Rise of China's Creative Class? (The Diplomat)

Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class explores the thinking and lifestyle of the 30 million Americans responsible for the creativity that fuels the 21st century global marketplace. In his study, Florida explains that creative individuals are drawn not to workplaces and urban settings that offer the highest pay or tallest skyscrapers, but to places that can stretch their creativity and identity. They typically want to do challenging work with motivated people in a diverse and open workplace, and they want to live in cities where they can attend jazz festivals in the evenings and go hiking on the weekends. With the creative class, there’s a blurring of work and leisure so that creative individuals structure every minute of their lives in the pursuit of the new experiences and stimulations that are the font of their creativity.

China may be the world’s second-largest economy, but its assembly line and sweatshop economy is still worlds apart from the creative economies of the United States, Israel, and northern Europe. For the Chinese economy to maintain its trajectory it needs to become creative, and for that to happen it needs to re-structure its school system from one that focuses on tests to one that centers around experiences.

Two years ago, we created the Peking University High School International Division as a laboratory to see if and how creativity can be taught in Chinese schools. In one week in early June, we moved all our students and staff down to Yangshuo, China to replicate the lifestyle and workplace of the creative class.

In the mornings, we had our students go rock climbing or biking in the countryside, and in the afternoons we had them work in groups to teach at a local elementary school.

In our first day, our students reacted the way you would expect Chinese students to respond. In the great outdoors, the students complained about the mud and bugs, and in the classroom, they lectured to their young children with the same intense monotony that they were lectured to when they were six years-old. A student group wanted to structure their class in the following manner: have the children take an English examination the first day, then do corrections the second day, and then re-take it again the next. (They told me they were joking, but I wasn’t amused.)

That evening, we sat down with our students, and reflected on their experiences. We discussed things that work for some groups (getting the fifteen children to sit in circles, structuring lessons around playing games, building bonds with children and giving them individual attention), and things that needed to be improved upon (standing around the room looking bored, handing out gifts to students who got answers right, complaining about how loud and chaotic six year-olds are).

After the teacher-facilitated reflection and discussion in the evening, each group would sit down by itself for two hours to tinker with its teaching strategy. One group threw out a lesson plan that would put some college courses to shame, and instead had their fifth grade class work in groups building cardboard models of houses. Afterwards, they told us it was so much more challenging and strenuous to help their fifth graders work out group conflicts than to just lecture at them; also, the fifth graders were having so much fun they refused to go home.

Many Chinese parents believe that if they want their kids to work hard at school then kids need to be pampered at home – and need above all else to avoid physical exertion. Our students were working so hard at teaching in the classroom that we wanted them to relax by pushing themselves even harder in the mornings. We had a group of our students bike uphill for three hours one morning, and afterwards they bragged as much about their accomplishment as those who spent an hour overcoming their fear of heights and scaling a hilltop.

At the end of the trip, we explained to our students how their Yangshuo experience will help them become the vanguard of China’s creative class. By understanding their classrooms as an ever changing dynamic of a group of distinct individuals with their own special needs and abilities, our students were learning to be effective managers.

And by reflecting upon and discussing in groups their class performance, our students were internalizing this mental process, and thus becoming effective problem-solvers. In his book Adapt, Tim Hartford explains that creativity comes not from inspiration, but from perspiration: figuring out what the problem is, trying a solution, honestly assessing the solution’s limitations, tinkering with the solution until it works – or just starting anew.

But more than developing a knowledge base or a skill set, being part of the creative class means adopting a value system. It means wanting to go faster than you ever have on a mountain bike despite the mud and the rain; it means being scared and exhausted in the middle of a hill, and searching deep for the mental discipline and physical reserves to make it to the top; it means seeing into the minds of the elementary schoolchildren, and helping them see into the minds of others.

As Richard Florida wrote in his book, creative individuals seek to live each moment to the fullest, always pushing themselves out of their comfort zone, and striving to be their individual best and beyond. And if China is to move forward, its schools need to move beyond the rigidity of tests and into the openness of experiences.

