New HSK 7-9 Explained: Why the Advanced Levels Test Chengyu

Below HSK 7, Chinese four-character idioms (成语, chéngyǔ) barely appear on the official word lists. At HSK 7-9 they arrive by the hundred. That jump is the clearest sign of what the advanced levels are for, and it says a lot about how written Chinese works.

This guide covers the exam itself (format, timing, how levels are assigned), then the vocabulary, then the chengyu: how many, which kinds, and why an exam aimed at graduate students and professionals leans on a form that is two thousand years old.

---

What HSK 7-9 is

HSK 7-9 is the advanced stage (高等) of the nine-level system set out in the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education (GF0025-2021). It was the first part of the new system to reach candidates. The Beijinger reported CTI's announcement of the first global sitting, held on 26 November 2022 as an internet-based test. Levels 1 to 6 only switch to the new format on 13 December 2026, as explained in HSK 3.0 Launch Date and Your Old HSK 2.0 Certificate.

The official Chinese Tests Service Website (chinesetest.cn) describes the intended candidates as international students on master's and doctoral programmes in China, students majoring in Chinese, and professionals working in Chinese in academic, economic, cultural and technological exchange.

One exam, three levels

There is no separate "HSK 8 paper". Everyone sits the same exam, and the result places them in one of four bands: Below HSK 7, HSK 7, HSK 8 or HSK 9. According to chinesetest.cn, the band is decided from ability values calculated with Item Response Theory, a statistical model that weighs which questions you answered as well as how many. It also takes into account the content and difficulty of the items. The score report gives five separate scores, one per skill, each on a 0-100 scale.

The format

From the test structure published on chinesetest.cn:

Section	Items	Time	What it contains
Listening	40	about 33 min	News reports, business negotiations, debates, interviews, lectures, documentaries
Reading	40	50 min	News, scientific articles, survey reports, academic literature, Chinese culture
Writing	2	55 min	Describe and analyse a chart; argue a position on a given topic
Translation	4	42 min	Explanatory, narrative and argumentative texts, from a foreign language into Chinese, written and oral
Speaking	5	about 20 min	Paraphrase or respond to documents, narratives and arguments
Total	91	about 200 min	60 objective and 31 subjective items

The exam is internet-based only. The published timetable runs listening, reading, writing and translation from 13:00 to 16:00 with one break, then oral translation and speaking from 16:30 to 17:00.

Two things stand out. First, a third of the items are subjective, meaning written or spoken answers marked by people rather than multiple choice. Second, the source material is the register of newspapers, reports and lectures. That is exactly the register where chengyu do their heaviest work.

The vocabulary: 5,600 new entries

The 2025 HSK Syllabus numbers its vocabulary from level 1 upward. HSK 6 ends at entry 5,400. The HSK 7-9 list adds 5,600 entries, ending at 11,000. The character lists grow the same way: 1,148 more characters to recognise (3,088 in total) and 500 more to write by hand (1,200 in total).

Levels 7, 8 and 9 share this one list. The syllabus does not split it into a level 7 part and a level 9 part, which fits the single-exam design: the list defines the territory, and your result shows how much of it you command.

For how these totals compare with the old six-level exam, see HSK 3.0 vs HSK 2.0: Every Change Explained.

The chengyu jump, in numbers

Counting four-character entries in the syllabus word list makes the shift plain:

Levels	Four-character entries
HSK 1-6 combined	26
HSK 7-9	430

Not every four-character entry is an idiom. The lower levels' 26 include ordinary compounds like 人工智能 (réngōng zhìnéng, artificial intelligence) and 二氧化碳 (èryǎnghuàtàn, carbon dioxide). The advanced list likewise contains 百科全书 (bǎikē quánshū, encyclopedia). But the great majority of the 430 are chengyu, and 195 of them have their own explained pages on this site, several of which are linked below.

The syllabus sets this up before level 7. Its task outline asks HSK 5 candidates to introduce "common Chinese folk sayings, chengyu and famous quotations" (民间俗语、成语、名言名句) and to write a short text about one. HSK 6 candidates should be able to write an article on classical poetry, chengyu or sayings. The HSK 7-9 topic outline then goes to the sources themselves. It lists the major events and figures of Chinese history, and the main ideas and representative thinkers of Confucianism and Daoism (儒家, 道家). Those are the texts most of the stories below come from.

Why the advanced levels need chengyu

The format table above is the real answer. Chengyu are compression: four characters that carry a whole story or argument. That makes them the natural vocabulary of exactly the texts HSK 7-9 is built on.

News and reports. A Chinese news writer can say a city's skyline is changing 日新月异 (rì xīn yuè yì, "new every day, different every month") instead of spending a clause on it. Policy language leans on fixed formulas like 因地制宜 (yīn dì zhì yí, adapting to local conditions), 实事求是 (shí shì qiú shì, seeking truth from facts) and 求同存异 (qiú tóng cún yì, seeking common ground while keeping differences). A reader who has to translate these word by word is too slow for a 50-minute reading section.

