China’s Secondary Schools Are Not Equal

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: A Chinese vocational student places in a global math competition against the odds, Chinese Premier Li Qiang makes a trip to Australia to further repair ties, and an investigation reveals a 2020 U.S. disinformation campaign about the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine.

Math Competition Underscores Inequality

An unexpected result in a math competition has made a Chinese student a hero while also calling attention to inequalities in the country’s education system.

Jiang Ping, 17, placed 12th in the preliminary round of the 2024 Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition last week. Most of the other finalists, 801 in total, are university students. Jiang was the only girl in the top 30, but what really makes her stand out is that she is a fashion design student at one of China’s vocational schools.

The story quickly caught on in part because of the classist underpinnings of China’s high school system. Although the country’s rigorous university entrance exam (gaokao) is better known, the zhongkao—the high school entrance exam taken after the ninth grade, when most students are 16—marks the start of dividing Chinese students into haves and have-nots.

It is currently zhongkao season, with the exam administered from June through early July. Each city sets the admission threshold for the exam differently; nationally, around 60 percent of students pass each year, meaning they get to attend traditional high schools. Like the gaokao, the test combines academic evaluation, a small physical education component, and questions that require politically correct answers. The last year of junior high in China is largely devoted to teaching the test.

The other roughly 40 percent of students either attend vocational high schools, known as zhongzhuan, or—relatively rarely—drop out of the education system altogether. In theory, zhongzhuan aim to provide alternative educational paths in the model of vocational schools in countries such as Germany. In practice, they are underfunded, severely lacking in trained teachers, and often stigmatized.

That stigma makes Jiang’s success at the math competition remarkable. Zhongzhuan students have limited routes to university, and while they are supposed to be set up for employment opportunities, they are paid less than regular high school graduates. Zhongzhuan programs often require exploitative internships, which have led to abuse; the suicide of a vocational student working at a factory in 2021 briefly caused a scandal in China.

As with similar entrance exams past and present, class and wealth are significant factors in student outcomes with the zhongkao. The hukou—China’s residence permit system—determines the quality of education that children can access in the first place, ranging from slowly collapsing rural schools to high-performing urban ones.

Private tutoring, which is necessary for the gaokao, is equally expensive for the zhongkao. The government tried to ban private tutoring in 2021 but ended up driving up prices even higher.

Once a student passes the zhongkao, there is a big difference between the best-quality high schools and the average ones when it comes to university admission. Unsurprisingly, the stress of the exams has led to some innovative cheating by parents, such as doping their children to increase their scores in the physical education component or moving their children to cities with more favorable admission thresholds.

Post-zhongkao education is subsidized, but it isn’t free. When students from poor families get into regular high schools, their parents sometimes can’t afford the higher fees that better schools charge. Meanwhile, if a wealthy student fails the zhongkao, they often have private school options, including international schools, that still offer a route to university.

The stigma around vocational education is relatively new. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, when very few Chinese students went to university, technical education was a prestigious route to a good job. In 2022, building on earlier changes, the central government embarked on a plan to transform vocational education into a meaningful path again, driven in part by China’s university graduate unemployment crisis.

However, that plan faces significant obstacles. Today, skilled trades are economically and socially undervalued in Chinese society. Rather than being carried out by trained professionals, jobs such as plumbing or glazing are often left to underpaid migrants who act as general handymen. The government target to put 50 percent of students into vocational education has caused panic among parents, who fear their kids ending up on a limited route that only a special few like Jiang can escape.

What We’re Following

Li Qiang in Australia. Chinese Premier Li Qiang made a well-publicized visit to Australia this week to try to further repair bilateral ties, which were badly damaged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Li’s visit may mean an end to any remaining trade barriers between the countries, many of which have already been lifted. China is also seeking to expand access to critical minerals produced in Australia, such as lithium.

The Australia-U.S.-U.K. submarine deal remains a point of contention for Beijing and Canberra, as does the fate of Australians imprisoned in China, such as dissident writer Yang Hengjun. Like many countries, Australia is trying to balance its security ties with the United States and trade ties to China. Local coverage of the visit was marred by Chinese Embassy officials’ attempts to block Li from seeing formerly imprisoned Australian journalist Cheng Lei at a press event.

Li, a close ally of Chinese President Xi Jinping, has been particularly prominent in Chinese media recently, receiving a rare run of People’s Daily front pages—a privilege usually reserved for the top leader.

