In 2016, the World Economic Forum reported that China produced approximately 4.7 million STEM graduates annually, far exceeding India’s 2.6 million and the United States’ 568,000. This vast output of technical talent translates directly into industrial capability: by 2024, China had become the world’s largest market for industrial robotics, accounting for 54 percent of global deployments, according to the International Federation of Robotics. These outcomes reflect more than differences in population size or educational preference; they reveal a structural contrast between a centralized, unitary state capable of coordinating education with national development goals and a federal system like that of the United States, where authority over schooling and workforce formation is fragmented across multiple levels of governance.
Central to China’s coordinated model is the gaokao, which operates not merely as a university entrance examination but as a key instrument of governance. Extending from its preparatory stages through final selection, the gaokao simultaneously sorts talent at scale, legitimizes state authority through meritocratic ideals, and serves long-term economic and developmental planning—particularly in STEM fields. In doing so, it allows the Chinese state to manage people, power, and development through a unified national mechanism, a degree of alignment that is structurally difficult for decentralized federal systems to achieve.
The Gaokao as a State-Centered System for Talent Allocation
The gaokao operates as a centralized mechanism through which the Chinese state identifies, ranks, and allocates talent across a vast population. In a country of over a billion people, the exam transforms individual academic performance into a legible, standardized hierarchy that the state can plan around. By converting millions of students into a nationally comparable, rank-ordered pool, the gaokao reduces uncertainty and enables the systematic deployment of human capital in line with state priorities.
At its core, the gaokao creates a zero-sum competition in which students are ranked primarily at the provincial level, determining access to a stratified system of higher education. Elite universities sit at the top, followed by lower-tier institutions and vocational colleges. This hierarchy closely resembles the logic of the imperial civil service examinations, but with a modern purpose: instead of selecting officials for an emperor, the system channels top performers into elite universities, key academic disciplines, and ultimately into state bureaucracies, research institutions, and strategic industries.
High scorers gain entry to universities that receive disproportionate government funding, political attention, and institutional prestige. Graduates of these institutions are overrepresented in senior positions within the Chinese Communist Party, state-owned enterprises, and other core sectors of the state apparatus. By tying elite status and career advancement to a state-controlled examination system, the gaokao fosters political loyalty. Those who succeed do so through the system, and their social mobility is closely linked to continued participation in, and alignment with, state structures.
The system also allows the central government to distribute talent unevenly but deliberately. Admission quotas linked to provinces, universities, and majors enable the state to steer human capital geographically and sectorally. Politically significant regions such as Beijing and Shanghai benefit from favorable quotas, while rural areas face structural disadvantages stemming from unequal educational resources. Yet the gaokao still offers limited upward mobility for exceptional rural students, selectively integrating top performers into national institutions and reinforcing central control over the provinces.
In this way, the gaokao functions not merely as an educational assessment but as an administrative tool of governance. It provides a scalable, standardized pipeline for allocating talent in accordance with state needs, ensuring that academic ability is translated into service to the bureaucratic, economic, and political priorities of the state.
The Gaokao and the Reproduction of Political Legitimacy in China
The gaokao, China’s national college entrance examination, functions as a powerful mechanism for reinforcing the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By promoting a narrative of meritocracy, fairness, and social stability, the exam presents the state as a neutral and competent arbiter of opportunity, even amid deep structural inequalities. Frequently described as a “stabilizing force” in Chinese society, the gaokao offers a standardized and widely recognized channel for social mobility, helping to mitigate resentment and channel ambition in ways that strengthen state authority.
Central to this legitimizing function is the perception of meritocracy. In a social environment often characterized by weak institutions, corruption, and the influence of personal connections, the gaokao’s reliance on objective, exam-based scoring is widely regarded as transparent and difficult to manipulate. Families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds invest heavily in preparation, viewing the exam as one of the few credible ladders of upward mobility. Although only a small fraction of candidates gain admission to elite universities, the promise of substantial rewards—including significantly higher earnings and access to state-sector jobs and welfare benefits—sustains belief in the system. This belief legitimizes unequal outcomes by framing success as the product of effort and ability, echoing long-standing Confucian ideals of merit-based advancement.
The gaokao also reinforces legitimacy through centralized control and the projection of state capacity. The government’s authority over exam content, scheduling, quotas, and enforcement is displayed annually through nationwide coordination and ritualized public attention, such as traffic restrictions and media coverage during test days. Historical experience suggests that disruptions to the examination system have often coincided with social unrest, whereas its continuity has contributed to political stability. By absorbing talented individuals into elite educational institutions and state-linked career paths, the gaokao further reduces the likelihood that educated elites become sources of organized dissent.
