Mobility, Time, and Value

This chapter analyzes the high-stakes of the Gaokao, which, together with its undetermined outcome, forms a pillar of its fatefulness. It talks about how people see the exam as something consequential since it enables them to migrate from rural to urban places, expanding their capacity to realize important life projects like marriage, childbirth, and eldercare. It also emphasizes the value to people of the migration from rural to urban living, which relates intimately to how they perceive it as a journey toward modernity and national development. The chapter refers to the central-place theory that models China's complex system of interconnected, hierarchically nested regions and markets and corresponds closely with people's native understanding of place. It recounts how urban hierarchy assumed its current form after the commercial revolution of the Tang-Song transition in the ninth to thirteenth centuries.