I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China).
And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents.
That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao.
Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university.
Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy.
The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2]
In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university after two-years of exams that determine your final grade (and chances). There are literally only public schools.
I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”.
Thanks for sharing additional detail and it resembles what I remember - but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.
Imho a 30% ratio for university graduates is a sweet spot for society. We have great (free) vocational training programs in Germany that empower all those who did not go to university to make money quicker and they more often that not end up in financially better situations. University often pays off only for top university graduates once they pass 35/40 years of age.
The main difference is Germany actually puts money in vocational education and values it socially.
China does not.
China's education spend is only 4.1% of GDP, and much of that is diverted to academic high schools and universities. Furthermore, vocational students are viewed as "bad students" and good faculty prefer to join academic high schools or private high schools due to a better salary and social standing. Furthermore, even SOE factories (the traditional hirer of vocational students) in China now prefer hiring college graduates instead of vocational students because of a glut of college graduates due to cultural shifts in the 2000s-2010s, anti-vocational student bias, and college graduates trying to get a stable "iron rice bowl" (to use the Korean term) government job.
> I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”
I think that was the aim of the legislation, but in action it didn't help social mobility much, because upper income households just resorted to private or online tutoring, and everyone ignores it.
It's not like legislators send their kids to vocational schools - they also prefer to send them to academic or top private schools so that they can then attend university (either domestically or abroad).
> but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.
In face value it doesn't, but in action urban academic high schools and primary schools get the lions share of funding, and until recently those are gatekept to people holding a hukou for that city.
This meant that urban migrants who weren't able to convert their rural hukou to an urban hukuo (because that meant losing their rural landholdings which is the only asset of worth they have), and their kids were stuck either in underfunded rural schools or crappy private primary schools in an urban area.
This has a significant impact on social mobility to this day, and is a major reason why China's median household income remains very low. Urban China's median household income is $6,000, but rural China's is around $3,000. This means the bottom half of urban society in China and much of rural China's society does not have much of a chance of upward mobility because they can't pay for private tutoring nor can they afford a good private high school if their kid fails the Zhongkao.
> In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university
Overall 50% of the population are eligible to apply for university since completing higher tier education at a vocational school or completing specialized courses at "lesser" schools can also fullfill the acceptance requirements for related fields of study.
There are additional paths people can beyond high schools and we have different tiers (allgemeine Hochschulreife; Fachhochschulreife) for different tiers of universities (academic further qualifying for a PhD career / practitioner); as the original post was referring to Chinese high school students specifically I tied it back to Gymnasium where give or take 30% of students go (probably a tad higher today because they lowered the bar).
There isn't a significant division between a a Gymnasium and Fachoberschule, because a Fachoberschule student can choose to get an Arbitur as well via an optional 13th year. And because German universities are de facto open entry, an Arbitur is all you need to be admitted.
China's vocational high schools on the other hand don't open the same doors to tertiary education that a Fachoberschule student has because they are structurally segregated away from academic students.
And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents.
That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao.
Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university.
Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy.
The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2]
[0] - https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-20...
[1] - https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075
[2] - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf