A Private School Marked Teacher's Day by Handing Its Gaokao Teachers $250,000 in Cash

While one group of Chinese parents spent Teacher's Day crowdfunding cosmetics for their children's teachers — and drawing an official inquiry for it — a school in Henan province went the other way. The New Era Senior High School in Taikang County, Zhoukou, marked 10 September by handing its graduating-class teachers 1,818,700 yuan, roughly 255,000 dollars, in cash bonuses for this year's gaokao results.

The ceremony filled the school auditorium. Photographs from the scene show rows of teachers in white shirts each holding a red placard printed with their personal award — 53,108 yuan, 34,590 yuan, 30,364 yuan, down the tiers — and one plaque carrying the fund's total. Fifty-plus teachers of the class of 2026 shared the money; the largest single award was 76,000 yuan, several months of take-home pay for a typical county-school teacher. "I received the 76,000-yuan gaokao award," the grade director, surnamed Meng, told Jimu News's report on the ceremony. "This is the school's recognition." The amounts, the school said, were calculated from the number of classes each teacher carried and how their students did — with the undergraduate-admission rate named outright as a metric.

Online, the story was quickly dubbed "the most hardcore gift" — zui yinghe de liwu, internet slang for a present so substantial it resets the scale. The phrase did real work in the contrast: in Taiyuan the same week, a parents' chat group that crowdfunded 5,000 yuan of cosmetics for a teacher ended in an official inquiry, while here was a school paying a fortune to its teachers, openly, on camera. Chinese social media has spent years arguing about what Teachers' Day gifts actually mean — gratitude, obligation, a bribe with a ribbon — and a principal handing out placards with numbers on them read, to many, as refreshingly honest.

The school's defence of the scheme was that senior-year teachers deserve it: they "get up early and stay up late," a spokesperson told Dahe Daily's report, and the bonus is meant to build "a virtuous cycle" in which the best teachers put their best energy into their students. It is the first year the school has run a dedicated gaokao bonus fund.

But the open secret underneath the applause is what the bonus buys. Taikang is a county of about 1.5 million people in Henan, the province with China's largest gaokao cohort and among its thinnest odds of a place at a top university. For private high schools there, undergraduate-admission rates are the product: they determine enrolment, tuition and survival against rivals in the same market. A 76,000-yuan cheque is not simply generosity — it is a school bidding for next summer's results, and telling its teachers precisely what part of their job the money is for.

That tension is where the debate settled. Some commenters called the bonuses long overdue recognition for the hardest-working teachers in the building; others asked what happens to the students who pull a class average down — and to the subjects, like art and PE, that no placard has ever celebrated.