As generative artificial intelligence technology moves further into education, the annual gaokao season, China's college entrance examination period, which will kick off on Sunday, is also seeing new changes.

For some students and teachers, AI may have begun to move beyond the role of a simple answer-finding tool. In certain study scenarios, it can be used to help students review mistakes, understand knowledge points, polish essays or receive revision suggestions. But this may also raise new questions for schools during the exam preparation period.

On Friday, the Ministry of Public Security's cyber police bureau said in a WeChat post that police in Yichun, Jiangxi Province, had handled a case in which a suspect used videos of so-called "gaokao exam paper bags" to claim he had access to "leaked 2026 gaokao questions and answers." The suspect allegedly attempted to sell the fake papers for 2,000 yuan ($281) each, and the account was shut down, according to the post.

China's Ministry of Education issued a warning on June 2, reminding students and parents to be alert to false advertising such as "famous teacher predicted exam questions" and "AI predicted exam questions," the China News Agency reported.

At the same time, several AI platforms in China have announced or indicated corresponding adjustments during the gaokao period to prevent the technology from being used for exam cheating, media reports said.

The discussion around AI and the gaokao has just begun.

AI use on campus

In daily exam preparation and classroom tutoring, some teachers and students in China have already begun exploring how AI technology can be used in practice.

In Shanghai, where educational resources are highly developed, frontline teachers are beginning to test the practical boundaries of AI in language teaching, while also seeing its limitations.

Wu Xinyi, an English teacher at a high school in Shanghai, told the Global Times that AI can be used to revise essays.

"I think it is acceptable to use AI to polish an essay. You can input a specific prompt, and it can make the language sound more advanced. In fact, some teachers now also use AI to assist with essay grading," Wu told the Global Times.

"Sometimes, we deliberately compare essays written by AI tools with those written by students. You can see that it does have some very good, even impressive parts, but many parts appear rigid and formulaic," she said.

Compared with discussions in more developed regions over AI-generated text, compliance and depth of thinking, the application of such technology in less-resourced grassroots schools faces more basic thresholds.

Xiao, a teacher at a county-level high school in East China's Shandong Province, told the Global Times that AI has been included in some teaching-related tasks, and relevant departments have been actively advocating its use. But in actual grassroots teaching, implementation remains difficult.

A document Xiao showed the Global Times about an AI competition organized by local education authorities suggested that local schools are being encouraged to explore AI-related teaching practices.

"Every step is a hard threshold, from improving teachers' understanding and changing their mindset to upgrading the school's overall hardware facilities, especially for rural county-level schools with limited resources like ours," Xiao said.

Meanwhile, overreliance on AI in relation to gaokao has also drawn warnings.

China's Ministry of Education issued a warning on June 2 for the 2026 gaokao, reminding students and parents to be alert to false advertising such as "famous teacher predicted exam questions" and "AI predicted exam questions," to take the exam with integrity and strictly observe legal boundaries, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The ministry said gaokao questions have continued to undergo reform in recent years, with directions and exam content constantly changing and innovating. Relying on AI or "experts" to predict questions in order to obtain high scores is unrealistic, the ministry said.

Fairness in the exam room
As AI is increasingly used in daily learning, how to prevent it from being used to cheat in a gaokao exam has become a matter of public concern.

Sichuan-based Red Star News recently reached out to several AI platforms in China. For instance, Doubao customer service said that Doubao could be used normally during the gaokao period, but photo-based question answering and similar functions would be unavailable, with specific arrangements subject to the actual page display during the exam.

A Tencent staff member said that, during last year's gaokao, Tencent's Yuanbao had made clear that it would not answer exam-related questions. An iFlytek staff member also said there was no definite information yet, but that large models would likely have their limits. Baidu's relevant business department said it had not yet received notice of restrictions on some Wenxin functions during the gaokao period, the report said.

According to a report by Xiaoxiang Morning Herald based in Central China's Hunan Province, in 2025, some users posted online that Tencent Yuanbao could not be used normally during the gaokao period.