What Israel Can Teach China

Here's a news flash: China isn't creative.

That’s something I’ve argued before, and in September 2010, I created Peking University High School International Division as a laboratory to see if and how creativity can be taught in China.

Last week, twenty students and I traveled to Israel for six days to study what makes Israel “a start-up nation,” as Dan Senor and Saul Singer call it in their New York Times bestseller. With a diverse population of eight million, Israel lacks water, oil, and land, is encircled by hostile neighbors, and is a terrorist target. (Not to mention the international condemnations it gets for its treatment of the Palestinians.) Yet, despite all this, it has become arguably the world’s most dynamic economy. It has 4,000 start-up companies, attracts almost one-third of the world’s venture capital, and more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ exchange than companies from Europe.

Start-Up Nation tells us that Israel is so innovative because of its culture of “tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combine with a unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity.” And that’s what we experienced as we traveled from the sun-soaked stone city of Jerusalem to the rolling hills of Haifa to the Mediterranean coast of Tel Aviv.

In Jerusalem, we learned that Judaism has survived several millennia of persecution because it dares to innovate. Walking around the ruins of the Second Temple, our guide, himself a former rabbi from California, explained to us how Judaism was once a stagnant and hierarchical religion based on animal sacrifice. After the Romans burned down the Second Temple, Judaism’s heart and soul, in the year 70 in retaliation against Jewish revolt, Jews no longer had a place to make their sacrifice to God. Faced with the possible extinction of their religion, Judaism responded by re-inventing itself into the modern rabbinical tradition, one based on interpretation and on prayer. “Each generation now has the right to re-define Judaism for itself,” our guide told us. And this tradition has helped Israel today to re-imagine its most pressing problems into its most lucrative opportunities.

Take, for instance, Israel’s water problem. Nature provides barely enough water for Israel, and that’s why in 1993 the Technion, Israel’s institute of technology and de facto laboratory, created the Water Research Institute. The Institute brings together the university’s top engineers, chemists, biologists, and physicists, who collaborate together to solve Israel’s water problem. Right now, the Water Research Institute is building a new “water-wise” building, which aims to meet 80 percent of its water needs by harvesting rainwater on its roof, and recycling “gray” water from showers and sinks. It’s also helping the Israeli government desalinate the Sea of Galilee in an eco-friendly and energy-efficient way. These are technologies and management systems that once developed can be profitably exported to countries that have severe water shortages. (For example, China.)

If China is the world’s sweatshop then Israel is the world’s laboratory. China needs to learn to become a laboratory if it is to survive the environmental pollution, financial mismanagement, and social inequity that derive from being the world’s sweatshop.

So how can our Chinese students become the creative talent that China needs? And what makes Israel so innovative? Israel’s answer is, as always, short and simple: Ask questions.

These two words in fact represent the cultural chasm that divides Israel and China. As Start-Up Nation mentions, Israel lacks hierarchy and formality so that when we visited a public high school in Tel Aviv, we saw teachers interrupt the principal, and learned that Israelis consider “shyness” a learning disability. When I asked an Israeli 14-year-old girl how much homework she does at night, she responded with “Why are you asking me this question?” Israel is a radically different world for my students, many of whom have already been on school trips to the United States and Botswana. In these two countries, our students discovered it was encouraged to ask questions, and to stand out. In Israel, they were told it was rude not to ask questions, and if you don’t stand out then you’re a loser.

To ask questions is not simply to raise your hand and open your mouth, which are difficult enough for many a Chinese student. It entails a radical re-ordering of how you relate to yourself, and to the world around you – it requires a flattening of the world, the centering of the world around yourself, and ultimately a willingness to overturn the world if need be. That’s what makes Israel such an innovative culture, yet also why so many other cultures find Israelis difficult to deal with.

