Testing times stymie student hopefuls

Students at Huaqiao University in Quanzhou, Fujian province, enjoy themselves at a water-splashing festival on the college campus. The university is one of two specially designated for overseas Chinese who have returned to China to study.  Provided to China Daily

As China's schoolchildren sweat over the national college entrance examination, overseas-based Chinese hoping to study at the country's top universities are finding that their ambitions are being dashed by regulations originally designed to help them. Zhao Xinying reports.

Chinese citizens living overseas are finding their path to higher education blocked in their ancestral homeland, and a measure that was specifically designed to meet their needs is the biggest stumbling block to academic success.

There are generally two ways for overseas-based Chinese to study in the motherland: They can apply for admission to two designated universities for overseas Chinese via a recommendation from their high school, or they can take a college entrance exam especially formulated for Chinese living overseas and then try to gain admission to a university on the basis of the result.

Experts said the exam was created with the best of intentions, but in reality it is hampering the efforts of a large number of talented overseas Chinese who want to study on the mainland, and is also disrupting China's chances of maintaining ties with ethnic Chinese living overseas.

Despite the good intentions underpinning the exam, very few overseas Chinese are successfully admitted to their dream university, according to Wang Qiang, head of Bofei Education, a cram school in Beijing that helps to prepare students for the test.

"A lack of publicity means very few overseas Chinese know that the government has provided a specially designed exam. Most simply aren't aware that they can gain entry to universities on the Chinese mainland in this way," he said.

According to Wang, about 4,000 overseas Chinese register for the exam every year - the overwhelming majority come from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

However, very few of them can earn scores high enough to gain admittance to the best universities in the mainland, he said.

"From my observations, most overseas Chinese students score about 400 out of 750 points in the exam, which means they can only attend the most ordinary universities or colleges, while the very prestigious ones they have been dreaming of - universities such as Peking, Tsinghua and Fudan - are far beyond their reach," he added.