Argument. The writing section asks you to defend a position. Chengyu are the hinges of Chinese argumentative prose: 总而言之 (zǒng ér yán zhī, in sum), 不言而喻 (bù yán ér yù, it goes without saying), 归根到底 (guī gēn dào dǐ, in the final analysis), 相辅相成 (xiāng fǔ xiāng chéng, complementing each other). Used well, they mark an essay as fluent. Used wrongly, they mark it just as fast.

Translation into Chinese. The translation section runs from a foreign language into Chinese. Rendering "they all arrived at the same idea without consulting each other" as 不约而同 (bù yuē ér tóng) is the difference between a correct translation and a natural one.

The stories behind the list

A large share of the HSK 7-9 chengyu are compressed stories from texts written more than two thousand years ago. Knowing the story is the fastest way to know the usage, because the story is the meaning:

• The Han Feizi. A farmer of Song sees a hare break its neck on a tree stump and stops ploughing to wait for another: 守株待兔 (shǒu zhū dài tù), waiting passively for luck. A man of Chu boasts that his spears pierce anything and his shields stop anything: 自相矛盾 (zì xiāng máo dùn), contradicting oneself. The modern word for "contradiction", 矛盾, comes from that story.
• The Lüshi Chunqiu. A man drops his sword from a boat and marks the boat's side to find it later: 刻舟求剑 (kè zhōu qiú jiàn), clinging to a method after circumstances have moved on. A thief covers his own ears so as not to hear the bell he is stealing: 掩耳盗铃 (yǎn ěr dào líng), self-deception.
• The Strategies of the Warring States. A man finishes drawing a snake first, then loses the wager by adding feet: 画蛇添足 (huà shé tiān zú). Mending the pen after losing the sheep is not too late: 亡羊补牢 (wáng yáng bǔ láo). A traveller heads north to reach the southern state of Chu: 南辕北辙 (nán yuán běi zhé).
• The Mencius. A farmer pulls up his seedlings to help them grow and kills the crop: 揠苗助长 (yà miáo zhù zhǎng).
• The Zhuangzi. A frog in a broken well boasts to a great turtle of the Eastern Sea about the splendours of its puddle: 井底之蛙 (jǐng dǐ zhī wā). A monkey keeper calms his monkeys by switching three-in-the-morning-four-at-night to four-and-three: 朝三暮四 (zhāo sān mù sì).
• History. Zhao Kuo, the general who knew every military text and lost an army: 纸上谈兵 (zhǐ shàng tán bīng), all theory and no practice. Mao Sui, dismissed with the jibe that real talent shows like an awl's point through a bag, answered that if he had been put in the bag earlier, the whole blade would have broken through: 脱颖而出 (tuō yǐng ér chū), to stand out.

Pairs like these are where advanced candidates slip. 守株待兔 and 刻舟求剑 both describe rigid thinking, but the first is about waiting for luck to repeat and the second is about failing to notice change. An exam with 31 human-marked items will notice which one you chose.

Beyond stories: the other kinds on the list

Not every advanced chengyu has a famous anecdote. Three other groups are worth studying as sets:

• Patterned description. Number and direction frames that paint a scene: 五花八门 (wǔ huā bā mén, all kinds of), 七嘴八舌 (qī zuǐ bā shé, everyone talking at once), 四面八方 (sì miàn bā fāng, from all directions), 东张西望 (dōng zhāng xī wàng, glancing around).
• Character judgements. The vocabulary of references and evaluations: 一丝不苟 (yī sī bù gǒu, meticulous), 德才兼备 (dé cái jiān bèi, both virtuous and able), 见义勇为 (jiàn yì yǒng wéi, acting bravely for what is right), 光明磊落 (guāng míng lěi luò, open and above-board).
• Persistence and effort. 持之以恒 (chí zhī yǐ héng, to persevere), 锲而不舍 (qiè ér bù shě, to keep carving without stopping), 循序渐进 (xún xù jiàn jìn, step by step), 半途而废 (bàn tú ér fèi, to give up halfway). The last is the one to avoid with 5,600 entries ahead.

How to study them

Learn chengyu the way the exam uses them, not as a list:

1. Story first, gloss second. If you know the hare and the stump, you will never confuse 守株待兔 with 刻舟求剑.
2. Learn the register. Many advanced chengyu are formal. 众所周知 (zhòng suǒ zhōu zhī, as everyone knows) belongs in an essay or a speech, not a text message.
3. Practise in sentences you would write. The writing and translation sections reward chengyu that fit the sentence around them, not chengyu dropped in for show.

A good next step is the 12 Chinese idioms for HSK 7-9, alongside the HSK 6 idioms that bridge into them. For the everyday vocabulary underneath, the HSK hub and its HSK 6 page cover the levels below.