The next time you see an AI breakthrough that blows your mind, hold your applause for a second—check the creator’s name. Chances are, it’s either a Li, Wang, or Zhang, or someone with a pinyin name that’d make Google Translate sweat. From AlphaGo to ChatGPT, the AI arms race might look like a geopolitical tug-of-war, but dig deeper and you’ll find it’s really a showdown between two wildly different education systems. On one side: China’s army of “gaokao grinders” forged by tiger moms wielding math Olympiad textbooks.