After users sent image-recognition summary requests, Yuanbao replied that "this function is unavailable during gaokao hours." Other common AI tools such as Kimi, DeepSeek and Doubao also had related arrangements during the gaokao period.

The Ministry of Education reminded candidates that bringing a mobile phone, smart watch or bracelet, smart glasses and any other banned device into an exam room constitutes cheating, even if the device is switched off.

In April, the "AI + Education" action plan was issued by the Ministry of Education and other government departments, requiring in particular that AI applications be safe, trustworthy and controllable, the Beijing Youth Daily reported.

The report quoted Xie Yongjiang, director of the Institute of Internet Governance and Law at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, as saying, "If there is even the smallest loophole in the organization of the exam, AI tools could magnify it infinitely and cause incalculable negative consequences. Restricting AI answering functions is meant to block the possibility of AI-assisted exam-taking and ensure absolute fairness in the exam."

From the perspective of international comparison and academic ethics, Estelle Qiu, a young scholar based in Australia, said AI is challenging intellectual property and human thinking while offering convenience.

Qiu told the Global Times that at the Australian university where she works, undergraduate students are allowed to use AI. In principle, the school allows them to first complete their own writing and then use AI for polishing, but students must clearly declare such use.

"However, there are two major pain points in AI use. First, it may undermine confidentiality to some extent. Second, when it comes to deeper academic papers, AI still cannot really get how the human mind works," she said.

The Beijing News said in a recent commentary that AI is evolving rapidly, with computing power and algorithms constantly improving and technological dividends being released. "But the faster it develops, the more necessary it is to respect rules and uphold bottom lines," the commentary said.

A viral stress-relief toy known as "Natasha" has sparked widespread controversy in China after videos showing users smashing, stomping on, piercing and otherwise "abusing" the baby-shaped toy spread across social media platforms.

According to the China Youth Daily, a growing number of primary and secondary schools across the country have issued notices banning the toy from campuses. As of Saturday, several major e-commerce platforms had removed promotional videos that marketed the product with violent content. However, some sellers were still using images of clenched fists and violence-oriented slogans to advertise the toy.

Sun Hongyan, a researcher at the China Youth & Children Research Center, a national institution specializing in youth and adolescent work research, warned that based on observational learning theory, children and adolescents could internalize behaviors by observing and imitating others. Violent ways of playing with the toy may be perceived by youth as entertaining and could normalize aggressive behaviors among young people, Sun said.

Sun noted that the toy's baby-like appearance amplifies its potential negative impact. Baby dolls symbolize vulnerable lives that deserve care and protection. As minors are still developing moral judgment, marketing messages such as "the harder you throw it, the more stress you relieve," combined with social media algorithms rewarding increasingly extreme content, may lead some young people to believe that bullying the weak is acceptable, gradually blurring their moral boundaries, according to Sun.

Yu Xukun, Executive Director of Beijing Children's Legal Aid and Research Center, also cautioned that repeated exposure to simulated violence in interaction with such toys could become psychological preparation for real-world aggression under certain circumstances.

"In cases we have handled, some children who suffered domestic violence came to believe that violence could solve problems and later directed such violence toward others, eventually facing legal consequences," Yu said.

Fang Zengquan, professor at School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University and director of the Center for Minors' Digital Literacy, criticized the marketing strategy behind the toy.

"Linking a baby-shaped toy directly to stress relief and promoting it with slogans such as 'Squeezing a baby is more stress-relieving than raising one' essentially turns the image of an infant into a gimmick," Fang said. "It encourages users, particularly adolescents, to derive pleasure from physically squeezing, pinching and deforming the toy, treating babies as objects for emotional release or entertainment."

Fang warned that repeatedly associating infant imagery with destructive behavior could weaken young people's empathy and protective instincts toward real babies and, in extreme cases, foster unconscious aggressive impulses toward living beings.

On June 1, the China Consumers Association (CCA) stated that violent and sexually suggestive marketing videos related to the toy may violate the law. According to the association, some sellers have posed the toy in sexually suggestive positions and paired it with ambiguous captions or adult-themed props, while others have used violent treatment of the toy to attract traffic and attention.

