About three years ago, 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 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.”