The Hope Tax

On the examination empire that manufactures aspiration and the arithmetic that may undo it.

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The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li

(Harvard University Press, 2025)

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Anyan Hu, translated by Jack Hargreaves

(Allen Lane, 2025)

The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in

China by Cora Lingling Xu

(SUNY Press, 2025)

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On the eve of the Spring Festival, 2009, every storefront was dark on a street in Nanning, Guangxi region, except one. Inside, a young man ate alone, cut deep, he would later write, by feelings of utter hopelessness. He immediately corrected himself: "I live in a time of peace and have never really, truly suffered, so it's melodramatic to talk like that." But the sentence that followed was more honest, confessing that "It occurred to me that being born into this world isn't necessarily a blessing."

That was Anyan Hu and at the time he was between jobs (I lost count at

nineteen) having started a failed clothing business, and not yet secured the next foothold in a career that would stretch from parcel sorting centers to gas stations, bicycle repair, shops, bakeries, and malls all over China. Some years later, his pay was lower than it had been at the gas station. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, his memoir, has sold nearly two million copies in China, which must constitute a sociological data point given its suggestion that a large number of people recognize themselves or loved ones in its pages.

What Hu saw in himself that New Year’s Eve, and what his book brings into view, was the interior life of a system that two 2025 academic volumes describe in great detail from the outside. Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li's The Highest Exam offers a comprehensive English-language account of how the 高考 (gaokao) architecture operates: its quotas, its premiums, its historical roots, and the elegant circularity by which it recruits talented individuals into the very apparatus that sorted them. Cora Lingling Xu's The Time Inheritors uses the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to argue that what families transmit across generations is not merely money or connections but time itself, meaning the compressed labor of previous generations that determines whether a child enters the examination system as a creditor or a debtor. Both are serious works but neither quite explains why so many people feel the way Hu felt that evening.

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The Legalist strategist Shang Yang, who argued in the Book of Lord Shang that a strong state requires a weak populace, gave later historians the material to name his method 疲民之术 (pí mín zhī shù), or the technique of exhausting the people. The principle was simple, has never truly gone out of fashion, and mainly involved keeping the subjects too busy competing with one another to organize concerted opposition. This produces not only strong outputs but self-absorption as the subject that is calculating their advantages is rarely building collective leverage. The genius of the system is that obedience appears as ambition while freedom is experienced as competition. The gaokao, literally the “highest exam,” may be the most elaborate contemporary

expression of this principle. Mao Zedong, who understood exhaustion as a governance technology better than most, saw it clearly enough to despise it. “Our method of conducting exams,” he declared, “is a method for dealing with the enemy, not the people.” He abolished the system during the Cultural Revolution and sent urban students ‘down’ to learn from peasants in the countryside. Yet Deng restored it within two years of his death.

For two days every June, China comes to a standstill. Parents stand vigil outside

examination halls. Men occasionally don qipaos for luck, the garment's name slightly echoing the idiom 旗开得胜 (qī kāi dé shèng), victory from the first attempt. Tens of millions of families are synchronized to a single event, a score. But synchronization does not begin in June. It begins at birth, intensifies at four when urban parents first slate children for tutoring, and saturates childhood so completely that by the time the examination hall is reached, twelve or more years have been poured into a single number.

Jia and Li meticulously document this machinery, showing how the government designs every question, determines every date, assigns regional quotas, and sets strict cutoff scores for admission to each university by province. The premium for navigating the hierarchy correctly is staggering. College graduates earn an average 40% more than non-graduates; graduates of elite colleges earn a further 40% premium over non-elite counterparts. These numbers translate into the fact that only elite credentials can reliably flatten the three "mountains" of expenses: education, medical care and housing.

An elite state-sector post in Beijing comes with subsidized housing at roughly a third of market value, exemption from school-district requirements for your children, and free medical care. In other words, a shadow economy of status goods that official salaries alone cannot purchase. Fourteen centuries ago the Tang Emperor Taizong, surveying the candidates newly recruited through his examination system, remarked that the heroes of the empire were all in his pocket, and today 64% of college graduates still name government employment as their top career preference.

What makes the system durable is the simple fact that it works. China's education system provides far more social mobility than that of the United States. The top 20% of Chinese families are twice as likely to attend elite colleges as the bottom 20%. In America, the ratio is eleven to one.

This is less surprising than it sounds. The gaokao need not deliver many winners as a threshold of around 5% gaining elite admission is sufficient to keep tens of millions of families investing. For those who still harbor doubts, there's always the logic of the motivational slogan deployed to sell the system to its most disadvantaged participantsc: 没有高考你怎么跟富二代竞争 (méiyǒu gāokǎo, nǐ zěnme gēn fù'èr dài jìnzhēng): "Without the gaokao, how could you compete with the second-generation rich?" Rather ingeniously, the exam is not presented as the source of inequality but as its only remedy. To believe that, however, quotas must not be examined too closely.