The CCA said such practices use vulgarity and violence as marketing gimmicks, run counter to core socialist values, violate the principles of common moral code, and can breach laws and regulations including the Cybersecurity Law and the Advertising Law.

The CCA urged businesses, platforms, schools and families not to allow "stress relief" to become a cover for violence or permit internet traffic to reward vulgar content.

Stress-relief toys are fundamentally products for emotional and self-oriented consumption, the CCA said, adding that all parties should work together to foster healthy and sustainable emotional-consumption environments. Online platforms should fulfill their gatekeeping responsibilities by removing and banning content involving violence, pornography and other materials that violate public morality. Manufacturers and sellers should abide by laws and regulations, ensure their products are both entertaining and safe. Meanwhile, families and schools should help minors develop healthy ways to manage stress and identify harmful online content.

The waters slated for "delimitation" by Japan and the Philippines lie east of China's Taiwan island. Their proposed so-called "delimitation negotiations" gravely infringe on China's maritime rights and interests, run counter to international law and the basic norms governing international relations, and are entirely illegal, null and void, Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday. 

Zhu noted that compatriots across the Taiwan Straits belong to the Chinese nation. They must uphold their national stance, stand for the fundamental interests of the nation, and jointly safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as the overall interests of the Chinese nation. 

Should the DPP authorities collude with external forces to betray national interests, they will surely be spurned by compatriots on both sides of the Straits and punished by history, the spokesperson said. 

64 Chinese nationals who had been detained by Philippine authorities were released on Thursday evening, with embassy staff dispatched to the scene to provide assistance and care, the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines announced in a statement on Friday. Another six Chinese nationals are currently undergoing procedures for their release.

These Chinese nationals had been working at a steel plant in Misamis Oriental Province of the Philippines and were detained by Philippine law enforcement authorities on May 15.

According to the Chinese Embassy, the Philippine Department of Justice recently ruled that evidence was insufficient to support allegations that the Chinese nationals had violated the country's nuclear safety law, immigration regulations and labor laws, and therefore ordered their release.

The Chinese Embassy and consulates in the Philippines attached great importance to the case and repeatedly lodged solemn representations with senior Philippine officials and relevant government agencies, urging the Philippine side to handle the matter in a lawful, fair and expeditious manner and to refrain from infringing upon the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens, according to the statement by the Chinese Embassy.

During the detention period, Chinese diplomatic missions in the Philippines conducted multiple consular visits to the detained nationals and continued to provide them with assistance and support. The embassy said it will continue to make every effort to safeguard the safety, lawful rights and interests of Chinese citizens and institutions in the Philippines, while once again reminding Chinese nationals in the country to strictly comply with local laws and regulations.

On Wednesday, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Ji Lingpeng expressed China's position regarding the frequent detention of Chinese citizens by Philippine law enforcement agencies in recent months.

Ji said China highly values the protection of the personal safety and legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens in the Philippines and has serious concerns over the recent actions taken by Philippine military and law enforcement authorities against Chinese nationals.

For every case involving detained Chinese citizens, Chinese diplomatic missions in the Philippines have lodged immediate representations with the Philippine side, urging authorities to notify Chinese diplomatic and consular missions within four days of any detention, arrest or other deprivation of liberty involving Chinese citizens and to clearly explain the reasons for such actions, Ji said.

He also called on the Philippine side to handle relevant cases in accordance with the law, ensure the personal safety, lawful rights, humanitarian treatment and due process rights of the individuals concerned, and promptly release those found not to have violated Philippine laws, rather than subjecting them to unlawful or prolonged detention.

Seventy-five days after having returned to the ground, the Shenzhou-14 crew members met the press on Friday and were in good spirits. They were also in good physical and mental shape, said health experts at the press conference, noting that they have now moved into the recovery observation stage and will be able to return to normal soon.

The recovery of normal body function for the taikonauts after they returned from space consists of three stages - quarantine, convalescence and observation - according to health experts speaking at the press conference on Friday.

