With a mixed feeling of hope, excitement and anxiety, millions of students across the country will sit the national college entrance exams, or gaokao, on Wednesday. What makes this year's exams even more memorable is that it is the 40th anniversary since they were resumed after the end of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

There is hardly any policy in China's modern history that has had such an effect on people's futures as the resumption of the exams. For 11 years before 1977, the institutions of higher learning, all caught up in the political chaos, enrolled students based on recommendations by working units or rural communes.

About 5.7 million candidates, most of them forced out of schools and sent to work in the countryside and factories, took part in the exams in 1977. Although only 270,000 were enrolled that year, the message was sent and received. For the first time in so many years, people started to realize that they could write their own destiny again with mastery of knowledge. The zeal to learn and make up for the lost time among tens of millions of young people started to change the country's landscape of education and ushered in a new spring for science.