China, PISA, and education as strategic state infrastructure: a longitudinal study of the educational reforms of the People’s Republic of China between 2000 and 2026, their articulation with the Five-Year Plans, and the progressive construction of a system linking universalization, territorial equity, educational quality, science, technology, and talent development.
By Claudia Aranda and LumusAI
Summary
The PISA 2025 results, published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on September 8, 2026, once again place the participating Chinese jurisdictions among the highest-performing education systems in the assessment. Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang —designated by PISA as B-S-J-Z (China)— scored 597 points in science and 612 in mathematics, the highest scores among participating systems; 527 in reading, behind Singapore’s 535; and 560 in the new computational problem-solving assessment, behind Macao (572) and Singapore (563). The OECD itself identifies B-S-J-Z and Singapore as the two highest-performing systems overall across science, mathematics, and reading.
The magnitude of the result, however, requires an interpretation that goes beyond the ranking. PISA did not conduct a national sample covering all provincial-level divisions of the People’s Republic of China, so its scores should not be statistically attributed to the country as a whole. The OECD itself specifies which territories constitute B-S-J-Z and documents the progressive expansion of China’s participation: Shanghai from 2009; Beijing, Jiangsu, and Guangdong from 2015; and Beijing, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang together with Shanghai from 2018.
Yet it is equally insufficient to interpret B-S-J-Z as four independent educational enclaves whose performance says little about China. These jurisdictions are part of a national educational architecture built over decades through common legislation, a national curriculum, public funding, learning standards, supervision systems, territorial redistribution of resources and teachers, national quality assessment, and successive cycles of planning and correction.
This study reconstructs that trajectory from the beginning of the twenty-first century through 2026, drawing primarily on Chinese legislation and documents issued by the State Council, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and the Ministry of Education. PISA is used primarily as an external instrument for comparative measurement.
The purpose is not to prove that state planning is the sole cause of the results. The available evidence does not permit such an inference. The objective is to determine whether there is historical consistency between the institutional mechanisms developed by China and observable educational outcomes.
The evidence supports a more limited but significant thesis: the high performance of B-S-J-Z is consistent with a long-term process through which the Chinese state has sought to raise both the ceiling and the floor of its education system.
The most revealing figure in PISA 2025 may therefore not be the score of 612 in mathematics. It is the fact that only 1.8% of students assessed in B-S-J-Z are low performers simultaneously in science, mathematics, and reading, compared with an OECD average of 19.7%; while 55.5% are top performers in at least one of those areas, compared with 11.9% across the OECD.
The same evidence introduces a decisive warning: B-S-J-Z lost considerable ground in reading between 2018 and 2025. Even one of the highest-performing systems overall is not immune to contemporary transformations in cognitive habits. This contradiction —mathematical and scientific excellence alongside declining reading performance— constitutes one of the principal challenges Chinese education policy will have to address during the 15th Five-Year Plan.
Method: studying China through the categories by which China organizes its own system
The analysis deliberately adopts a Chinese institutional perspective.
This does not mean assuming that every government statement automatically constitutes a true description of reality. It means establishing a fundamental epistemological distinction: in order to understand what a political system is attempting to do, its objectives, categories, instruments, and mechanisms must first be studied through its own sources; only then should distinctions be made between declared policy, implemented policy, and observed outcomes.
A documentary hierarchy is therefore used.
At the first level are laws, State Council decisions, documents of the CPC Central Committee, national plans, and Ministry of Education regulations.
At the second level are statistics, national monitoring systems, territorial certifications, and official Chinese reports that make it possible to observe implementation.
At the third level, PISA is used for international measurement and comparison among participating systems.
Analytical interpretation occupies a fourth level and is identified as such.
For example, the statements “China has set the objective of reducing territorial disparities” and “China has eliminated territorial disparities” are not treated as equivalent. The first is documented; the second has not been demonstrated and, in fact, China’s own contemporary policies acknowledge the persistence of such inequalities.
This method helps avoid two opposite forms of reductionism: interpreting the Chinese system exclusively through external categories, or treating its institutional self-description as sufficient evidence of its actual outcomes.
What PISA 2025 actually says
The journalistic statement that “China leads PISA” requires precision.
B-S-J-Z scored:
Science: 597 points.
Mathematics: 612.
Reading: 527.
Computational problem solving: 560.
B-S-J-Z leads in science and mathematics. Singapore leads in reading. The OECD itself characterizes B-S-J-Z and Singapore as the two highest-performing systems overall across the three traditional domains.
