Zachary M. Howlett. Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2021. 282pp. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781501754463
This review assesses Zachary Howlett’s ethnographic study of China’s national college entrance examination (Gaokao) as a “fateful rite of passage” – a ritual event in which social stratification accumulated over years is compressed into a single high-stakes moment and repackaged as individual merit. Howlett’s central contribution is to show how meritocracy functions ideologically: by foregrounding procedural fairness and individual effort, the exam obscures the structural inequalities that determine outcomes long before students sit down to write. The review engages this argument critically on two fronts. First, it questions whether Howlett’s account sufficiently reckons with Chinese conceptions of selfhood, in which the years-long cultivation of character, not just test performance, is itself constitutive of personhood, which may partly explain why students accept rather than resist the institution. Second, it asks why, if meritocracy’s contradictions are as acute as Howlett suggests, Gaokao has only grown in scale and social legitimacy since his fieldwork. The review concludes that the book is empirically rich and analytically provocative, but leaves the question of the institution’s durability and the alternative pathways quietly diffusing its pressures underexplored.