As the news broke, Chinese internet users ruthlessly mocked the Zhao and Guo families. The stereotype of Chinese “new money” being “crazy rich” yet easily deceived was once again reinforced.

The anger online is a reflection of the frustrations of the many hardworking ordinary people in China’s stratified society. A 2010 report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences entitled “Contemporary Chinese Social Structure” found that China’s social structure lagged its economic development by about 15 years.

It appears many in China are painfully aware that the “Matthew effect”, whereby the rich tend to get richer, is at play here. The luxury of being able to send one’s children to study at world-renowned universities only increases the next generation’s chances of amassing more wealth.

In the US, as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni put it, “there’s nothing unusual about using big sums of money – for private tutors, for application whisperers, for ‘donations’ – to get a leg up on the competition”. Chinese college admissions are moving in that direction too.

With young parents anxious to make sure their progeny win at the starting line, affluent families are willing to put all their resources into their children’s education, from advanced mathematics and piano classes to more costly hobbies like the horse riding that Zhao is fond of and that most Chinese cannot afford.

Furthermore, when it comes to scarce educational resources, the underprivileged, especially those from the rural areas, lose out.

Meanwhile, many well-travelled English-speaking children from super-rich families have opted out of the gaokao; instead they must make the “difficult” choice between the United States or the United Kingdom for higher education.

While there are a sizeable number of wealthy Chinese youth attending top-tier universities abroad and the Zhao family is not the only one involved the recent scandal, it has attracted the most vitriol on social media.

“Others might not recognise you can do it but you have to prove to them you can with your own hard work and actions,” she said in the video. She also said, “Some people think, ‘Did you get into Stanford because your family is rich?’ No, the admissions officers basically do not know who you are.”

Zhao insisted that her admission to Stanford was purely the result of “burying her head and studying hard”, as the Chinese phrase goes, and that she had to give up horse riding to focus on school work.

Not surprisingly, those assertions have been at the centre of the internet backlash. “For those of us born “left-behind” to have believed this and swallowed the bogus ‘toxic chicken soup’, it’s disgusting,” wrote one internet user. “Actually all that matters is money.”

To some extent, the scandal also reflects privileged Chinese people’s belief that there is nothing money can’t buy. In today’s pragmatic and consumerist Chinese society, wealth is almost the only standard by which success is measured and many people dream of making a fortune. On closer scrutiny, though, the roots of many successful people’s wealth are questionable.

Forbes estimates that pharmaceutical mogul Zhao Tao, Zhao Yusi’s father, has a net worth of US$1.8 billion. His family’s wealth was accumulated through marketing traditional Chinese medicine and health supplements.

In 2002, Chinese prosecutors found that Zhao Yusi’s grandfather, a former doctor and co-founder of the company, had paid a bribe of US$10,000 to a senior food and drug administration official to get his products approved.

The once aspirational narrative now resembles a cautionary tale. Successful people, who are wont to present themselves as talented and hardworking while effacing the unfair advantages they enjoy, should remember that not presenting the facts honestly could backfire badly. Also, there is another well-known Chinese saying: “keep quiet and make your fortune”. Obviously, the Zhaos didn’t quite follow that dictum.

Audrey Jiajia Li is a nonfiction writer and broadcast journalist