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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Israel Can Teach China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Finland Can Teach China (The Diplomat)

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

Inside Shanghai's Schools (The Diplomat)

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

China's Economy After the Crisis (The Diplomat)

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

China's Hunger Games (The Diplomat)

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

Understanding China (The Diplomat)

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

Response to Readers' Questions (The Diplomat)

China Power blogger Jiang Xueqin answers readers’ questions on China’s economy, the Wukan protests and why things are looking good for Shanghai.

Matt Walters (LinkedIn):
What is your view concerning the recent protest movements in Wukan? Do you feel such incidents were just an isolated event or more of what’s to come?

“Wukans” have been happening throughout most of Chinese history, even in seemingly stable and prosperous times. Wukans happen because local officials run villages as their own personal fiefdoms, and because much of the wealth in the Chinese economy is generated by exploiting powerless and uneducated peasants in one way or another.

While Wukan-like incidents have been happening all over China for years now, Wukan generated a great deal of Western media attention partly because it tied into the Arab Spring paradigm, and partly because more and more Westerners are questioning China’s stability. While the Communist Party has managed to defuse the Wukan stand-off this time, there are bound to be many more Wukans in the future with much bloodier results.

And there’ll be many more “Wukans” because peasants just don’t matter. It’s really the urbanites who hold negotiating power with the Communist Party in China, and the urbanites hate the peasants even more than they hate the Party. Much of this is just self-interest (the countryside feeds the cities), and there’s nothing that scares the urbanites more than the idea of enfranchised peasants.

Jennifer Watkins (LinkedIn):
What do you think of this week’s visit by Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping? Do you think relations with America will move forward with this apparent emphasis on personal relationships?

Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to America had many goals, foremost among them to show to the inner Communist Party that he’s capable of representing China on the world stage, to continually engage America with the “peaceful rise” narrative, and to reinforce the importance of Sino-American engagement to a Chinese domestic audience. While there’s been a lot of heated discussion of Chinese nationalistic rhetoric and military maneuvers, the inner Party is pragmatic enough to realize that, for better or worse, China is too dependent on America economically to damage the Sino-American relationship. While Americans will probably pester Xi with specific questions that he can't answer (like the Syria veto), Xi would prefer if his actions speak for themselves, like the fact that he’s visiting Iowa and emphasizing his American ties.

Sanjay Khabra (Facebook):
The financial news media talk about China being threatened by a property bubble bursting. Is this unfounded or based on some truth? How would the Chinese government respond if a property bubble burst with the possibility of slowing growth?

With good reason, Westerners (such as China economist Nicholas Lardy) have been saying the Chinese property bubble market is about to burst since the late 1990s. And today, real estate prices have reached so high they’re beyond the reach of most middle class Chinese. But while middle class Chinese are frustrated, middle class Chinese who’ve seen the value of their real estate drop (most recently in Shanghai) cry bloody murder, and take to the streets. At a macro level, real estate is financed by bank lending, and so real estate prices are tied to the entire health and stability of the financial system.

Now if you’re a Western economist or anyone with any common sense, this situation is frightening. But people sometimes forget that the Chinese economy isn’t a free market system – it’s still a command economy in which the state controls bank lending, and real estate companies are usually arms of local governments. Because of the interference of the state, bubbles can reach a more greater unsustainable level than in free market economies, where bubble bursts are healthy corrections of the economy.

So the short answer is no, the Party won’t permit the real estate bubble to burst because the consequences would be unpredictably grave. The Party would rather just print money, which is what it’s effectively doing now.

Patrick Chang (LinkedIn):
You’re often scathing about the state of education in China, and actually China generally. Is there anything you see day to day that makes you feel at all optimistic about China today?

With my writings, I aim to inform the reader as to the general situation in China, and because of China’s structural issues I’m necessarily bleak. China is, and has been for a long time, an unmanageable behemoth: It’s much too populated, too poor, and too diverse to govern effectively using a monolithic bureaucracy.

And China’s economy is mainly dependent on the few (city folk) exploiting the cheap labor of the many (peasants), which causes a great deal of political, social, and cultural tensions. These two reasons – the use of a monolithic bureaucracy to maintain national unity, and the continued economic exploitation of the peasantry – mean that China lacks the structural capacity to become an open, innovative, and progressive economy and society. My education articles are meant to offer a specific instance of this nationwide reality.

That said, I’m optimistic about certain cities in China, such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Chengdu, Qingdao, Dalian, etc. These are relatively well-functioning, well-organized, high-performing cities with a highly-educated middle class. Their future prospects are very bright, irrespective of what happens to the rest of the country. These cities are already showing glimpses of democratic tendencies and a fledging creative class.

Why Jeremy Lin Matters (The Diplomat)

One writer who must be excited right now about basketball team the New York Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin is Michael Lewis, America’s best writer of non-fiction. In his book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Lewis profiles the Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane, as he stole unseen stars from wealthier teams by exploiting baseball’s prejudices; unlike the rest of baseball, Beane wasn’t interested in good looking athletic players who either hit homeruns or struck out nobly, but in smart players who got on base. In The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Lewis uses the inspiring rags-to-riches story of a poor homeless African-American high school player to explain how football strategy and tactics have evolved over the years.

And at long last, with the arrival of Jeremy Lin onto the world stage, Michael Lewis can complete his sports trilogy.

Lewis’s book would begin with last Friday, when basketball’s best player, Kobe Bryant, and his Los Angeles Lakers side waltzed into Madison Square Gardens. Having just heard of “Lin-sanity,” Bryant’s both bemused and annoyed. He’s heard how six days before, Lin, a player who slept on his brother’s couch and whom the Knicks were debating whether to pay minimum wage, scored 25 points against the New Jersey Nets, lifting the Knicks to a rare win and himself to instant Internet fame. And then Lin led the Knicks to victory against both the Washington Wizards and Utah Jazz, scoring over twenty points in both.


That’s all Hallmark movie-of-the-week nice and sweet, but now Lin and the Knicks must play against Kobe Bryant, who has led the LA Lakers to five NBA championships. And the Knicks haven’t beaten the Lakers since 2007. Plus the Knicks are missing their two star players.

So when Lin played the best game of his life, scoring 38 points against the Lakers, leading his team to a 92-85 win, even Kobe Bryant had to acknowledge Lin was no longer an Internet sensation, but a star: “Players don’t usually come out of nowhere. If you can go back and take a look, his skill level was probably there from the beginning. But no one ever noticed.”

The 6 foot 3, 200 pound, 23-year old Lin’s story is truly remarkable. He’s the first Harvard graduate to play in the NBA in almost sixty years, and he’s the first American of Chinese or Taiwanese ancestry to play in the NBA. And his five games of averaging 20+ points make his the best start in NBA history. So Bryant’s implied question “How come nobody noticed Lin’s star potential?” would be the focus of Michael Lewis’s book, not just looking at how basketball players are born and bred, but also looking at the often ignored Asian-American community, and how Lin’s ascent promises to forever transform the Asian-American identity.

Kobe Bryant is right in that Jeremy Lin had the skills to be a superstar all along. As a high school senior, Lin captained Palo Alto High School to a state championship, and was considered the best high school player in California. He hoped to play at UCLA or Stanford, but no college offered him an athletic scholarship. He got stuck at the professional athlete’s idea of a ghetto called Harvard, where he set Ivy League scoring records. Upon graduation, no NBA team drafted him, and when he signed with the Golden State Warriors, many speculated it was a publicity stunt, as Jeremy Lin had a large and loyal following among the local Asian-American community. He bounced from one NBA bench to another before ending up on the bench of the Knicks and sleeping on the Manhattan couch of his brother, a dental student at New York University. The Knicks were about to cut Lin when injuries and hopelessness called him off the bench against the New Jersey Nets.

So why didn’t anyone notice Jeremy Lin before?

The first answer is that sports teams often aren’t good at figuring out who’s really good, as Michael Lewis illustrated in Moneyball and as Malcolm Gladwell argued in his New Yorker article, “Game Theory.” Both Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell make the same point: That professional baseball and basketball teams overvalue individual performance statistics, and undervalue statistics that show an individual’s contribution to team success. As he’s demonstrating with the New York Knicks and has previously demonstrated with Palo Alto High School and Harvard, Jeremy Lin is an excellent leader, ball passer, and court strategist, but he lacks the flashiness of an Allen Iverson, whom Gladwell considers one of basketball’s most over-rated players.

The second answer is complex and murky: That Lin was discriminated against because he was Asian-American.

As Michael Lewis reminds us in Moneyball, professional athletics discriminates against most people, especially those who are short, fat, or pitch underhand, irrespective of their actual ability and talent.

What’s interesting here is how Lin’s success could alter the way Asian-Americans are perceived and how they perceive themselves.

While Lin is the quintessential American underdog story of hard work and tenacity, passion and persistence conquering all it wasn’t an Asian-American story until Lin came along. Cultural prejudices against Asian-Americans tend to be stubborn and persistent because they happen to be mostly true: Many Asian-Americans excel in school without showing passion or curiosity, and become professionals where they demonstrate little initiative or creativity.

When college recruiters saw Lin play, many were probably thinking “He’s a scrawny Asian-American kid” and some may have been thinking “Does he have the passion and drive to excel at the game, or is he just playing us so that he can get a full scholarship to come to our school, drop out of the program to focus on his grades, and then end up as an investment banker?” And Lin probably didn’t articulate his love of the game because he also has those stereotypically Asian-American traits of humility, forbearance, and reticence.

As Lin’s recent performances prove, he must passionately love the game, which permitted him to stay focused and work hard, despite the cultural discrimination and his lack of genetic gifts. And that’s what makes him such a compelling story to people all around the world, whether they be basketball fans or not.

Lin will undoubtedly have some bad games now and then, but he’s already proven he can play in the NBA, and he will undoubtedly finish with a great first season that will herald a great professional career. But his historical significance will be how he’s a cultural pioneer, breaking barriers and prejudices, and transcending the limitations of his sport, his identity, and his time.

Jeremy Lin has made all Asian-Americans and many East Asians proud. And for young Asian-Americans who are silently and secretly battling their individual aspirations against parental demands and cultural expectations, Lin has finally given them a voice, and forever changed their world.

Michael Lewis, if you’re reading this: Get started on the book now.

Avoiding US-China Cold War (The Diplomat)

In 1971, U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger visited China to negotiate a “world shaking” alliance between the two Cold War adversaries. Since then, he has continued to help manage the Sino-American relationship, most notably in the aftermath of the June 4 crackdown, when Kissinger is said to have negotiated a deal that permitted the dissident Fang Lizhi, who had sought sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, to flee to the United States, thereby resolving a potentially explosive political impasse.

In his new book On China, Henry Kissinger offers a framework for future U.S.-China relations by looking back at China’s diplomatic history, starting from 1793-4, when the Qing empire rebuffed Britain’s Lord George Macartney’s attempt to establish a diplomatic relationship. Back then, Britain, like the United States today, was a missionary power, intent on spreading the gospel of Christianity and free trade. But China back then saw itself as it sees itself today: The Middle Kingdom, the glorious sun that tributary states must revolve around in order to receive its light.

Kissinger explains the difference in Western and Chinese diplomacy and geo-political strategy with two board games. Westerners play chess, positioning its power on the board, striking at the enemy with logic and planning. Chinese play Go, a game in which winning requires encircling your opponent.

To understand how differently these two games are played, consider Kissinger’s first visit to China to negotiate with Premier Zhou Enlai what would later become the Shanghai Communique. Kissinger came to China with a timetable and talking points, but Zhou preferred that Kissinger visit the Forbidden City, and extend his stay. Whereas Kissinger hoped to achieve his diplomatic mission quickly and directly, Zhou surrounded Kissinger with flattery and personal attention to break down his defenses.

Since that fateful rite of passage, Kissinger has continued to advise Chinese and American Presidents, and by writing On China no doubtKissinger hopes current and future policymakers can benefit from his understanding of Chinese thinking. And as a policy book, On China demonstrates how Kissinger has mastered the games of both chess and Go so that he can communicate effectively to both his Chinese and U.S. foreign policy audiences.

For China’s current and future policymakers, Kissinger reminds them of Mao Zedong’s disastrous diplomacy, in which the Great Helmsman managed to surround and almost strangle China by alienating the Soviet Union, the United States, and India while debilitating China’s industrial capacity and ability to wage war.

To criticize Mao Zedong, Kissinger first surrounds him with obsequious praise before turning Mao’s own words against him.

In 1958, Chairman Mao ordered the shelling of Taiwan’s offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, deliberately provoking the United States, which had treaty obligations to defend Taiwan. And why play such a dangerous game? Here’s Mao’s reported reasoning for his actions:

“[T]he bombardment of Jinmen [Quemoy], frankly speaking, was our turn to create international tension for a purpose. We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time?”

When Khrushchev sent his Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko to Beijing to calm down his impetuous ally lest he start a nuclear war, Mao explained to Gromyko how China and the Soviet Union could destroy the Americans, albeit at the cost of hundreds of millions of Chinese lives:

“I suppose the Americans might go so far as to unleash a war against China. China must reckon with this possibility, and we do. But we have no intention of capitulating! If the USA attacks China with nuclear weapons, the Chinese armies must retreat from the border regions into the depths of the country. They must draw the enemy in deep so as to grip U.S. forces in a pincer inside China…Only when the Americans are right in the central provinces should you give them everything you’ve got.”

Kissinger contrasts Mao Zedong’s foreign policy with that of Deng Xiaoping, but careful to not disrupt the cosmic Communist unity that Chinese leaders so cherish, he first explains that Mao’s Cultural Revolution had paved the way for Deng’s economic reforms: “Mao destroyed traditional China and left its rubble building blocks for ultimate modernization.”

In contrast to Mao’s vengeful pride, Deng practiced a pragmatic humility, traveling to the West to solicit for technology and expertise to help modernize China, an act that Mao would have interpreted as treason. Kissinger avoids quoting “brilliant” Mao’s famous aphorisms, but does quote Deng’s 24-character statement on how China ought to manage international affairs: “Observe carefully; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.”

For Kissinger, China’s fragile geo-political and economic situation can be directly linked to Mao’s violent idealism, while China’s strategic alliances and economic rise can be credited to Deng’s modest pragmatism. That’s a very strong message to China’s current leadership, who are witnessing a revival of Mao Zedong rhetoric in the Chinese military, as exemplified by Col. Liu Mingfu’s book China Dream.

For American policymakers, Kissinger directly cautions them to ignore Chinese nationalistic rhetoric (just as Zhou Enlai once cautioned Kissinger to ignore Mao’s rhetoric). For Kissinger, Communist Party leaders are first and foremost Chinese strategists who practice Realpolitik: “China’s strategy generally exhibits three characteristics: meticulous analysis of long-term trends, careful study of tactical options, and detached exploration of operational decisions.”

Kissinger believes that by building diplomatic institutions (what he calls the “Pacific Community”) China and the United States could avoid another Cold War; The Qing’s rebuff of Lord Macartney is a history that must not repeat itself.

Chinese Students Paying U.S. Tuitions (New York Times blog)

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/how-chinese-students-pay-u-s-tuitions/

by Mark MacDonald

Rendezvous recently poked around the issue of Chinese high school students doctoring their applications to gain admission to U.S universities. Surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that more than half of all Chinese students will have faked something in their admission packets.

