The Prisoner's Dilemma (Diplomat)

In September 2000, I visited Yunnan Province’s Muga township in the green hills along the China-Burma border. I spent a month there researching minority education in China, focusing on the Lahu tribe, considered one of China’s ‘losing’ minorities for their failure to assimilate into the Chinese mainstream. As a Western-educated, politically correct journalist, I had decided the Lahu had refused Han Chinese schooling to protect their cultural identity.

But wouldn’t the Lahu prefer a better life? After all, if they insisted on community coherence over economic progress, then their society could ultimately fail and die, as Jared Diamond pointed out in his book Collapse.

I spent the next four years researching the Lahu, eventually directing a documentary about them called ‘Children of Blessing.’ During my research, I discovered that the stubborn determination of the Lahu not to fit in—by failing school, by refusing to learn Chinese, and by secluding themselves with poverty and ignorance in the hills—was matched by an intense self-hatred of that sub-group of Lahu who had assimilated.


In the parlance of game theory, both Lahu groups were employing strategies to maximize their individual outcome. Those Lahu who failed to fit in sought to maximize their survival by maximizing their allies; they emphasized community to avoid being abandoned, and made it taboo to be ‘Chinese.’ (Lahu kids were pressured to fail in school.) Those Lahu who did fit in had to justify abandoning their community, and to swear their loyalty to the Han Chinese mainstream.

This anthropological/sociological phenomenon isn’t unique to the Lahu. In 2006, when I was a UN official in Kabul, school burnings were commonplace in Afghanistan. The media reported that the culprits were Taliban fanatics determined to stop the modernization of Afghanistan, but I wondered if it might be village conservatives who sought to keep their youth by keeping them illiterate and ignorant of the outside world. And after reading Zhou Yeran’s profile of his Chinese classmates, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the Chinese and the minority they love to mock so much—the Lahu.

Zhou was responding to a New York Times article ‘The China Education Boom on US Campuses’ that glorifies Chinese students studying in the United States. Zhou Yeran wrote that the majority of Chinese students aren’t like those profiled in the Times, and ‘don’t join debate teams, don’t go partying every weekend, and most certainly don’t convert to Mormonism.’ In fact, many are ‘are troubled, isolated or sleep-deprived.’

Here is Zhou’s account of one classmate: ‘During his three years studying in America, (he) had never made a single American friend…He spends most of his spare time in the dorm room, playing Counter Strike, doing homework and reading Japanese manga.’

Zhou also tracked down a Chinese student interviewed by theTimes:

‘(She) refuses to hang out with her Chinese classmates. When being interviewed by the New York Times she explained why. “They can’t talk,” she is quoted to say, “They can’t communicate with American people.”

‘Her Chinese peers, furious after reading the article, left angry messages on Zhao’s homepage. Many called her a “traitor.” Hurt and depressed by the harsh criticism, Zhao went to her American friends for a shoulder to cry on. They comforted her and told her not to worry, “We are your real friends, not them.”’

You would almost see the sparks fly if you were to put the two in the same room. It’s likely that the Chinese who can’t fit in will return to China, where they’ll help fuel Chinese prejudices about the United States (Americans discriminate against Chinese). And the Chinese who can fit in will stay in the US, where they’ll help fuel US prejudices about China (Chinese can’t speak English). Instead of helping bridge the Sino-America divide, Chinese students studying in the United States may make things worse.

A decade ago, when I was a patriotic Chinese, I would think the United States was at fault for being so culturally domineering. But after four years of the Lahu I’ve had some second thoughts.

I respected the Lahu for protecting their cultural identity, but I also found them impossible: whenever I visited the Lahu offered angry stares, their dogs were allowed to bark at me, and the kids hid behind sheds. The Lahu community was coherent, but a result more of fear and inertia than of love and loyalty: people just gossiped, neighbours fought, and villages never lacked lazy drunks. I could see why any ambitious Lahu would try to get away.

At the end of the day, it’s the high-achieving, outward-looking Lahu who are the community’s best chance of a better life for all. But if the community helped these ambitious Lahu leave in the hope that they return, there’s a good risk of abandonment. The Lahu are trapped in ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’: Trust is necessary for the Lahu community to advance, yet any risk of betrayal is unacceptable (no matter how great the rewards of trust). And, in the United States, Chinese students are often so imprisoned by their fears and insecurities that they choose to attack people like Zhao rather than try to see any truth in her words.

The Lahu’s Chinese neighbours tell me that the Lahu are a dying culture because they’re an insular, xenophobic community where people try to keep each other down rather than help each other up. But, if I were to show them Zhou’s article, could they say that the Chinese are that much different?

What Shanghai's PISAs Really Say (Diplomat)

Last week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, with Shanghai 15-year olds outperforming their peers from Singapore, South Korea, and Finland by a considerable margin in math, science, and reading ability. The world’s reaction was a bit over-the-top, with one American in the New York Times comparing Shanghai’s PISA results to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik.

For many Chinese and Westerners in China, there were two, simultaneous reactions. First, with generous government funding, some of China’s best universities, a dominant middle class, and a progressive and cosmopolitan culture, Shanghai was lauded as having China’s best education system, but people also noted it couldn’t be considered representative of China as a whole. (Chinese like to say that Shanghai is closer to Europe than it is to Beijing.) The second reaction was: How did Shanghai cheat?

Shanghai could have selected its 5000 best students to take the test, or it could have gotten early access to the test questions and prepped its students. The local teachers who graded PISA could have been generous, or just reported inflated scores. There could have been translation issues as well. Yet the New York Times reporter Sam Dillon scoured the details for evidence of cheating, and this was the best he could find: ‘Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well.’

Okay, so Shanghai took the test seriously—that’s it?

But what if I were to say that Shanghai taking the test seriously could in fact explain why it did so well? In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that there’s a direct correlation between the ability to take tasks seriously and high test scores:

‘When students sit down to take the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.’

Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It’s possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving maths problems.

As a teacher, I think 90 percent of teaching is getting students to focus, listen, and concentrate in class. And if you think that’s easy, it’s obvious you’ve never dealt with 15 year-olds, who no matter their nationality or culture must deal with the rampaging confusion of adolescence: the onslaught of sexual awareness and a fast-growing body, the early search for identity and meaning, and the demands of parents and teachers. So, considering all this, it’s quite a bureaucratic feat to get the world’s 15 year-olds to even sit down for a test administered by an organization they’ve never heard of, let alone to take PISA seriously enough to want to do well on it.

In my school, we had a couple of students who by mid-term were failing, but once we threatened to fail them (in China, no one fails) went overnight from the bottom of the class to near the top because they suddenly focused in class and did their homework.

And I believe that those 5000 Shanghai students were even more motivated than my two students because Chinese take international competitions and their image abroad as life-or-death matters. Chinese can simultaneously be xenophobic, and desperate for international recognition and praise. Remember the 2008 Beijing Games, and that scary, manic determination to win the most gold medals? It seems as though China constantly needs these international awards—Olympic gold medals and PISA high scores—as much as it needs 8 percent GDP growth and new skyscrapers to validate itself in its own eyes.

Is it possible that China’s bureaucratic obsession with international awards and praise is to divert people’s attention from real-life problems—China’s unsustainable asset bubbles, endemic corruption and crime, the unemployment rate for university graduates—that show that China is in fact a house of cards just waiting to come tumbling down?

The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail (Wall Street Journal)

It's ironic that just as the world is appreciating the strengths of China's education system, Chinese are waking up to its weaknesses. These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests. For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.

On Tuesday, Shanghai's 15-year-olds topped the global league tables in reading, science and math in the Program for International Student Assessment, a test run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This comes as no surprise to anyone working in Chinese schools.

With its demanding parents, ambitious students, and test-obsessed culture, China's K-9 schooling is probably the most rigorous in the world. And Shanghai, an open and cosmopolitan city that is boundlessly ambitious and fiercely competitive, has always been China's K-9 education leader.

So China has no problem producing mid-level accountants, computer programmers and technocrats. But what about the entrepreneurs and innovators needed to run a 21st century global economy? China's most promising students still must go abroad to develop their managerial drive and creativity, and there they have to unlearn the test-centric approach to knowledge that was drilled into them.

The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning. Chinese students burn themselves out testing into university, where many of them spend their time playing World of Warcraft.

Both multinationals and Chinese companies have the same complaints about China's university graduates: They cannot work independently, lack the social skills to work in a team and are too arrogant to learn new skills. In 2005, the consulting firm McKinsey released a report saying that China's current education system will hinder its economic development.

But don't the PISA results at least show that China's K-9 education is the best in the world, and that standardized testing, as U.S. President Barack Obama seems to believe, is necessary to improve American schools?

Not really. According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake. Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.

Even Shanghai educators admit they're merely producing competent mediocrity. The OECD report states, "[T]he dictates of the examinations have left students with little time and room for learning on their own. 'There is an opportunity cost in terms of time and space,' said [one experienced Shanghai educator]. 'Students grow with narrow margins' and are not fully prepared for their lives and work in the future. This is seen as a deep crisis, exacerbated by the reality of single-child families."

A consensus is growing that instead of vaulting the country past the West, China's schools are holding it back. They equip everybody with the basic knowledge to be functional in a socialist economy. But now that China is a market economy hoping to compete globally, it's jealous of America's ability to turn its brightest students into the world's best scientists and businesspeople.