In computational problem solving, introduced in PISA 2025, the highest results are:
Macao (China): 572.
Singapore: 563.
B-S-J-Z (China): 560.
Japan: 557.
These are the values reported in the OECD table and Executive Summary.
There is a textual inconsistency elsewhere in the OECD report, where the names are incorrectly associated with those values. This study therefore uses the matching results in the official table and the Executive Summary, rather than the inconsistent sentence.
The analytically relevant aspect is not limited to the averages.
The distribution simultaneously shows an extraordinarily high concentration of students at the upper end and an exceptionally small proportion below basic proficiency levels.
This makes what will be termed here the “cognitive floor” —an analytical category developed in this study, not an OECD concept— a central variable for interpreting the Chinese case.
China is not B-S-J-Z, but B-S-J-Z is not a system separate from China either
PISA 2025 assessed Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, not a national probability sample of China. The OECD explicitly refers to the assessed entity as B-S-J-Z (China).
The correct methodological conclusion is that 612 does not constitute “China’s national mathematics score.”
But that statistical fact does not resolve the institutional question.
Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang are subject to national education legislation, national curriculum standards, national compulsory-education policies, and central planning and supervision mechanisms.
The relevant question is therefore to determine how much of the observed performance can be related to characteristics shared by the national system, and how much corresponds to the particular conditions of four jurisdictions located among the country’s most economically and educationally advanced regions.
PISA is insufficient to answer that question.
China has its own National Compulsory Education Quality Monitoring System. Its revised 2021 version explicitly states that monitoring should produce objective information for educational decision-making and for improving teaching and governance. Its conception is not limited to academic performance either: it establishes a system intended to encompass moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and labor education. The regulations also prohibit specifically preparing students for the monitoring exercise, interfering with sampling, or falsifying results.
The document likewise establishes mechanisms linking findings to policy adjustments.
PISA and China’s national monitoring system therefore perform different functions. PISA enables international comparison of participating jurisdictions. The national system allows the state to observe its own education system territorially.
The absence of a national PISA score does not mean the absence of national assessment mechanisms.
The starting point: building a common foundation of basic knowledge
A decisive element for understanding the current process appeared in 2001, long before China’s first PISA results.
The Ministry of Education then approved the Outline for Basic Education Curriculum Reform.
The document explicitly criticizes aspects of the previous model and proposes reducing excessive knowledge transmission, mechanical memorization, and repetitive drilling, while strengthening initiative, practical ability, inquiry, and problem-solving.
It also establishes something fundamental to China’s territorial structure: a national, local, and school-level curriculum architecture.
For rural areas, it allows adaptations related to local economic, productive, and territorial conditions while maintaining the basic requirements of the national curriculum.
Thus, as early as 2001, a feature appears that would continue over subsequent decades:
a common national floor;
territorial adaptation;
fundamental standards that do not disappear with that adaptation.
This conception is relevant for interpreting PISA decades later: the stated objective is not merely to select high-performing students, but to build generalizable foundational capabilities.
2005-2008: turning the right to education into a state financial obligation
A common curriculum has little equalizing capacity if the material conditions required to receive it depend radically on local wealth.
In December 2005, the State Council reformed the financing mechanism for rural compulsory education. The document explicitly strengthens government responsibility and describes the progressive incorporation of rural compulsory education into the public-finance guarantee system.
The 2006 revision of the Compulsory Education Law legally consolidated the principle of nine years of compulsory education and the state’s responsibility to guarantee it.
Another decisive step followed in 2008. Through State Council document 国发〔2008〕25号, the government ordered the nationwide abolition, beginning with the autumn semester, of tuition and miscellaneous fees in urban public compulsory education and strengthened governmental responsibility for financing it. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance subsequently implemented the measure.
The institutional sequence can therefore be formulated as:
formal right → public financing → material possibility of a common standard.
It does not prove educational equality.
It creates an institutional condition for pursuing it.
2010: equity explicitly becomes national policy
The National Outline for Medium- and Long-Term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020) is one of the central documents in this trajectory.
Its formulation is unequivocal: primary responsibility for educational equity lies with the government. The same program identifies quality improvement as the central task of reform and calls for the establishment of national standards and quality-assurance systems.
The resulting architecture includes national standards, redistribution of resources, strengthening of the teaching profession, reduction of disparities between schools, urban-rural integration, and differentiated support for disadvantaged territories.