If China is to be creative, it simply can’t declare it a national priority, or just send Chinese students overseas. It needs to re-imagine its society from one that is hierarchal and stagnant to one that is free and open, just as Judaism did two thousand years ago. While it was hard for our students to speak out, to challenge authority, and to ask questions, they in fact did learn to do so. And they discovered they like it. While we were at the Technion, our students peppered a Technion biology professor with so many questions that he couldn’t finish his presentation on genetically modified foods even after he stayed half an hour longer than he had planned. Instead of walking away angry, he did so impressed, like a true Israeli.

If Chinese must ask a question they often ask “why.” For example, why visit Israel? If China is to be truly creative, it needs to learn from the Israelis, and start asking “why not?”

To learn more about our trips to Israel and Botswana please visit our student blog at blog.sina.com.cn/ourvoices2011.

What Finland Can Teach China (The Diplomat)

I’ve just finished a week visiting Finnish schools, and on my last day, while touring Finland’s best high school, I ran into China’s vice minister of education, who was spending the day in Helsinki looking at what China can learn from the world’s best K-12 school system. If the vice minister were to ask me what parts of Finland’s education system I thought China could and should emulate (he didn’t) I’d tell him there were two things. First is Finland’s pre-kindergarten system, in which children as young as nine months-old can attend until they are six. In each class, four university-educated teachers supervise about twenty children as they play sports, eat meals, and sleep together. This voluntary and pay-as-you-can daycare may seem costly, but it’s the best investment a society can make if it wants to ensure equality of opportunity for its children. That’s because this daycare system helps close the achievement gap between rich and poor kids. Researchers at the University of Kansas have reported that by the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children raised in well-educated families, and this is as true in China as it is in the United States. Because Finnish children spend their day talking with and playing with university-educated professionals, it empowers them with such a large vocabulary that when they do start school they learn more quickly than their Western peers. More important, this daycare system takes children who might be from violent and volatile homes, and puts them in a safe and predictable learning space. Research has found that children whose parents can’t be trusted to put food on the table (or to even just be present) will develop long-term issues with self-esteem and self-control, leading to poor test scores and relationship issues. The second thing that I think China can emulate is Finnish education’s emphasis on empathy, which starts at daycare. From the moment they enter school, Finnish children are taught to help each other, and to appreciate difference and diversity. Students as young as 14 years-old can define for me that empathy is “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, and knowing how he or she thinks and feels” because they’re taught that by their parents and teachers, and given the space to develop it by playing with their friends, dating, and working part-time. Cultural sensitivity is as much a national pride as self-reliance and Nokia, and English textbooks emphasize tolerance as much as syntax. Empathy is an education imperative because Finns want first and foremost a polite and orderly society. But empathy can also lead to an innovation economy. It permits Finns to work together, and to understand and access foreign markets. Emotional intelligence also often leads to creativity, something that China is desperately searching for