Why China Bans AI During Gaokao Season
This morning, I overheard my grandparents discussing my cousin’s latest gaokao mock exam. It went something like this:
Grandpa: “He still has two years.”
Grandma: “Which university does he want to attend?”
Grandpa: “The one in Hong Kong. It’s a pretty good school. But the cutoff score is so high. He needs at least a score of 640 or more!”
Grandma: “No one said it’d be easy. I heard he’s been waking up at 6am every morning this summer to study.”
Conversations like this play out in millions of households each year. Every June, thirteen million Chinese students sit for the two- to three-day gaokao, the college entrance exam that can decide their future in a single score. For centuries, exams have been the crucible through which Chinese ambition and anxiety are forged. Yet in recent years, though, even as parents strategize and students cram, one thing is certain: during gaokao season, certain features of AI tools are disabled. The restriction is meant to prevent cheating, yet at the very moment when Chinese teenagers face the most important test of their lives, the most powerful tool of their generation is locked out. China may champion AI innovation on the world stage, but in its own education system, it remains a source of deep suspicion.
Historically, Chinese education has rested on the twin pillars of diligence and memorization, which generations have called 苦读, or “bitter studying.” Beneath the surface debate over AI lies a deeper, generational expectation that children must retrace the same path of hardship their parents endured, learning endurance, grit, and the discipline to push through when nothing comes easily. To the older generation, AI tutoring tools would feel like a hollowing out of moral substance, as if discipline itself can be outsourced. Yet for the younger generation, raised in an economy where competition is fiercer than ever, not leveraging this new technology can often mean being left behind.
When we talk about the politics of AI and education in China, we often see how the state wants to be number one in AI but fears its social impact at home. While that’s true, it only sweeps the surface. The gaokao is one of the few institutions in China that still carries the aura of fairness. Corruption scandals have rocked other parts of life, but the gaokao retains a reputation, however imperfect, as a meritocratic pathway. Imagine a rural student memorizing formulas with pen and notebook, while an urban student has a personalized AI tutor simulating test conditions and correcting errors instantly. Both sit the same gaokao, but their journeys to the exam room could not be more different. But honestly, if AI provides some students an advantage before the exam, that’s a different problem, but at least during the four days of testing, the state wants everyone in the same boat: pen and paper, sweat and nerves.
Beyond the classroom, AI apps are shaping how students learn and think. Each interaction generates massive, granular data that investors, schools, and even parents can monitor. AI platforms now claim they can forecast a student’s likely gaokao score months in advance. In practice, this creates a new kind of pressure, one where a student is no longer only competing with classmates but with a number generated by an algorithm, a kind of algorithmic fatalism. Some students see it as motivation, but many feel that their future has already been calculated and that the system knows before they do whether they will succeed or fail.
The bigger question is what happens when students trained under these restrictions graduate into a world where their peers abroad have always treated AI as second nature. The gaokao preserves a level playing field domestically, but globally, its graduates may face a new kind of inequality. For a generation trained to succeed without AI, the ultimate test may no longer be a national exam but how they compete in a world where AI is second nature.
