In the imperial examinations, the top three candidates of the final palace exam were popularly called zhuangyuan, bangyan and tanhua. Together they were known as the san dingjia, the three legs of the tripod. On the official golden list, the jinbang, the zhuangyuan appeared only as “first place in the first class.”
The first known zhuangyuan was Sun Fujia, in 622.
Mencius said: “Favorable timing is not as good as favorable terrain. Favorable terrain is not as good as harmony among people.” In the original: 天时不如地利，地利不如人和.
The Song statesman Fan Zhongyan wrote in his Record of Yueyang Tower: “In the following year, the government ran smoothly and the people lived in harmony (政通人和), and all neglected tasks were taken up again.”
On June 23, 2021, the Ministry of Education issued guidance on university applications after the gaokao. It says: “Hyping the ‘gaokao zhuangyuan,’ admission rates, high-scoring candidates and repeat candidates is strictly prohibited.” The zhuangyuan is a province’s top scorer, named after the first place of the imperial examinations.
As a young man, Mao Zedong wrote: “To struggle with heaven is endless joy. To struggle with the earth is endless joy. To struggle with people is endless joy.” Red Guards later recited the lines.
In On Contradiction, written in 1937, Mao called the law of contradiction, the unity of opposites, “the fundamental law of nature and society.” The unity of opposites, he held, is conditional and relative. Struggle is unconditional and absolute.
China’s best-known lists of universities are numbers. Project 211, approved by the State Council on November 18, 1995, set out to build about 100 universities for the 21st century. Project 985 goes back to a speech by Jiang Zemin at Peking University’s centenary on May 4, 1998.
According to Xinhua in 2024, many companies ask applicants for their diyi xueli, first degree, and sort it into three tiers: 985, 211 and ordinary universities. A Ministry of Education notice strictly prohibits job postings that limit candidates to 985 or 211 universities.
On November 8, 2013, the Supreme People’s Court published Guiding Case No. 18, ZTE (Hangzhou) v. Wang Peng. The court held: “An employee who ranks in the last tier of an employer’s graded evaluation is not thereby ‘unable to do the job.'” Ranking last does not meet the legal conditions for ending a contract unilaterally, and the employer cannot dismiss the employee on that ground.
In 816, Bai Juyi wrote the long poem Song of the Pipa (琵琶行). He had been demoted the year before to a post at Jiujiang. In the poem, a woman from the capital plays the pipa on a boat at night. Her music slows, the strings seem to freeze, and the sound stops for a moment.
Bai writes: “A hidden sorrow and a secret grief arise. At this moment, silence is better than sound.” (别有幽愁暗恨生，此时无声胜有声) Then the music bursts out again, like a silver jar breaking.
Measures issued by nine government departments in 2018 to reduce the burden on schoolchildren say: “Exam results are evaluated by grade levels. Publishing students’ exam scores and rankings in any form or manner is strictly prohibited.”
The Regulations on the Protection of Minors in Schools, announced on June 1, 2021, forbid schools and teachers to make students’ exam scores and rankings public.
The Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry (二十四诗品) describes twenty-four styles of poetry. One of them is called Implicitness (含蓄). It contains the line 不著一字，尽得风流: “Without writing a single word, it captures all the grace.”
The book is traditionally attributed to the Tang poet Sikong Tu. In 1995, the scholars Chen Shangjun and Wang Yonghao argued that it appears in the records only after the Yuan dynasty and was probably not written by him.
Chinese academics call talent titles such as Changjiang Scholar maozi, hats. In 2018, Science and Technology Daily wrote that the worship and abuse of hats in academia had become “very prominent.” It added: “Once one has a hat, it is easy to get more hats and more resources. The winner takes all.”
In October 2020, the Party Central Committee and the State Council published a plan to reform educational evaluation. It calls for overcoming “the stubborn ills of only scores, only admission rates, only diplomas, only papers and only hats.”