What we were unable to explore in our original piece, however, was how these students and their families finance their American college educations. U.S students amass debt, of course, but educational loans in China are virtually unheard of.

“I’m always surprised by how indifferent Chinese parents are to costs,’’ said Jiang Xueqin, the deputy principal of Peking University High School, one of China’s s premier schools. He helps students and their families with their study-abroad plans, and he wrote to us at length about the contours of this highly nuanced issue.

“Most of our parents are indeed well-connected and wealthy,” Mr. Jiang said, “although it’s extremely unclear how much money they actually have. A government official in Beijing may officially make 5,000 yuan a month’’ — about $790 — “but there’s no way that he’s only making that much money.”

Tuition at Mr. Jiang’s high school is nearly $12,700 a year, he said.

Many upwardly mobile Chinese families, especially those who have adhered to the state’s one-child policy, have been saving for years to pay for college. If they’re still short, they might sell their apartment, and extended family members might kick in.

Of Mr. Jiang’s 43 current students, only one has explicitly told him that she cannot afford overseas study. So she’s looking for a scholarship.

Foreign students are highly prized (and heavily recruited) by budget-challenged public universities in the United States because the foreigners typically pay much higher tuition fees than in-state students.

At the highly ranked University of Michigan, for example, an incoming freshman from Shanghai is charged nearly $38,000 in annual tuition and fees, while a kid from Kalamazoo will pay less than $13,000. Add in books, travel, room, board and the occasional 2 a.m. pizza, and the Chinese student will be well over $50,000.

Mr. Jiang noted the tension that often arises when it becomes clear that the Chinese (or other foreign students) are paying far more than their in-state counterparts.

“The locals think that the Chinese are rich foreigners, while the Chinese think they’re paying for the lazy locals to go to school,’’ Mr. Jiang said. “This disparity also leads to a mentality among Chinese students that they are ‘purchasing’ the American university degree.”

So why do Chinese parents spend so much money?

“While there’s a minority of parents who think an American education superior, I think most see an American college degree as a luxury goods item — they want the ‘face’ value of an American-educated child. This study-abroad phenomenon is also benefiting from a herd mentality.”

At Mr. Jiang’s school, the parents look most closely at the rankings by U.S. News & World Report.

“They’re usually aiming for a top 50 school,’’ he said. “The really prestigious brands in China are Harvard (every parent’s dream school), Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and Wharton.

Mr. Jiang also mentioned a new trend he’s seeing — “a growing consensus within China that Chinese students who’ve studied abroad and who return to China are becoming a social problem.’’

“They return with limited English and limited marketable skills, yet they also have high expectations,’’ he said.

“As well, while they really don’t fit in America, they have also developed habits and ways of thinking that don’t permit them to integrate back into Chinese society easily.’’

Does China Have a Soul? (The Diplomat)

The New York Review of Books blog has posted an Ian Johnson interview with Zhang Ping (who writes under the name Chang Ping), one of China’s most daring writers whom the Communist Party previously hounded out of reporting from China.

The piece is worth reading for both the interviewee and the interviewer.

Inspired by Liu Binyan to become a journalist, Chang Ping has a career that shares many similarities with that of his role model. But there’s one major difference. Liu, with his journalistic exposes of the inept Communist Party political, economic, social, and moral management of China, inspired a generation of disaffected youth to carry the intellectual flame.

By the late1990s, when Chang Ping came into prominence at Southern Weekend, a Guangzhou-based newspaper famed for its investigative journalism, the Party had begun to buy out China’s intellectual class so successfully that it could easily persecute those who couldn’t be bought out – individuals such as He Qinglian, Ai Weiwei, and Chang Ping.

Chang Ping now lives in Germany, but is attempting to start a new media organization to effect change in China. Unfortunately, as was the case with Liu and He, Chinese intellectuals tend to fade away once in exile.

For China watchers, Johnson needs no introduction, as he’s the most intellectual of Western reporters working in China today. In much of his recent reporting, Johnson spends a lot of time sipping tea with exiled Chinese writers or meditating with Daoist masters. And I think he does so because he seeks enlightenment on a question that must gnaw at all China watchers: Does China have a soul?

This question must sound embarrassingly racist or, given China’s economic trajectory, increasingly irrelevant. But it’s also China’s most important question because the flip side of this question is: Does China have a future?

We are often blind to these questions because we are so focused on economic data, which we faithfully believe to reveal the reality of China to us. But GDP growth, consumer spending, and stock market ups and downs don’t tell us the level of individual happiness or the strength of social cohesion. Economic data may tell us that China is more prosperous and powerful today than at any time in its history, and that’s true. But what’s also true, if you crisscross China talking to elderly Chinese, is that China was more honest and happy back in the Mao Zedong days than it is today.

It’s obvious from his reporting that Johnson would rather trust his own eyes than economic data. He’s interested in China’s intellectual and spiritual state – or what Chang Ping calls “the civic spirit” – because that’s what reveals a nation’s “emotional intelligence,” China’s ability to absorb the shock of the inevitable economic downturn, and China’s will to hold together when the economic glue fades.

The United States is facing a tough economic storm now, but no one doubts that the American people share “civic spirit” and are all invested in the nation’s democratic soul, as is so eloquently outlined in Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence” and Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. And that’s why most can be confident that this current recession will only make America leaner and stronger in the end.

