Even in death, China’s former premier Li Keqiang cannot escape the shadow of his overweening boss, Xi Jinping. The commentary around his untimely passing–Li was only 68 and not obviously in poor health–has been filled with implicit and explicit comparisons to the man he served loyally for a decade as China’s second-ranked Communist Party leader.

The general temptation to see Li as representing an alternative school of thought and the potential for a different political trajectory is as strong as it is unsupported by real evidence. Despite much speculation about internal differences between Xi and Li, the system is designed to prevent us from knowing much about the personal views and predilections of Chinese politicians.

The differences in their background made it almost inevitable that Xi and Li would be perceived as representing different ideas, interest groups and, dare I say, classes. Education everywhere is a strong determinant of social position, and due to the accidents of Chinese history, the educational experiences of the two men differed dramatically.

Li was among the first group of students to take the restored college entrance examination in 1977, in which he did well enough to earn a place at the prestigious Peking University. That made him a symbol of meritocracy and the return to traditional intellectual values. Xi is two years older, and started college in 1975, when universities were still more focused on political indoctrination than education; he got his place as a “worker-peasant-soldier” student on the basis of political connections. Fairly or not, those experiences have formed how people interpret the two men: Li as a true child of the reform era, Xi with one foot still in the Mao era.

Writers have mined public records and private recollections to piece together pictures of their early years. Chun Han Wong’s new biography of Xi Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future, has a particularly valuable opening chapter on Xi’s early life, with lots of interesting details that are clearly sourced.

Xi was among nearly 2,700 students who enrolled at Tsinghua University’s Beijing campus in the fall of 1975 … as a worker-peasant-soldier student. He pursued a degree in organic chemistry, but university education at the time was more political than academic, marred by a lack of intellectual rigor and patchy teaching. One friend described Xi’s Tsinghua training as a degree in applied Marxism. Not that it mattered to Xi, who told another friend that he had no plans to work in the chemical industry. Xi, the friend recalled, “wanted to enter politics.”

While many of his peers indulged in romance, alcohol, and movies, Xi focused on politics, overseeing propaganda work as a member of his class’s party committee. Friends recalled a budding politician who showed savviness beyond his years.

More about what university life in China was like at that time, and what it exactly it meant to be a “worker-peasant-soldier” student comes from Jaime FlorCruz’s memoir The Class of ’77: How My Classmates Changed China. FlorCruz, a Filipino who later became an eminent foreign correspondent in Beijing, enrolled as a foreign student at Peking University in 1977, overlapping with both the last cohort of worker-peasant-soldier students and the new cohort of students who had passed the entrance examination. But his first encounter with Chinese university life came in 1971, when he visited as part of a unofficial delegation from the Philippines.

The makeup of the student body was curious as well. None of them had to take an entrance test to gain admission—a surprising development given that China was the historic originator of the concept of qualifying public service examinations. Many of the students we met had spent two to three years working in farms and factories; most of them, they said, got into Beida on the recommendation of the farmers and laborers they had worked with. Other students had previously served in the army and were similarly recommended.

The prerequisites for admission were simple: good health, work experience, and high “political consciousness.” Academic prowess was much less important than a student’s commitment to the ideals of the Chinese revolution and to the belief that working with one’s hands was better than book learning. As part of what Beida officials called the concept of “open-door schooling,” students were expected to extend their education beyond the classroom and to engage in street cleaning, farming, and assisting factory laborers with compiling “revolutionary histories” of their workplaces. These would help develop their moral, physical, ideological and intellectual character, we were told.

The guiding principle for all the subjects was a rigid Maoist perspective, including the doctrines of “combining theory with practice,” of “learning by doing,” and of “being socially relevant.” Students said that high grades were unimportant. Academic performance was rated as excellent, good, or fair but no one failed. Each class automatically moved from one level to another every year. Individual achievement was downplayed. Assignments were completed collectively, including the writing of essays and even sitting for examinations. In another break with tradition, where it once used to take four or six years to complete a degree like physics, the requirement had been reduced to two or three years.

The deficiencies of this system were pretty obvious, and Deng Xiaoping had already tried to overhaul university education in 1974, but was thwarted by conservative opposition. After the death of Mao in 1976, though, things changed quickly:

In 1977, Deng Xiaoping had not yet re-emerged as paramount leader, but he was already a force behind the scenes, and he and the other reformers knew that the existing worker-peasant-soldier student body of China’s universities would not be able to deliver his “Four Modernizations”—in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense. So, it was decided to overhaul the education system. One of the first results was the Class of ’77.

This class, the first step towards normalcy after the Cultural Revolution, was selected from a huge number of applicants of the “lost generation,” capable students whose studies had been cut short or denied after 1966. The average level of knowledge was much higher than those of the Worker-Peasant-Soldier students, who did not have to pass competitive entrance exams to enroll. The selection process for the Class of ’77 was a dramatic throwback to an older China, the revival of competitive qualifying examinations for college admission. It provided an opportunity for those who had been shut out of college for political reasons.

According to the memoirs of former vice-premier Li Lanqing, the demand for the college entrance examination was so high that the government ran out of paper on which to print the exams; the problem was solved by using paper that had been allocated for printing Mao’s Selected Works. FlorCruz’s account makes it clear how the return to exam-based meritocracy was very much a form of “class struggle” in reverse, an explicit decision to valorize the groups that had been targets during the Cultural Revolution and downgrade those (the workers, peasants, soldiers) who had been valorized.

Though separated by only two years in chronological age, Xi and Li ended up being situated on opposite sides of this historic divide in education. That must have had profound effects on their life experience and personality, though inevitably these we must speculate about most of these. In 2011, Chris Buckley interviewed many of Li Keqiang’s classmates from Peking University; the resulting piece gives a good flavor of the time, and why people expected Li to be relatively liberal. Li’s liberalism, if such it was, ended up being expressed more in terms of affect and attitude than in substance. Perhaps that’s because in the end what Xi and Li had in common outweighed those differences: both had political drive and ambition from an early age, and spent their adult lives pursuing ever-higher office in the same political system.