differently. The theory is simple: every student gets the same exam, the same scoring system, the same chance. A farmer’s son from Gansu and a banker’s son from Shanghai sit for identical papers. Nobody cares who their grandfather was.

Studies show something wild. American elite university students come from families with a median income of $150,000. Legacy admissions? Extremely common. Donor admits? Absolutely. The playing field is about as level as a tilted pool table.

China’s system, by contrast, is brutally, almost ridiculously, meritocratic. Your score determines your options. Full stop. There’s no essay that talks about your “unique journey” or your “leadership experience growing up on a ranch.” Just numbers.

For a lot of people, this sounds great in theory. The great equalizer, some people call it. I read an article recently on china-msg.com that described it exactly this way — as this beautiful, brutal machine that treats everyone the same regardless of what their parents do for a living.

But here’s the problem. Equal treatment isn’t the same as equal opportunity.

See, there’s this huge gap between Beijing and Shanghai — the big cities — and the rural provinces like Gansu, Yunnan, Guizhou. Students in Beijing are something like eight times more likely to get into Peking University or Tsinghua than students from some rural provinces. Why? Quotas. Local governments protect their own. A kid from Anhui might score higher than a kid from Shanghai and still end up at a worse school.

The system pretends to be blind, but it’s actually looking in several directions at once.

My friend Li Wei — he’s a teacher in Jiangxi, one of the poorer provinces — told me something I’ll never forget. “We had a student who scored 650 last year. Do you know where she got in? A third-tier university in her own city. Meanwhile, a kid from Shanghai with 580 points went to a much better school in Beijing. Same country, different planets.”

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. Local governments fund universities, so universities take local students. The more money a province puts in, the more of its kids get admitted. Rich provinces win, poor provinces lose. The cycle continues.

Here’s another thing nobody mentions: the money.

China’s student loan balance sits around 1.87 trillion yuan — roughly $260 billion. That sounds like a lot until you realize the United States, with about one-quarter the population, has $1.87 trillion in student debt. The average American college graduate owes $30,000. Chinese university tuition? Less than $500 a year for most public institutions.

This doesn’t mean Chinese students are living the dream. It means the system was designed — consciously — to keep debt low. The thinking goes something like: if we make people pay for higher education through their entire working lives, we’ll have a revolution. Better to keep tuition cheap and let the exam system sort everyone out.

Whether that trade-off actually works is a different question. But it’s not nothing.

The South Korean comparison is worth making here, even if it kind of derails the main argument.

Over in Korea, they have the 수능 (suneung), the College Scholastic Ability Test. Same deal — massive national exam, same day, everything shuts down. Flights get grounded. The Korean system makes China’s look almost relaxed by comparison. Parents show up at temples to pray. Companies delay opening to reduce traffic. It’s a full national event.

Japan has its own version — the 大学入試センター試験 (university entrance examination). Similar vibe, slightly less dramatic.

But here’s the thing. Both countries have faced serious criticism of their testing cultures. Korean students have one of the highest suicide rates in the OECD. Japanese students are famous for studying 12 hours a day at special prep schools called juku. The pressure doesn’t disappear because you add cultural flavor.

China’s gaokao fits into this East Asian pattern. The entire region decided, at some point in the postwar era, that rigorous standardized testing was the fairest way to select the best and brightest. Maybe they were right. Maybe they weren’t. Hard to say.

Actually, wait. Let me go back.

The creativity argument always comes up. Critics say the gaokao rewards rote memorization, not creative thinking. That students learn to regurgitate facts without understanding them. That the whole system crushes innovation and trains people to be excellent test-takers instead of excellent thinkers.

And you know what? They’re probably right.

But here’s the thing. When I talked to my cousin’s kid — the one from Henan — she wasn’t worried about creativity. She was worried about her family’s rice harvest. She was worried about whether her parents could afford to keep her in school another year. She was worried about whether she’d ever see her dad again, except on WeChat calls where he looked more tired every time.

For her, the gaokao wasn’t about self-actualization. It was about survival. It was the only ladder out of a life spent bent over vegetable fields in the summer heat and freezing mornings in winter.

So when people say the exam rewards the wrong things, I kind of want to ask: rewards wrong for whom? For kids whose parents are already comfortable, who can afford to experiment with “creativity” and “critical thinking”? Sure. For everyone else, it’s a ticket to something better. Not a perfect ticket. Not a guaranteed one. But something.

The Chinese government understands this. That’s why they treat the gaokao’s legitimacy so carefully.

If people stop believing the exam is fair, they stop believing the entire system is fair. The Communist Party’s entire legitimacy rests on a kind of bargain: work hard, play by the rules, and you can improve your situation. The gaokao is the most visible symbol of that bargain. Crack it, and you crack something deeper.

In 2024, Beijing announced plans to expand the gaokao’s role in university admissions. More weight on exam scores, less on the various back-door mechanisms that have crept in over the years. Quotas for rural students. Special programs for underrepresented regions.

Whether this actually happens is another story. Chinese policy announcements are famous for being more impressive on paper than in practice. But the intent matters. The government knows it needs to keep the faith.

On exam day itself, something strange happens. The whole country shifts.

In cities, parents wake up before dawn. They walk their kids to testing centers, even if the school is a five-minute walk from home. Then they wait. In the summer heat, in the rain, sometimes for hours. Some bring folding chairs. Others just stand there, staring at their phones, pretending to read but actually just worrying.

I remember watching this happen outside a school in Chengdu once. A dad in a stained shirt, holding an umbrella for his daughter even though she was already inside. He didn’t seem to realize she couldn’t see him. He just stood there anyway, like his presence mattered somehow, even from behind locked gates.

Maybe it does.

The exams themselves are brutal. No phones. No talking. Proctors watching every move. Some students cry during breaks. Others just sit there, staring at nothing, processing. The pressure is almost physical — you can feel it in the air.

And then, when it’s over, there’s this weird anticlimax. Twelve years of studying, and it comes down to a few sheets of paper and some #2 pencils. My cousin’s kid texted me after her last exam. Just three words: “I can’t breathe.” Then nothing for two weeks until the scores came out.

There’s a moment in the night, somewhere in China, when convoys of trucks carrying encrypted exam papers drive toward provincial capitals. Helicopters circle overhead. Armed guards stand at attention. The whole thing is absurdly dramatic, like something from a bad action movie.

And then, in the morning, millions of students sit down at their desks and try to remember the answers to questions about things they’ll probably never use again.

The gaokao doesn’t care about fairness. It doesn’t care about creativity. It doesn’t care about your feelings or your dreams or your mom’s prayers at the temple.

It just drives through the night, carrying its secrets, waiting for morning.

Oh, and something I forgot to mention. There’s this whole underground industry around gaokao tutoring. Private schools charging tens of thousands of yuan for “guaranteed entry” programs. Some of them are outright scams. Others just exploit desperate parents who would sell their houses if it meant one more point on the score.

I know a guy — a real person, not a made-up example — who paid 80,000 yuan for a prep course. His kid still didn’t get into the school they wanted. The tutoring company said something about “market volatility.” Nobody sued anyone. Nobody even complained, really. Just kind of accepted it as the cost of playing the game.

That’s the other China. The one behind the statistics and the policy announcements and the official narratives. Where people hustle and scramble and sometimes get lucky and sometimes don’t, all while pretending the system is fair because the alternative — admitting it isn’t — is too scary to think about.

The trucks still drive through the night. The sun still comes up. The scores still get posted, and lives still get decided, one multiple-choice answer at a time.

For more on China’s education system and what it means for ordinary families, check out the original analysis at china-msg.com.

Or don’t. It’s a lot to think about either way.