Already nipping at the nation’s economic heels, schools in the People’s Republic aspire to outshine their American counterparts, ironically pulling from the West’s progressive playbook. Indeed, China’s widening education agenda, while just as demanding as before, draws from a blend of educational ideals, ranging from those of John Dewey to Mao Zedong.

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China’s national exams, known as gaokao, have served as the channel for getting ahead in Chinese society since the 10th century. “Exams may have no use for me,” Haiyan, a 26 year-old graduate student, told me, “but I cannot realize upward mobility” without doing well. She said she rose from a rural village of 200 families by scoring fourth in her county on the national exam and winning a coveted spot in a top Beijing university.

The intense expectations for learning woven into the age-old exams—not to mention a longstanding Confucian faith in literacy that still underlines Chinese culture—continue to produce stereotyped whiz-kids in math and graduates with extremely sharp memories, at least according to their performance on international assessments. Shanghai students contend each year with Finnish and Singaporean peers to rank at the top on international OECD education rankings (how China samples pupils remains controversial). But it’s increasingly clear that didactic teaching and regimented exams have, arguably, failed to produce young people who foster technological innovation or design breakthroughs in engineering. China remains far behind in the arts, cultural invention, or academic research. Beyond a handful of inspiring fiction writers, many now living in exile, the country has seen few notable figures emerge in the humanities.

The nation’s bulwark of meritocracy has also begun to crumble, a wake-up call to government leaders. Faced with slim odds of winning a university seat, the count of high-school students sitting for the national exam has declined from 10.5 to 9.3 million between 2008 to 2010. A rising share of top scorers dodge what are often arcane Chinese colleges and head overseas, especially offspring of the growing nouveau riche. China’s ambitious reform of college admissions now sends “a clear message to secondary-school students and their teachers that a narrow focus on rote learning … may not be enough to ensure entry to higher education,” wrote John Morgan and Bin Wu, experts on China policy, in an article for The Conversation.

But whether the remake of testing in China will truly move teachers to shift their emphasis away from drilling on facts to analysis and critical thinking isn’t clear. In certain cases, this type of questioning is exactly what the Chinese government continues to stamp out. “Teachers quietly talk about the pro-democracy uprising” at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Xiaoyan, a Beijing graduate student told me. “But it’s not asked on the national exam, so students don’t take it seriously.” And the shrill polemics of some government leaders continue to dampen inventive thinking inside schools. “We must, by no means, allow into our classrooms material that propagates Western values,” The New Yorker quoted Minister of Education Yuan Guiren saying earlier this year.