On the other hand, the European Union has no unifying ideas and values, and that’s why the possibility of a Greek default, no matter its impact economically, could begin the process of the EU’s political death.

Within the Party’s inner sanctums, the nation’s soul is very much a concern. Consider President Hu Jintao’s speech calling for China to expand its cultural power both abroad and at home: The Communist Party is desperate for a unifying vision to unite the Chinese people for the economic tough times ahead.

Ironically, a nation’s soul and cultural unity comes from the same poets and philosophers, its thinkers and writers (individuals such as Liu, He, Ai Weiwei, and Chang Ping) that the Communist Party has persecuted. The United States soft power – its vision of individual freedom and empowerment that animates both Disney movies and Special Forces troops operating in the world’s most far-flung corners – developed its power and force through generations of open and honest and vigorous debate over its soul.

Does China have a soul? We’ll only know once the China edifice starts crumbling. If it doesn’t have a soul, then China may very well fall into the abyss. If it does, whether it be a previously hidden intellectual or religious tradition, it will naturally rise to the challenge.

Johnson is now scouring China for what could save the Communist Party, or what could possibly come after the Party and ultimately save China. And that’s why his reporting, while neither trendy nor topical, is certainly urgent and necessary.

Why U.S. Needs a China Threat (The Diplomat)

The Atlantic correspondent Robert Kaplan is one of America’s most influential geo-political thinkers, if not the most influential. He’s the author of numerous books and policy articles informed by his extensive travels to the most chaotic parts of the world, and even more extensive reading of philosophers and poets of the human condition. He sits on the Defense Policy Board , which advises the Pentagon, and has worked as a consultant to the U.S. military.

In other words, what he thinks has geo-political implications. So what does Kaplan think of China?

It’s clear from his reporting that the U.S. military considers China the number one threat in the Pacific Ocean, which Kaplan calls “America’s private lake.” In his book Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, Kaplan embeds on a destroyer, inside a nuclear submarine, and on a bomber, and what impresses him most is neither the technology nor the power of the military, but the passion and dedication of the soldiers, seaman, and pilots, and the experience and authority of the sergeants and corporals, who are the heart and soul of the U.S. military. While never made explicit, America’s fighting men and women are always learning, collaborating, and preparing themselves for their new enemy: China.

And, for Kaplan, it’s not just the Pacific where the interests of the United States and China will collide.

Kaplan’s most recent book is Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and Future of American Power, which argues that the Indian Ocean is now the nexus of globalization, and thus the center of gravity for geo-politics: Through the Strait of Hormuz, oil is delivered through the Strait of Malacca to fuel the world’s most dynamic economies.

In Monsoon, Kaplan travels to major ports along the Indian Ocean littoral, some of which are being built by Chinese money and labor. Kaplan envisions the Indian Ocean as a major source of conflict between India, which is expanding vertically, and China, which is expanding horizontally. And where they meet is resource-rich Burma, where China is constructing roads to connect its southwest to Burma so that it can break into the Indian Ocean and secure a new route for energy supplies.

As a writer, Kaplan can sometimes be edgy and passionate, but he’s above all careful and nuanced. It can sometimes be hard to catch what he’s saying, but here’s what I think is the subtext of Monsoon: China’s ambition is to become a two ocean blue-water navy, and thus a true global superpower. To accomplish that, China must “Finlandize” the southeast countries of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, as well as take Taiwan back into its fold so that it can finally break into the Pacific. The United States ought to counter by shifting its focus from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific region, and work with the democracies of India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesian, and Australia to balance undemocratic China.

But Kaplan presents very little evidence as to why and how China threatens U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific. He does not visit China for his book, and so can’t see for himself how China may soon be too overwhelmed with environmental degradation, financial mismanagement, and social unrest to concern itself with the seas. And he himself is a canny enough thinker of military matters to know that the Chinese military, even if it were to surpass the United States in number of ships and submarines, lacks the U.S. military’s democratic culture, spirit, and purpose which make American fighting men the best in the world, and the U.S. military machine the most flexible and resilient.

So why does Kaplan consider China a threat? Perhaps it’s because he spends so much time with U.S. military officials that he’s adopted their China paranoia? But I think there’s a deeper psychological reason why Kaplan sees China as a threat: Because he, like so many other American intellectuals, understand deep down that the real threat to America is America itself, that the United States is amusing itself to death with Jersey Shore, Facebook, and the Superbowl.

And, as Kaplan argues passionately and eloquently in his essay “The Dangers of Peace,” which closes his book The Coming Anarchy, it’s this state of lethargic complacency that makes nations shallow and stupid, and which also creates the conditions for catastrophic war:

“After the Napoleonic Wars, many decades of peace in Europe led to rulers who lacked a tragic sense of the past, which caused them to blunder into World War I.

“The solution for such trends is simple: struggle, of one sort or another, hopefully nonviolent. Struggle demands the real facts, as well as real standards of behavior. While governments lie in specific instances during wartime, war ultimately demands credibility, whereas long periods of peace do not; with no threat at hand, lies and exaggerations carry smaller penalties. Struggle causes us to reflect, to fortify our faith, and to see beyond our narrow slots of existence.”