The Shenzhou-14 crew has completed the first two stages, showing a stable emotional status and good mental condition, and their body weight has stabilized at pre-flight level. The muscle strength, endurance and cardiorespiratory reserves have been further restored, achieving the expected results.

They have now moved into the third stage of recovery observation. After an overall evaluation, the three taikonauts will be able to return to normal training and work.

After concluding their six-month stay at the China Space Station and completing the first direct handover in orbit in the country's history, Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe, the three taikonauts of the Shenzhou-14 safely returned to Earth on December 4, 2022.

It marked the first return mission after the completion of the China Space Station's T-shape basic structure.

Many localities have issued policies to encourage state-owned enterprises to play an exemplary role in stabilizing employment and expand recruitment of college graduates, with some provinces and cities requiring no less than half of the hiring quota at state-owned enterprises be dedicated to college graduates.

The office of the Guangdong Provincial People's Government recently published a notice on optimizing and adjusting stable employment policies and measures to promote development and benefit people's livelihood. Showing clear support for state-owned enterprises expanding the scale of recruitment, the notice pointed out that the number of new college graduates recruited by state-owned enterprises in the province this year should be no lower than that of 2022.

Additionally, East China's Anhui Province also issued a notice requiring state-owned enterprises to recruit at least 50 percent of fresh graduates to ensure that the number of college graduates accepted by state-owned enterprises remains stable.

Besides this, the provinces of Hunan, Gansu and Jiangxi have made similar notices. Among them, Central China's Hunan Province requires that provincial state-owned enterprises accept more than 4,700 graduates, while Northwest China's Gansu requires provincial state-owned enterprises to recruit more than 5,000 college graduates in 2023. Meanwhile, provincial state-owned enterprises funded and supervised by the Jiangxi government are set to recruit no less than 5,000 college graduates this year.

The number of college graduates is expected to reach 11.58 million before the end of 2023, an increase of 820,000, according to estimates by China's Ministry of Education. 

South China's Hainan Province proposed in July that state-owned enterprises should play a role in attracting young employees and ensure that no less than 1,000 college graduates are recruited by the end of 2023, while East China's Fujian Province is requiring the implementation of a one-time increase at state-owned enterprises to ensure that the number of college graduates recruited exceeds that of 2022.

An employee at PetroChina's Beijing branch surnamed Li told the Global Times on Sunday that more than 80 percent of new hires at the branch office in 2023 have been graduates. Moreover, a staff member surnamed Zhao with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's research and development center in Beijing told the Global Times that the recruitment rate of graduates at the company in 2023 reached 90 percent.

The demand for state-owned enterprises to expand the scale of recruitment is in response to graduate demand and aims to alleviate the current problem of comparatively low youth employment, Xiong Bingqi, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing, told the Global Times on Sunday. 

According to Xinhua News Agency, as of August 11, the number of college graduates recruited by central enterprises and state-owned enterprises under the national asset supervision system has exceeded the same period in 2022. With the summer recruitment of state-owned enterprises gradually underway, it is expected that the recruitment volume will continue to increase in the future.

The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council has also made arrangements for the recruitment of college graduates by state-owned enterprises in 2024 at a meeting held in July.

The meeting required central enterprises and local state-owned enterprises to strive to complete the recruitment plan for the 2024 college graduates by the end of August, and gradually provide a batch of high-quality positions in September and October, in order to identify a group of high-quality target candidates as early as possible.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, as of August 11, the number of college graduates recruited by state-owned enterprises under the national asset supervision system has exceeded the same period in 2022. With the summer recruitment of state-owned enterprises gradually underway, it is expected that recruitment volume will continue to increase in the future.

The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council has made arrangements for the recruitment of college graduates by state-owned enterprises in 2024 at a meeting held in July.

The meeting required central and local state-owned enterprises to strive to complete recruitment plans for the 2024 college graduates by the end of August, and gradually provide a batch of high-quality positions in September and October, in order to identify a group of high-quality target candidates as early as possible.

