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.