Tsinghua Graduate, 38, Wins Place in Peking University Medical Program After Three Years of Gaokao

At 38, Li Long will start university again this autumn, 18 years after he first did.

Li, a Tsinghua University graduate who scored 695 on China's national college entrance examination in 2008, has been admitted to the eight-year clinical medicine program at Peking University Health Science Center. It was his fourth time taking the exam, known as the gaokao, and, he has said, his last.

He returned to the exam hall in 2024, 2025 and again this year, scoring 626 and then 642 – both short of the medical schools he wanted. This year he placed in the top 300 in Heilongjiang Province, up from around 1,300th. He has not made the score public.

"I spent three years proving something I already knew I could do," Li told Jimu News. Returning to the exam, he said, was never about demonstrating his ability or correcting the past. It was about spending the second half of his life on work he values.

Li grew up poor in Harbin. His parents supported the family through manual labor, and after their home was demolished they stayed for a time in a relative's unheated garage. He rarely attended the after-school classes his classmates took; there was no money for them.

Medicine drew him early. He watched elderly relatives move through illness and treatment, gravitated toward biology and chemistry in high school, and read medical books at the library.

But in 2008 the decision came down to money. Medical training would take years before it paid anything, and he wanted to start earning and buy his parents a home. He chose Tsinghua's experimental class in fundamental mathematics and physics instead, tutored students while still enrolled, and later bought his family an apartment in Harbin.

He spent the years after graduation in private tutoring, coaching students into Tsinghua and Peking University. Regulation crackdown on the for-profit tutoring industry pushed him to reconsider his own direction. By 2024 he judged that he had both the ability and the family circumstances to try again.

It cost him. In his final month of preparation this year, Li studied from 8am to 10pm. His wife and child had by then lived through three years of his second run at high school, and he said he felt guilty that it left him unable to care for them as he wanted.

Knowing this attempt was his last, he said, made him calmer. The previous two years had taught him what coaching never could: sitting the gaokao is not the same as solving practice papers or teaching someone else to.

He resists calling the admission a triumph. He had already proved he could pass a test, he said; the exam was simply the only practical route into a Chinese medical school that kept him near his aging parents. He resists being read as a model, too. Most lives, he said, are not fundamentally changed by taking the gaokao again, and not every regret traces back to a choice made at 18.

One criticism has been harder to shrug off – that an older candidate takes a scarce place from a younger one. Li said his score did put him ahead of younger candidates, but that everyone competed under the same rules and he received no special treatment. To accusations that documenting his preparation online was a play for online traffic, he said attention matters to anyone running a social-media account; what matters more is what it is used for. He hopes to share study methods without selling anxiety.

What comes next will not resemble an exam. Li expects to be 46 when he finishes the program and calls himself a beginner in medical research. What he thinks he has over classmates nearly two decades younger is certainty: he will not leave this field again for financial reasons.

He would still choose as he did in 2008, he said. His family had to come first, and the path he took improved their lives. After decades spent chasing security and getting other people's children into good universities, he wants to stay in one field long enough to contribute something of his own.