No country on earth stops itself as completely, as deliberately, and as tenderly for its children as China does for the Gaokao. The more closely I study it, the more I think India should look at it not with envy, but with hard, uncomfortable honesty about its own examinations.

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For a few days every June, the world’s second-largest economy effectively pauses. Construction sites fall silent. Traffic is rerouted and horns are banned near test centres. In 2024 a record 13.42 million candidates sat the National College Entrance Examination; in 2025, more than 13.3 million did. Each one walked into a hall while an entire state apparatus arranged itself around their concentration.

This is the part that should give us pause. India runs examinations of comparable stakes for comparable millions — and yet our two systems could scarcely be more different in how they are executed, how far they are trusted, and what they finally produce.

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The logistics of an incorruptible exam

China treats the integrity of the Gaokao as a matter of national security, and it means this literally. Cheating is not merely an academic offence; since 2015 it has been a crime, and organised cheating can carry a prison term of up to seven years.

Question papers are printed in high-security facilities, some of them inside prisons, under closed-circuit cameras and guard. They travel under escort in tracked vehicles, monitored in real time by the BeiDou satellite system, so that any unauthorised detour is flagged at once. At the test centres, candidates pass through security gates and biometric checks — facial recognition, fingerprints, iris scans — that make impersonation almost impossible. Inside the halls, signal jammers smother stray frequencies, and AI-assisted surveillance catches the excessive head-turning or whispering a human invigilator might miss.

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Now hold that against India’s recent record. The NEET-UG paper leak of 2024 became a national scandal, with several State governments demanding the exam be scrapped altogether. Our integrity model still leans heavily on physical frisking and dress codes that ban full sleeves and thick-soled shoes — on suspicion at the door rather than a hardened, end-to-end chain of custody.

I am not arguing that India should militarise its examinations. I am arguing that public faith in fairness is the foundation on which everything else rests. China has grasped that once students stop believing the contest is honest, the entire meritocratic promise collapses. We are closer to that edge than we like to admit.

The deeper question both nations are dodging

And yet the Gaokao exacts a terrible human price. Among Chinese senior-school students, the pooled prevalence of depressive symptoms is estimated at around 28%. Surveys find large majorities reporting moderate-to-high academic stress, and a substantial share showing signs of clinical anxiety. Researchers have documented the chronically elevated cortisol of teenagers who sleep fewer than six hours a night for years on end.

The Chinese have given the underlying disease a name — neijuan, or “involution,” the relentless over-competition that yields diminishing returns — and a name for the surrender too: tang ping, “lying flat,” where exhausted young people simply opt out. India has no neat vocabulary for any of this. But every parent in a coaching town recognises the condition, and Kota’s suicide figures tell the same story in a different script.

South Korea, whose Suneung exam grounds flights and delays the opening of the stock market, completes a troubling East Asian pattern.

Critics increasingly argue that these single-exam systems carry an “innovation deficit.” They train young minds to fear failure, obey the rubric and memorise — precisely the skills artificial intelligence is busy rendering worthless. China’s youth unemployment climbed past 18% in 2025 even as it produced brilliant test-takers, partly because graduates drilled to ace standardised papers struggle with the unstructured problems a real economy throws at them. It is now nudging students toward vocational colleges and new majors in fields such as brain–computer interfaces and rare earths to close that gap.

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To its credit, China is reforming. The Xin Gaokao, or New Gaokao, now covers some 98% of candidates through a flexible “3+1+2” model that lets students mix the sciences and humanities and grades electives on a percentile curve — so that not every raw mark is a matter of life and death.

So here is where I land. India and China share the same demographic furnace: too many gifted children, too few good seats. China has out-built us on the logistics of trust, and out-tried us on reform — even when its reforms have backfired. We have neither matched its integrity nor avoided its mistakes.

The real contest of this century will not be won by whoever can test 13 million children most flawlessly. It will be won by whoever first finds the courage to ask whether the test itself is still measuring the right thing. China has begun to ask. Have we?

(Jayant Shilanjan Mundhra is an independent business analyst who runs newsletters called Decoding the Dragon and BharatNama and actively presents deep dives on listed Indian companies, public policies and Chinese strides in varied domains.)