Reform is on the horizon. This year the Chinese government released a 10-year plan including greater experimentation. China Central Television's main evening news program recently reported on Peking University High School's curricular reforms to promote individuality and diversity.

As director of Peking University High School's government-approved International Division, an experimental program to prepare students for study in America, I've attended meetings where Beijing's top education officials endorsed importing Western curricula. Nevertheless, it's safe to say China won't challenge America's leadership in education anytime soon.

Shanghai's stellar results on PISA are a symptom of the problem. Tests are less relevant to concrete life and work skills than the ability to write a coherent essay, which requires being able to identify a problem, break it down to its constituent parts, analyze it from multiple angles and assemble a solution in a succinct manner to communicate across cultures and time. These "critical thinking" skills are what Chinese students need to learn if they are to become globally competitive.

So the first step of education reform is trying to teach students who are good test takers to be good essay writers. To write well in English, students need to understand concepts such as thesis and argument, structure and support, coherence and flow, tone and audience, diction and syntax—concepts that are barely introduced in Chinese schools. One way we'll know we're succeeding in changing China's schools is when those PISA scores come down.

China's Future? In the Provinces (Diplomat)

I’ve been working in Beijing, China’s education and cultural centre, for six months now, and with each passing day I grow more nostalgic for Shenzhen, where the idea of culture is foot massage parlours. It’s easy for Beijingers to make fun of uncouth and uncultured, utilitarian and money-grabbing Shenzhen entrepreneurs, but in my two years in Shenzhen I had grown to love it for its openness, boldness, and progressiveness as much as for its good food, warm weather, and clean air.

Here’s what I know about Shenzhen. It’s the only place in China where someone can get generous funding and political support to reform the Chinese secondary school system. It wants to build a university called the Southern Institute of Science and Technology, and have Western administrators and professors run it. And it has ambitious plans to make Shenzhen the IT and innovation capital of China by educating effectively its citizenry (which means in the near future constructing more universities and sending students abroad on government scholarships). Shenzhen is China’s educational future, and it’s because Shenzhen is filled with uncouth and uncultured, utilitarian and money-grabbing entrepreneurs.

Let me explain why entrepreneurs with little education represent China’s best hope for education reform. First, entrepreneurs have a market mindset (as opposed to the bureaucratic mindset common in Beijing) so they care about what works, and it’s clear to them that the Chinese education system doesn’t work. Second,and more important, because Shenzhen is not well-known for its schools, it can build anew as it has little entrenched and vested interests opposed to experimentation and reform; as everyone knows, it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to build on virgin territory than to transform an existing city. Shenzhen, as a city with much immigration and little history, has no prejudices and endless ambitions.

It’s also important to understand thecrucial difference between a bureaucratic and a market mindset, and how it relates to education reform. In Beijing, parents tend to fall into one of three categories: government official, professor, or white-collar professional. If you think about it, government departments, universities, large Chinese enterprises, and multinationals are all bureaucracies where people rise based on their ability to accumulate credentials (getting advanced diplomas) and to cultivate patronage and guanxi (having a network of classmates in powerful positions). That’s why Beijing parents are so obsessed with getting their child into Peking and Tsinghua universities, and failing that into a top 50 USuniversity. That’s also why they care more about SAT and TOEFL scores (which will help their child get into a top American university) than about their child’s reading and writing ability (which will ensure that their child can handle the academic rigour of a top American university).

Running counter to the bureaucratic mindset is the market mindset, which has been nurtured in a highly competitive environment where one is awarded for ability, hard work, and performance. While I was in Shenzhen, I started the Foundation programme to educate junior high school students to become global citizens. I wanted the Foundation students to learn co-operation, communication, and critical thinking skills, but what I really did was put students into a room by themselves, gave them good teachers and a lot of English books, and expect them to learn to study by themselves without the pressure of grades and tests.

This is coincidentally a Chinese parent’s worst nightmare, and there was genuine concern that no one would come. I always imagined that it would be idealistic intellectuals interested in progressive education, but every one of the Foundation parents was a rags-to-riches entrepreneur who wanted their child to develop skills that would allow them to navigate and thrive in the global economy. More important, as managers concerned with results and performance, they’re looking first and foremost for competent workers, and so they know much to their chagrin the deficiencies of China’s education system (which has recently been discussed in-depth in the New York Times). Above all, what drives them is self-interest, not idealism: as entrepreneurs, they know for themselves first-hand that co-operation, communication, and critical thinking skills translate into cold hard cash in the global economy. (The Foundation parents were so happy with their child’s progress that they sent their students to study with me in Beijing when I moved up there.)

But, more importantly, the Foundation parents don’t presume to know how to educate their child, and so are willing to experiment and to listen with an open mind. This ismuch less often the casein Beijing, where there’s muchintellectual snobbery, and where there’s a mindset that if you don’t have at least twenty diplomas you’re not qualified to discuss education. Cementing the status quo are all the schools and education institutes thatsurvive on pride, prejudice, and inertia rather than thrive on openness, progressiveness, and innovation.

In the education world, Beijing is an old man sitting on his throne, high in the clouds, desperately demanding that the world stop turning. Far below the clouds is the clumsy youth whois Shenzhen, who learns to see by bumping into things and then changing direction, who learns to walk by falling down and getting up again, and who is forever moving forward because there’s nothing holding him back.

With its market mindset and humility, Shenzhen will boldly experiment, make mistakes, admit its mistakes, and then try again in the endless pursuit of whatever works. And that is why Shenzhen – and not Beijing – represents China’s educational future.

Swallowing Reform Whole (Diplomat)

Last month I reported on how the Beijing education committee was encouraging its schools to build international divisions to help students study abroad. A couple of weeks later there was a follow-up, higher level meeting where they provided a specific reason why: ‘technology’ transfer. During the more than three hour meeting, Beijing’s top principals and government officials remarked on how international divisions benefited curriculum development and reform in schools by bringing in Western teachers and expertise.

Hearing this, you’d think that this was a meeting of progressive educators with a global mindset. Sadly, I couldn’t help but detect a nationalistic and xenophobic undertone to all of it. The Beijing principals proudly noted, for example, how Westerners were relegated to minor administrative posts (‘academic director’), and how they’d been taught to respect Chinese culture. ‘We are in control,’ one principal noted proudly.

Leaders from the Beijing education committee nodded approvingly, saying that Beijing’s top high schools should ‘swallow, digest, and absorb’ what’s useful and desirable from the Western curriculum in order to produce ‘globally competitive Chinese citizens’ (as distinct from ‘global citizens’). The principals also noted proudly how they were using international divisions to train their Chinese teachers on how to implement and manage a Western-style curriculum.

It seemed to me that Beijing’s top education officials saw public school international divisions as a conduit for technology transfer. It seemed these education ‘reformers’ had decided that building globally competitive high schools was as easy as creating ‘authentic’ Italian pizza parlours: You build the pizza parlours, invite Italians to make pizza as Chinese look on, adapt the pizza for Chinese tastes, and finally, as the coup de grace, kick all the Italians out of the country.

Of course, it’s a positive step forward to have Beijing’s top education officials promote education reform. But they seemed to have little sense of what education means, and no sense at all of what reform entails.

A system, especially one as calcified as the Beijing public school system, can only ‘swallow, digest, and absorb’ the familiar. A digestive tract will repel the unfamiliar, anything that could potentially shock or challenge the system. But it’s only by stomaching that initial pain and trauma that the new actually becomes familiar. China, on the other hand, doesn’t plan to adapt to what is new—it expects the new to adapt to China.

‘We’re encouraging reform and experimentation in public school international divisions’, Beijing’s top education officials seemed to be saying at the meeting, ‘but only if we maintain complete control, no mistakes are made, and the results are exactly what we anticipate’.

But change by its nature is shocking and traumatic, and the results of reform unpredictable and uncontrollable. I’ve written before about a radical education experiment that caused, to continue the digestive analogy, the school to vomit and spit out blood. But while things got out of control and mistakes were made, the experience taught students like Zhou Yeran to excel in the United States by not fearing failure.

The trauma from the Shenzhen experiment also shocked the management team into being a more cohesive unit that was able to quickly build a strong study abroad programme.

If it’s to truly become ‘globally competitive’ and reform education, China needs to swallow the new whole, and learn bear that initial pain and shock to its system. And it needs to let in not only Western teachers and curriculum, but Western schools and management. China’s best students may flock to these Western schools, but this shock to China’s education system can also shock its schools into being better.

China’s public high schools will only learn from the West if they learn to trust and empower Westerners instead of just putting them on display. If China is to engage the world, it must first learn to welcome it. Until then, Chinese students will have to just look forward to pizza drowned in sweet corn and mayonnaise.

Christmas Comes Early (Diplomat)

Progressive educator Wang Zheng’s appointment as headmaster of Peking University High School has brought with it a spate of renovations to the campus. We’re constructing an International Division building—a four-storey building that will have a library, a coffeehouse, a kitchen, a media centre, a theatre, state-of-the-art laboratories, and fitness facilities.

It’s an ambitious and expensive project, and each time I meet with the architects the project seems to grow more ambitious and expensive. (They’re now suggesting oil paintings and chandeliers for the library, and SMART boards for every classroom.)

So you’d think the man who actually signs the cheques would be worried about the spiralling costs. But I was told that there are also plans to build a new gymnasium, a new soccer field, an indoor climbing wall, indoor tennis and squash courts.

My first response: How are we going to pay for all this? (Actually, my first response was that a velodrome would be nice.)

