I was not familiar at all with China’s national college exam, the gaokao, until reading about it in Susan Blum’s book, Schoolishness, and talking with her about it on a podcast episode we released in August – episode 152, you should check it out – and I’m incredibly grateful to Susan for making the connection with my guest today. Zachary Howlett is associate professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, joining me from Singapore, and author of the book, Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Exam in China. I thought at first ah, sure, every country has its school gatekeepers and methods of rationing secondary & post-secondary education – the SAT & ACT in the US, or the GCSE’s in the UK, for example – so how is this any different? But what I was not prepared for in Zachary’s work was the sheer magnitude of the gaokao as a deeply Chinese cultural, economic, political, and even a magical and religious phenomenon that touches every aspect of life, and for which there really is no American equivalent. 

The blurb on the back of the book from Karrie Koesel captures it so well, “Zachary M Howlett opens the black box of the gaokao to reveal that it is not only a fateful rite of passage, but also a complex social phenomenon laid in with ritual, magic, dark horses, examination champions, latent, potential, luck, character building, social inequity, and the possibility of changing one's fate.”

Meritocracy and its Discontents book link

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