Time to add another gorgeous space photo to the Hubble Space Telescope’s list of greatest hits. For the orbiting observatory’s 26th anniversary in space, astronomers snapped a picture of the Bubble Nebula, a seven-light-year-wide pocket of gas being blown away by a blazing massive star about 7,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia.

The star responsible for the bubble is young, just 4 million years old, and about 45 times as massive as our sun. It is so hot and bright that it launches its own gas into space at more than 6 million kilometers per hour. The vibrant colors in the nebula represent the elements oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen.

Hubble launched April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery. A series of visits by astronauts have kept the aging telescope’s suite of cameras, spectrometers and ancillary equipment up-to-date and operating well into its third decade.

SAN DIEGO — A remote planet — the first with hints of a limestone shell — has been shredded by its dead sun, a new study suggests.

A generous heaping of carbon is raining down on a white dwarf, the exposed core of a dead star, astrophysicist Carl Melis of the University of California, San Diego said June 13 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The carbon — along with a dash of other elements such as calcium, silicon and iron — is probably all that remains of a rocky planet, torn apart by its dying sun’s gravity. Many other white dwarfs show similar signs of planetary cannibalism (SN Online: 10/21/15), but none are as flooded with carbon atoms as this one.

A planet slathered in calcium carbonate, a mineral found in limestone, could explain the shower of carbon as well as the relative amounts of other elements, said Melis. He and Patrick Dufour, an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal, estimate that calcium carbonate could have made up to 9 percent of the doomed world’s mass.

While a limestone-encrusted world is a first, it’s not shocking, says Melis. The recipe for calcium carbonate is just carbon and calcium in the presence of water. “If you have those conditions, it’s going to form,” he says.

“The real interesting thing is the carbon,” Melis adds. Carbon needs to be frozen — most likely as carbon dioxide — to be incorporated into a forming planet. But CO2 freezes far from a star, beyond where researchers suspect rocky planets are assembled. A limestone planet could have formed in an unexpected place and later wandered in while somehow retaining its carbon stores in the warm environs closer to its sun. Or the carbon might have been delivered to the world after it formed. But, Melis says, it’s not clear how either would happen.

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was, as the honorific the Rev. suggests, a clergyman. Too bad he wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe if he had been, lawyers today wouldn’t be so reluctant to enlist his mathematical insights in the pursuit of justice.

In many sorts of court cases, from whether talcum powder causes ovarian cancer to The People v. O.J. Simpson, statistics play (or ought to play) a vital role in evaluating the evidence. Sometimes the evidence itself is statistical, as with the odds of a DNA match or the strength of a scientific research finding. Even more often the key question is how evidence should be added up to assess the probability of guilt. In either circumstance, the statistical methods devised by Bayes are often the only reasonable way of drawing an intelligent conclusion.

Yet the courts today seem suspicious of statistics of any sort, and not without reason. In several famous cases, flawed statistical reasoning has sent innocent people to prison. But in most such instances the statistics applied in court have been primarily the standard type that scientists use to test hypotheses (producing numbers for gauging “statistical significance”). These are the same approaches that have been so widely criticized for rendering many scientific results irreproducible. Many experts believe Bayesian statistics, the legacy of a paper by Bayes published posthumously in 1763, offers a better option.

“The Bayesian approach is especially well suited for a broad range of legal reasoning,” write mathematician Norman Fenton and colleagues in a recent paper in the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application.

But Bayes has for the most part been neglected by the legal system. “Outside of paternity cases its impact on legal practice has been minimal,” say Fenton, Martin Neil and Daniel Berger, all of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University London.

That’s unfortunate, they contend, because non-Bayesian statistical methods have severe shortcomings when applied in legal contexts. Most famously, the standard approach is typically misinterpreted in a way known as the “prosecutor’s fallacy.”