now. Unfortunately, China’s vice minister of education didn’t see Finland’s focus on equity and empathy while he was in Helsinki. The school where I ran into the vice minister’s delegation is considered the top school in Finland, producing many of the nation’s doctors, lawyers, and professors. It lets in only the nation’s best students, focuses on preparing them for the college entrance exams, wins more international science and math competitions than any other school in Finland, and offers the elite International Baccalaureate program. In a chemistry classroom, a teacher told the vice minister that her students did at least two hours of homework a day (most Finnish high school students I’ve spoken with don’t do any), and the vice minister paid the students the highest compliment: “I only wish that Chinese students could work as hard as you!” The students laughed proudly. The student council president joined us during the tour, and asked me what I thought of the school, and I said that the school seemed too academic and too conservative. He replied that the problem is that Finland’s college entrance exam rewarded rote memorization. Once he and his classmates graduated from high school, they had half a year to memorize five thick textbooks. There was so much new information to memorize that everyone in the school had to pay good money to learn test-taking strategies from cram courses. (An alternative to all this is to do what most Finnish students actually do, and just not care.) Then and there, it dawned on me the irony of the situation: The Chinese vice minister had traveled nine hours by plane to find himself in a Finnish school that most resembles a school he could have just walked to from his office. There was one major difference, however. The vice minister asked the principal if the school had an entrance examination, and the principal replied that the 180 students were admitted each year based on their grade point average in junior high school – and that’s it. And that’s it? For any one who’s worked in Chinese education, this answer can only raise more questions: What do you do about guanxi (network of relationships)? How do you know their GPAs are real? What if 10,000 kids apply with perfect school records? What the vice minister didn’t understand is that most Finnish parents would rather have their child drop out of school than have him or her attend an institution that motivates students to chase high test scores. When a junior high principal heard I was about to visit Finland’s best school, she blurted out, “That school has five suicides a year!” That, of course, wasn’t true, but during my visit when I asked a teacher if the school was as truly stressful and competitive as people say, she replied, “Well, not so much as ten years ago.” After the vice minister and his delegation left, I had a roundtable discussion with students, and they told me they were concerned that Helsinki was cutting back funding to high schools, including theirs. That means that, during high school, they will no longer take courses at the University of Helsinki, and advanced level physics and math. They told me that Finland’s success on international tests like the PISA was making the country complacent. I didn’t tell them this, but I think that Finns care about the problems of elite students even less than they care about PISA. What the Finns fundamentally believe is that the best students have so many advantages that they don’t need any more, and that’s why Finns are cutting back funding to their elite schools, but not to their daycare system. This is an attitude that China’s vice premier would have benefited from hearing. Unfortunately, because of the school he visited, he could only come away all the more convinced of the deep-rooted Chinese belief that national school systems are secretly like China’s if they’re any good, or secretly want to be like China’s if they’re not.