The principle that emerges differs from an understanding of equality as absolute uniformity.
The objective is for territorial location and social origin not to determine radically different floors of access to knowledge.
From “having a school” to “having a good school”
In 2012, the State Council issued a particularly useful diagnosis because it explicitly acknowledged the problem that remained unresolved.
China had completed the nationwide universalization of nine-year compulsory education and, according to the document, had fundamentally solved the problem of “有学上”: having a school to attend.
Yet clear differences in level and quality remained among regions, between rural and urban areas, and among schools.
The new objective was formulated as “上好学”: receiving a good education.
The institutional response was to deepen school standardization and pursue a more balanced distribution of teachers, equipment, books, and infrastructure, with particular support for rural and weaker schools.
This transition is essential for understanding the historical sequence.
Chinese education policy did not stop once virtually all children entered the system.
The criterion of success shifted from coverage toward quality and the distribution of that quality.
Redistributing teachers, not only money
One of the most interesting policies appeared in 2014.
The Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security established a mechanism for rotating school principals and teachers within local jurisdictions.
In urban and high-quality schools, at least 10% of teachers meeting the established conditions were to participate in rotation each year; at least 20% of those rotated were to belong to the category of key or experienced teachers.
The policy reveals an important conception of educational inequality.
Two schools may have similar buildings and comparable budgets and yet provide very different opportunities if one concentrates the most experienced teachers.
Educational redistribution therefore also requires redistributing professional capital.
The PISA trajectory must be read carefully
China has not presented the same territorial universe in every edition.
Shanghai participated from 2009.
In 2015, participation was expanded to include Beijing, Jiangsu, and Guangdong, forming B-S-J-G.
From 2018 onward, the participating group became Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang: B-S-J-Z. PISA’s own participant page documents this sequence.
PISA 2009 recorded Shanghai’s extraordinary initial performance. PISA 2012 again placed it at the top. Canonical sources for both rounds are available in official OECD documentation.
PISA 2015 is methodologically important because it introduced B-S-J-G. In science, for example, this group scored 518 points.
The consequence is fundamental:
there is no homogeneous Chinese national PISA series for 2009-2025.
It is not valid to present a difference between Shanghai 2012 and B-S-J-G 2015 as an increase or decline in “China,” because the assessed population changed.
The cleanest territorial longitudinal comparison for the group currently under study is therefore B-S-J-Z 2018 versus B-S-J-Z 2025.
PISA 2018: first place and self-criticism at the same time
In PISA 2018, B-S-J-Z ranked first in reading, mathematics, and science, with 555, 591, and 590 points respectively.
Yet the response published by China’s own Ministry of Education is especially revealing.
The report did not merely celebrate the result.
It acknowledged that students in the four jurisdictions devoted a great deal of time to study and that their efficiency measured as score per hour was relatively low: 44th, 46th, and 54th in reading, mathematics, and science.
It also reported a school-belonging index of -0.19 and an average life-satisfaction score of 6.64, placing them 51st and 61st respectively in the comparison conducted.
The same document acknowledged inequality problems: teacher shortages in rural areas, urban-rural differences in teaching capacity, and inequality among schools.
This background matters because it makes it possible to identify an institutional feedback mechanism.
Maximum academic performance was not officially interpreted as proof that the system had no problems.
It cannot be concluded from this that the system always corrects its shortcomings successfully.
What can be observed is a recurring documentary sequence:
measurement → diagnosis → identification of contradictions → policy modification.
That sequence constitutes an important feature of Chinese educational planning.
2021: “double reduction” and the contradiction produced by educational success itself
The strong social value attached to education and competition for better opportunities produced an unintended effect: an enormous private tutoring industry.
From an equity perspective, this creates a structural problem. Even when public schools provide a common curriculum, family income can once again be converted into educational advantage through the market.
In July 2021, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council approved the policy known as 双减, “double reduction.”
The document explicitly establishes two objectives: reducing excessive homework and reducing the burden of off-campus academic tutoring. It also aims to reduce family anxiety, protect rest, strengthen school-based education, and reduce household educational expenditure.
The measure can simultaneously be interpreted as market regulation, child-welfare policy, and redistributive policy.
The latter characterization is an analytical interpretation and should not be confused with the literal language of the document.
The policy does not eliminate academic competition, nor does it demonstrate that family-based differences have disappeared. The gaokao and access to prestigious institutions continue to generate strong incentives for competition.