Cities like Beijing and Shanghai receive the most seats per capita, not because their students are more talented but because centuries of administrative and intellectual life have made them the natural homes of China's elite institutions — a geography of learning that no single government created but that none seriously tries to dismantle either. While the top 14% of Beijing students gain admission to elite universities, only the top 3-4% of students from Shandong, a province of comparable talent but lesser political standing, achieve the same.

Rural students are effectively eliminated before the race even begins: legally barred, without an urban hukou, from the top 10% of high schools, they are taught by teachers who have often barely graduated middle school, and are unable to afford the retake years that urban families treat as routine insurance. The most strategically minded families respond by relocating their household registration to more favorable provinces before their child sits the exam, a practice common enough to have acquired its own name, 高考移民 (gāokǎo yímín), gaokao migration. It is perhaps the clearest evidence that sophisticated participants understand exactly what the system is: politicized distribution trussed in meritocratic garments.

The gaokao is not, as its official mythology maintains, a level field. It is a carefully

administered distribution of unequal chances, whose genius lies in separating allocation from perception. And perhaps its most guileful act is the way it monumentalizes the score. It follows you for life and because you were given it, alone, in a hall, on a specific morning, surrounded by strangers, the hierarchy it produces feels less like politics than fate.

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Xu's The Time Inheritors supplies the mechanism by which fates are engineered in

advance. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of capital as accumulated labor time, she

argues that what advantaged families transmit is not merely money or social

connections but the freedom those resources purchase. This, in turn, gives the security to plan across decades, to make mistakes without catastrophe, to defer income in favor of a better position further down the road. The dominated, she notes via Bourdieu, are"condemned to live in a time orientated by others, an alienated time."

The case studies that carry Xu's argument are often more powerful than the

Bourdieusian apparatus she deploys to organize them. Jiao, a student from rural China with illiterate parents, achieves excellent gaokao results but chooses a second-tier university to spare his family the one-year military training requirement at Peking or Tsinghua, a delay that would mean an extra year's tuition and a year's postponement of the income his family has already begun to anticipate. Yet his degree proves worthless, and when he attempts to climb further he fails the postgraduate entrance exam twice. By this time he is worse off, tallying two additional years and a substantial sum spent on test preparation. Neither redeemable. Xu calls this the "qualification trap." It is the opposite of what the system promises. It is also a form of 啃老 (kěn lǎo), "gnawing on the old," the condition in which adult children draw on parental resources not as investment capital but as subsistence, reversing the intergenerational flow that the entire system is designed to generate.

The asymmetry runs deeper than economics. For disadvantaged students, Xu observes, education is constructed as an act of kindness from parents and siblings who sacrifice to fund it: a moral and financial debt to be eventually repaid. Meanwhile, for single children in urban middle-class families, education is a nonnegotiable entitlement and a parental obligation. The rural student therefore enters the same examination system carrying a weight the urban student does not feel, namely the knowledge that the cost of striving has been borne by others, and that the income from any credential must flow to creditors before it goes anywhere else. This type of student therefore chooses the safer institution, forgoes the experimental years, and takes the first job rather than the right one.

These are real insights and Xu renders them with care. But the book is also, at times, its own qualified argument for the limits of academic distance. It is dense and repetitive in a way that neither companion volume is, and has the quality, which is not so uncommon in sociology, of restating its central claim in slightly different terminology across successive chapters rather than progressively deepening it.

Xu is not unaware of the ironies of her own position: her acknowledgements list the aid she has received and her dedication to her aunt (a rural woman who never attended school but managed to catapult her niece into the heart of western academia) is moving. But the dedication also marks the framework’s limit. The aunt is the kind of figure it cannot neatly contain: someone whose life confirms structural constraint at every turn and yet exceeds it in ways Bourdieu’s categories cannot predict. She is neither absorbed nor defeated. Her trajectory demands something more than inherited time to explain. That limitation remains, quietly untheorized, in the dedication itself.

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Anyan Hu also fits none of these frameworks, which is why he is indispensable to them. He may not use the word gaokao much but he doesn’t need to. The examination's shadow falls across every page of his book as the absent condition

of everything else: not a door he walked up to and found locked, but one whose

location he was never given, which left him to improvise a life outside the system's charmed logic. Yet he is not, in any conventional sense, a victim. He is too self-aware, morally exacting and unwilling to be merely aggrieved. But he is an unflinching witness to what the system looks like from the outside.

What he sees, above all, is time rendered as both expensive and futile. His calculations are those of someone for whom every minute has a price, and such a price slowly drains a person of everything when wages are so low: urinating costs one yuan; eating lunch costs ten in lost minutes. He skips lunches and barely drinks water in the mornings to reduce restroom breaks. He works 72 hours a week instead of the contracted 60 because the manager has arranged it so that 60 hours would leave teams operating below subsistence levels. He wears through a pair of brand-new trainers in four months. These are not theatrical complaints, in fact he tends to record them with the air of a weary accountant, but they are evidence of a life organized entirely around the recovery of time that the hierarchy has taken.

