Tomorrow is a big day for Chinese high school students:

This year, a record 10 million Chinese youngsters will sit the two-day
National College Entrance Exam, starting on Thursday, vying for about half that
number of university places.

The entrance exam — commonly known as "gaokao" in Chinese — is credited as
the backbone of China’s remarkable reform-era growth in the 30 years since it
was restored, despite mounting criticism that it encourages rote learning and
puts too much pressure on overburdened adolescents.

Nevertheless the annual rite, during which virtually the whole nation holds
its breath, has turned people’s lives around, for better or worse, over
generations.

     The incredible pressure to pass the exam is rooted in the crazily competitive nature of contemporary Chinese society.  There are millions and millions of job seekers.  To find good employment in a city – because few young people want to be left in the countryside, isolated from urban opportunities – you need to distinguish yourself; you need education and intellectual skills.  Many, many young students, and their parents, believe that, if they fail to get into college, their families will be destined to second-class economic status.

     Some parents go to extremes to secure a physical and mental edge for their kids:

Their target is Ritalin, a drug used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD) containing the active ingredient methylphenidate hydrochloride.

Some parents were begging people like "Sun", whose son suffers from ADHD, to
get the amphetamine-like stimulant from doctors, the newspaper said.

"I was puzzled why they needed the drug and only later understood that it was
for their children preparing for the exams," Sun was quoted as saying.

      A casual observer might think that this is just a modern expression of the traditional "Confucian" veneration of education.  You know: the Chinese have long emphasized education, going back to the old examination system that recruited bright young me into the imperial bureaucracy.  It’s a Confucian thing.

      But those who actually read Confucian classics – like the Analects and Mencius – know that the hyper-competitiveness of the gaokao has little to do with what Confucius understood as education. The college entrance exam is all about getting ahead materially: get into college, get a good paying job, live a more comfortable material life, perhaps even become rich.  Now, I have nothing against those folks who are trying to gain a higher salary and a better place to live and the like.  Those, however, are not the goals Confucius had in mind.

      Take these Analects passages, for example:

The Master said: "Poor food and water for dinner, a bent arm for a pillow – that is where joy resides.  For me, wealth and renown without honor are nothing but drifting clouds. (7.16)

The Master said: "A person who can study for three years and never worry about a salary – that is very difficult to find." (8.12)

The Master said: "The noble-minded devote themselves to the Way, not to earning a living.  A farmer may go hungry, and a scholar may stumble into a good salary.  So it is that the noble-minded worry about the Way, not poverty and hunger.
(15.32).

      "Way" for Confucius meant a stable social order based upon individuals fulfilling their personal obligations and their family duties.  Doing the right thing in one’s closest loving relationships was more important than gaining a good salary.  Honor came first, even if doing the honorable thing mired one in poverty.  That might sound idealistic, and hopelessly detached from modern realities in a highly competitive economy, but that is what Confucius said, and what he meant.

     To say, then, that gaokao craziness somehow reflects "Confucian" culture is just another distortion – to add to a long, long line of historical distortions – of the thinking of Confucius.

     It is not Taoist, either.  Indeed, I imagine many frustrated Chinese high school students may this week find some solace in the Taoist rejection of "knowledge," especially the kind of "knowledge" that is demanded by the gaokao."

If you give up learning, troubles end…

    – Tao Te Ching, 20

…The knowing are never learned
and the learned never knowing…
   
    – Tao Te Ching, 81

    UPDATE: Jeremiah adds some historical meat to the above bones with a great post on the imperial exam system – one of my favorite topics.