Comparative perspectives further enhance public acceptance of the system. As argued in The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China by Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau (published September 2025), China’s exam-centered admissions process may offer more predictable social mobility than the holistic admissions model used in the United States. Despite persistent inequalities, gaokao scores are shown to correlate more reliably with educational and occupational outcomes, reinforcing the perception that advancement is rule-based rather than discretionary. This comparison bolsters public buy-in by presenting the Chinese system as comparatively fair and effective.
Beyond its practical and comparative advantages, the gaokao plays a crucial ideological role. Its clear rules, national standardization, and formal impartiality portray the state as rational, rule-bound, and just. Social frustration generated by intense competition and pressure is often redirected toward individual performance rather than systemic or political critique. While the exam is widely experienced as exhausting and unforgiving, its authority is rarely challenged. In this way, the gaokao not only allocates educational opportunities but also sustains political order by legitimizing inequality, disciplining aspiration, and reinforcing the CCP’s performance-based claim to governance.
The Gaokao as an Instrument of Economic Planning and Development
The gaokao occupies a central place in China’s economic governance by tightly integrating education into the state’s long-term development strategy. Rather than serving merely as a mechanism for individual selection, the examination functions as a planning tool that aligns human capital formation with national economic priorities. Through this system, the state channels talent toward sectors deemed essential for growth, innovation, and industrial upgrading, thereby embedding education directly within China’s centralized approach to economic transformation.
A key function of the gaokao lies in resource allocation and sectoral prioritization. By controlling university enrollment quotas, majors, and institutional hierarchies, the government can steer students into strategically important fields such as engineering, science, medicine, and teaching. In recent years, this steering role has become especially pronounced with the expansion of STEM places at elite universities, partly in response to intensifying technological competition with the United States. Substantial public investment in these programs has helped create a large, technically skilled workforce capable of supporting high-productivity industries, including advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
Empirical research underscores the macroeconomic significance of this education-driven strategy. The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China by Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau (published September 2025) documents how gaokao-driven college expansion—growing roughly twenty-five-fold between 1999 and 2011—substantially upgraded China’s labor force. The authors argue that these improvements in educational attainment and skill composition can explain up to one-third of China’s GDP growth through productivity gains. This finding highlights the exam’s role not simply as a selection mechanism, but as a foundational pillar of China’s post-1978 economic rise.
The gaokao has also supported long-term development by producing a workforce well suited to rapid industrialization. Its emphasis on standardized curricula, rote learning, and high-stakes testing—particularly in mathematics and science—has generated disciplined, technically proficient workers who excel at incremental innovation and efficient production. This educational model was especially effective during the “reform and opening up” era, when China’s primary challenge was technological catch-up and cost-efficient manufacturing. At the same time, scholars increasingly caution that the system’s rigidity may constrain frontier innovation as China approaches the global technological frontier, given its tendency to reward conformity over creativity.
More broadly, the gaokao enables sustained economic governance by giving the state a reliable lever over the future labor force. Its predictability allows policymakers to coordinate investments in education, infrastructure, and regional development over long time horizons, while adjusting enrollment scales and disciplinary emphasis to match evolving economic goals. Rather than leaving human capital formation solely to market forces, the gaokao embeds individual aspirations within a framework of national planning. In doing so, it has played a decisive role in supporting China’s economic development by transforming education into a strategic instrument of state-led growth.
Why Centralized China Can Govern Through a Single Exam While Federal America Cannot
China’s ability to organize society around a single, high-stakes national examination such as the gaokao, while a federal country like the United States cannot, is best explained by differences in state structure rather than culture. The contrast lies in how authority, legitimacy, and elite formation are organized. What functions as a stabilizing governing instrument in a centralized system would be politically and institutionally unworkable in a federal one.
At the core of this divergence is the distribution of sovereignty. In China, education is ultimately subordinate to the central state, which exercises authority over examinations, universities, funding, credentials, and access to elite careers. This produces a vertically integrated system in which a single rule-maker can design, enforce, and legitimize a unified national tournament. By contrast, the United States operates under divided sovereignty. Power over education is fragmented among the federal government, state governments, local school districts, and largely autonomous universities. No single actor possesses the legal authority or political capital to impose a nationwide exam regime without provoking substantial resistance or constitutional challenges. A system built on competition requires a single referee; federalism structurally prevents that concentration of power.
Control over elite pipelines further differentiates the two systems. In China, elite universities are state institutions, and access to top positions in government, state-owned enterprises, and high-status research organizations depends heavily on elite educational credentials. The gaokao thus governs both entry into elite institutions and exit into elite careers, giving the state leverage over the entire process of elite reproduction. In the United States, by contrast, elite universities are autonomous and often privately governed, and employers rely on a wide array of signals beyond formal credentials, including internships, networks, extracurriculars, and soft skills. Because the state does not monopolize elite recruitment, no single exam can exert comparable governing power.