He is at his most perceptive when describing the system's secondary enforcement

mechanisms, such as the way precarity produces its own policing. Dignity is priced out. Resentment has nowhere to accumulate. The pressure chamber holds, until it doesn't. A courier, provoked beyond endurance by an Audi driver leaning on his horn, produces a metal club and destroys his car. He ends up in prison because he cannot, or will not, pay compensation. One incident and the arithmetic of a precarious life collapses entirely.

"The more you work," Hu notes, observing the courier economy, "the more you pay. The less you do, the less you lose. So do nothing, lose nothing." The system does not need to actively suppress resentment as it prices resistance out of reach. Minor violations receive disproportionate costs; dignity becomes a luxury; and the exhaustion that results from the permanent management of small precarious crises consumes exactly the surplus attention that political consciousness would require.

Hu brings similarly dour thoughts to consumerism, realizing that it offers a type of imprisonment, albeit one that feels like freedom because it tells you what to want and then sells it to you, but whose logic of self-realization through work leaves the deeper machinery of discipline intact. He has arrived at this through living, not reading. And he has arrived, too, at something close to a philosophy, seeing society's wellbeing as dependent on spiritual diversity the same way a gene pool depends on the biological equivalent. The single narrow path, bounded by the score, queue and credential, couldn't be more opposed to what he describes in a rare moment of prescription.

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All three books, in different ways, circle a single question, which is for how much longer can the technique hold?

At root, the gaokao regime requires credible conversion. The system appears able to

accommodate inequality, corruption, inherited advantage, even prolonged slowdown, so long as effort appears to translate (with sufficient regularity) into stable incorporation within the hierarchy. The threshold need not be generous but it must remain plausible.

However, there are signals that this plausibility is thinning. The proportion of 18-to-24-year-olds attending college has risen from 1% in 1977 to 67% in 2021. Elite college admission through the gaokao runs at around 5% and the

postgraduate entrance exam, the next rung on the ladder, has a pass rate of

approximately 20%. Expansion has produced access but it has also produced

arithmetic: a larger cohort trained to expect elite incorporation than the hierarchy can indefinitely absorb. The 40% wage premium Jia and Li document for college attendance was measured under conditions of rapid growth. Put bluntly, it may not survive credential inflation at scale. The logic of absorption (stretching the queue forward through expanded postgraduate programs, civil service exams, and professional certification tiers, and ensuring that delay never quite feels like exclusion) is the system's primary response to this arithmetic. The civil service exam has its own vernacular, namely 考碗 (kǎo wǎn), sitting the exam for a bowl — the iron rice bowl's modest descendant. The image tells its own deflating story, which isn't transformation, nor the Tang Emperor's pocket full of heroes, but a bowl, sustenance, security. In brief, ambition is miniaturized. It is not nothing, as each additional credential tier absorbs another cohort of strivers for another two or three years, keeping them in the queue rather than outside it, but the technique has a limit. At some point the queue becomes noticeable as such.

The crucial distinction, which none of the three books addresses particularly

sharply, is between two very different forms of surplus: the disappointed poor, who have always existed and whom the system has always managed, even when they descend to the status of lumpen, and the disappointed credentialed — the graduate who expected incorporation and did not receive it, who has the cultural capital to articulate grievance and the social proximity to others in the same position to recognize it as structural rather than personal.

The tension is not between the poor and the rich so much as meritocratic

claimants versus inherited incumbents. These are hardly natural allies to the dispossessed. Historically, they are the class that writes pamphlets, staffs movements, and scolds the masses to understand that the rules are negotiable. The extreme case is Hong Xiuquan, who sat the imperial examination four times (1827-1843), failed each time, and responded by proclaiming himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ and raising the Taiping Rebellion, a movement that killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million people. Hong is not a model but a register: the outer limit of what surplus credentialed ambition, convinced the system is rigged, has historically been capable of producing.

What proves corrosive is not hardship per se but the perception that conversion is

stalling and that credentialed strivers confront credentialed incumbents whose advantage rests less on score than on background. Under those conditions, surplus ambition ceases to be absorbed and begins to congeal, at first without political consequence, but for how long?

Hu never entered the queue. He has no credential to feel cheated of, no incorporation that was promised and withheld. And yet on that New Year's Eve in the empty city he arrived, alone and without a framework, at a thought the entire system depends on its subjects never having: that being born into this world, at this moment, isn't necessarily a blessing. The examination empire is erected on the contrary. Its creed is that with sufficient effort the accident of birth can be overcome, that the score is the man, and that the horizon is always worth running toward.

But the horizon is receding. The Tang Emperor's boast still holds, given heroes line his successor's pockets, but the pocket is straining. The gaokao is sustained less by fairness than by plausibility, and that plausibility depends on arithmetic. When the arithmetic no longer works, belief becomes a liability. The real question is not whether the system is fair given it never was. The question is whether enough people can be kept, for long enough, from realizing its unfairness extends to them too.