And China is the ideal villain for the United States to struggle against: It’s so big and omnipresent, so aggressive and undemocratic that Hollywood couldn’t have cast a better villain.

Just as nostalgic as the U.S. military for the Cold War, Kaplan is essentially predicting a new Cold War between China and America, and a new existentialist threat that will force the United States to come together and teach its students math.

That’s a romantic idea from a writer who has dedicated his career to questioning the practicality and purpose of romantic ideas.

Here are the closing words of Kaplan’s 1994 book The End of the Earth: A Journey into the Frontiers of Anarchy: “The more I saw of the world, the less I felt I could fit it into a pattern. No one can foresee the precise direction of history, and no nation or people is safe from its wrath.”

The Genius of "A Separation" (The Diplomat)

The Iranian film “A Separation,” now playing in North American theaters, will most likely win this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and has already won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film as well as best film at the Berlin International Film Festival. “A Separation” is writer and director Asghar Farhadi’s fifth film, and it’s the one that will establish him as one of the world’s most brilliant storytellers.

The title ostensibly refers to an urban middle class couple who have separated from each other; English teacher Simin has gotten a visa to emigrate to the West, but her husband Nader, who works in a bank, refuses to leave his father who has Alzheimer’s. They have an 11-year-old daughter Termeh (played by the director’s daughter) who doesn’t want her parents to leave each other, and so chooses to stay with her father, knowing that Simin won’t leave Iran without her.

But the title also refers to the rural-urban, traditional-modern, moral-utilitarian divides that coalesce to form the main conflict in this movie. After Simin leaves to live with her parents, Nader hires a villager named Razieh to look after his father. Looking after a male patient with dementia is too much for the pregnant Razieh, who must commute three hours to work. When Nader’s father soils his pants, the profoundly pious Razieh has a crisis of faith, and seeks religious counsel to see if God will permit her to change the poor man’s pants. She’s underpaid and exhausted, but ultimately she’s bound to the family’s misfortunes by her own: her husband has lost his job as a cobbler, has to take medication for the consequent depression, and is in and out of debtors’ prison. One day, Nader returns home to find Razieh absent and his father tied to the bed, and he becomes so distraught and angry that he fires Razieh by pushing her out the door. Then Nader and Simin find themselves in a hospital where they learn that Razieh has had a miscarriage. The two families entangle themselves in a legal fight to determine who was culpable for Razieh’s miscarriage, and in the process dig themselves deeper and deeper into a moral conundrum.

Farhadi manages several neat tricks with this movie. “A Separation” is morally complex without being morally confusing, is dramatically tense and emotionally powerful without being melodramatic and emotionally overwhelming, and is sympathetic to all characters and viewpoints while affirming the power of truth and love.

Farhadi accomplishes this by building strong contrasts and comparisons between the three sets of characters. There’s the two wives Simin and Razieh, while standing with their husbands and across from each other, nevertheless are devout to the “truth” (Simin to a modern and metaphysical “truth,” Razieh to the Koran), and thus stood together throughout the film.

Then there’s the two families’ daughters who live in different worlds. One scene in a court of law outside the judge’s chambers captures how irreconcilable this chasm really is: While waiting for their parents, Termeh is pre-occupied studying for her final exams with the help of her grandmother, while Razieh’s 6-year-old daughter looks on with sad bright eyes, having never been inside a classroom and knowing she’ll never get into one. But despite their differences they’re both united by a child-like attachment to what is right, what is fair, and what is true – an innocence that makes them equally suffer as the film sinks into its moral murkiness.

What ultimately drives the plot of the film is the conflict between the two husbands, who are tragically alike. Razieh’s husband Hodjat is consumed with anger at his poverty and powerlessness, and he becomes more volatile and violent as he seeks justice for his wife and his unborn child, but feels helpless against a modern middle class urban society that seems to have united against his family. Simin’s husband Nader is consumed by pride, which ironically makes this secular man a fanatic, as he seeks to prove his innocence, even if he has to lie, conspire, and abandon his wife to do so.


Besides using vivid characterization, Farhadi also manages to balance the complexity, contradictions, and conflicts by filming minimally in interiors. Every scene is either shot inside an apartment or a hospital or a court or a school or a car. He doesn’t use wide angles to allow the audience to breathe a bit, nor does he attempt to control mood with music, color, and lighting. But the film’s claustrophobia works to the story’s advantage, magnifying and reflecting the tension and the anxiety in the characters themselves.

What ultimately makes this movie work so well then are the individual performances of all the actors. In his book The Ends of the Earth, Robert Kaplan argues that Westerners have a misconception of Iranians as cold and aloof Muslims, while in reality they’re poetic and passionate Persians – which is perhaps why they often make such gifted actors.

Towards the climax of the movie, Simin has negotiated a truce with Hodjat to pay “blood money” for the miscarriage so that the feuding can stop its downward spiral. Simin and Termeh, who is now living with her mother, go tell the good news to Nader in his apartment. Arguing that by paying he would profess his guilt, he refuses, and Simin walks out angrily. She attempts to take Termeh with her, but Termeh refuses. The 11 year-old fears his father’s lies and equivocations, but above all she fears losing him, and so she tries to convince his father to take the deal. Then Nader says to her in that cold calculating manner only he’s capable of: “If you think I’m guilty go get your mother, and I’ll do what she wants.”

