China’s genius classes differ in important ways from talent streams in the west. First, the system dwarfs its international competitors in scale. Second, it is state-driven. China graduates around five million majors in science, technology, engineering and maths every year, according to the state media Xinhua, compared with about half a million in the US.
Tens of thousands of these graduates are genius-class students, taken out of regular classes for an intense period of study between the ages of 16-18. While others swot for China’s feared college admissions exams, the gaokao, those on the genius path have the chance to bypass that fate altogether, bagging places at top universities before they are out of high school, depending on their results in starry international competitions. The best students continue to more advanced talent schemes at the top Chinese universities, such as the elite computer science programmes at Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities.
When Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s Taiwanese-American CEO, called Chinese AI researchers “world-class” last year, he was likely thinking of the genius-class grads who are building the country’s tech powerhouses such as DeepSeek and Huawei, as well as AI companies internationally. “You walk up and down the aisles of Anthropic or OpenAI or [Google] DeepMind,” said Huang last May, “there’s a whole bunch of AI researchers there, and they are from China . . . They are extraordinary and so the fact that they do extraordinary work is not surprising to me.”
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