The answer? China needs to hit education spending of 4 percent of GDP this year, and so public schools have a mandate to spend as much money as possible.

In 1993, China announced it would boost education spending from 2 percent of GDP to 4 percent. Yet 17 years later, it has still failed to achieve this goal. As new skyscrapers and highways populate China, critics both external and internal have called for more education spending. The United Nations reports that China educates almost one-fifth of the world’s students on just one percent of the world’s education budget. The China Youth Daily says China spends five times more money wining and dining its government officials than in educating all its students from grades one to nine. And, as critics point out, 4 percent of GDP is still anyway well below the spending of developed nations. Even India spends 7 percent of its GDP on education.

So why is China so determined to reach 4 percent this year? Because the Communist Party cares about China’s children? Not likely. It’s because this year marks the end of China’s 11th five-year development plan, and government officials—like the patrolmen who stalk the highways at the end of each month to fill their monthly quota—must reach that 4 percent mark. In practical terms, this means building a lot of new schools.

But at least this will mean better education for students in China, right? Well, not necessarily.

In 1998, at Peking University’s 100th anniversary ceremony, President Jiang Zemin announced a government plan to turn China’s top universities into world-class institutions. More than a decade later, most people think that Chinese universities are still far from that distinction, and arguably with cheating and overcrowding, corruption and censorship running rampant, many schools may actually have gotten worse.

Back in 2002, when I was writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I reported on how Chinese university officials went abroad and took mental snapshots of the architecture of America’s best universities while ignoring their academic freedom; when they returned home, they built new science parks and libraries without growing the intellectual freedom and academic discipline necessary to power these facilities. It seemed that all that construction dust kept people from seeing that education was first and foremost about carving and shaping new intellectual spaces rather than about digging large holes and filling them.

I’m not going to deny I’ll enjoy all of Peking High’s new facilities, and I do believe that these new facilities could have real lasting educational value. But it would be better if we could use the money to hire and properly train young, smart graduates to become China’s new generation of teachers, to send students and faculty to South Africa and Russia (and any other place that challenges and expands their identity), and to bring in educators from everywhere to make Peking High a truly international school.

But the Chinese bureaucracy is too pre-occupied with statistics and five-year plans to bother with people and ideas.

Maybe I’ll ask Santa for that velodrome, after all.

China: Please Study Abroad (Diplomat)

Last Friday, the Beijing education committee summoned representatives from Beijing’s 10 leading public high schools to discuss study abroad students. Among those invited were People’s University High School, Tsinghua University High, Peking University High, Beijing Number Four, and the Experimental School, all of which already have a sizable contingent of students in the Ivy League and alumni networks in the United States.

As the director of Peking University High’s study abroad programme, I attended on our school’s behalf. During the meeting, the education committee ordered all schools to better prepare students for studying abroad, to maintain contact with them once they’re in the United States, and to instill patriotism in them so they’ll return to help develop the motherland.

For me, the meeting marked a sudden change in government attitude towards the study abroad phenomenon. What was interesting was not what was said—it was that anything was said at all.

Previously, Chinese education officials had remained silent on the issue because Chinese students attending high school and university in the United States is such a sensitive and emotional topic here. Study abroad students tend to be either the very worst kind of student (spoiled and lazy rich kids who can’t cope with the rigour and discipline of Chinese schools) or the very best (brilliant and driven students who can’t cope with the rigour and discipline of Chinese schools), all of which invites a strange and volatile mix of condescension, scorn, anger, and jealousy among officials.

Chinese school officials, for the most part, tend to oppose studying abroad because losing their best students would mean lower national examination scores, which, as bureaucrats, they live and die by. That’s why most Chinese students who want to study abroad do so secretly, cramming for the national examination during the week and cramming for the SAT and TOEFL on weekends.

Last Friday, though, the government explicitly told the top schools in Beijing they now had to help study abroad students (which, by the way, doesn’t mean they’ll actually do so). The government rarely issues clear directives, but here it was telling schools to open an office specifically to help potential study abroad students apply to American schools and to establish an alumni network.

Why?

The Chinese bureaucracy wouldn’t be a bureaucracy if it actually had explanations for its actions, so much of what follows is educated guessing.

I’m sure many readers have jumped quickly to the conclusion that the Communist Party wants to monitor and control study abroad students. But, as I explained last week, the Communist Party can easily do this already by reading each student’s personal profile on the Internet. In fact, the Party’s not worried about China’s study abroad students because they’re generally drawn from either the ruling elite or the middle class that’s the Communist Party’s main base of support.

So I think there are two more plausible explanations. First, as I’ve said before, the study abroad phenomenon is growing exponentially, forcing the government to speak out on the issue. But the more important reason, I believe, is that the Party’s realpolitik strategists have made a compelling case to Party leaders that China is losing out badly in the war for ‘knowledge workers’ to the United States, and if something isn’t done about this China can never properly challenge US hegemony.

This year, Premier Wen Jiabao promulgated China’s 10-year education development plan, which acknowledged that China’s education system wasn’t producing the creative and management talent necessary for China’s continued economic expansion and development. Despite the praise of Yale’s President Richard Levin, China’s higher education system is a mess. Cheating and plagiarism are rampant in Chinese universities and both Chinese companies and multinationals grumble about the arrogance and incompetence of Chinese university graduates. In turn, Chinese universities complain about how the national examination system often sends them narrow-minded and disinterested students who just want to play Counter-Strike all day.

In fact, recently, 11 of Peking’s top professors wrote a joint letter suggesting that the faculty ought to screen top exam scorers to determine their academic potential (i.e., to make sure the students’ minds are still intact after a decade of relentless and remorseless memorization and regurgitation).

It’s clear therefore that it will take decades for China’s higher education system to sort out its problems—if it ever can. So in the meantime a rising China’s only real option is to educate its best and brightest in US colleges and universities—and to encourage them to return.

Of course, the best long-term solution to China’s shortage of knowledge workers is for China to become an open and progressive, diverse and cosmopolitan society that celebrates one’s individuality and humanity as much as one’s power and wealth, and which encourages everyone—foreigners alongside Chinese—to experiment and to innovate.

But that would require imagination, a word which also happens to be the antonym of mandarinate. So the government’s first move in its strategy to win the hearts and minds of China’s study abroad students is to ask Chinese public schools to suck up to their very best study abroad students, just like they now suck up to their very best exam takers.

Youth Indifference in China (Diplomat)

Last month, Zhou Yeran, a former student of mine whom I’ve written about before, published a piece in his university’s newspaper discussing his Chinese classmates’ reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to a Chinese citizen for the first time.
If the award had been for chemistry or physics, there would have been a surge of nationalistic pride in China. But it was the Peace Prize, and it was awarded to a Chinese citizen that the Communist Party had sentenced to 11 years in prison for 'inciting subversion of state power.' So the Party understandably saw it as a slap in the face, and enforced an awkward quiet throughout the country.
At Peking University High School, the most progressive school in Beijing (which is admittedly much like saying Vietnam has the best ski programme in South-east Asia), one student tried to organise a symposium on Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, but was reprimanded by the school authorities. Even the student editors of the school’s daily newspaper, which published the symposium announcement, were given an angry tongue lashing.
You'd think that in contrast, Chinese students who have opted to study at university or college in the United States would be open-minded about discussing Liu. Yet Zhou wrote that when he mentioned Liu's name over lunch with six of his Chinese University of Illinois classmates, an until then suppressed silence turned into outright anger:
'After a long awkward silence, one of (my Chinese classmates) said, “I can’t offer much comment. I just don’t know much about him, or the Nobel Prize.” He sounded wary and defensive.
'“I don’t care about this whole thing at all,” another joined in, “I don’t think the situation in China is as bad as the Western media makes it seem!”…Others nodded and concurred.
'“The true problem is, do we really want this ‘Western-styled’ democracy?” my Chinese classmate continued, quite assertively, “Look how it has failed in India, Thailand and many other Asian countries!” There was another round of nodding.
'“I think this is just Western countries trying to mess with China again,” another classmate inserted, rubbing his glasses, “you know, like what they did in 2008.” He was referring to the boycotting of the Beijing Olympic Games.
'Eventually, a girl joined the discussion. “I don’t think Liu Xiaobo deserves the prize,” she said. “How has he made a contribution to China’s democracy? No Chinese has even heard of him! Liu is just too naïve.”
Sadly, Zhou’s classmates’ angry, almost xenophobic words are too often stock responses to any Western criticism of China, responses instilled in students by their Chinese teachers and the state media, and reinforced by the social spaces they inhabit.
Over two decades after students marched on Tiananmen Square to challenge the Communist Party, the Party, as Ian Johnson wrote in the New York Review of Books last month, has become more firmly entrenched in power than ever.
And the Party has done so, ironically enough, by co-opting the very forces that were supposed to undermine it: the free market and globalization, the Internet and the media, and above all China’s educated and internationalized youth -- Zhou's classmates.
Thanks to the free market and globalization, Zhou and his classmates have only known stability and prosperity. And because they spend all their time on Renren, China’s version of Facebook (if you see a young Chinese entranced with his laptop or mobile phone he’s most probably logged on to it), their innermost thoughts and habits can be monitored and analyzed by the Party for any possibility of potentially subversive behaviour, just as Google and Amazon mine personal data for consumer preferences.
Just like Leonardo DiCaprio in Christopher Nolan’s film 'Inception,' the Communist Party’s virtual army works to extract information from, and burrow itself into, the sub-consciousness of today’s Chinese youth, to implant thoughts and opinions through repetition of message.
The Party doesn't need China’s youth to obey it, or even like it. All it needs is for China’s youth to believe there’s no alternative to the Communist Party, and that they needn’t concern themselves with politics at all.
Sadly, one of Zhou's classmates likely spoke for many Chinese students in the United States when he said: 'I didn’t come to America to learn their politics. I came here to get their diploma. Then I’ll (go home, and) get a nice job.'