Inside Shanghai's Schools (The Diplomat)

Ever since it topped the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, Shanghai schools have been the envy of the world. Last week, I visited Shanghai to get a sense of how it’s educating the world’s smartest 15 year-olds. I found all the school principals I met with to be dedicated, their schools well-funded, their students disciplined, and their teachers responsible (teachers only teach nine hours a week, but use the rest of their workday to prepare for class, mark homework, attend training workshops, and tutor their failing students). In other words, I found Shanghai’s schools to be like Shanghai itself: organized and efficient. But I also discovered that while seemingly open and progressive, Shanghai schools are burdened by an impossible mission: They have to educate high-performing test-takers who are happy and creative. Shanghai education officials know that the stress on tests is killing children’s curiosity and creativity, and so they decree that elementary school children must have an hour of sports and not more than half an hour of homework each day, and that schools must not stream students and must not have weekend classes. But principals will be promoted based on test scores. Only the top 60 percent of Shanghai students can go on to high schools. Starting in grade six, there are district-wide examinations each year for four years, culminating in the high school entrance examination (the zhongkao). That means starting in sixth grade, each student and each school is ranked publicly. Those schools that are just not making the cut will either face a parent revolt or a student exodus. What’s more, the government, concerned with social opportunity, demands that all students reach a minimum score on the zhongkao (which forces schools to secretly stream students and secretly tutor those failing). These contradictions manifest themselves in Shanghai classrooms in tragi-comical ways. In the first primary school I visited, my host, Miss Zhang, told me she had to fight tooth and nail against teacher and parent opposition to ensure that her 600 students got 30 minutes of playtime in the morning and in the afternoon. Her school is one of the city’s “creative education” laboratories, and she showed me her digital classroom where students could design furniture and clothes. The classroom was equipped with a 3-D printer and a hologram projector, and there was another play classroom that displayed Transformers made of Lego parts. These rooms were neat and orderly, always with a teacher on hand to ensure that the kids were playing creatively in a neat and orderly manner. In art class, students made clay dolls, and Miss Zhang proudly showed me how creative her first-graders were. Neatly stacked at the back of the room, the dolls were beautiful, although they all looked the same, and Miss Zhang told me that the parents had “helped.” The dolls were of “Lil’ Create,” the school’s official creativity mascot who encourages kids to be open and curious explorers. “Lil’ Create” in posters around the school and in the comics given to students exhorted the kids to see creativity as “a pleasure, a habit, and an ideal.” (Only in China could they turn “creativity” into a political movement.) In the next elementary school I visited, the principal there, Mr. Zhang, waxed eloquently about his “sunshine education.” He had TVs positioned all around the school, blaring all day about how students shouldn’t do too much homework, or get stressed over tests. He showed me his digital classroom where his fourth-graders were coloring in pictures, as surveillance cameras monitored their every movement (one young boy who sat near one of the cameras stopped coloring, and sat transfixed by the large black eye that was staring back at him). In the next room, there were monitors that showed the children coloring. Mr. Zhang explained that the point of the surveillance technology was that teachers could monitor how full of sunshine the kids were at being able to color, without being disturbed. When we visited an empty classroom, I picked up one of the student backpacks, and commented how heavy it was for a second-grader. Mr. Zhang opened the backpack, saw the ten textbooks neatly packed inside, pulled out the pencil case, and started blaming the pencil case for making the bag so heavy: “When I was young, our pencil cases were so much lighter.” Then his assistant looked for a backpack that didn’t weigh twenty pounds. We couldn’t find one, and so Mr. Zhang explained to me that the issue was the classroom didn’t have lockers, and so the students were forced to use their backpacks as lockers – they don’t actually take the backpacks home. We saw four fourth-graders sweeping their classroom, and I began talking to them. I asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up. The first two kids didn’t know, and the third said he wanted to be a police officer so he could help the motherland by catching pickpockets, and the fourth thought that was a pretty good answer, and so said, “Yeah, what he said.” Then I asked the kids what they did after school. Their bodies shook uncomfortably, and one of them accidentally told the truth: “We do homework until at least eight.” And at that point Mr. Zhang kicked me out of the school. (I’m used to getting kicked out of Chinese schools.) Mr. Zhang’s “sunshine education,” like every other new slogan or idea in Chinese schools, was something that was for show, and if he were serious his school wouldn’t be oversubscribed, forcing him to convert dance studios into classrooms. (I also noticed that his classrooms had on average 43 students when Shanghai has limited elementary school classrooms to forty students.) During my Shanghai visit, I had an opportunity to converse with four Shanghainese seventh-graders at a new private Western-style boarding school catering to the growing minority of progressive parents who could afford to opt out of the Shanghai’s public school system. All four were happy with their experience so far; “I finally have control over my own life,” one freckle-faced boy told me with joy and pride in his face. When I asked them about how much homework they had to do in elementary school one cherub-faced boy begged me to stop asking. With his head hung low, he said in a failing voice, “I don’t want to re-live that trauma.”

