More on Cheating

Slashdot links to a Reuters story on cheating in Chinese university entry exams:

With 9.5 million students competing for only 2.6 million vacancies, some universities installed cameras and mobile-phone blocking technology at exam halls to foil the cheats.
But students "racked their brains" and in some cases injured themselves with "low-quality devices" to come up with new ways to cheat, state media reported Tuesday, underlining the highly competitive nature of education in China.

What's surprising about this is not that students are willing to go to extreme measures to get into a college in China. (We've discussed this trend in the US recently.) Rather, it's surprising (shocking?) that there are 9.5 million students wanting to get into university and only 2.6 million spots. Wouldn't opening more universities solve this problem, while also providing education to those that want it?

Perhaps there is some reason why the Chinese government does not want their younger generation to be more college-educated. I can imagine that even in China universities would generally be allied with liberalism, and the government certainly might not want that. But with the boom in the Chinese economy and the technological shift that has accompanied it, don't they need a more and more educated workforce as their economy moves into the future?