China's Education Gold Rush (Diplomat)

In his book The China Dream, Joe Studwell chronicled the ambitions and delusions of foreign entrepreneurs scrambling to get into China. The absolute article of faith was that if only one in every hundred Chinese bought a razor, that this would still be a hell of a lot of razors sold.

Today’s China gold rush is in education. In his book The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy pointed out that historically, the Chinese have spent their capital either on land or in education. And, as a Beijing public school official, I can confirm from experience that Chinese parents will sacrifice everything for their child’s education.

It’s something US colleges and high schools have discovered to their delight, with at least 100,000 Chinese students currently enrolled in the United States, many of whom are paying around $50,000 a year for the privilege. That’s probably why the US embassy in Beijing seems keen to rush through student visa applications, and why Chinese education fairs draw so many foreign participants.

If Joe Studwell were to write a sequel to The China Dream, it would likely focus on education, China’s last great untapped market, and he would probably write that while there’s been an increasing trickle of US schools entering the China market ever since the late 1990s, the deluge will really have started after Dr. Kenneth Smith, a short and bespectacled educator who seldom ventured outside his native New England, decided to visit China.

The superintendent of the Millinocket, Maine public school system has been looking to enroll Chinese teenagers to save his financially-troubled school system. The New York Times is rightfully curious as to why Chinese parents ‘would spend $27,000 to send their children to Stearns High, which is housed in a 1960s building, has only one Advanced Placement course and classroom maps so outdated they still show the Soviet Union, and where more than half of the 200 students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch’. But, Dr. Smith assures us, there’s fresh air, a tall mountain to hike, and ‘a great’ performing arts programme. (And to make Stearns High even more appetizing, the school cafeteria will soon offer lo mein.)

Yes, it sounds like a crazy idea. But it’ll probably work because, well, China is a crazy place.

And it’s also a big place where you have demanding parents who plan obsessively and meticulously over their child’s schooling, career, and family and where you have thoughtless parents who ship their child off overseas with a lot of money and freedom because he was too spoiled and undisciplined at home. So you can bet that unscrupulous Chinese agents working on commission will make a more convincing pitch than Dr. Smith does to Chinese parents on the value of a Maine education.

Regardless of what happens in Maine, there are going to be a lot of Chinese students attending American high schools in the coming years -- and I know from personal experience there’s as much peril as promise in such a trend.

As a six-year old Chinese immigrant to Toronto, I had an unhappy and traumatic experience in the public school system, but as a 21st century educator I believe it’s crucial that Chinese students learn to be global citizens. The trick, though, is to educate students at an early age to be confident and outward-looking, to welcome difference and diversity, and to send them to a Western school that will both push and support them.

A year ago, an experimental programme I started called Foundation aimed to prepare seven Chinese middle-school students for American high school. The programme has taught them how to write a five-paragraph essay and how to cook a Chinese dinner for their future American host family, as well as the joy of team sports and of quiet reading. Having witnessed these kids, repressed by an often soul-crushing education system, blossom, we looked for a school in the United States that would love them as much as we did. When we felt we found a good partner school, we invited their principal, maths teacher, a student, and his mother to China, where they spent a week hiking the Great Wall and eating Peking Duck with our students and their families.

In the spring, our students will be going to the US -- and that’s when our work will really begin; we plan to communicate weekly with our students and our US counterparts, and we’ll try to mediate if any cross-cultural problems arise.

We’ve invested so much time and thought into our seven students because, more than commodities and consumers, we see them first and foremost as children. They are innocent and impressionable, and they trust us adults to love them as human beings with unlimited potential, and not as a source of endless profit or as a quick fix to budget shortfalls. It’s a principle I’m afraid Dr. Kenneth Smith and others involved in China’s great education gold rush may forget.

Cheating in China (Diplomat)

According to a New York Times article last week, fraud is as familiar a fixture on Chinese campuses as gothic architecture is on American ones:

‘Pressure on scholars by administrators of state-run universities to earn journal citations — a measure of innovation — has produced a deluge of plagiarized or fabricated research. In December, a British journal that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing more than 70 papers by Chinese authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor.

‘In an editorial published earlier this year, The Lancet, the British medical journal, warned that faked or plagiarized research posed a threat to President Hu Jintao’s vow to make China a “research superpower” by 2020.’

Fraud has always been a problem in Chinese academia, and when US academics encounter it in China, they often respond with shock and disgust, as Yale professor Stephen Stearns did after teaching only one semester at Peking University, where he failed three of his students for plagiarism.

What particularly upset Stearns about the academic dishonesty he encountered in China was how little Chinese university administrators and professors seemed upset by it.

Ten years ago, when I was working as the China correspondent for the Washington-based Chronicle of Higher Education, I reported on how a Peking University sociologist Wang Mingming was accused of plagiarizing from a US textbook, a case that ignited a firestorm in Chinese academia.

I interviewed many Chinese about the case, but for them it wasn’t a question of whether Wang Mingming was guilty, but who Wang had angered to get into trouble in the first place. (The story has a happy ending: Wang is still at Peking.)

Americans like Stearns can’t be faulted for being angry at academic dishonesty. But just as they can’t understand why Chinese academics aren’t angry, many Chinese can’t see why foreign critics are so fired up either.

The fundamental issue is that while Stearns sees Peking as an academic institution, Chinese know that first and foremost Peking is a bureaucracy, and in many ways an extension of the Communist Party. (In fact, some say it’s more like a de facto government ministry.) And what matters in a bureaucracy are interpersonal relationships, which can be the antithesis of academic integrity.

But as Zhang Ming, a People’s University professor tells the New York Times: ‘We need to focus on seeking truth, not serving the agenda of some bureaucrat or satisfying the desire for personal profit.’

The thing is, though, we tend to forget that it was only after World War II that US universities themselves became world-class research universities—only a century ago, they had the same academic reputation as, well, Chinese ones today. For example, US medical schools used to be unregulated diploma mills (they took anyone who would pay the tuition), producing doctors who did more harm than good. Then a handful of European-educated visionaries founded John Hopkins, and revolutionized medical research and education in the United States. After World War II, the Ivy League transformed from being a set of party schools for American rich kids, into serious academic institutions.

Because many of the United States’ universities are private, they have the autonomy to choose to improve. But in China, higher education reform is directed from the top down by party officials rather than by academics. It was Jiang Zemin in 1998 who called for ‘world-class universities,’ and it was Hu Jintao who called for China to become a ‘research superpower’ by 2020.

Yet, as long as the Communist Party controls the universities, they’ll continue to be political bureaucracies where professors care more about serving the agenda of some bureaucrat and fraud and cheating will become even more pervasive ‘non-problems’.

China's English Learning Industry (Diplomat)

The Economist has reported that Disney has entered China’s English-learning market. This seems like a sure-fire way for Disney to leverage its brand because learning English is a national obsession and a lucrative industry in China. It’s China’s de facto second language, and a prerequisite for getting into the right schools and the right companies. How to learn English is, literally, the billion-dollar question right now in China.

But as someone who’s taught English on and off for the past 12 years to Chinese students I know that they have a love-hate relationship with the language: they know how important it is to learn, but no one’s figured out how they can learn it effectively, making Chinese too often feel frustrated and impotent.

In the public school system, students study mainly grammar to learn one of the world’s most ungrammatical languages (to learn English via grammar is like Van Gogh trying to paint with a ruler). Everyone knows this, but no one can do anything about it because grammar can be tested, and to even attempt to test real English ability would be to discriminate heavily in favour of China’s already too-heavily favoured coastal cities, which can invest in small classes and foreign English teachers.


One of the major schools is literally an industry in itself, and only in China could a test preparation centre be the number one brand in the private education world. Unfortunately, students don’t go there to learn English (although English classes are offered), but how to do well on the myriad of examinations to get into English-speaking universities. Every student who even thinks of going abroad one day will pass through it, but its popularity both reveals and reinforces the dominant mentality among Chinese students: that English isn’t a language, but a series of tests.

This mentality doesn’t help when Chinese actually have to use the language in an interview with a multinational in Beijing, to do some shopping in the United States, or even saying hello to a Westerner. This frustration and insecurity has partly fuelled the growth of that unique Chinese phenomenon called ‘Crazy English,’ whereby whole crowds gather to learn English by shouting it out. Its founder, Li Yang, believes it works because it builds confidence. But as the New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent Evan Osnos points out, there are also some that suggest it encourages nationalism and xenophobia.

There are a couple of big schools that are popular with white collar Chinese that offer foreign teachers and small classes to improve a student’s oral English ability. I’ve had two of my high school students enrol in their programmes, and they do come back with exceptionally strong oral English. Unfortunately, their Chinglish (expressing English with Chinese grammar and thinking) is still intact, and they’ve picked up a lot of bad habits along the way.