China's Economy After the Crisis (The Diplomat)

Economist Nicholas Lardy has a new book out called Sustaining China’s Economic Growth After the Global Financial Crisis, a lucid and pithy exploration of China’s economic weaknesses, and how Beijing can grapple with them. In Lardy’s analysis, the Chinese economy is “unbalanced”; it relies too much on exports and residential property prices to fuel its economy, two distortions and dependencies that favor certain interests at the expense of the nation. Consider exports. China has created a global addiction to its cheap goods, but with consequences for its environment and to its economy, as well as the global economy. China subsidizes its exporters with cheap power and water, as well as easy access to bank loans. Then there’s how China undervalues its currency, which in turn has led to distortions in the global economy. But despite government subsidies, China’s export industries make little money if at all, which forces the government to subsidize them even more; the Chinese have raised “corporate welfare” to a whole new level. Then there are the urban real estate bubbles, fueled by what Lardy calls “financial repression”: low bank interest rates that tax depositors, and a scarcity of investment vehicles. To put in perspective the real estate bubble, consider this statistic: “After 2003, the urban population increased by an average of only 19 million annually, but average residential housing investment of 6.8 percent of GDP was two-thirds larger than in 2000-2003, and annual residential housing starts soared from 490 million square meters in 2004 to 1,290 million square meters in 2010.” These economic trends have led Premier Wen Jiabao himself to call China’s growth “unsteady, imbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” Lardy frames the problem and solution more technically and diplomatically, while calling for a bold shake-up of China’s economy: “The central thesis of this study is that the evidence from the past seven or eight years shows that modest, marginal, incremental economic reforms will not lead to a fundamental rebalancing of China’s economy. Underlying financial distortions – including administrative controls that keep deposit interest rates low, an undervalued exchange rate, subsidized energy, and so forth – are contributing to a significant ongoing misallocation of resources throughout the Chinese economy. These distortions contribute to a low share of wages and a high share of corporate profits in national income; a low share of household disposable income in GDP; a high share of savings and a low share of consumption in household disposable income, and thus a low share of private consumption in GDP; a high share of household savings allocated to housing; an elevated share of investment in GDP; and a still large external surplus. A much more concerted and sustained effort is needed to remove underlying financial distortions if China’s economic imbalances are to be reversed.” Lardy lists four fiscal policy measures to “re-balance” the Chinese economy from one that’s driven by exports and real estate bubbles to one driven by domestic spending and services. First, the government needs to stimulate private spending by cutting personal taxes, as well as spend more on social goods such as health, education, welfare, and pensions. Second, the government needs to stop controlling interest rates on both deposits and loans, allowing capital to flow more efficiently to entrepreneurs instead of directing it towards state-owned enterprises. Third, it needs to increase the value of the renminbi. Finally, it needs to stop subsidizing state-owned enterprises with cheap commodity prices as well as cheap access to capital. While these solutions sound both complicated and expensive, Lardy makes a compelling argument they’re neither. Beijing itself has the power and mechanisms to liberalize bank loans and the renminbi’s exchange rate, and needs not convince the provinces to go along (which would be politically impossible). More important, the costs of not doing anything are just too great for China’s political system to bear. Currently, China’s economy is structured to benefit state-owned enterprise and real estate companies, creating a situation where China is helping the rich get richer at the cost of a vibrant society, a clean environment, and a healthy economy. Financial liberalization would break this stranglehold of the vested interests, and help build a more rational and robust economy: depositors’ money would go to companies that actually make money, creating more jobs, increasing real wages, and slowly weaning China off its unsustainable dependency on exports to fuel growth. So, if the solution is this straightforward and simple – and the consequences of the problem so dire and dangerous – then why hasn’t China acted already? Is it because financial liberalization isn’t a priority for the team of President Hu Jintao and Wen? Is it because they’re not powerful enough to enforce their views on the rest of the Politburo? Is it because they’re heading out the door, and would rather have the new team of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang deal with the problem? I have my own theory, which I explained in a previous post: Considering how poor and populated, chaotic and unmanageable China is, it’s in the long-term best interests of China’s elite to behave like parasites and predators. China’s elite are enriching themselves by bankrupting the state, and, already having shifted assets and family abroad, will continue to do so until the state itself collapses. We’ve seen this behavior consistently throughout Chinese history, most recently with Chiang Kai-shek’s misrule that permitted the Communists to rise to power. And now, as the Chinese would say, history is about to complete yet another circle.

China's Hunger Games (The Diplomat)

