The Highest Exam is an exceptional and unusually compelling contribution to the study of Chinese education, governance and society. Written by economists Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau, the book advances a clear central argument: China’s education system operates as a “centralized hierarchical tournament,” a structure that not only shapes educational experiences but also mirrors and reinforces the logics of state power, social organization and political stability. The authors contend that understanding the gaokao tournament is essential for grasping how China governs, how its society functions and how its influence extends abroad. This argument is convincing, not least because it is developed through a rare combination of rigorous empirical research, vivid personal narrative and lucid exposition.
One of the book’s most striking qualities is its clarity. The prose is remarkably accessible, so much so that a high school student with no prior knowledge of China, education or economics could follow its arguments with ease. The opening vignette of “Little Li” reads with the narrative force of award-winning longform journalism, setting the tone for a text that is as enjoyable as it is analytically rich. This accessibility does not come at the expense of intellectual depth. Rather, it reflects the authors’ mastery of their material and their commitment to communicating complex ideas without jargon or obfuscation.
The analysis is coherent and tightly structured across three parts: family, state and society. Part one examines the intense familial investment in children’s education, situating this “obsession” within the systemic inequalities that shape educational opportunity. The authors’ own trajectories, from rural and working-class origins to elite universities in Beijing and then to Stanford and California, provide ethnography-like texture to their discussion of mobility, aspiration and constraint. Their reflections on the belief that hard work alone guarantees success, and on the absence of time or space to imagine alternatives, are particularly illuminating.
Part two, on the state, is analytically the strongest. Here the authors unpack the political logic of the tournament system, drawing on inventive empirical designs to demonstrate how centralized control over education has historically served the interests of political stability. Their discussion of the Qing dynasty’s quota system, and its relationship to revolutionary participation after the abolition of the imperial exam in 1905, is a powerful example of interdisciplinary insight: economic methods are used to test hypotheses long debated by historians. The authors’ personal experiences, such as Hongbin Li’s involvement in designing Advanced Placement Economics tests in China, only for the reform effort to be abruptly halted, add depth and immediacy to the analysis of how political priorities shape educational structures.
Part three turns to society, exploring how the values embedded in the tournament system – meritocracy, competition and hierarchy – permeate Chinese social life and increasingly influence educational debates in the US. The chapter on Asian American parents’ legal challenges to affirmative-action policies is provocative, suggesting that migrants shaped by China’s exam culture may seek to remake American education in its image. While compelling, this claim would benefit from more systematic empirical investigation, a point the authors themselves implicitly acknowledge.
The book’s evidentiary base is robust and distinctive. Much of the empirical material derives from the authors’ own decades-long research programmes in the economics and political economy of education. Their studies on identical twins, for example, demonstrate that China’s higher education system functions less to build human capital than to select and sort individuals based on pre-existing ability and family background. This contrasts sharply with systems in the US, UK and Australia, where higher education tends to build networks and skills independent of family origins. Their regression discontinuity work on students scoring just above and below elite university cutoffs further reveals the powerful signalling effects of elite degrees, shedding light on the phenomenon of “first-degree anxiety.”
The quantitative evidence is complemented by rich personal accounts, of rural schooling, factory life, elite university culture and transnational educational mobility. These stories, while not generalizable in a statistical sense, offer insights rarely captured in formal research. They also underscore the book’s meta-argument: that knowledge production is often dominated by the privileged, and that this book itself represents a form of knowledge-making from below.
If there is a limitation, it lies in the relative absence of qualitative research beyond the authors’ own experiences. Chapter three, for instance, relies heavily on the work of Prashant Loyalka and colleagues, and the discussion of meritocracy in chapter seven would have been enriched by engagement with recent anthropological and sociological works such as Zachary Howlett’s Meritocracy and Its Discontents (Cornell University Press, 2021), Jin Jin’s Education and Upward Social Mobility in China (Routledge, 2024), Jinting Wu’s Fabricating an Educational Miracle (SUNY Press, 2016) and Suning Liu’s Neoliberalism, Globalization, and “Elite” Education in China (Routledge, 2020). Yet this critique must be tempered by disciplinary realism: economists cannot be expected to conduct ethnography, and the authors’ candour about what economists “haven’t figured out how to measure” is refreshing.
The book’s methodology is therefore best described as hybrid: part autoethnography, part research synthesis, part original empirical contribution. This hybridity is a strength. It allows the authors to weave together personal narrative, historical analysis, survey data, natural experiments and policy evaluation into a cohesive whole. It also makes the book unusually engaging for a wide readership.
The potential audience is broad. The book is ideally suited for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in Chinese studies, sociology of education, anthropology, political science, economics of education and migration studies. Its clarity makes it accessible to nonspecialists, while its empirical sophistication ensures its value for researchers. Teachers of comparative education will find its China–US contrasts particularly useful, and scholars of shadow education will appreciate its discussion of tutoring expenditures and the implications for China’s “double reduction” policy.
In terms of contribution, The Highest Exam significantly advances the field of Chinese studies by offering a comprehensive, empirically grounded and theoretically coherent account of how education structures Chinese society and state power. It also contributes to disciplinary debates in economics, political science and sociology by demonstrating how educational systems function as mechanisms of selection, signalling and governance. Its interdisciplinary sensibility – drawing on history, anthropology and sociology – further enhances its value.
Ultimately, this is an outstanding book: analytically rigorous, narratively compelling and intellectually generous. It opens the “playbook” of the gaokao with remarkable clarity, revealing not only how the system works but why it persists and what it means for China and the world. It deserves a wide readership and will undoubtedly shape scholarly and public debates on Chinese education for years to come.
