The Trap of Exceptionalism: How Elite Higher Education in China Produces Class and Gender Inequality
Elite universities in China exhibit the potential to become global leaders. AI company DeepSeek’s success, for example, has drawn attention to the Chinese educational system, as core members of DeepSeek were educated at China’s top universities, notably Peking University (PKU) and Tsinghua University (THU). DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, came from humble origins and completed both undergraduate and graduate studies at the highly selective Zhejiang University. Liang’s is a familiar success story under meritocracy. But there is something more: Liang is praised in China not simply for his academic pedigree, but for having “sheer intellectual excellence.”
My book project, The Trap of Exceptionalism, interrogates this idolization of “sheer intellectual excellence” in elite Chinese higher education. Drawing on interviews with 133 junior and senior students at PKU and THU, the book identifies a cultural schema of exceptional competence that contributes to gendered and classed interpretations of academic performance, a career prestige hierarchy, and a singular vision of success.
The Meaning of Merit
Part I problematizes exceptionalism in Chinese elite higher education—the idea and practice that as the level of education progresses, the assessment and selection mechanisms should become more stringent and only the most intelligent and competent students can continue to be considered as excellent. While merit is commonly assumed to be a combination of innate talent and hard work, the definition of “the most intelligent and competent” at PKU and THU valorizes innate talent, understood in contrast to hard work, as a qualitatively different and superior kind of merit. This meaning of merit advantages class-privileged students and men in assessing themselves as competent and projecting excellence. Under exceptionalism, women, especially the less privileged, are prone to assess themselves as less competent, as they identify more with hard work than innate talent.
Unequal Aspirations and Conventional Success
Part II shows that self-assessment of competence during university has an influence on students’ expected class position after university. Excellence at PKU and THU is tied to a relatively narrow vision of success. Like their American counterparts, elite students flock to finance, consulting, and technology. Students who assess themselves as less competent under exceptionalism (their competence as qualitatively different from some privileged peers), however, come to reason that they should belong to a relatively lower social stratum after graduation.
Contributions
My book advances scholarship on meritocracy, inequality, and higher education by foregrounding the meaning of merit and individuals’ divergent relationships to merit and evaluation. These meanings and relationships are not random, but shaped by social processes in education and by social categories such as class and gender. My book therefore contributes to the increasing understanding that meritocracy is not only flawed but may not be the normative ideal to strive for, as it becomes a status hierarchy that justifies inequality.
While women have been gaining an advantage over men in educational attainment and academic performance, my book highlights an overlooked mechanism that disadvantages women in education and the school-to-work transition.
Moving beyond the popular focus on China’s exam culture, The Trap of Exceptionalism critiques a salient script of conventional success in Chinese elite higher education—one with outsized power over how people understand their own and each other’s worth.