> It's pure statistics

I'm not so sure about that: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2026/ suggests peak high school in china was years ago.

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yorwba 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Of ≈17 million Chinese students who graduated junior high school after grade 9 in 2024, ≈10 million were admitted to a high school, ≈4 million to a vocational school and the remaining ≈3 million disappear from education statistics, presumably directly entering the workforce. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_...

So at least in theory there's still lots of room to increase high school enrollment, though I doubt this would lead to noticeably more geniuses. The testing system is pretty good at sorting the best students into good schools, I think.

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jldugger 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately it's hard to take China's population / enrollment demographics at face value. There's many incentives in the system to overstate growth, and cross checks between different reports that _should_ be correlated suggest they're quite overstated.

It's bad enough they passed some legislation a few years ago[1], but the damage has in many senses already been done. And it's unclear how effective the changes will be. So it's entirely possible those 3 million missing high schoolers never existed.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-top-legislative-b...

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AnotherGoodName 5 hours ago | parent [-]

At this point i’ve witnessed over 30years of “stats about China aren’t real” type posts while they continue to demonstrate impressive economic and social results that i’m far more inclined to believe the potentially flawed Chinese data than posts that basically claim all data out of China is fake.

	▲	advael 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Isolated demands for rigor, really. China does have a lot of incentives to publish misleading statistics. Also, so does everyone else. In most places we bake skepticism of official lines from government and industry alike into our epistemic weights and move on, but when China does it we're supposed to treat it as a big deal. Propaganda at its finest