Short answer: yes. The gaokao's foreign-language paper (外语) is compulsory and worth 150 points, but it does not have to be English. Candidates can choose among English, Japanese, Russian, French, German and Spanish. The language is declared when the student registers for the exam, and the paper counts toward the total in exactly the same way whichever language is chosen.
Who chooses Japanese or Russian? Partly geography and history. Russian has long been taught in some schools in China's northeast, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, regions with historical and trade ties to Russia and Central Asia. Japanese is taught in some schools in the northeast and elsewhere. In recent years, a further group of students has switched from English to Japanese or Russian in senior high school because their English results were weak. Reliable national figures are not consistently published, so precise numbers quoted online should be treated with care.
How the papers differ: in structure, the Japanese and Russian papers broadly mirror the English one, with listening where the province includes it, reading comprehension, a language-use section and a writing task. The syllabuses expect a smaller vocabulary than the English one. Japanese gives Chinese readers a head start through shared characters, though their meanings do not always match; its difficulty lies in particles, conjugation and politeness levels. Russian requires learning a new alphabet and a grammar with six noun cases and paired verb aspects.
The advantages are real for the right student: a fresh start in a language with a smaller required vocabulary can lift a weak foreign-language score. The drawbacks are also real. Some university programmes accept only candidates who took English, or are taught in English; these limits are written into each university's admission rules. At university, the student may still need to take English courses, or must pick a school that offers Japanese or Russian as the general foreign-language course. Not every high school can teach these languages to exam level.
For families outside China trying to understand the system, the key point is that the choice is legitimate and recognised, but it narrows some options while opening others. Anyone considering it should check the admission rules of their target universities and their province's examination authority, since policies differ by province and can change from year to year.