Navigating Uncertainty: Life-Course Disruption and Provisional Agency Among Chinese Graduate Entrance Exam Retakers

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

This paper examines how young adults navigate temporally structured uncertainty through repeated attempts at China’s National Postgraduate Entrance Examination (commonly known as kaoyan). Drawing on 14 semi-structured interviews with 11 participants conducted between 2022 and 2023, the study analyzes how retaking the exam becomes a strategy for managing disrupted transitions between university and adulthood amid intensified credential competition and constrained mobility opportunities. Rather than experiencing non-admission as a discrete failure, participants often described their first attempt as temporally “unfinished,” shaped by fragmented preparation, institutional disruption, pandemic-era uncertainty, and competing relational obligations. Retaking therefore functioned not simply as repeated educational investment, but as an attempt to realign effort, timing, and future expectations within a synchronized selection system that tightly organizes legitimate pathways of advancement. Participants interpreted disruptions through moralized understandings of discipline, responsibility, and appropriate time use, rendering delay meaningful as investment, adjustment, or waste. To explain how actors sustained forward movement despite uncertain outcomes, this study conceptualizes provisional agency as a temporally oriented form of action grounded in conditional and revisable futures that preserve direction without requiring certainty. By foregrounding the temporal organization of uncertainty, the paper contributes to broader debates on life-course disruption, youth precarity, and institutionalized transition regimes beyond the Chinese context.

Author

• Skylar Li