U.S. anti-vax disinformation. In an investigation published last week, Reuters revealed that in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military ran a disinformation campaign in the Philippines to spread mistrust of the Chinese-produced Sinovac vaccine. Reuters reports that the secret program involved at least 300 fake accounts that used the hashtag #ChinaAngVirus—meaning “China is the virus.”

The posts sought to blame China for spreading COVID-19 and to discredit the vaccine, presumably contributing to a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment in the Philippines. Although China ran larger disinformation campaigns aimed at U.S. vaccines and blamed the U.S. military for the pandemic, the new revelations have damaged the U.S. image in the Philippines—giving China ammunition—and led Manila to call for further inquiry.

In the wake of the Reuters report, the U.S. military said it stands by the program.

Tech and Business

No property market recovery. Chinese home prices and sales fell in the first half of the year despite government stimulus efforts, as the long and painful deflation of the country’s decade-long property bubble continues. The state is preventing prices from reaching their actual floor out of fear of spurring panic among the property-holding urban upper middle class—which means that sales, down another 30.5 percent so far this year, can’t return to anything like normal.

A flurry of data released Monday showed that retail sales are slightly up, although nowhere near where they need to be for economic recovery. Industrial output year-on-year was below expectations despite a major manufacturing push that has prompted tensions with other countries that fear the consequences of Chinese industrial overcapacity.

Hopes for a wider stimulus program seem to be constantly dashed—possibly because it would go against Xi’s own economic ideology.

Local government funding. Local governments in China have struggled to keep up with their budgets since before COVID-19 hit—and the central government has been largely unwilling to fill the holes, although it offered a new borrowing program last year. That has led to late pensions and delayed raises, but the latest symptom of increasingly desperate local authorities is the sudden appearance of old tax bills for firms.

Business taxes in China are less a matter of law and more a matter of negotiations and corruption between businesspeople and local officials. That means that there is a lot of room for the authorities to suddenly discover unpaid taxes when they need the funds.

FP’s Most Read This Week

• Morality Is the Enemy of Peace by Stephen M. Walt
• Why Biden’s Gaza Gambit Is Likely to Fail by Aaron David Miller and Steven Simon
• The Hidden Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy in ‘Red Dawn’ by Antonio De Loera-Brust

A Bit of Culture

As a society, China has always loved ghost stories and strange tales of the supernatural. But Chinese visions of other worlds can be somewhat more material than those in many other cultures, as in this fourth-century tale of practical ghost-keeping.—Brendan O’Kane, translator

Song Dingbo Catches a Ghost
From Investigations Into the Spirit Realm, compiled by Gan Bao (d. 336)

When he was a young man, Song Dingbo of Nanyang was out walking one night when he met a ghost.
“I’m a ghost,” said the ghost. “Who are you?”
“I’m a ghost too,” Dingbo lied.
“Where are you going?” asked the ghost.
“I’m going to the market in Yuan.”
“That’s where I’m going too!” the ghost exclaimed, and the two set off together.

They had gone a mile or so when the ghost said, “Walking is too slow. How about we take turns carrying each other?”
“Very good,” Dingbo said.
So the ghost picked up Dingbo and carried him on his shoulders for another mile or so. “You’re awfully heavy,” said the ghost. “Are you sure you’re a ghost?”
“I’m new at this,” Dingbo said. “That must be why I’m so heavy.”

When Dingbo’s turn came, he found that the ghost weighed almost nothing. They each took a few turns carrying the other.
“I’m new at being a ghost,” Dingbo said again. “I forget—is there anything we’re afraid of?”
“Only the spittle of the living,” the ghost said. And on they went.

When they came to a stream, Dingbo told the ghost to cross first. He listened as hard as he could, but the ghost made no sound at all as it crossed. His own crossing involved much splishing and splashing.
“Why all the noise?” asked the ghost.
“I only just died,” Dingbo said. “I’m not used to crossing water, that’s all. Don’t give me a hard time about it.”

As they approached the market in Yuan, Dingbo lifted the ghost up onto his shoulders and held on as hard as he could. The ghost squealed and sputtered and begged to be let down, but Dingbo ignored its cries. He didn’t set it down until they reached the middle of the market.

As soon as it touched the ground, the ghost transformed itself into a sheep, and quickly Dingbo spat on it before it could change again. He sold the sheep for 1,500 cash and went on his way.