Bad grammar, speed and length of speech at the expense of clarity and precision, and the unnecessary and incorrect usage of complex vocabulary are all obvious bad habits, but the most fatal flaw is the aggressive confidence that these schools instil in their students so that students are blind to their weaknesses and deficiencies. (Disney shouldn’t have any of these issues because it’ll be teaching little children oral English.)

And then, finally, there’s that most expensive and ostensibly more assured way of learning English: going abroad. There are expatriates in Beijing who lived here for years who don’t speak a word of Chinese, but they didn’t come to Beijing for either the language or the culture. Chinese who go abroad for high school are better in that they can at least converse, although most still have difficulties reading and writing.

So what could be the problem with learning abroad? The problem overseas is the most common refrain at home as well: there are too many Chinese. Chinese who are abroad tend to cluster together, and have limited interaction with the Western world, hindering their language learning. In fact, Canada, where I’m from, has even made Chinese its third language!

A Peking University (Diplomat)

On October 6, Peking University High School will celebrate its 50th anniversary, a time as much for reflection as for celebration.

When Peking University launched the high school in 1960, it dispatched its professors to teach the children of the faculty of Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Staff and students were proud of the school, and it was common for students to return as teachers. Current principal Wang Zheng is a graduate of the high school, and his former math and Chinese teachers teach in the International Division.

From its inception, Peking University High School was considered the best high school in China. But not anymore.

In 1998, then Vice-Principal Wang Zheng hired me to teach English, and back then I found the students to be curious and creative, and the school to be open and free. Those days as a new teacher were some of the happiest and most rewarding of my life.

But in 2000, the high school made a disastrous decision that would prove to be its downfall.

Back then, the Beijing education bureau in its infinite wisdom permitted its cash-starved schools to make money themselves. Principals became businessmen: they leased space to hot pot restaurants and beauty parlors, opened weekend cram courses, sent their students to expensive private schools overseas for a commission, and charged students who didn’t test into their high school an exorbitant entrance fee.

These were small scams that temporarily relieved budget crunches. And then a real estate developer suggested to China’s most famous school the biggest education scam yet—building Peking University High School franchise schools around China. The school was so prestigious and famous that local governments offered free land and preferential loans.

The school leaders heard ka-ching! The teachers were apparently resistant, until the developer reportedly offered a pay raise and a free European vacation. Ten years later, Peking University High School has over a dozen franchise schools scattered around the country, and its reputation is now destroyed.

Wang said he’s determined to close down these mismanaged franchises.That will be hard enough, but there’s a much more difficult task ahead for him.

Peking University High School teachers have always been proud of and trusted their students’ self-discipline and love of learning (that which Chinese call suzhi or ‘cultivation’). But this cultivation came about because of the university’s strong, selfless intellectual tradition and the relentless poverty under Mao Zedong’s autarky.

Chinese intellectuals saw themselves as selfless servants of the motherland, but after Tiananmen 1989 and the mad gold rush following Premier Zhu Rongji’s wholesale dismantling of China’s socialist apparatus, intellectual self-sacrifice was seen as more shameful than prostitution and watermelon-selling. Life’s goals were to make money and spend it rather than to learn and improve oneself.

And in this new social milieu Peking University High School’s fragile freedom became unfettered chaos: Discipline and drive disappeared, and in their place came dating, video games, mobile phones, and Internet chat rooms and blogs. Test scores dropped, and Peking University professors scrambled to place their only child in other high schools. School administrators were clueless and paralyzed: other schools responded to the shifting culture by clamping down on students, but that would be against Peking University High School’s tradition of freedom and openness.

Wang came of age in the 1980s China, a radically different time from today’s China. The trick now is to maintain the school’s proud traditions while embracing/confronting 21st century China. It will be no easy task, and it may well be impossible.

As alumni gather for Peking University High School’s 50th anniversary, there will be a lot to celebrate. But there’ll be even more to ponder.

Back to School (Diplomat)

It’s a new school year, and as I mentioned I have a new job in Beijing, running the International Division—a partnership between Peking University High School and the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. My management team has moved up with me to Beijing from Shenzhen; we’ve recruited thirty bright motivated students for our inaugural year, we have an excellent staff of both Chinese and foreign teachers, and even before classes started we’ve received favourable media coverage.

But I admit I still deeply miss my students at Shenzhen High School, and regret how the Special Curriculum ended. Was I right to have stuck to my vision? I kept on repeating the message ‘it doesn’t matter what American university you get into, but how you do when you get there.’ Looking back, I realized how stupid and naïve Chinese administrators, parents, and students must have thought I was.


In my first meeting with the new students in the new programme, I was intent on sticking to this message, but was unsure of how to best articulate it. Half an hour before orientation I received an e-mail from Zhou Yeran, a Shenzhen Middle School student who just started at the University of Illinois. I’ve written about him previously, and this past summer he began editing a feature hour-long documentary on the building of the Special Curriculum, 10 minutes of which you can watch here.

I shared both Zhou Yeran’s video and e-mail with my new students, telling them that three years from now, when they are enrolled in US universities, I hope to receive a similar e-mail from all of them. In fact, it’s the goal and purpose of the International Division to educate them in such a manner so that every student will write me such an e-mail.

Here is Zhou Yeran’s e-mail in its entirety:

‘Having been in America for two weeks, I'm starting to understand why so many Chinese students are failing here.

'The biggest obstacle for Chinese students is not culture, knowledge or even language. It's their narrow comfort zones that's making them isolated and socially marginalized. A Chinese student might speak perfect English and get straight A's in classes, but the idea of making friends using English, learning a new way of living or asking a question in class is simply horrifying for him. It is so tempting for him to stick with his fellow Chinese friends, speak Chinese all the time, and take totally unchallenging courses such as Math and Physics. In short, he wants to live his old life in this new country. But the thing about America is, living that old life is easy to do. People are used to gangs of Chinese shouting mandarin, and simply choose to ignore them most of the time. No one is eager to Americanize him, he either actively blend in or become isolated. Most Chinese take the latter, easier choice.

'Now I realize how important my last year in Special Curriculum is.The most crucial thing I've learned from this experience is not leadership or writing skills, but rather the spirit of constantly challenging myself, stepping out of my comfort zone and embracing new ideas. My new life here is a tabula rasa, I can do whatever I want to do and be whoever I want to be. I'm in the Yoga club (and totally enjoyed its first session); I'm learning Ultimate Frisbee; I'm taking the American Literature seminar (in which I am probably the only international student) and facilitating the discussions all the time; I'm socializing with all kinds of people: Americans, Indians, Koreans, African-Americans...; I've applied to work for the Daily Illini (I hope they'll hire me, because I really, REALLY want that job); I can be "Joe", "Zhou", or "Yeran".

'I have to admit, though, things weren't always going so well. At first, socializing in English was totally awkward and uncomfortable (mostly due to my lack of confidence), but after a week I've made a lot of friends and my confidence has been rocketing. The first American Literature reading assignment was hard to understand (It was Columbus and John Winthrop. I knew virtually nothing about the fourth voyage or the Puritan values and certainly wasn't used to reading English written with "thy"s), but I struggled through it, learned the backgrounds from Wikipedia and realized it wasn't half as hard as it seemed. So now, at the end of a very long and exciting week, I guess I can say that I've been doing pretty well.’

Now back to work.

How the World is Like China (Diplomat)

Some readers of this blog might think I’m a self-hating Chinese. Actually, this isn’t true at all—I am, above all, a self-hating global citizen. It’s back-to-school time, and I’d like to share some stories that demonstrate that education systems around the world are just as hopeless as the Chinese system.

1. This country is financially and ideologically bankrupt. Its elite seem like a kleptocracy, and the people are discontented, joining radical groups. In response, its politicians decided to print money. China? No, it’s America, where public officials have responded to financial implosion and public cynicism by spending $578 million dollars building the world’s costliest school.

Surely, Chinese officialdom won’t sit idly by and let US politicians outdo them in extravagant waste of public resources? China’s poorest children will be happy to hear any and all potential funding for their school will be diverted to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen as they compete to build the world’s costliest school so that the Chinese bureaucracy can maintain its reputation.

2. Teachers who don’t teach, and students who don’t study. Falling standards and discipline. Too much drug-taking and video-game playing on campus. Governments around the world are failing to reverse these trends, and so one government has taken the novel approach of deciding that these could be, in fact, positive trends.


You’d think that that government would be China, which I called doublethink nation previously. But it’s actually the government that legalized pot. This outrageously glib article discusses how a school is responding to the Dutch government’s call for ‘self-directed learning’ by overhauling the traditional classroom:

'The prototypical factory model with its self-contained classrooms is replaced by an environment that features a diversity of spaces that flow into one another. The design promotes reflective, collaborative learning that mimics the way teenagers think, learn and socialize.'

Maybe it’s just me, but reading this passage and looking at the photos I get the feeling this school will become the ideal setting for students just wanting to smoke pot and play World of Warcraft together. But, then again, what better model of ‘self-directed learning’ is there than World of Warcraft?

3. Okay, maybe no one really cares what the Europeans think and do anyway. So let’s go back to the only place that does matter—namely the United States, and specifically Princeton University, where a student created a ruckus, made an ass of himself, is proud of it, and isn’t Chinese.

Ebay billionaire and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s son and captain of Princeton’s rugby team Will Harsh apparently willfully and harshly (!) kicked softball-playing graduate students off the rugby field, even though they had university permission to be there.