But the intervention reveals something fundamental about the Chinese conception of education: the state claims legitimacy to intervene when the expansion of a parallel educational market comes into conflict with its educational and social objectives.
From “basic balance” to “high-quality balance”
By the end of 2021, the 2,895 county-level administrative units covered by the system had achieved certification for “basic balance” in compulsory education.
Certification was not based solely on enrollment. It included school operating standards, differences among schools, teachers, guarantee mechanisms, quality, and governance. Public satisfaction had to reach at least 85%.
China then raised the benchmark.
The objective began shifting from basic balance toward “high-quality balance.”
By the end of 2025, the Ministry of Education reported that 572 counties had reached this new standard.
The process remains incomplete.
That is precisely why it is analytically important: official Chinese sources themselves do not claim that territorial inequalities have disappeared.
The change in standard reveals another characteristic of the process: once a threshold becomes generalized, the public-policy benchmark can be raised.
The 2022 curriculum: national core and adaptation
In 2022, the Ministry of Education published the new Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan and 16 curriculum standards.
The reform maintains an integrated nine-year design, updates content, establishes core competencies, and defines academic quality standards intended to guide the depth and breadth of teaching.
The process begun in 2001 is therefore updated rather than abandoned.
The architecture can be described analytically as:
centralization of objectives and fundamental floors;
territorial and school-level adaptation within defined limits;
assessment and supervision reconnecting local outcomes with national standards.
It is not absolute uniformity.
Nor is it full decentralization.
This point is crucial given China’s territorial diversity. A rural child does not need to receive exactly the same educational experience as a child in Shanghai in order to participate in the same system. Policy allows territorial adaptation without abandoning common requirements.
PISA 2025: an exceptional ceiling and an exceptionally high floor
Seven years after PISA 2018, B-S-J-Z continues to perform extraordinarily well among participating systems.
But from a universalist perspective, the most important result emerges when both ends of the distribution are considered together.
55.5% of students are top performers in at least one of the three traditional domains.
Only 1.8% are simultaneously low performers in science, mathematics, and reading.
The corresponding OECD averages are 11.9% and 19.7%.
The contrast between these two indicators makes it possible to distinguish selective excellence from distributed excellence.
A system could produce a small, extraordinary mathematical elite while leaving a large proportion of children below foundational knowledge levels.
That is not what the B-S-J-Z data show.
They show both a very high ceiling and an exceptionally small lower tail.
Within the logic of Chinese education policy, both ends matter: developing advanced talent and raising the general level of the population.
That is where the analytical usefulness of the concept “cognitive floor” arises.
Inequality: the Chinese result does not justify a complacent interpretation
The exceptional results of B-S-J-Z do not amount to educational equality.
The recent history of Chinese education policy itself contradicts such an interpretation.
If, after achieving basic balance, the state creates a new category of “high-quality balance”; if it maintains mechanisms for shifting resources toward weaker schools; if it rotates teachers; and if its own diagnoses continue to identify territorial gaps, then the distributive problem remains open.
This allows a fundamental distinction to be established.
The success of a redistributive policy should not be measured by asking whether every difference has disappeared.
The relevant questions are:
which differences persist;
how much they have been reduced;
which mechanisms reproduce them;
which new policies emerge to address them;
and whether the distribution of learning progressively becomes less dependent on origin and territory.
In this sense, PISA is one piece of evidence, not the entirety of the diagnosis.
The great contradiction of 2025: reading
The Chinese result cannot be turned into a triumphalist narrative.
The territorially homogeneous comparison between B-S-J-Z 2018 and B-S-J-Z 2025 shows a significant deterioration in reading.
In 2018, B-S-J-Z scored 555 points. In 2025, it scored 527. The result remains very high internationally, but the decline is too substantial to be treated as a statistical detail.
This is particularly interesting because in 2018 the Chinese Ministry itself had reported that B-S-J-Z students had the highest index of interest in reading among participating systems.
Between 2018 and 2025, therefore, a transformation appears that demands explanation.
The decline should not automatically be attributed to smartphones, short-form video, social media, the pandemic, or artificial intelligence.
All are possible hypotheses.
None is demonstrated by PISA.
The question must remain open.
Cognitive technology and the attention economy: a research hypothesis
PISA 2025 introduces a computational problem-solving assessment precisely as societies debate the cognitive impact of digitalization.
B-S-J-Z scores 560 points, one of the three highest results among participating systems, behind Macao and Singapore.
