Gaokao still the door to the future

As I prepared to write this column on Thursday morning, 9.15 million teenagers across the country had already begun a Chinese language exam an hour earlier. During their two day grilling for the college entrance qualification, the students will sit tests in Chinese and English languages, mathematics and science or humanities.

For Chinese students the two days of exams are viewed as two of the most important days of their lives, because the exam results will determine whether they enter higher education or not, which promises - at least theoretically - a decent job in the future.

In fact the enrollment rate was low until the dramatic "enlargement of enrollment" in 1999. It was between 10-20 percent in the 1950s and 1960s before the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), during which colleges and universities suspended recruitment. When the entrance examination - known as the gaokao in China - resumed in 1977, 5.7 million candidates competed for 273,000 seats in college classrooms, an enrollment rate of only 4.8 percent.