Breaking North American box office records and winning over audiences and critics alike last weekend was the movie adaptation of the first part of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling teen science fiction trilogy The Hunger Games. The movie has inevitably been compared with the 2000 Japanese hit movie Battle Royale, where a former high school teacher, at the behest of the Japanese government, kidnaps his former ninth grade class and forces them to kill each other on a remote island until only one is left standing. In the dystopian The Hunger Games, after a holocaust has wiped out most of North America, the prosperous metropolis Capitol enslaves and starves 12 surrounding districts. Each year, for 75 years now, as a way to both entertain the masses as well as remind them of their failed rebellion and subjugation, the Capitol organizes the Hunger Games circus, where two teenagers from each district must compete in a “Battle Royale” last-man-standing scenario. Some adults have observed that the Hunger Games’ immense popularity among adults and teenagers is linked in part to its publication date: 2008, when the sub-prime crisis hit and Lehman Brothers collapsed, ultimately leading to the birth of the Occupy movement. But while that helps explain its enduring appeal among adults, it doesn’t explain its appeal among teenagers. To understand that, it’s important to note that the Hunger Games trilogy has many antecedents: the books of Roald Dahl, the animated movies of Hayao Miyazaki, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and other cultural works held deep in the hearts of children for articulating their deep distrust and disgust of the adult world’s obsession with power, and especially with what Holden Caulfield famously called “phoniness.” Indeed, in the final part of the Hunger Games trilogy (spoiler alert!), the heroine Katniss Everdeen, after having survived two battles to the death because of her purity and resolve, becomes a pawn in a power struggle that could ultimately wipe out humanity. In many ways, the closest comparison to the Hunger Games isn’t Battle Royale, but Orson Scott Card’s science fiction series Ender’s Game, where a boy prodigy is manipulated by adults into wiping out an alien species: both are terribly written and plotted out to the angst and disgust of adults, and both capture the imagination of teenagers because it articulates in their terms their angst and disgust with adults. And this mutual angst and disgust is natural and healthy, as Judith Rich Harris so convincingly argues in The Nurture Assumption. For decades, both psychologists and parents believed they mattered to teenagers’ development, when in fact evolution endowed teenagers with enough imagination, resilience, and empathy to survive in a world without adults as long as they had each other. It doesn’t matter if children listen to Mozart or are taken to the museum on weekends, if they’re an only child or if their parents are divorced – but it does matter to their social, intellectual, and emotional development if they are given the space to develop and maintain a close circle of friends. And, for a variety of reasons, our children are being given less time to be children and to associate with other children. In fact, modern day parents in many parts of the world have developed a paranoia about protecting their child from other children. The antithesis of the Hunger Games, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, so eloquently encapsulates the adult fear of the brutality of the teenage mind that it’s a pity it’s not true: If you strand a group of teenagers on an island, no matter where they came from, they would learn to help each other. In fact, psychologists have discovered that if you put a group of teenagers who don’t speak the same language together they quickly develop a new pidgin language to communicate with each other – and to do so would require a level of trust and co-operation among teenagers that, judging from the way we regulate our schools, we adults had always assumed they weren’t capable of. The Nurture Assumption’s message to psychologists and parents is so right it’s unnerving: Leave the kids alone, and they’ll still do fine without us. So what’s neither natural nor healthy is how across the world we adults have institutionalized supervision and control over every corner of our children’s lives that was thought neither desirable nor possible a generation ago. In both America and China, parents circle over their children as they do homework or play soccer or go on “playdates” with their carefully vetted friends, and quarrel with their teachers over their children’s grades and their coaches over playing time. America’s version of the Hunger Games is the Ivy League admissions game, and China’s version of the Hunger Games is the national college entrance examination or gaokao system. In all these zero-sum last-man-standing games, teenagers deprive themselves of sleep, friendship, and compassion in order to please and entertain the adults who supposedly love them most, but who instead are fixated on winning bets and bragging rights within their social networks. In the Hunger Games, the Capitol cannibalizes the youth of the surrounding districts to deprive them of the nourishment of hope and a sense of the future – the endless possibilities and the regenerative spirit that the young represent. The Capitol is both rational and honest about why it cannibalizes the world’s youth like that. But we are neither. So now, do we begin to understand why teenagers around the world love the Hunger Games so much?

Understanding China (The Diplomat)