The data therefore do not support a simplistic opposition between “technology” and “learning.”
A system can be deeply digitalized while simultaneously achieving exceptional levels in mathematics, science, and computational problem solving.
A more interesting hypothesis for future research is to distinguish between technologies deliberately used to expand cognitive capacities and technologies or modes of use whose economic functioning depends on capturing, fragmenting, or prolonging attention.
That distinction could help explain why the expansion of advanced digital capacities may coexist with difficulties in cognitive activities requiring sustained concentration, such as certain forms of reading.
But PISA does not demonstrate that hypothesis.
It makes it researchable.
Education as a political, people-centered, and strategic matter
The Outline for Building a Leading Country in Education (2024-2035) provides insight into the political philosophy articulating these policies.
The document explicitly defines three attributes of education:
政治属性 — political character;
人民属性 — people-centered character;
战略属性 — strategic character.
The three dimensions must be read together.
The political character implies CPC leadership, ideological education, and the explicit transmission of the values of China’s socialist project.
The people-centered character links educational legitimacy to access, equity, and the satisfaction of social needs.
The strategic character places education within talent development, scientific and technological capacity, and national modernization.
An analysis from the Chinese perspective should not conceal the first dimension in order to emphasize the other two.
Political leadership is constitutive of the system.
From a liberal perspective, objections may be raised concerning pluralism, intellectual autonomy, and the relationship between state and education. From the Chinese institutional conception, the premise is different: the state explicitly defines the political and social orientation of education and integrates it into the national project.
The analytically relevant issue is that the same political coordination capacity that structures ideological content also makes it possible to establish a national curriculum, redistribute teachers, finance education territorially, create assessment systems, and mobilize resources on a national scale.
Both dimensions belong to the same institutional system.
The 15th Five-Year Plan: education, science, technology, and talent as a strategic system
The Education Development Plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan, approved by the State Council on June 22, 2026, through 国发〔2026〕19号, marks a new stage.
The document again defines education through its political, people-centered, and strategic attributes and states:
“一体推进教育科技人才发展”
that is, to advance the integrated development of education, science and technology, and talent.
The change is highly significant.
Education no longer appears only as social or cultural policy.
It is explicitly integrated with:
basic education;
higher education;
scientific research;
talent development;
innovation;
productive modernization;
technological capacity.
From this perspective, B-S-J-Z’s mathematics score of 612 takes on a dimension that a school ranking does not capture.
Mathematics constitutes cognitive infrastructure for engineering, computer science, physics, robotics, data science, electronics, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing.
If a system succeeds in substantially increasing the proportion of students capable of operating at advanced mathematical levels, it broadens the population from which scientists, engineers, technicians, and specialists can later be trained.
The strategic advantage does not lie in turning every adolescent into a scientist.
It lies in widening the initial funnel.
“Artificial intelligence + education”
The 15th Five-Year Plan explicitly establishes the initiative:
“人工智能+教育”
“Artificial intelligence + education.”
The plan incorporates AI into the transformation of teaching, training, assessment, research, and educational governance, and links its development to digital infrastructure, educational applications, standards, and ethical and safety oversight mechanisms.
The logic differs from simply asking whether a student should use a chatbot to complete an assignment.
The state-level question is broader:
what capabilities must the education system develop in a society permeated by artificial intelligence, and how should that technology be governed in order to serve those objectives?
The same plan maintains the objective of ensuring that national fiscal spending on education remains above 4% of gross domestic product.
The combination is significant:
technological innovation;
public financing;
standards;
regulation;
ethics;
oversight.
Institutionally, AI is not presented as an external force that simply enters the school.
China is attempting to incorporate it into educational planning.
Five-Year Plans as a feedback mechanism
The historical reconstruction makes it possible to identify a sequence.
First stage: universalization.
The fundamental problem was ensuring that all children had access to school.
Second stage: financing and public guarantee.
The right to compulsory education was progressively translated into fiscal responsibility for the state.
Third stage: balance.
Once access had become generalized, policy began addressing disparities among territories, between urban and rural areas, and among schools.
Fourth stage: quality.
The objective ceased to be merely ensuring that everyone was inside the system and became ensuring that they received quality education.
Fifth stage: correction of side effects.
Overload, private tutoring, competition, well-being, and inequalities arising from families’ ability to purchase educational advantages became explicit objects of regulation.
Sixth stage: strategic integration.