In formal logical terms, the prosecutor’s fallacy is known as “the error of the transposed conditional,” as British pharmacologist David Colquhoun explains in a recent blog post. Consider a murder on a hypothetical island, populated by 1,000 people. Police find a DNA fragment at the crime scene, a fragment that would be found in only 0.4 percent of the population. For no particular reason, the police arrest Jack and give him a DNA test. Jack’s DNA matches the crime scene fragment, so he is charged and sent to trial. The prosecutor proclaims that since only 0.4 percent of innocent people have this DNA fragment, it is 99.6 percent certain that Jack is the killer — evidence beyond reasonable doubt.
But that reasoning is fatally (for Jack) flawed. Unless there was some good reason to suspect Jack in the first place, he is just one of 1,000 possible suspects. Among those 1,000, four people (0.4 percent) should have the same DNA fragment found at the crime scene. Jack is therefore just one of four possibilities to be the murderer — so the probability that he’s the killer is merely 25 percent, not 99.6 percent.

Bayesian reasoning averts this potential miscarriage of justice by including the “prior probability” of guilt when calculating the probability of guilt after the evidence is in.

Suppose, for instance, that the crime in question is not murder, but theft of cupcakes from a bakery employing 100 people. Security cameras reveal 10 employees sneaking off with the cupcakes but without a good view of their identities. So the prior probability of any given employee’s guilt is 10 percent. Police sent to investigate choose an employee at random and conduct a frosting residue test known to be accurate 90 percent of the time. If the employee tests positive, the police might conclude there is therefore a 90 percent probability of guilt. But that’s another example of the prosecutor’s fallacy — it neglects the prior probability. Well-trained Bayesian police would use the formula known as Bayes’ theorem to calculate that given a 10 percent prior probability, 90 percent reliable evidence yields an actual probability of guilt of only 50 percent.

You don’t even need to know Bayes’ formula to reason out that result. If the test is 90 percent accurate, it will erroneously identify nine out of the 90 innocent employees as guilty, and it would identify only nine out of the 10 truly guilty employees. If the police tested all 100 people, then, 18 would appear guilty, but nine of those 18 (half of them) would actually be innocent. So a positive frosting test means only a 50 percent chance of guilt. Bayesian math would in this case (and in many real life cases) prevent a rush to injustice.

“Unfortunately, people without statistical training — and this includes most highly respected legal professionals — find Bayes’ theorem both difficult to understand and counterintuitive,” Fenton and colleagues lament.

One major problem is that real criminal cases are rarely as simple as the cupcake example. “Practical legal arguments normally involve multiple hypotheses and pieces of evidence with complex causal dependencies,” Fenton and colleagues note. Adapting Bayes’ formula to complex situations is not always straightforward. Combining testimony and various other sorts of evidence requires mapping out a network of interrelated probabilities; the math quickly can become much too complicated for pencil and paper — and, until relatively recently, even for computers.

“Until the late 1980s there were no known efficient computer algorithms for doing the calculations,” Fenton and colleagues point out.

But nowadays, better computers — and more crucially, better algorithms — are available to compute the probabilities in just the sorts of complicated Bayesian networks that legal cases present. So Bayesian math now provides the ideal method for weighing competing evidence in order to reach a sound legal judgment. Yet the legal system seems unimpressed.

“Although Bayes is the perfect formalism for this type of reasoning, it is difficult to find any well-reported examples of the successful use of Bayes in combining diverse evidence in a real case,” Fenton and coauthors note. “There is a persistent attitude among some members of the legal profession that probability theory has no role in the courtroom.”

In one case in England, in fact, an appeals court denounced the use of Bayesian calculations, asserting that members of the jury should apply “their individual common sense and knowledge of the world” to the evidence presented.

Apart from the obvious idiocy of using common sense to resolve complex issues, the court’s call to apply “knowledge of the world” to the evidence is exactly what Bayesian math does. Bayesian reasoning provides guidance for applying prior knowledge properly in assessing new knowledge (or evidence) to reach a sound conclusion. Which is what the judicial system is supposed to do.

Bayesian statistics offers a technical tool for avoiding fallacious reasoning. Lawyers should learn to use it. So should scientists. And then maybe then someday justice will be done, and science and the law can work more seamlessly together. But as Fenton and colleagues point out, there remain “massive cultural barriers between the fields of science and law” that “will only be broken down by achieving a critical mass of relevant experts and stakeholders, united in their objectives.”