Education Nation: China’s Exam Fetish

China's college exam, the gaokao , is fetishized as the ultimate test, yet a lesser-known story is how it entrenches regional education discrimination. Its role at social engineering is also clear, with AI suddenly becoming the sixth most popular major in China, on command from above. This month, the Little Red Podcast sets the first ever podcast gaokao . The intrepid test-takers are Edward Vickers from Kyushu University, co-author of Education and Society in Post-Mao China and host of the Asian Education Podcast , Karron Huang, who is studying for a Masters in early childhood education at the University of Melbourne and sat the gaokao in 2015, and Ruixue Xia from the University of California San Diego who coauthored The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China . Image: c/- Karron Huang. Morning gaokao study session, Foshan No. 1 High School, Guangdong, 2015. Transcripts are available at

You can listen to Education Nation: China’s Exam Fetish online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Education Nation: China’s Exam Fetish is an episode from The Little Red Podcast by The Little Red Podcast.

This episode is 47:33 long.

This episode was published on Dec 8, 2025.

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