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Graduates of the first three years
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THOSE who took gaokao in 1977, 1978 and 1979 came to be known as the “three new generations.” They were considered to be the smartest, most competitive and hardest-working university students the country has ever seen.
1977
On a freezing winter’s day in January 1978, Geng Baiming was working in a small village in rural Anhui Province when he received word that he had been accepted to East China Normal University. He had been on tenterhooks since he took gaokao two months earlier.
Geng knew nothing about the university in Shanghai. It was not even included on the list of schools available for application. The rehabilitation of the nation’s education system had happened so quickly that many universities weren’t adequately prepared. East China Normal University was added to the list after the exam.
“But it didn’t matter to me,” Geng says. “I was just happy to be enrolled at any university, not to mention one in Shanghai, which meant I could finally return home.”
Some 600 young Shanghainese working in the countryside had taken the national entrance exam at the same time as Geng, but he was the only successful candidate.
“Before the exam,” Geng says, “some of us organized a study group together, and the farmers were really kind to give us more spare time to prepare for the exam.”
He says he had always loved to read and had scrounged up books wherever he could find them during the “cultural revolution.” That helped him pass the exam.
1978
Last year, retired attorney Jason Yao attended a class reunion marking the 30th anniversary of graduation from the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
“I was quite surprised by the big attendance,” Yao says. “A lot of classmates flew back from abroad. We talked a lot about our old school days and all the difficulties we encountered. We didn’t have textbooks for many classes. Our professors made copies of hard-to-get reference books or used their own notes as textbooks.”
Yao was working in a government office when he heard about the restoration of gaokao. His decision to take the exam drew frowns from family and friends.
“They thought it was too risky for me to leave a great job for four years of study,” he says. “At that time, a job was a job for life, and respect for knowledge and intellectuals wasn’t fully restored.”
For 10 years during “cultural revolution,” he had been secretly reading at the home of a friend, whose sister was a professor and owned a large number of books. Yao says he especially liked to read the biographies of foreign presidents and noticed that many of them were lawyers before they became world leaders.
“Even then, I believed law and order would be restored one day, and when that happened, the country would need legal experts, who were rare at the time,” he says. “I thought that would be the best way I could contribute to the country’s development.”
1979
Retired professor Zhao Wenlin was teaching mathematics in a high school in 1977 when he heard about the revival of gaokao. He was one year from finishing high school when the “cultural revolution” started in 1966, dashing hopes of going to university. But when the opportunity later presented itself, he hesitated.
“I would be taking the exams with my own students,” he says. “And I had to accept the fact that I might do worse than them on the exams.”
At the time, students attended school only in the morning, where the curriculum was heavy on factories and agriculture. There were only two years of middle school and two years of high school.
“Of course, I never gave up reading and learning in those 10 years,” Zhao says. “I was lucky to be working in a school, where I had access to more books than most of my peers.”
He decided to take the risk and spent a year preparing for the exam, which he finally took in 1978. He failed, but he didn’t give up. Zhao took the exam again in 1979, and finally was enrolled in the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and Science.
“A student’s elder cousin took the exam in 1977 and went into the same major as me at the same university,” he says. “So he ended up becoming my schoolmate, one grade higher.”
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