You can’t blame the Chinese princeling wannabe though. First, he was merely defending the divine and universal right of the rich, white, and foolish to indiscriminately bully anyone who is not rich, white, and foolish. He also has an older brother who at a Princeton eating club apparently threw beer at someone, and explained his actions by pointing to himself, and saying, ‘Billionaire.’

Still, can any parent naming a child ‘Will Harsh’ really expect him not to grow up to be a mean idiot?

Recruiting Season (Diplomat)

When I began working in Chinese education two years ago, I came across an unfamiliar term: shengyuan. It translates as ‘student pool,’ and all Chinese school administrators are obsessed with it.

School administrators in China are less like educators and more like politicians who aim to rise in the education hierarchy. That ultimately means producing good statistics (percentage of students admitted into key universities is the most important statistic), which in turn means recruiting good students.

There are different strategies for attracting shengyuan. In Shenzhen, the most common practice is to devote a lot of resources to building a strong junior high school. Good students come in for the good education, and over three years school administrators can lobby students to sign contracts, pledging to enroll in the high school.

My Special Curriculum students had terrifying stories of the consequences of trying to break out of their junior high school’s grasp. First, all the top administrators will take the student out of class, and spend long hours persuading him to sign. If the student refuses then he is ostracized, and not permitted to go to class. (Principal Wang Zheng eliminated this practice at Shenzhen High School’s junior high division.)

In Beijing, school administrators use more carrots than sticks. Every top school will have an ‘experimental’ class which will have access to the best teachers. Principals will lobby hard the parents of top test-scorers, making promises of individual attention and special treatment.

Very few Chinese administrators appear actually to believe that education is about improving lives. In fact, the pedagogical approach in China is blunt, harsh, and effective: recruit top test-scorers, oppress them with too much homework and test cramming, and they’ll do well on the national examination. And after three years of relentless cramming, their brains will be so fried, their individuality and imagination so shattered, that they’ll think they actually received a pretty darn good education.

The competition for top test-scorers has become so intense in China that top high schools start scouting and recruiting from elementary school. All high schools are looking for maths prodigies (in China, you’re a good student if you’re good at mathematics) so their teachers will teach maths weekend classes to gifted sixth-graders, run summer workshops, and slowly and deliberately befriend and lobby the parents.

This is, of course, no different from how America’s most successful high school coaches recruit the nation’s top teenage athletes.

Few American high school athletes will go onto the pros, and there’s no professional league of test-takers where Chinese test-taking stars can go after their one and only skill becomes redundant. The American high school athlete may win a state championship and a Chinese student may win a test-taking gold medal (yes, those things actually do exist in China), but their unhealthy obsession with winning translates into a narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness that will hurt more than help them in life. (I discussed the consequences of a results-oriented education system here).

Chinese students know they’re being used, and they know that education is just a game, and the very ‘best’ among them are determined to become players instead of being played. This partly accounts for why China’s very ‘best’ become so selfish and arrogant, something I criticized in my last article. Whatever innocence, idealism, and imagination Chinese student may have had is stamped out of them by the end of their junior high school years.

In China, it’s common for individuals to rise to the top by stepping on top of others. But for educators to rise to the top by stepping on children is perverse even by Chinese standards.

When Good Students are Bad (Diplomat)

At the end of the first semester of the Special Curriculum one of our brightest students dropped out. It wasn’t because she wasn’t learning, and it wasn’t because she feared the instability. She’d received a C in gym class because she refused to go despite repeated warnings. Her mother came everyday to complain about the grade, but we refused to budge. ‘My girl has been the top of her class since kindergarten, and all her teachers love her,’ she told us. ‘But here you don’t care about her at all.’

While building the curriculum I discovered that our problem students were typically those who thrived in the traditional Chinese education system. They were also the very ones who questioned the value of the English curriculum, of learning critical reading and thinking skills, of participating in activities, of group work and co-operation, and of going to gym class. They preferred to memorize SAT vocabulary words, and would complain vocally if they only got an A instead of A+. But their transcripts were also the best: while they struggled and complained in the Special Curriculum they received the highest marks and praise in their Chinese classes.

So why do such top-performing Chinese students have so many issues?

In the Peking University High School International Division admissions camp we’ve had a lot of students who did very well on tests but seemed ill-behaved, selfish or arrogant.

There was one admitted student, for example, who did well on tests and who seemed well-behaved and well-adjusted. But she couldn’t make up her mind whether to accept the offer, telling us that a traditional Chinese high school education would cover material ‘deeper.’

To prove her wrong I had her audit a summer class. This summer in Beijing I invited English teachers from the Newton, Massachusetts public school system to teach literature to my Shenzhen High School students.

The admissions camp student sat in the class transfixed and absorbed, as my senior one (grade ten) Shenzhen students and their American teacher read and discussed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The seminar was fast and intense. Afterwards I asked this student what she thought, and she told me the class was easy; she still thought that the Chinese curriculum was ‘deeper.’

I was confounded by the student’s reaction, but later a friend explained that ‘deeper’ for Chinese students meant a lot of memorizing. Having grown up and succeeded in the traditional Chinese education system this student who was bright, mature, and intent on going abroad believed in it so much that she thought memorizing was deep and thinking was shallow. This ought to be obvious – if you’re winning a game you think the game is good – but that doesn’t make it any less tragic.

The tragedy is that Chinese students who succeed in the Chinese educational system are often stubbornly setting themselves on a path of future failure.

Let’s go back to my student who dropped out of the programme. Because she did so well on tests her teachers spoiled her from an early age, and she’s used to teachers breaking the rules and making exceptions just for her. Indeed, China’s very best students are used to schools fighting for them as though they were American college football recruits.

That’s a lot of power for teenagers to have, and that’s why they become arrogant, narrow-minded, selfish, and irresponsible. And their life essentially ends when the one skill set they’ve developed (test-taking) becomes redundant, and they have to enter the workforce. A minority will adjust and change their ways, but the majority will go through life bitter and disappointed, frustrated and angry.

In my next article I’ll elaborate on this issue, explaining how Chinese schools recruit the brightest students, uses them, and then throws them away.

How to Fight Guanxi (Diplomat)

Guanxi is the first and foremost problem in Chinese education. It’s bad for the school because it disrupts and destroys standards and discipline, and it’s bad for the students because it both spoils them and insults their ability and intelligence. A few students used guanxi to enter the Special Curriculum in Shenzhen, and they were last in the class in all subjects: they weren’t stupid, just lazy, a state of mind reinforced by their parents’ all too readiness to use money and power to protect their child against the greatest teacher of them all—failure and disappointment.

Now that I’m in Beijing I often wonder if it’s possible to build a strong educational programme in the imperial capital of guanxi. To counter guanxi, which is essentially about leveraging one’s personal network, I thought it best at Peking University High School to emphasize process over people. So we instituted a policy that to enter the International Division, students must enroll in a week-long admissions camp.

Every day students take four classes—science lab, mathematics, physical education, and English—where teachers evaluate them for ability (can they follow the class?), attitude (do they participate?), behavior (do they pay attention?), work ethic (do they do the homework?), and study habits (do they take notes?). Every night we give them a two-hour aptitude test. With the test results and teacher evaluations we can gauge their academic ability and intellectual potential.


But that’s not enough. Because the International Division is meant to be a free and open institution, it’s important to assess whether students have the self-discipline and self-control, the life skills and mental strength to thrive in the programme? So at 6am in the morning students are woken up and asked to run 2000 meters, their roms are checked every day, they’re made to copy out Milton’s Paradise Lost for an hour a day, and they’re overloaded with classes and homework.

There are also a lot of interviews. We interview them to make sure they’re applying for the right reasons, and that it’s their desire and decision, not their parents’. We’ve also asked the Special Curriculum students (they’re in Beijing from Shenzhen for summer school) to form a student admissions committee. Having transitioned from the Chinese education system into our programme they know intimately the type of students who would thrive.

Finally, in a personal interview, I’ve actually tried to convince the candidates not to come. I told them the International Division is too rigorous and demanding. It’s too new and untested. It’s focused on educating global citizens, rather than securing students’ a place in America’s best universities.

At the end of the admissions camp I had a parents’ meeting where I explained to the parents that all students who applied were great, but many were uncertain if they wanted to study overseas and many lacked the academic ability to do well in our programme. We weren’t looking to fill places—we wanted students who would thrive. That meant that if we admitted 40 students we’d educate them to the best of our ability, and if we admitted five, then we would do the same.

I gave each parent a report on their child, explaining the child’s strengths and weaknesses in their life and study skills. I gave them some time to read the report, and then I opened the floor to questions. We expected them to be angry and complain, but instead the parents thanked us for our hard work and dedication. (My staff worked from 6am until 2am, closely monitoring and evaluating the students.)

And when they went home the parents didn’t try to leverage their guanxi and try to force their child upon us—instead they called their friends and told them that the Peking University High School International Division was a great programme, and that they should apply for the next admissions camp!

Here We Go Again (Diplomat)

Late last month, China’s Ministry of Education released the second draft of its 10-year education blueprint for public discussion. The research, planning, and drafting process took three years and was spearheaded by Premier Wen Jiabao himself. There’ll be a month of public discussion and debate before the paper is officially released this October.

In its preamble, the paper acknowledges that ‘K-12 students have too much pressure, the promotion of character education has faltered, students have problems adapting to society and to the workplace, (and) the schools aren’t producing enough competent and creative talent.’

