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1Written with Claire Cousineau, The Highest Exam offers an elegant public-facing synthesis of Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li’s research on Chinese education, higher education, and social mobility, bringing a body of quantitative findings into a coherent and highly readable narrative, with the gaokao 高考 serving as its central thread.

2The organising idea is that the gaokao, and by extension, Chinese education and ultimately Chinese society, operates as a tournament, one which is centralised and highly hierarchical. The book’s three parts essentially unfold the three terms of that phrase. Part One, “Family,” describes the tournament. Seen from the household, the exam is above all a financial burden whose stakes and costs the authors lay out in compact, citable form: a related article based on China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) estimates that education spending amounts to 17.1% of parental income among households with school-enrolled children, and to 7.9% of total household expenditure in a broader sample, including households with and without children used for international comparison, far above the levels observed in most comparison countries (Hu et al. 2023). Before the 2021 crackdown, tutoring and extracurricular activities accounted for about 12% of education spending, while most costs came from in-school expenses. The contest is also profoundly unequal: in 2003 only about 7% of rural youth from poor counties were admitted to any college, against 48% of their urban peers. The most provocative move comes when the authors ask what a degree actually buys. Drawing on comparative testing and their own large surveys, they report that Chinese students enter university with critical-thinking and STEM skills equal or superior to peers abroad, yet stagnate or even decline across four years, so that the wage premium on an elite degree reflects less the human capital built in college than the signal carried by the gaokao score that secured admission. This is the book at its sharpest.

3Part Two, “State,” turns to the system’s centralisation. The gaokao is presented as the modern heir of the imperial civil-service examination and, above all, as an instrument the state can mobilise at will: expanding STEM quotas under US–China technological rivalry, channelling resources to strategic universities, and manufacturing the human capital the leadership judges the nation to need. The authors also attempt to show how China’s administrative hierarchy interlocks with the educational one, i.e., how bureaucratic rank and schooling are wired together. This is the connective tissue of the whole thesis, and also the strand that could have been developed further. The authors rightly identify hierarchy as central to the Chinese educational order, but hierarchy here is not only bureaucratic. It is also rooted in the centre–periphery structure produced by China’s uneven modernisation, running through the distance between metropolitan cities, provincial cities, county towns, and villages, as well as through the stratification of schools themselves. The argument would have been even richer had the book moved more explicitly from administrative hierarchy to these spatial and educational hierarchies.

4Part Three, “Society,” widens the lens until the tournament becomes a theory of Chinese power as such. The same winner-takes-the-position logic, the authors argue, runs through the wider social field: provincial officials compete on a single GDP metric for promotion, and academics on their publication counts, while the structure reproduces itself across the institutions that distribute status in China. The book then follows this logic across the Pacific. In its most timely chapters, it traces how the competitive dispositions cultivated by Chinese schooling have begun to permeate American life. According to the authors, Chinese and Asian American families carry test-centric strategies into the United States and feed the arms races over coveted school districts. The claim that the exam empire is expanding outward, reshaping the country the authors now live in, gives the book a reach well beyond area studies.

5This synthetic ambition is the book’s main strength. Jia, Li, and Cousineau give non-specialist readers a clear and compelling entry point into a field usually fragmented across technical articles and specialised debates. At the same time, the book’s breadth and quantitative authority leave less room for the ethnographic texture of exam life: how students and families experience competition, justify sacrifice, and make sense of selection by a single score. Readers interested in these lived and moral dimensions may therefore want to read it alongside qualitative studies such as Zachary Howlett’s Meritocracy and Its Discontents (2021), Yi-Lin Chiang’s Study Gods (2022), and existing French-language work on Chinese-style meritocracy (Li 2020). Together, these works complement the economic synthesis by restoring the lived experience, social meanings, and moral stakes of exam competition.

6A subtler reservation concerns the language through which China is explained. The authors write with first-hand knowledge of the exam system, and this gives the book much of its force. Yet because the book is written for an Anglophone readership, it occasionally uses terms that are immediately legible to that audience but less precise for describing Chinese institutions. This is the case, for instance, when the author discusses the imperial keju 科舉 and glosses it as an “education system.” As Miyazaki Ichisada (2019) observed, however, the ingenuity of the keju lay precisely in organizing an examination rather than an education: it selected candidates for office while leaving much of the labour and cost of schooling to families. Likewise, the passing reference to protesting parents risking a docked “social credit score” imports a familiar Western shorthand into a context better described as administrative and financial sanctions. As the book’s ambition is to explain China through the gaokao, its portrait would be still stronger if it more consistently used concepts that capture the internal logic of Chinese educational and political institutions.

7The Highest Exam is an important and highly readable contribution to the study of Chinese education. It makes a substantial quantitative research programme accessible without reducing its complexity and shows how the gaokao can serve as an entry point into wider questions about China. Students and general readers will find in it a clear introduction to a much-discussed institution, while specialists may read it as a useful map back to the economics on which it draws, and outward to the qualitative and historical questions it invites.