The Gaokao Also Has Its Tricks

Practicing questions or brushing up on passports, there’s a question of how to play the game here.

The Gaokao in recent days has been, for the vast majority, perhaps the most brutal competitive exam of their lives, like thousands of troops squeezing onto a narrow bridge.

Yet some people didn't even squeeze in. They chose to take a detour.

Some of the older folks I know opted to move their children's identities overseas early on, avoiding cram schools from a young age and returning to compete as 'international students' after high school graduation, entering domestic 985 and 211 universities with very low scores. With just a piece of identity, they easily 'overtake on a bend.'

This behavior is not cheating; it is a high-level play allowed within the system. It is the most typical and straightforward form of legal exploitation in the real world.

Many people used to think that 'exploitation' meant speculation, finding loopholes, or taking shortcuts, but it is not that at all.

True exploitation is a way of thinking; it is a result of a combination of cognition, vision, and execution.

From early years of P2P and postal currency arbitrage, to today's cryptocurrency airdrops, on the surface, these are opportunities in different fields; fundamentally, they reflect the same cognitive structure: understanding the rules, seeking structural dividends, executing quickly, and achieving excess returns.

Real exploiters are never limited to the play of a specific platform or a particular country. Their advantage lies not just in technology but in the differing levels of perspective in viewing the same problem.

For instance, can you break free from local thinking and see the language arbitrage, identity arbitrage, geographical arbitrage, and even information arbitrage between different countries from a global perspective? Even with the internet's development today, these arbitrage information gaps still exist in abundance.

The difference lies in which level you can view the problem from, which determines what level and odds of exploitation opportunities you can capture.

Just like the Gaokao every year, it is indeed a question, but there is no unique solution, and the paths are not just one. Whether practicing questions or taking a detour overseas, both are a form of cost/return betting.

In the ultimate sense, exploitation is a reflection of systemic cognitive ability, an understanding of rules, capturing trends, and the extreme realization of information gaps.

In my view, exploitation is not speculation; it is about winning according to the rules at a higher dimension.