But despite its shortcomings, parents from middle or lower social strata would abhor the notion of scrapping gaokao, because they perceive it as the fairest criterion available for admission to college and a major avenue for upward social mobility at a time when social trust is lacking.

For migrant workers seeking equality, it would also be like barking up the wrong tree to ask their children to pioneer in the gaokao reform in an effort to skirt around the opposition from urban residents.

While being sketchy on opening up the general university enrolment system, Beijing has said it will allow migrant workers' children to attend local vocational colleges in 2013, with the option of matriculating from universities after graduating with diplomas in 2014.

The parents considered the offer an insult to their injury. The vocational schools, a key thrust of future Chinese higher education development, are shunned by urban students and plagued by serious shortages of students.

All these factors may help explain why major cities have adopted delaying tactics with such a potentially explosive social problem. In Beijing alone, more than 400,000 students from migrant families are in pre-college education. And thousands of migrant gaokao hopefuls have to leave the city every year.

But migrant parents and children cannot wait indefinitely. One of them, Zhan Haite, went to kindergarten, primary school and junior high school in Shanghai, where she has lived with her family since 2002. Aged 15 now, she has started idolizing Martin Luther King Jr and Aung San Suu Kyi after learning that she cannot take gaokao in the city because she is not a permanent resident.

Who knows which way the discontented group will turn?

The writer is editor-at-large of China Daily. E-mail: dr.baiping@gmail.com

(China Daily 01/12/2013 page5)