During the 15th Five-Year Plan, education, science, technology, talent, and AI are conceived within a common architecture.
This sequence does not demonstrate that every policy has worked.
What it does show is something different from rigid planning understood as mechanical implementation of a program written in advance.
The observable documentary pattern is:
objective → implementation → assessment → identification of contradictions → new intervention.
The documentation is consistent with an institutional feedback and correction mechanism.
The contradictions China has not yet resolved
An analysis from the Chinese position would be incomplete if it omitted the tensions that the sources themselves make visible.
The first is territorial.
The transition from “basic balance” to “high-quality balance” exists precisely because achieving a minimum national standard does not eliminate quality differences among regions and schools. The fact that, by the end of 2025, only 572 of the 2,895 counties had reached the new standard shows that the transition remains underway.
The second is socioeconomic.
Universal access to public schooling does not eliminate the advantages derived from family economic, cultural, and educational capital.
The third is competitive.
Regulating private tutoring may reduce one source of inequality, but it does not eliminate families’ incentives to seek advantages as long as access to certain universities and career paths remains highly competitive.
The fourth is well-being versus performance.
After PISA 2018, the Ministry itself acknowledged long study hours, relatively low efficiency per hour, and comparatively unfavorable outcomes in school belonging and life satisfaction.
The fifth is reading.
The decline between 2018 and 2025 shows that even B-S-J-Z faces difficulties in preserving certain reading capacities within the new cognitive environment.
The sixth is creativity versus standardization.
A system that is extraordinarily effective at building a common knowledge floor does not automatically guarantee divergent thinking, radical innovation, or creativity. Precisely for this reason, contemporary Chinese documents increasingly emphasize innovation, inquiry, scientific thinking, and advanced talent development.
The seventh is political.
State coordination provides enormous capacity for mobilization and redistribution, but the political and ideological direction of the system simultaneously raises the question of how much intellectual space can be granted to questioning, heterodoxy, and critical thinking —qualities that an innovation-based economy also requires.
These contradictions do not, in themselves, invalidate the model.
They are precisely the problems through which its next stage will have to be evaluated.
Can causality between planning and PISA be established?
Not in a strict sense.
PISA is not a causal experiment.
There is no equivalent China without the educational reforms against which the results could be compared.
Moreover, powerful variables intervene:
economic growth;
urbanization;
poverty reduction;
parental education;
family culture valuing education;
demographic change;
private educational investment;
digitalization;
territorial differences;
selection of participating jurisdictions;
and the effects of the pandemic and global transformations in the educational ecosystem.
It would therefore be methodologically incorrect to claim:
“the Five-Year Plans caused the 612 points.”
The evidence allows a more rigorous inference.
There is temporal precedence: the principal reforms studied precede the observed results.
There is mechanism plausibility: funding, curriculum, teacher quality, monitoring, and redistribution can reasonably affect learning.
There is continuity: these policies extend across successive planning cycles.
There is consistency of results: participating Chinese jurisdictions have repeatedly shown high performance.
There is distributional evidence: B-S-J-Z combines extraordinarily broad upper performance levels with an exceptionally small proportion of low performers.
And there is observable institutional feedback: problems identified during one stage reappear as targets of intervention in subsequent policies.
The academically defensible formulation is therefore:
The results of B-S-J-Z are consistent with the mechanisms built by Chinese education policy during the period under study, and several of those mechanisms have causal plausibility; the available evidence does not, however, allow the independent effect of each policy to be identified or a specific causal magnitude to be attributed to state planning.
The real international contrast
The conclusion should not be framed as a simple opposition between “China” and “the West.”
There are high-performing non-Chinese systems and different institutional architectures capable of producing excellent results.
The most interesting Chinese distinction lies elsewhere.
The cognitive capacity of the population is treated —in the interpretation proposed by this study— as a strategic public good.
This is not a literal expression used in Chinese documents. It is an analytical synthesis derived from the articulation those documents establish among public education, equity, talent development, science, technology, and national strategy.
Education is not confined to the Ministry of Education or to a sectoral social policy.
It is connected with economic planning, science, technology, territorial development, talent formation, and national capacity.
Basic education therefore performs two simultaneous functions.
A distributive function:
reducing the proportion of children excluded from foundational knowledge.
And a strategic function:
creating a sufficiently broad base from which advanced scientific and technological capabilities can later be developed.
PISA 2025 makes it possible to observe both dimensions simultaneously.