So what’s to be done? The blueprint believes that the root of the problem is not China’s national examination system, but that students have too much competition and pressure:

‘The priority task is to ensure that the students’ workload is reduced. This would enable students to obtain more control over his spare time to develop his interests. There must be mechanisms in place to monitor and supervise the reduction in student workload. Additionally, school rankings based on graduation rate should be prohibited, and graduation rates should be banned from being publicized altogether. Out-of-school cramming courses should be banned, and extra-curricular activities should be encouraged so that students use their spare time positively and efficiently.’


On a personal note the paper sounds to me like a ringing affirmation of the reforms I discussed before introduced by Principal Wang Zheng at Shenzhen High School and the blueprint implies that China needs more visionary principals who have the courage to experiment and take risks. In fact, the blueprint even goes so far as to favour empowering localities and individual schools to experiment.

All sounds promising, right?

Unfortunately, China’s Ministry of Education is the Polonius figure in the Chinese political system: a fountain of obvious wisdom and empty rhetoric from an incompetent, powerless buffoon. Aiming to reduce pressure on the students without once mentioning the source of all this pressure (the national examination) is classic Chinese bureaucratic doublethink, and public discussion of this blueprint in a culture obsessed with education has either been mute or sceptical.

One Chinese blogger thinks that the new blueprint is old ideas recycled and re-packaged. For him, the individuals who most matter—teachers and students—are conspicuously absent from the reform process, and that’s why the plan ignites so little interest now and will have little impact once it’s introduced and ‘implemented.’

He also notes ironically that teachers and students just don’t have the time to participate in a discussion about how to reduce their workload and stress because they’re so overloaded and stressed.

Beijing's Study Abroad Market (Diplomat)

This February, Principal Wang Zheng left Shenzhen High School and returned to his alma mater, Peking University High School, to become its principal on its 50th anniversary.

After I left Shenzhen in July, Principal Wang asked me to build a new study abroad programme, which we’re calling the International Division. That means recruiting staff and students, building the curriculum, and overseeing the construction of the new building. And, because this is China, and Principal Wang is Principal Wang, he wants it all set up by September 1.

The two partners behind the International Division are Peking University High School and the Hotchkiss School. Peking University High School is China’s most famous high school, while the Hotchkiss School’s alumni include Henry Luce, and two US ambassadors to China, Winston Lord and Clark Randt. Its president of the board of trustees is former Goldman Sachs President John Thornton, who’s also a Tsinghua University finance professor.

So the project sounds like a winner. But there are many obstacles to overcome before next month rolls around…


When I was a journalist I lived in Beijing, and I know from experience that the corruption and complacency here are just as stifling and oppressive as the pollution and traffic. Reform and experimentation are far more possible in Shenzhen than in Beijing.

I also find Beijing parents too often to be ignorant of and indifferent to how to best prepare their children for success overseas. When they call our hotline they don’t ask what makes our programme special, tell us why their child is suitable for our programme and often don’t even know why they’re sending their child abroad. They ask three simple questions: Do you have SAT cram courses? Do you have an Advanced Placement curriculum? Do you offer an American high school diploma (some American high schools sell Chinese high schools the right to issue their diploma)?

These questions tell us how short-sighted and single-minded parents are: All that matters is that their child gets into an American university, and they ignore their child’s welfare, happiness, and development as a human being. They often don’t even ask their child if he wants to go study abroad, and most times the parents will send their child abroad because he can’t test into a Chinese university. (That’s ironic because a Western university is more rigorous.)

We tell parents our focus is on teaching students to write logically and read critically, the two most important skills necessary to succeed in US colleges.

Unfortunately, this message generally falls on deaf ears. The dominant mentality in Beijing is that the SAT and Advanced Placement system of tests is America’s version of China’s national examination, and that a school’s job is not to educate but to place students into top 50 US universities anyway possible.

Beijing Evening Weekly wrote of our programme: ‘No SAT preparation, no AP curriculum, no foreign diploma—will any students come?’

It’s an attitude promoted and reinforced by Beijing’s for-profit education providers. The market leader is the New Oriental School, which provides TOEFL, SAT, AP, and college counseling. Shenzhen High School prohibited students from seeking private agencies for college counseling, but in Beijing it seems every student goes to a private agency, many of whom will unscrupulously write the college application for students.

For a new education philosophy to work in Beijing it’s not just about building a great programme, but changing a stubborn and single-minded and inward-looking culture.

So this summer I’ll be in Beijing, building yet another programme from scratch, embarking on yet another wild ride in the Chinese education system.

I’ll let you know if I survive the summer.

Intake Bias at Yale, Peking? (Diplomat)

If I remember anything about Yale, I remember that there weren’t that many students there like me.

There were plenty of Asians, a good handful of Canadians, and lots and lots of guys—always guys—who passed glibness off as intelligence. As a loud-mouthed jerk, I fit right in (even by Yale standards I was arrogant).

But students from working class families, students whose dads used their hands to make a living, were barely welcome at Yale. If not in business, Yale fathers always seemed to be in education or healthcare or law or government. Never trade union members.

Not to say that my dad's work at a Chinese restaurant embarrassed me. I was enough of a Maoist then to believe in the noble virtues of manual labor—at least for other people. Indeed, I was rather proud that my dad earned an honest living cooking meals, while some other parents no doubt earned a dishonest one cooking the books. I even carried on the family tradition by washing dishes at Yale.

Chances are if I’d been the white, all-American son of a restaurant worker from Toledo, I never would have gotten into Yale. But my struggling immigrant background, my Canadian high school experience, and my unpronounceable name must have added just enough spice to getme in. Either that, or some absent-minded admissions clerk tossed my folder into the wrong pile. (It does happen.)

My impression that Yale and other ranking schools discriminate against working class applicants was backed by a study discussed in a recent New York Times commentary.

The study is similar to research done by Jerome Karabel and published as The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which showed how biases have always affected admissions policies at these schools. These biases have shifted over time, but the over-riding bias has always been to favor ‘people like us.’ In her book A is for Admission: The Insider’s Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, Michele Hernandez, a former Dartmouth admissions officer, admits that she and her colleagues favoured students who campaign for gay rights over those who campaign for gun rights. Karabel explains that America’s elite institutions can get away with such overt discrimination because their admissions process is subjective and secretive.

This is why Chinese are proud of their national examination system. The system may be cruel, brutal, and oppressive, but it’s also fair, transparent, and meritocratic.

But walk through Peking University and try to find a peasant child who studied his way into the Chinese establishment. You’d have better luck trying to interest Harvard in becoming a boxcar racing sponsor.

Ostensibly there’s great diversity among Chinese university students, but it’s a superficial diversity. If a Peking University student calls himself ‘provincial’ it means his father runs a province, and if he’s from a peasant background it means his grandfather was on the Long March with Mao.

Ditto for Harvard and Yale. They have enough black students who went to Exeter and who live on the Upper East Side to make their praise and defense of their affirmative action policies seem lame at best and repugnant at worst.

And even though the admissions process is supposedly qualitative it’s being made more quantitative by the overwhelming popularity of the US News & World Report university rankings. A student’s SAT and AP scores matter more than ever before, and that’s why Chinese refer to that system of tests as America’s national examination.

As the Chinese system shows, a so-called ‘fair, transparent, and meritocratic’ series of tests invariably favors those with a prodigious memory and an empty imagination—in other words, the children of technocrats and professionals who will become technocrats and professionals themselves. In his profile of Princeton students, David Brooks argues that the Ivy League churns out plenty of industrious and ambitious students with little imagination and moral character (this also matches my impression of my Yale classmates). The same could be said of Peking University students.

Peking University is called China’s Harvard not because anyone believes the two schools are academically comparable (or at least I hope not), but because they are both gate-keepers into the ruling elite. A long time ago, Harvard and Peking felt that sort of position empowered them to change their societies. But nowadays it seems like they’re more interested in maintaining their position, and thus they must 'rig' their admissions to cater to their respective ruling elites.

David Brooks may say that today’s very best American students have brains but no soul. The same can be said of the best universities in the US and China as well.

China: Doublethink Nation? (Diplomat)

In my last entry I talked about the inherent conflict of ideals highlighted by two classic works of literature—1984 and Dao De Jing—and what they say about the prospects for the West getting along with China.

I’d like to expand on that a little more by considering the two classic texts of Chinese strategy and diplomacy—The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Sun Tzi’s Art of War, because their depth of creative duplicity makes The Prince read like How to Win Friends & Influence People.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a long and rambling epic, but at its heart is the story of two generals, Liu Bei and his nemesis Cao Cao, in a quest for supremacy in the twilight of a dynasty. Liu Bei supposedly represents virtue and humility while Cao Cao represents opportunism and ambition. Liu Bei is forced into a leadership position to defend his emperor, and when his emperor dies his followers plead with him to resurrect a new empire. And, although Liu Bei at first refuses, circumstances and the determination of his followers force him to put on the crown.　


Cao Cao also took up the sword to defend his emperor, but once opportunity presented itself he immediately began plotting to take the throne. There’s no difference in action between Liu Bei and Cao Cao (they’re both ambitious schemers who manipulate and deceive their followers), but it’s Liu Bei’s hypocrisy and duplicity that make him the hero. In Orwellian terms, Liu Bei has perfected doublethink.

Here is Orwell’s description of doublethink:　

'Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.'



Now read some of Sun Tzi’s strategies:　

'Secret machinations are better concealed in the open than in the dark, and extreme public exposure often contains extreme secrecy.'　

