China’s genius plan to win the AI race is already paying off

A network of ultra-competitive high-school talent streams has been turning out the leading lights of science and tech.

- Zijing Wu

High school students preparing for the college admissions exams, known as gaokao, in Fuyang in eastern China's Anhui province, in 2025. While others swot for the gaokao, those on the genius path have the chance to bypass that fate altogether, bagging places at top universities before they are out of high school.

(PHOTO: AFP)

About three years ago, Ms Stacey Tang, a manager in a pharmaceuticals company in Beijing, received a peculiar phone call. A voice speaking from an unknown landline number instructed her to send her 15-year-old son to take a qualification test for the “genius class” at one of the city’s elite high schools.

It was November 2022, at the peak of Beijing’s Covid-19 lockdowns. Schools were mostly closed and any in-person contact was discouraged. Even so, the test setting sounded bizarre: a moving van that would drive the boy through the streets of the capital for an hour while he tackled college-level maths problems.

Some parents might have baulked at the idea, but not Ms Tang. “In any other country, you would immediately suspect an abduction plot or simple lunacy,” she said, grinning at me through the steam from her Starbucks latte. “Instead, I was weeping with joy and sent my boy right away. I understood this for what it was: his golden ticket to the best educational resources in China.”

Ms Tang’s son was one of an estimated 100,000 talented Chinese teenagers selected every year to enter a network of science-focused talent streams run across the country’s top high schools.

The genius classes, also called “experiment” or “competition” classes, coach gifted students to compete in international competitions in maths, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science. Ms Tang was on the genius path herself almost 30 years ago in her home city of Chengdu. It helped her move to Beijing to study at the prestigious Peking University and secure a well-paid job.