How Hong Kong residents bypass daunting China university entrance exam to secure places at elite schools
Students with residency in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan sit a different exam to China’s notoriously difficult gaokao. The ‘joint exam’ gives them an advantage when trying to gain admission to China’s top universities
With nearly 10 million candidates each year sitting China’s National Higher Education Entrance Examination, or gaokao, securing a place to study at one of the country’s top universities, such as Peking or Tsinghua, is a daunting challenge.
Despite the pressure, medical student Bater Yeung Rui-lai had no doubt he would be accepted into his dream school.
“I was 100 per cent sure [I would get into Peking University in Beijing],” he says. The quest seemed easy for Yeung, since he didn’t have to sit the notoriously difficult gaokao, which involves intensive problem-solving tests and lasts for three days.
China’s hukou – or household registration system – governs where residents can access public services. As part of the hukou system, Chinese students must return to their hometown to sit the gaokao in the last year of high school.
Yeung, though, was eligible to sit the much easier “joint exam”, officially known as the National Education Exams Authority – People’s Republic of China Joint Entrance Exam For Universities. The exam is tailor-made for students with residency rights in the Chinese special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, and Taiwan – which Beijing considers a province of China – who are applying to study at a university in mainland China.
Past exam takers, and agencies that prepare students to sit the joint exam, say the test is easier than the gaokao, and creates a lower entry threshold to top Chinese universities. As a result, some parents have forfeited their children’s Chinese hukou to bypass the gaokao.
Many of these parents became Hong Kong residents through the now-defunct immigration arrangement known as the Capital Investment Entrant Scheme.