Termeh’s facial response powerfully captures so many hues and shades: It’s at the same time loud and numb, stunned and aware, hurt and empowered. That one-second facial expression, caught between crying and laughing, reveals that if no one else has changed, she at least has. And she now knows that no matter how much she loves her father he’s lost to her and to himself.

“A Separation” is a bold masterpiece of Iranian film-making. Go see it at a theater, and be overwhelmed by its artistic and moral genius.

China's Mega-City Problem (The Diplomat)

In their article “How the rise of the megacity is changing the way we live,” the Guardian correspondents Paul Webster and Jason Burke profile Chengdu, a once lush and lethargic city of 500,000 back in 1950 that today is now a bustling and bursting metropolis of 14 million. Chengdu is just one of many cities found throughout the developing word that are acquiring “mega-city” status.

The Guardian reporters mention the building of two monuments aimed at shining the global spotlight on Chengdu, a city most famous for its teahouses where the young and the old laugh the day away playing cards:

“The New Century Global Centre is a leisure complex that will house two 1,000-room five-star hotels, an ice rink, a luxury Imax cinema, vast shopping malls and a 20,000-capacity indoor swimming pool with 400 meters of “coastline” and a fake beach the size of 10 football pitches complete with its own seaside village. Alongside will be another massive and futuristic structure, a contemporary arts centerdesigned by the award-winning Iraqi-born architect, Zaha Hadid.”

By definition, mega-cities are overwhelming – their problems more so than their potential. The center of Johannesburg, a recently minted mega-city, brims with slums of frustration and desperation, while its margins grow fat with financial centers and gated communities. The by-products of Beijing’s overcrowding are air pollution and traffic congestion, and its insatiable appetite for water and fuel deplete the surrounding provinces of their own potential. What makes mega-cities particularly daunting is their unmanageability, only worsened by the constant influx of migrants, who with their cheap labor and political disenfranchisement permit the middle class to achieve a high standard of living, but whose need for healthcare and housing the middle class refuse to pay for.

The Guardian article quotes Chengdu’s mayor, Ge Honglin, who understands the inherent instability in planning a “mega-city” in Sichuan, one of China’s poorest provinces and a steady supplier of migrants to China’s booming coastal cities:

“Chengdu's mayor, Ge Honglin, claims that the city has avoided some of the problems associated with migration into the cities by encouraging families to stay in the countryside. ‘The first thing I did was to improve the conditions – schools, shops, garbage collection, the sewage system. We had to cut the gap between rural and urban areas. If people could have a brighter future in the countryside, they'd stay there. So we’re not seeing people swarm into the city…Instead there are people in the city considering moving to the country.’”

If Ge can grow Chengdu on his timetable and schedule without unleashing vast environmental destruction and opening the gates to a flood of poor peasants, then he would be a finer technocrat than both Albert Speer and Robert Moses combined.

The main problem with Chengdu’s growth, as well as that of all of China’s urban centers, is the mentality of growth for growth’s sake, which emphasizes buildings and statistics over people and ideas. What China’s city planners need to understand is that a city exists to unite and inspire its people to engage in creative endeavors that would better themselves and their city.

Both Robert Moses’ arch-nemesis Jane Jacobs and the urban theorist Richard Florida believe that cities can and ought to be organic and dynamic, open and diverse communities that inspire their citizens. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class (a book heavily inspired by Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Florida argues that cities, if they are to thrive and prosper, must attract creative people, and “provide the integrated eco-system or habitat where all forms of creativity – artistic and cultural, technological and economic – can take root and flourish”:

“Creative people are not moving to [cities] for traditional reasons. The physical attractions that most cities focus on building – sports stadiums, freeways, urban malls and tourism-and-entertainment districts that resemble theme parks – are irrelevant, insufficient or actually unattractive to many Creative Class people. What they look for in communities are abundant high-quality amenities and experiences, an openness to diversity of all kinds, and above all else the opportunity to validate their identities as creative people.”

The irony of all this is that Chengdu, with its beautiful rural hills, its distinctive culture, its traditional openness and tolerance, and its artistic communities, could have become China’s top creative center if it built on its strengths.

By choosing rapid and vapid urbanization, Chengdu is losing its identity and character, and becoming a lesser version of Beijing – a tense conflict between buildings and people, a conflict which has alienated everyone from each other and himself.

Or much, much worse, it’ll become like Chongqing.

China's Land Grab Alchemy (The Diplomat)

The most contentious issue today in China, as has been true for the past decade, is land appropriation. What we just witnessed in Wukan, with peasants organizing to defend their land and livelihood, has occurred frequently over the past decade, and will continue unabated, but with little effect, in the next.

Wukan was powerful because it provided a neat “Good Earth” narrative to understand the otherwise messy reality of China’s land grab. Already, we are using Wukan as a frame of reference to understand struggles over land: Here’s the Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between Wukan and a new struggle:

“Guangdong party chief Wang Yang may have won praise for his light-handed approach in dealing with Wukan, but has he actually opened the floodgates for a wave of land grab protests? Yesterday, 1,000 villagers rallied at the Guangzhou city government headquarters as the provincial people's congress met elsewhere in the city for the closing ceremony of its annual session.”

