The launch of China’s reform era is conventionally dated to 1978, when the Communist Party’s Third Plenum agreed on a major change of economic strategy. But a major sign that China was embarking on a new direction came a year earlier, in 1977, when Deng Xiaoping directed universities to restart entrance examinations. Many universities had by that time reopened, after closing for a few years at the height of the Cultural Revolution. But admission was still reserved for “workers, peasants and soldiers” and admission decisions were largely driven by political recommendations. Deng’s instruction to de-emphasize politics and emphasize competence were a welcome sign that rationality and pragmatism were on the way back.

The general outlines of this story are well known, but I enjoyed the details in this account:

Young people, many of whom had seen their schooling opportunities delayed for more than a decade, hastily dusted off their textbooks and began studying to prepare for the college entrance exams. That year, 5.7 million entered their names for the exams, and 273,000 were enrolled. Because the number of applicants far exceeded the expected figure, for a time the authorities could not procure enough paper to print the exam papers. The problem was not resolved until the central authorities made the urgent decision to ship in all the paper previously allocated for the printing of the fifth volume of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.

I just love that last bit–it perfectly captures how poor and politicized China was at that time. The quote is from Breaking Through: The Birth of China’s Opening-Up Policy, a book by former vice-premier Li Lanqing (in English translation).

The consequences of that decision to reallocate resources away from propaganda and towards education were far-reaching, and the experiences of that first wave of new students have been subject of numerous books and articles. Many of the people who took those 1977 exams and enrolled in university went on to become rather influential figures (see these recollections by longtime foreign correspondent Jaime FlorCruz, who was one of them).

Indeed, we may now be living at the peak of the influence of the so-called Class of 1977. A September press conference ahead of the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China gathered together three of China’s top economic technocrats: central bank governor Yi Gang, Finance minister Liu Kun, and National Bureau of Statistics director Ning Jizhe. In an unusually personal moment for such an event, they mentioned that all three of them had taken the college entrance exams in 1977.