China Revises University Entrance Exams to Get the Emoji Generation to Read More Classics

The Gaokao is going back to the past in a bid to force a generation of emoji users to embrace their Classical Chinese roots. Beijing students will have to break out (or download) a copy of the 18th-century classic Dream of the Red Chamber, (红楼梦 Hónglóu mèng), to prepare for the 2017 university entrance exam.

The Beijing News reports that the Cao Xueqin novel was one of several works included in the new edition of the Gaokao "Examination Study Guide" published by the Beijing Education Examinations Authority this week. The study guide is seen as a preview for that year's Gaokao, the multi-day national university entrance examination usually held in June.

If you're not up on your "Redology,"  think Downton Abbey meets Game of Thrones meets Keeping up with the Kardashians. It's a long novel about a rich family involving a considerable amount of romantic intrigue and just enough naughty bits to keep those uninterested in historical fiction flipping through to the good parts. (It's also completely awesome, and I highly recommend reading the David Hawke's translation in its entirety.

Hopefully, the kids will find time to read the actual novel and not simply stream either the classic of bad voice dubbing which is the 1987 miniseries ...

... or the even worse 2010 schlock-fest starring androgynous heartthrob Yang Yang.

According to the recently published examination guide, questions related to the novel may include things like "Pick the wrong interpretation of this poem by the character Lin Daiyu," and "Guess which of your high school classmates has already received early acceptance to Columbia and doesn't have to care about any of this." 

Students will also need to brush up on their Shen Congwen and Lu Xun as well as gain inspiration from the survivors of a KMT prison camp in Red Crag (红岩 Hóng yán), find hope reading the post-Mao era opus of Ordinary World (平凡的世界 Píngfán de shìjiè), and learn how to write short declarative sentences from Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.

There is good news, though. Students will no longer have to know anything about the Protestant Reformation, as that pesky bit of Western enlightenment history is being removed from this year's test, Beijing News reports.

On a related historical note, the Ministry of Education also announced this week that they were retroactively lengthening World War II (AKA the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression) by six years. Textbooks will now reflect that the war began with the first Japanese incursions into Manchuria in 1931 and not, as had previously been written, with the launch of the full-scale invasion of North China in 1937. Happy times kids: That's six more years of anti-Japanese sentiment to cram in before your first history exam next fall!

This year's university entrance exams in Beijing are scheduled for June 6-8.​

Images: wikimedia.org, html5.qq.com, ytimg.com