Chengdu Says Scrapping the High School Entrance Exam Is "Not Yet Feasible" as Through-Training Pilot Reaches 39 Schools

On October 9, a Chengdu resident posted on Sichuan province's "Ask the Government" platform urging the city to scrap the high school entrance exam, known as the zhongkao. The parent wrote that their 13- or 14-year-old studied until eleven or twelve every night, and asked: "Which parent would willingly let their child be tracked into a vocational school?" The request was for every child to receive an equal high school education, with selection deferred to university admission.

On October 15, the Chengdu Education Bureau replied. It said the exam remains the basic mechanism for allocating senior high school places, and that conditions for abolishing it entirely "are not yet in place." Rather than removing the test, the city is working to dilute the weight of a single exam by raising the share of places reserved for leading high schools, piloting comprehensive high schools that blend academic and vocational tracks, and opening vocational routes into higher education.

Chengdu began its through-training pilot in October 2025. The first cohort comprised eight schools. A second batch announced in July 2026 added 31 more, taking the total to 39 and covering all 23 districts and county-level cities, with at least one pilot school in each.

Of the 39 schools, six run only the primary-to-high-school twelve-year model, 26 only the six-year junior-to-senior model, and seven run both. They operate 75 pilot classes — at 45 students each, at most 3,375 students. Students registered in the programme can move on to their own school's junior or senior section without sitting an exam.

The city has previously had to clarify what the initiative does and does not mean. In October 2025 it dismissed online claims that Chengdu was "trialling the abolition of the zhongkao" as a misreading of the through-training reform: participation is voluntary and pupils may opt out. Similar pilots are under way elsewhere — Shengsi county in Zhejiang enrolled all but its self-selected leavers in the local academic high school in 2025, Loudi in Hunan starts two twelve-year pilots from autumn 2026, and Qingyuan in Guangdong plans one from autumn 2027.

Nationally, the Ministry of Education addressed the same question in 2020. It argued that nine years of compulsory education fits China's income level, noting that compulsory schooling averages 9.8 years across upper-middle-income countries and 10.4 years across high-income ones, and that senior secondary education in China is selective rather than compulsory — which is why an entrance exam still does the sorting.

Wang Feng, who heads the education system reform unit at the China National Institute of Education Sciences, said the through-training pilots serve two purposes: easing competition at the primary-to-junior transition and in the zhongkao itself, while advancing exam reform from the side.

Chang Shenglong, who heads the evaluation committee of the Shanghai Education Society, framed the pilots as preparation for a different demography. Enrolment peaks arrive in sequence: primary schools peaked in 2023, junior secondary is peaking in 2026, senior secondary will peak in 2029 and higher education around 2032. After the high school bulge passes, the sector will face more places than pupils. Through-training, he said, reduces the waste of re-mixing cohorts between stages and builds policy experience for that "more seats, fewer students" era.

In the near term, the response to parental anxiety has been capacity rather than abolition. Guangdong plans more than 200,000 additional academic high school places, Wuhan 8,000 on top of the 8,000 added in 2025, and Qingdao more than 6,000 next year. Chengdu's answer suggests the exam will stay; what is changing is how much it decides.