#13 China’s College Entrance Test Feeds the Meme Machine
This is issue #13 of the Magpie Digest newsletter, originally sent on 6/14/2018
Last weekend, 9.7 million Chinese high school seniors breathed true freedom for the first time in years after completing the grueling two-day college entrance exams known as the gaokao (高考, literally “high / test,” and short for the National Higher Education Entrance Exam).
The gaokao, the latest incarnation of China’s long-standing tradition of extensive nationwide tests, has been a life-defining event for Chinese students since its reinstatement in 1977. For most Chinese students, their gaokao score is the sole factor that decides not only which domestic colleges they will gain admission to (if any!), but also what majors they will be assigned. Only about 40% of gaokao takers are admitted to college each year. This intense competitive pressure and urgency fuels a nationwide mania around the test, manifesting in a 100-billion-dollar test preparation industry, students faking ethnic minority status to get extra points, and one city awarding its top-scoring student with real estate last year.
The gaokao is also the reason why high schoolers are conspicuously underrepresented on China’s active social media landscape: for all of high school, their schedules are micromanaged down to the minute to cram for these two impossibly pivotal days. Online, however, gaokao week has become an annual occasion for older internet users to reflect on their own youth and playfully spectate the exam from a safe distance.
A Time for Nostalgia
For better or worse, memories of the gaokao are inextricably linked in people’s minds with their teenage years. Gaokao week, then, has become a time for 18+ internet users of all ages to reflect back on their own test experiences and reminisce about how much has changed. Apps and social media promotions capitalize on this wave of nostalgia by letting users imagine themselves as test takers, past and present.
Left: a WeChat mini-app promoting a celebrity biopic series called “My Time and Me” allows users to upload a selfie and generate a reverse-aged gaokao ID from their own teenage years.
Right: actress Zhang Ting shares a photo of herself modified with a gaokao-themed photo filter and the caption, “Good luck on gaokao, say hello to the future.”
Essay Prompts Become Rich Meme Fodder
During most of the nine-hour gaokao, students are tested on a vast but finite set of materials: any skill or fact from their entire education is fair game. But one part of the gaokao is infamously unpredictable: the long-form essay prompt, which ranges from the abstract (“From flowers to birdsong, music to code, genes to sculpture, different languages unlock different worlds”) to the propagandistic (“A letter to 2035, when the age of socialism will be realized…”) to the downright bizarre (this year, one prompt was just the story of how statistician Abraham Wald introduced the concept of survivorship bias during World War II). After local media reveal the essay topics for every region on test day each year, the internet makes a tradition of discussing, being aghast at, and making fun of the prompts online.
In recent years, the always-creative online fan communities have even made a game of subverting these essay prompts. At time of writing, the hashtag #盲狙高考作文# (“blind gaokao essay prompts”) has over 8,200 posts on Weibo.
Left: “#Thorki# It’s gaokao season again~ anyone want to play a game of “blind gaokao essay prompt”? Before gaokao essay topics are announced, commit to a region whose prompt you will be writing or drawing about (national/Shanghai/Jiangsu/etc.) No limits on theme or length. Must be about Thorki. As for me, I’m choosing the Shanghai prompt! Good luck to all my large gaokao-taking babies! If no one wants to play, I’ll quietly delete this.”
Right: “#Thorki# Aphasia (Jiangsu Gaokao Essay Prompt) First, I’d like to congratulate myself on taking the real test several years ago, otherwise I’d probably be crying at the exam site. [This prompt] is so hard to write! I exceeded the word limit! By a lot! 0 points on the essay!…”
An Opportunity to Pass Down Life Advice
After this year’s test takers put down their pencils, they will have to endure 2–3 weeks of suspense before their results come back. Those test results will reveal their options (or lack thereof) for what colleges and majors they can enter into. When it comes to selecting a course of study, many students simply choose the most prestigious or lucrative option available to them — an online survey in 2015 revealed that nearly 70% of incoming college students know very little about the majors they choose.
One thing that is almost guaranteed, however, is that the pace of schoolwork will slow down considerably in college, which means that students will likely have much more free time. These newly liberated college underclassmen, some of the most active social media users in the country, use gaokao week as an opportunity to dispense funereal wisdom about what (not) to study from the other side.
A collection of classic antithetical couplets rewritten to discourage incoming students from specific majors. A sampling below, paraphrased to preserve the rhyming effect:
“Last night an evening breeze blew past me / only dumb***s study metallurgy.”
“Autumn wind and pearly dew cross paths / might as well code if you’re going to do maths.”“Sleep through bitterly short spring nights until the sun is high /do physics and be alone until you die.”
But of course, the most important piece of life advice around the gaokao is simply: show up, unlike the unlucky author of this now-famous viral Weibo post which reappears every year around this momentous week in June:
Original post: “Fuck!!!!!!!!!!!! I overslept!!!!! Fuck I’m not going to college aaahhhh!!!!!!!!”
Repost comments (from oldest on bottom right to newest on top left): “Bumping a classic” / “Always repost a classic” / (paraphrasing a proverb) “Every year, there is a new reincarnation of this poster” / “I can’t believe this was 2 years ago” / “Hahaha, how is the original poster doing right now??” / “Do y’all have to drag this up EVERY year to warn students?” / “A tragic story”
(Don’t worry too much for the original poster — those who don’t score high enough for college admission, including those who oversleep their exams, can and often do retake the test the following year. Alibaba founder Jack Ma famously did so three times before he was accepted into a university.)
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Magpie Digest is a project of Magpie Kingdom, a consultancy that provides analysis, business advisory services, and custom research to help businesses translate their value for the Chinese market. The Magpie team (Christina Xu, Tricia Wang, and Pheona Chen) is based in New York and Shanghai.
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