James Kynge

you know, dressed up with his little red tie around his neck, he would get applauded and mothers would pop out of their homes and give him a little dumpling or some other little bit of food to eat because everybody in China admires a clever kid.

But Alice, what do you think about this system of skimming off clever kids?

Yes, absolutely.

Alice, you mentioned, I think, that there's about 100,000 of these students that are selected every year to go into this genius class streams.

And those students sort of find themselves somewhere in the system later on.

One of the things that I hadn't realized about this until I read the article in the Financial Times that you mentioned by Zijing Wu was that if you get selected, you get to skip the Chinese high school exam called Gaokao.

And there is no more dreaded a word, I think, in the Chinese language than gaokao because it is this absolute solid year of stress for any student who wants to graduate from high school.

The competition is so intense that every year you hear about students having nervous breakdowns.

You know, families that have kids that are about to do gaokao are in major, major sort of protective mode.

But it's interesting to think about the dynamics of this because if you get to skip doing the gaokao, then you can focus more on the subjects that you're interested in.

You don't have to do the gaokao syllabus.

So you can just focus on, let's say, if math is your thing or computer science is your thing, you can specialize in that area.

And that allows you to make greater progress towards the genius dream and to, you know, come up with the breakthroughs that you've just been mentioning, Alice.

The other thing I think is instructive is that we're talking 100,000 students that are selected for these genius streams.

There are every year nearly 13.5 million Chinese students that take Gaokao.

So you can already see what a tiny proportion of students are being skimmed to go into these genius streams.

That really is a tiny, tiny proportion of the very brightest kids in the country.

And the last thing I'd say, Alice, is that, yes, this resonated with me so much, having read quite a lot of Chinese classical literature.

The way in which Chinese culture lionizes bright kids, especially poor bright kids, is truly amazing.

There are so many stories that go back thousands of years, in fact, to, you know, like a particular boy saying,