Read: Chen Guang: Deciphering 60,000 Peking University Archives: Who are the people who get into China's top universities?

(Chen Guang’s original article can be found at: http://www.aisixiang.com/data/106309.html)

After reading the article, Li Yousheng wrote: “I entered the prestigious Peking Union Medical College in 1963 and studied in the Department of Biology at Peking University until 1967. I came from an ordinary rural family in Hebei, so my research aligns with Professor Li Zhongqing’s findings. However, I must point out that after 1949, the stable mainland government following years of war made universal primary education possible. The Communist Party also advocated that children from poor families should also attend school, establishing complete primary schools in rural areas for the first time, leading to a sudden surge in the rural school population. I enrolled in school in the spring of 1950, starting with my family’s primary school. The school was moved four or five times before the first local primary school was finally established around 1952 in Grandma Temple. Because it was newly built, I attended primary school for an extra year and a half.”

As far as I know, during the Qing Dynasty, the ranks of Xiucai (秀才), Juren (举人), and Jinshi (进士) were once equated with primary school, middle school, and university, respectively. A county might only have Xiucai and primary school graduates. In my father’s time, a county with hundreds of thousands of people only had a primary school. My father had to go to Tianjin, a provincial capital-like city, to take the Juren exam for middle school. Our county only started building a high school in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, and I was in the third graduating class of high school in the county. Only then were six of my classmates able to go to university in Beijing, one of whom went to Tsinghua University. None of the first and second graduating classes went to Beijing because there was a learning and familiarization process involved in establishing a high school for the first time. Because of the construction of the high school, our county received several graduates from teachers’ colleges; they were the only people in the entire county who had attended university.

Of my sixty classmates in university, only about ten came from rural areas; the rest were from cities, many from families of highly educated individuals. They were clearly better equipped and had a broader perspective than their rural classmates, a result of their different living environments.

Excerpt by Li Yousheng: This article introduces Li Zhongqing (son of Li Zhengdao) and his research team’s work on the period from 1952 to 1999.

The results were obtained by entering the academic records of 64,500 Peking University students into the computer. They are also collaborating with Soochow University to digitize the academic records of 86,000 students from 1933 to 2003.

Li Zhongqing stated that there were approximately 180,000 university graduates during the Republic of China era, and they collected around 100,000 student records from 25 universities. The final research results revealed that from 1906 to 1952, over 60% of the educational elite were children of local professionals and merchants, particularly from the Jiangnan and Pearl River Delta regions. According to Li Zhongqing’s team, high school education at the time only covered about 3% of the population, and university entrance examination methods were highly disadvantageous to children from impoverished families, further reducing the possibility of the lower and middle classes receiving elite education. This situation is similar to what Li Zhongqing observed at American universities; he noted that over one-third of the students at top American universities like Harvard and Yale come from the wealthiest 5% of families in the United States.

At the beginning of the new regime, “almost all the students of Peking University and Suzhou University came from cities and towns, mainly from professional and technical personnel, cadres, and merchant families,” Li Zhongqing and others wrote in their book *The Silent Revolution*. However, in the decades that followed, the number of students from rural and working-class families gradually increased. Li Zhongqing and others also noted that in the early days of the new regime, the rapidly growing number of peasant children mostly came from landlord and rich peasant families, but around the time of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, the number of poor and lower-middle peasants at the bottom of the rural population increased “instantly.”

(Starting in 1970) At that time, 70% of the students who were recommended to university came from families of cadres or had political connections. A Sichuan educated youth recalled: “(University) admissions were almost entirely monopolized by cadres of communes and brigades. In some places, the children of these cadres were lined up in order, and the recommendation list stretched all the way to 1987.”

…In other words, according to this survey, the more strictly admissions are based on exam scores, the greater the chances for the poor; the more reliance is placed on subjective standards such as interviews, the smaller the chances for the poor.