The 1.8% simultaneous low-performance figure makes the floor visible.
The extraordinary concentration of high-performing students makes the ceiling visible.
Conclusion
The PISA 2025 headline is true but insufficient: the participating Chinese jurisdictions lead in science and mathematics and, together with Singapore, constitute the two highest-performing systems overall across the three traditional areas assessed in PISA 2025.
But the ranking is only the surface of the phenomenon.
Beneath it lies a historical process spanning approximately a quarter of a century.
China moved from attempting to guarantee a school place for every child to publicly financing compulsory education; from there to establishing mechanisms aimed at reducing territorial disparities; subsequently to redistributing teachers and resources; then to measuring quality nationally; later to intervening in the commercialization and overload generated by educational competition itself; and finally to integrating education, science, technology, talent, and artificial intelligence within a common national strategy.
The result is neither a homogeneous system nor one free of inequalities.
Nor does PISA demonstrate that China as a whole would obtain the same mathematics score of 612 as B-S-J-Z.
What the combination of internal and external sources does allow us to observe is something more important: exceptional results appear within an institutional architecture consistent with the deliberate large-scale production of cognitive capacities.
That is why the central figure may not be 612.
It may be 1.8%.
An education system should not be measured only by the heights reached by those who go furthest, but also by the number of children it leaves below foundational knowledge levels.
In B-S-J-Z, the proportion simultaneously performing below basic levels in all three traditional domains is exceptionally small compared with the OECD average.
The major uncertainty now lies in the future.
PISA 2025 shows that the Chinese system can maintain an extraordinary advantage in mathematics and science while simultaneously experiencing a significant erosion in reading.
The challenge of the coming decade will be to determine whether the same state capacity that succeeded in universalizing, financing, standardizing, assessing, and redistributing education can respond to a transformation of a different nature: changes in the cognitive environment in which children learn.
The 15th Five-Year Plan indicates that China has identified technological transformation as a strategic issue.
It does not seek to choose between education and technology, but to incorporate technology into an educational project; not to separate schooling from science and innovation, but to integrate them; not to abandon planning in the face of artificial intelligence, but to extend planning into that domain.
This gives rise to the most important question posed by PISA 2025:
What happens when a state regards its population’s capacity to read, reason, calculate, investigate, and solve problems not merely as an educational outcome, but as national strategic infrastructure?
The Chinese case does not yet offer a definitive answer.
But it provides one of the largest-scale processes of political and educational transformation available for studying that question over the coming decade.
Limitations of the research
This study does not attribute B-S-J-Z scores to the People’s Republic of China as a whole.
Nor does it construct a nonexistent national PISA series: Shanghai 2009 and 2012, B-S-J-G 2015, and B-S-J-Z from 2018 onward correspond to different territorial universes. The OECD itself documents these changes in participation.
The cleanest longitudinal statistical comparison for the four jurisdictions currently under study is 2018-2025.
Chinese government documents make it possible to establish objectives, instruments, diagnoses, and certain administrative outcomes, but they are produced by institutions that also participate in formulating or implementing the policies under study. They must therefore be interpreted as primary sources: they have extraordinary value for understanding what the Chinese state does, measures, acknowledges, and seeks to achieve, but they are not in themselves equivalent to an independent external assessment.
PISA provides international comparison, but it does not causally identify the policies responsible for observed differences either.
Finally, the relationships among digitalization, smartphones, short-form video, artificial intelligence, attention, and declining reading performance remain research hypotheses. PISA may provide relevant associations and patterns, not causal proof.
Primary documentary and statistical references
People’s Republic of China
Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2001). 教育部关于印发《基础教育课程改革纲要（试行）》的通知 [Outline for Basic Education Curriculum Reform (Trial)], 教基〔2001〕17号, June 8, 2001. Ministry of Education of China — 2001 curriculum reform Documentary verification:
State Council of the People’s Republic of China (2005). 国务院关于深化农村义务教育经费保障机制改革的通知 [Reform of the funding-guarantee mechanism for rural compulsory education], 国发〔2005〕43号, December 24, 2005. State Council / Ministry of Education — 2005 rural education funding reform Documentary verification:
State Council of the People’s Republic of China (2008). 国务院关于做好免除城市义务教育阶段学生学杂费工作的通知 [Notice on the elimination of tuition and miscellaneous fees for students in urban compulsory education], 国发〔2008〕25号, August 12, 2008. Ministry of Education of China — 2008 document The existence, title, document number, and content of the provision are corroborated by official indexing and Ministry documentation on its implementation.
Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2010). 国家中长期教育改革和发展规划纲要（2010-2020年） [National Outline for Medium- and Long-Term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020)]. Ministry of Education — National Program 2010-2020 Documentary verification:
State Council of the People’s Republic of China (2012). 国务院关于深入推进义务教育均衡发展的意见 [Opinion on further advancing balanced development in compulsory education], 国发〔2012〕48号. State Council / Ministry of Education — Balanced development, 2012 Documentary verification:
Ministry of Education, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (2014). 关于推进县（区）域内义务教育学校校长教师交流轮岗的意见 [Opinion on the rotation of principals and teachers in compulsory-education schools]. Ministry of Education — 2014 teacher-rotation policy Documentary verification:
Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2019). PISA2018测试结果正式发布 [Official publication of PISA 2018 results], December 4, 2019. Ministry of Education — Official Chinese report on PISA 2018 Documentary verification:
CPC Central Committee and State Council (2021). 关于进一步减轻义务教育阶段学生作业负担和校外培训负担的意见 [Opinion on further reducing homework and off-campus tutoring burdens for compulsory-education students]. Ministry of Education — Official text of the “double reduction” policy Documentary verification:
Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2021). 国家义务教育质量监测方案（2021年修订版） [National Compulsory Education Quality Monitoring Plan, 2021 revised edition], 教督〔2021〕2号. Ministry of Education — National Monitoring System 2021 Documentary verification:
Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2022). 义务教育课程方案和课程标准（2022年版） [Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan and Curriculum Standards, 2022 edition]. Ministry of Education — 2022 curriculum and standards Documentary verification:
Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2022). 2895个县级行政单位实现县域义务教育基本均衡发展 [2,895 county-level administrative units achieve basic balance in compulsory education]. Ministry of Education — National certification of basic balance Documentary verification:
CPC Central Committee and State Council (2025). 教育强国建设规划纲要（2024—2035年） [Outline for Building a Leading Country in Education (2024-2035)]. Ministry of Education — Text of the Outline for Building a Leading Country in Education 2024-2035 Documentary verification:
State Council of the People’s Republic of China (2026). 教育发展“十五五”规划 [Education Development Plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan], 国发〔2026〕19号, approved June 22, 2026. State Council / Ministry of Education — 15th Five-Year Education Development Plan Documentary verification:
Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2026). Review of balanced development in compulsory education: 2,895 counties with basic balance and 572 with high-quality balance by the end of 2025. Ministry of Education — Official 2026 review Documentary verification:
OECD / PISA
OECD (2010). PISA 2009 Results: What Students Know and Can Do. Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science, Volume I. OECD — PISA 2009 Results, Volume I Verified official canonical page:
OECD (2014). PISA 2012 Results: What Students Know and Can Do, Volume I, Revised edition. OECD — PISA 2012 Results, Volume I Verified official canonical page:
OECD (2016). PISA 2015 Results, Volume I: Excellence and Equity in Education. OECD Publishing, Paris. DOI: 10.1787/9789264266490-en. OECD — PISA 2015 Results, Volume I The canonical publication and its DOI have been verified.
OECD. PISA participant: China (People’s Republic of). Official record of participating jurisdictions and years of participation. OECD — China’s participation in PISA Verification:
OECD (2026). PISA 2025 Results, Volume I: Future-Ready Students. OECD — PISA 2025 Results, Volume I The science, mathematics, reading, and computational problem-solving results used in this study were cross-checked against the tables and Executive Summary.
OECD (2026). PISA 2025 Results, Volume I: Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z), China. Country Note. OECD — PISA 2025 Country Note: B-S-J-Z (China) Official document published on September 8, 2026.
Final note on method and verification
Chinese sources are used primarily to reconstruct the objectives, principles, legislation, instruments, internal diagnoses, and policy sequence of the People’s Republic of China’s education system.
PISA is used as an external instrument for observing comparative performance and not as an authority for determining the political or historical meaning of the Chinese education system.
Interpretive claims —among them “cognitive floor,” “cognitive capacity as a strategic public good,” and the distinction between cognitive technology and the attention economy— are not attributed to the OECD or the Chinese Government: they constitute analytical categories developed in this study.
The research systematically distinguishes between institutional self-description, observed data, and analytical inference.
Claudia Aranda and LumusAI
September 8, 2026