'You conceal your hostility by assuming outward friendliness. You ingratiate yourself with enemies, inducing them to trust you. When you have their confidence, you can move against them in secret.'

'Inflict minor or non-fatal injury on oneself to gain the enemy’s trust. This is a technique particularly for undercover agents: you make yourself look like a victim of your own people in order to win the sympathy and confidence of enemies.'



The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a description of doublethink in practice, and Sun Tzi’s Art of War is an instruction manual on how to implement doublethink. (There really are too many Liu Beis scattered throughout Chinese history, the most famous being of course Mao Zedong.)　

Compare these foundational texts of the Chinese empire with that of the Roman empire, Virgil’s Aeneid. The Trojan Aeneas has two main qualities: he’s pious and honest. Many Chinese would find him an idiot, and even Virgil depicts him as lacking any agency or ideas of his own. He’s neither a thinker nor a debater, and he comes truly alive and displays his personality only on the battlefield where by leading his Trojans to vanquish the Latin tribes arrayed against him he sows the seeds of the Roman empire.

And Americans admire above all else George Washington, a simple honest warrior who fathered a country and who in return asked for nothing more than to retire to his Virginia farm. Both Aeneas and George Washington would be horrified by the Art of War, and many Chinese would likely find both these men simple-minded and naïve. But the two are the heroes of history’s two greatest empires, and that’s no accident. A nation that worships Aeneas or Washington also typically worships hard work and honesty, duty and honor. And a nation that worships Sun Tzi and Mao Zedong also in many cases worships dishonesty and duplicity, deception and scheming:　

China is full of practitioners of doublethink, and Orwell warned us that the ultimate consequence of doublethink is a people incapable of progress, a culture trapped in an inward-looking game of deception and duplicity. Thus, China’s long history is not its most blessed strength but strongest curse.

Language, Culture and War (Diplomat)

George Orwell’s 1984 is the classic Western description of totalitarianism, while Laozi’s Dao De Jing (The Book of the Way and Virtue) is a foundational text of Chinese culture and thought. 1984 was published in 1949, and the Dao De Jing appeared over two millennia earlier.
Orwell never concerned himself with China; he had written 1984 in response to fascist and communist totalitarianism, a decidedly 20th century phenomenon. So what if I were to say that 1984 and the Dao De Jing are an intellectual debate between Orwell and Laozi? And what if I were to also say that George Orwell’s dystopia was in fact Laozi’s utopia? A look at the two texts says a great deal about why China and the West may be destined to disagree—or worse.
The similarities between the two classics are striking. Orwell’s masterpiece describes an England under the Ingsoc (English socialism) system, which is held together by Newspeak, doublethink, and the slogan ‘War is Peace/Freedom is Slavery/Ignorance is Strength.’ All three have equivalences in the Dao De Jing, but are rendered more poetic, subtle, and acceptable: Laozi was Big Brother’s propagandist.
In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ Orwell described how vital language was to vibrancy of thought, and in 1984 he continues the theme to its logical extreme: without language there could be no thought. Thus, Newspeak:
‘Don’t you see the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’

Newspeak aims to destroy and negate language, to strip away the nuances and subtleties, beauty and elegance of a language. It becomes only functional and thus a strait-jacket: the person must do—he can neither question nor doubt nor change because there aren’t words for such dissent.
Although the Dao De Jing never discusses language specifically, its attitude towards language, like Big Brother’s, is one of suspicion and hostility.
Big Brother and Laozi share a fundamental logic, worldview, and attitude: proscribe language, destroy thought, and negate the self. Big Brother understands that doublethink actually means no-think, for if everything is a contradiction, there’s no point in believing in anything. The Dao De Jing is nothing but doublethink, full of flux, instability, and contradictions in its praise of flux, instability, and contradictions:
As soon as everyone in the world knows that the beautiful are beautiful,
There is already ugliness.
As soon as everyone knows the able,
There is ineptness.

In 1984, Winston Smith cries for truth and freedom by insisting on the rationality, stability, and determinacy of things. But both Big Brother and Laozi would laugh at and pity Smith’s stubbornness. In the climax to 1984, Smith is captured by Big Brother’s spymaster O’Brien, who enlightens the delusional and misguided Smith through the ‘purifying’ technique of torture. O’Brien wants Smith to negate his memories and thus negate all who is—once Smith’s sense of self is vanquished he will submit automatically to the ‘truth’:
‘Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston…When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth.’

If you were to substitute Winston Smith with Orwell, O’Brien with Laozi, and the Party with Laozi’s The Way, this passage would clearly express the ideological divide between Orwell and Laozi—and between West and East.
Of course, Laozi is far more subtle and poetic than O’Brien, but he celebrates ignorance, passiveness, humility, and subservience, and in one passage he even mirrors the syntax and logic of the slogan ‘War is Peace/Freedom is Slavery/Ignorance is Strength’:
Credible words are not eloquent;
Eloquent words are not credible.
The wise are not erudite;
The erudite are not wise.
The adept are not all-around;
The all-around are not adept. (Chapter 81)

How ironic is it that in trying to describe the most intolerable unforgiving hell, Orwell has re-written the Dao De Jing for a Western audience? The sort of philosophy that repels a Western writer is in fact too often the culture of China.
So why should China and the West get along? It’s not just that their value systems, as underscored in these two classics, are different—they’re fundamentally at war with each other.

Cultural Clash (Diplomat)

Last week, the New York Times ran a piece on Zhai Tiantian, a disgruntled Chinese graduate student turned martyr after the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, had him arrested for threatening to burn down the school.

The news has been badly reported and hotlydiscussed in China for the past six weeks. Zhai seems a typical product of China’s education system, whose broken English, Chinese reasoning, and lack of social grace have mired him in personal and professional squabbles since arriving in the United States in 2003. He’s argued with his advisor, and in a TV interview accused his school of being racist. The New York police had also arrested him for harassing a woman, which prompted the Stevens Institute of Technology to suspend him.

Zhai’s appeals were in vain, and when he threatened the school the police came to arrest him, and he now faces deportation. Zhai’s fate hinges on how an American court of law interprets his words ‘I’m going to burn that building down.’ Zhai’s US advocates insist that he was speaking metaphorically, and the Chinese people are baffled by how a nation which protects freedom of speech could take such words so seriously.


Why did Zhai utter those words, regardless of what they meant? Because such behavior is too often considered normal in China. Zhai represents a new type of Chinese that most Americans have yet to encounter. Americans are familiar with the Asian stereotype of either shy and studious or psychologically unbalanced. But Zhai is a normal Chinese who’s grown up in a country where too many people get ahead in life by bullying and by cheating.

All this reminds me of the Coen brothers’ movie ‘A Serious Man,’ about an unlucky physics college professor, Larry Gopnik. He happens to have a Korean student who is bad at maths. Clyde, the Korean student, fails a physics mid-term, and asks Gopnik to give him a passing grade because the test was unfair—no one told him mathematics was part of physics.

The argument goes nowhere, and the Korean student surreptitiously leaves an envelope with hundred dollar bills inside. Gopnik discovers the envelope, and calls Clyde back into his office, and Clyde refuses to admit he had left the envelope. After this encounter, Clyde’s father Mr. Park, visits Gopnik at home, and threatens to sue him if he doesn’t pass Clyde:



Mr. Park: [The problem is a] culture clash.

Gopnik: With all due respect, I don’t think it’s that. It would be a culture clash if it were the custom in your land to bribe people for grades.

Mr. Park: Yes

Gopnik: So you’re saying it is the custom?

Mr. Park: No, it’s defamation—ground for lawsuit.

Gopnik: Let me get this straight. You’re threatening to sue me for defaming your son?

Mr. Park:Yes.

Gopnik: If it were defamation there would have to be someone I was defaming him to, or I….All right, let’s keep it simple. I could pretend the money never appeared. That’s not defaming anyone.

Mr. Park:Yes. And passing grade.

Gopnik: Passing grade?

Mr. Park:Yes.

Gopnik: Or you’ll sue me?

Mr. Park: For taking money.

Gopnik: So he did leave the money?

Mr. Park: This is defamation!

Gopnik: It doesn’t make sense. Either he left the money or he didn’t.

Mr. Park: Please. Accept the mystery.



I remember when I first arrived at Shenzhen Middle School in the autumn of 2008, and Principal Wang Zheng called me into his office. For the past four hours, he had been arguing with a father whose son was applying to US universities. The father had paid a magazine to publish his son’s economics paper, and his son had written to American universities about this ‘achievement’.

But in the school report to US universities, our counsellor had written that the student had ‘co-wrote’ the economics paper. Another student had opened this confidential school report, and told the student. When the student failed to get into an American university, the father decided that the school must be at fault. I quizzed the student, and discovered that his test scores were low, his spoken English was terrible, and that he didn’t participate in any extra-curricular activities. But his father was absolutely convinced that the two letters ‘co’ had sunk his son’s future, and demanded we write to the universities to admit our mistake.

So, the father had bribed a magazine to publish his son’s article, his son’s friend had opened a confidential letter and leaked the contents, and his son’s English was mediocre—and somehow Shenzhen Middle School and the prefix ‘co’ were to be blamed for his son not getting accepted?

Ultimately, with the real threat of a disgruntled and powerful father coming to the school every day to badger Principal Wang, we relented and wrote the letter—and the student did end up getting into an American university. US universities will be dealing with a lot more students like Zhai, even if they deport this one.