Western observers often describe China as “inscrutable,” but perhaps a lot of the mystery surrounding the Chinese condition comes from the fact that Western eyes are so focused on China’s culture and history that they are blind to China’s geography and demographics, which are ultimately the roots of the culture and history. To explain China, we need to understand three basic principles about China: 1) China is so vast in terms of land and people that it sees itself as an enclosed universe onto itself. 2) China’s overpopulation and its limited natural resources mean that the Chinese economy and political system are both based on a national zero sum game of exploiting the peasantry. 3) This exploitation of the peasantry is so convenient and lucrative it becomes the elite’s raison d’etre, which in turn leads to a stagnant inward-looking authoritarian political order and philosophy that fears progressive ideas as much as peasant rebellions. To see how these three principles explain China, consider Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. It’s a brilliant biography which attempts, through the prism of the extraordinary career of one of America’s finest tactical field commanders, to explain how an army of one million Japanese could overrun a nation of 400 million, and why once Chiang Kai-shek had successfully manipulated the United States into helping China against Japan he began demanding bribes for defending China. In becoming Chiang Kai-shek’s advisor and director of America’s Lend-Lease program in China, the Sinophile Joseph Stilwell wanted to infuse Chinese soldiers with the American fighting spirit of individual initiative he had seen so triumphantly prevail over the ancien regimes of Europe in World War I. Stillwell’s major enemy in teaching the Chinese to stand up for themselves wasn’t the Japanese, but Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese ancien regime he so personified: “It was a long time before Stilwell could bring himself to admit that Chiang did not really want a well-trained, well-equipped fighting force; that such a force represented to him less a boon than a threat; that he feared that an effective 30 divisions might come under a new leader or group, undermining or challenging his own control, and that Stilwell’s proposal to remove incompetent commanders would remove those loyal and beholden to him; that he was not interested in an army that could fight the Japanese but only in one that could sustain him internally; that for this believed it sufficed to have more divisions and more guns, planes and tanks than the Communists.” Chiang thought like so many Chinese leaders before him, believing that China’s size and culture would eventually shallow the invader, and thus his priority was to maintain his position within China, not strengthen China’s position in the world: “[Chiang] had made the same choice as his predecessor, Prince Kung, Regent at the time of the Taiping Rebellion, who said the rebels were a disease of China’s vitals, the barbarians an affliction only of the limbs.” Much more painful for Stillwell, a general who prided himself on his closeness to and compassion for the infantryman, was to see the contempt the Chinese elite had towards the people they led, a contempt borne out of both fear and reliance. One of Chiang’s officers told Stilwell that one battle’s 600,000 Chinese casualties was “really a good thing [because] Chinese soldiers are all bandits, robbers, thieves, and rascals. So we send them to the front and they get killed off and in that way we are eliminating our bad elements.” Educated at West Point, Stillwell was from a distinguished military family, and was shocked to hear from the same officer that “the Chinese learned long ago to make the lower classes do the fighting. At first the nobles fought, but they soon got over that and made the people do it for them.” Soon enough, Stilwell witnessed for himself the Chinese elite’s callousness. While Stilwell was in India preparing for the Burma offensive, the Chinese soldiers sent to his command were packed on a cargo plane and naked because their officers thought “it would be foolish to waste uniforms if the men were to be given new ones anyway.” When an American officer complained to his Chinese counterpart with a list of the soldiers who froze to death on the plane, the Chinese offer threw the list into the garbage can. Stilwell eventually became so disgusted with Chiang’s regime that he compared America’s Asian ally to its European nemesis: “a one-party government, supported by a Gestapo and headed by an unbalanced man with little education.” But Tuchman, armed with the hindsight of history and perspective, understood that Chiang’s situation was as hopeless as Stilwell’s mission of reform was impossible. China’s size and population made it unmanageable and ungovernable, and those who rose to the top could not lead, but at best hang on: “For a hundred years the Chinese had struggled to unburden themselves of misgovernment only to have each effort of reform or revolution turn itself back into oppression and corruption, as if the magic prince were bewitched in reverse to turn back into a toad. China’s misgovernment was not so much a case of absolute as of ineffective rule. If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more... “Chiang Kai-shek’s authority, like that of Europe’s medieval kings, rested on the more or less voluntary fealty of provincial barons…Chiang was not an activist possessed of compelling energy to overturn the old. He changed nothing. He was a holder with no goal but to hold.” In 1944, Stilwell was recalled by President Roosevelt at the Generalissimo’s behest, and he died of stomach cancer in a San Francisco hospital shortly after. The cancer had been spreading for quite some time, but Stilwell, oddly enough, never felt any pain. Did he feel no pain because he was so absorbed by his China mission, or did he feel no pain because China had taught him not to feel anymore? We’ll never know the answer to that, but we know what happened to Stilwell’s China and what will continue to happen to China. Here are the book’s final words: “In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.”