Differences in political legitimacy further explain why these systems diverge. China’s regime rests primarily on performance-based legitimacy, emphasizing stability, economic growth, and administrative competence. A centralized examination that promises upward mobility through effort fits squarely within this logic and helps justify social stratification. The United States, however, derives legitimacy from pluralism, rights, and individual freedom. A single, high-stakes national exam would likely be criticized as exclusionary, inequitable, and incompatible with personal choice. What reinforces legitimacy in one political system would undermine it in the other.
Social attitudes toward hierarchy also play an important role. In China, hierarchy is explicit and socially normalized, and examinations are accepted as legitimate tools for sorting individuals into ranked tiers early and decisively. In the United States, egalitarian ideals sit uneasily with overt, centralized ranking. Admissions systems are intentionally complex and “noisy,” using holistic evaluations and multiple pathways to soften the appearance of rigid hierarchy. This diffusion of judgment is not accidental but essential to the stability of a federal system.
Taken together, these structural differences explain why China can govern education and social mobility through a single national examination, while a federal country like the United States cannot. Centralization enables coherence, control, and legitimacy in China’s system, whereas federalism, institutional autonomy, and pluralistic legitimacy in the U.S. make such concentration of authority both impractical and politically destabilizing.
Innovation at the Frontier, Fragility at the Base of the STEM Talent Pipeline
The United States has long demonstrated extraordinary strength in generating scientific breakthroughs and rapidly commercializing them at scale. Its innovation system excels at moving ideas from early success to global dominance, supported by world-class research universities, venture capital, and entrepreneurial culture. Yet this strength masks a structural weakness: the country has struggled to cultivate a broad, durable foundation of domestic STEM talent at population scale. In other words, the system is highly effective at amplifying excellence once it appears, but far less effective at producing large numbers of well-prepared entrants in the first place.
One core constraint lies in the social and cultural stratification of STEM careers. While software engineers and technology entrepreneurs enjoy high prestige and visibility, manufacturing engineers, technicians, and skilled industrial workers receive far less recognition and social support. This disparity disproportionately affects African American and Hispanic communities, where access to high-status STEM pathways is weaker and role models are fewer. As a result, critical technical fields tied to production, automation, and infrastructure suffer from chronic under-supply, even as demand remains strong.
Family strategies and educational pathways further reinforce this imbalance. Elite households concentrate resources on long-horizon STEM tracks—particularly computer science—while middle- and lower-income families often favor programs with faster, more predictable economic returns, such as nursing, business, or vocational credentials. These choices are not merely preferences but responses to risk, limited cultural capital, and rising educational costs. Lengthy and demanding STEM degrees, especially in engineering, frequently impose debt burdens exceeding $60,000, discouraging capable students from less affluent backgrounds from entering or persisting in these fields.
At the system level, cultural resistance to standardized, large-scale technical training compounds the problem. Educational philosophies that prioritize individual creativity and self-expression—valuable for originality—are less effective at building uniform mastery of foundational skills across millions of learners. Meanwhile, the offshoring of traditional manufacturing has weakened local ecosystems that once trained and absorbed technical workers, reducing visible demand signals for many STEM occupations tied to industry rather than software.
Finally, the United States has relied heavily on immigration to sustain its advanced STEM workforce. Nearly half of STEM PhDs are awarded to international students, primarily from China and India, whose contributions are indispensable. However, this reliance has also softened the perceived urgency of investing in domestic talent formation at scale. As long as global inflows compensate for local gaps, the structural weakness in foundational STEM training remains insufficiently addressed. The result is an innovation system that shines at the frontier, yet rests on a narrower and more fragile human capital base than its global leadership ultimately requires.
Summary & Implications
The core issue is not whether a system can act, but whether it possesses the willingness, capacity, and institutional endurance to do so at scale. China’s gaokao and its production of millions of STEM graduates reflect a modern, state-centered governance model in education—engineering-driven, hierarchical, and oriented toward collective advancement. While this model has clear shortcomings, including uneven disciplinary balance and constrained innovation, it delivers decisive advantages in scale, predictability, and rapid coordination. China defines intelligence through infrastructure—both physical and human—treating talent cultivation as a long-term national project.
By contrast, the United States does not lack capability; it lacks institutional compatibility with such projects. Its federal structure, liberal traditions, and market-financial orientation inherently resist centralized, non-market, long-horizon talent allocation. The U.S. system excels at breakthroughs and commercialization, moving efficiently from “1 to N,” but struggles to build foundational capacity from “0 to 1 million.” This is not a divergence in educational philosophy but in political organization: China’s centralized authority, control over elite institutions, and hierarchical legitimacy enable tools like the gaokao to function as governance mechanisms, while the U.S. cannot replicate this approach without undermining its own political foundations.
References
- The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China. Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau. September 2025