Is there actually a connection between Wukan and this new protest? Will Wukan spark a wildfire of land grab protests around China? What was the real lesson of Wukan?

In 2001, I spent several months traveling around China – Shenyang, Jilin, Changchun, Chongqing, and Zhengzhou – interviewing villagers, and their main complaint was losing their land without fair and adequate compensation. But their complaints were also individual and local, and different individuals employed different strategies – suing the government in local courts, petitioning for the intervention of higher authorities (shangfang), petitioning even higher authorities (Falun Gong and underground Christianity), but generally just drinking a lot and cursing corrupt officials.


And because these complaints were individual and local, the foreign media was unaware of how commonplace these complaints were throughout the aughties, and local officials dealt with them on an ad hoc basis. In those rare instances when leaders and organizers arose among the villagers, the local officials divided and conquered by using carrots and sticks. They would try bribing one of the leaders to sow internal dissent and confusion, and if that didn’t work then what did was arresting all the leaders, and paying off the villagers; again, land complaints were individual and local in China.

When I was a young and impetuous reporter I attributed China’s land grab to the greed and corruption in the Communist Party. But now that I actually work in the periphery of the Communist empire as a Beijing public school administrator I can see that greed and corruption aren’t quite as commonplace as I once imagined.

Believe it or not, Chinese officials are human too, and they are driven by the same goals and concerns as bureaucrats and managers operating in any society. They want to protect their position, and rise within the hierarchy by pleasing their superiors. Above all, they’re risk adverse.

But, if so, then why do they appropriate land, an activity fraught with costs and risks? Consider the costs of land appropriation, if you were a local official: You have to devote a large staff to negotiate with villagers, and if negotiations don’t work then you have to deploy policemen to remove villagers off the land, and pay spies to ensure they do not organize. Consider Wukan, and how expensive it was to deploy all those riot police and equipment to lay siege to the village.

The main issue, though, is of risk. If the issue draws media attention, as it did in Wukan, higher authorities might investigate, and even in the unlikely situation you are clean there’s a great risk that you will be passed over for promotion, and you’d stuck be in a place like Wukan for the rest of your life. Also, what if peasants decide to take justice into their own hands?

And the mandarins in Beijing have enough spies (official media reporters) around the country to know how explosive the land grab issue is in China, and they’ve read enough history to know that it’s this spark that has ignited many an internal rebellion.

So, if grabbing land is costly, risky, and threatens the regime, why is it so commonplace? Because neither the Communist Party honchos in Beijing, nor their local minions in Wukan and Kanwu, have a choice in the matter.

The Party’s authority and legitimacy are predicated on guaranteeing at least 8 percent GDP growth a year, and economic growth is the mandate of all Party officials. If you’re Ningbo or Yantai or any large Chinese urban center with an entrepreneurial population and large resources then that’s not a problem. But if you’re a rural township of subsistence farmers then your best shot at producing the numbers you need to win praise and promotion is to grab that worthless land and put a factory or a condo on it. The magic of economic statistics is that, even if the factory or condo is empty, the value of land shoots up, and so does your career prospects.

Land grabbing is the Chinese equivalent of alchemy, and this quick immediate economic fix is just too addictive for local officials to say no to. This is a problem not just commonplace in the villages, but everywhere in China.

Consider the Chinese public school system, which focuses on test scores and college enrollment statistics. The system destroys students’ creativity and curiosity, independence and imagination, but as long as you get eighty percent of your students into tier one colleges you’re promoted and rewarded as a brilliant educator – just like magic!

No official was arrested because of the Wukan uprising. That’s because, as everyone knows in China, those officials were just doing their job.

Hu Jintao's Legacy (The Diplomat)

Last week, fellow China Power blogger David Cohen discussed Chinese President Hu Jintao’s essay remarking that China and the West are locked in a cultural war. The language and rhetoric used in the essay – “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration” – alarmed Western observers, and brought to mind images of Red Book-waving Red Guards.

Throughout his tenure, Hu has presented himself as the most disciplined and faceless of technocrats, so this is one of those rare moments when he’s actually said something worth commenting on. I’d like to offer some thoughts on Hu’s essay, and what it means for China in 2012.

First, I agree with David Cohen that Hu’s essay, like everything uttered by any Chinese leader, is meant for internal Communist Party consumption. In the lead-up to the October 2012 transfer of power, Hu has two immediate concerns: creating his legacy, while mapping out the Communist Party’s future strategy.

Second, what’s most interesting about Hu’s essay is not what he says, but what he doesn’t say: namely, that he chooses to focus on a problem that few in China think is actually a problem, while leaving out the still unresolved issues that he inherited ten years earlier from Jiang Zemin – the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, internal Party corruption, and China’s moral bankruptcy.

Throughout his tenure, Hu emphasized these three issues in dour empty speeches, most recently in his speech commemorating the 90th anniversary of the founding of China’s Communist Party in July 2011. Meanwhile, these problems have only worsened.

It’s always politically clever to use xenophobic fear-mongering to distract from real pressing issues, and this “last resort of scoundrels” hints at how desperate the Party has become.

Third, Hu’s essay implies that China’s moral decay – as symbolized by last year’s Guo Meimei and Wang Yue cases – represents a failure of China’s cultural producers to influence the hearts and minds of Chinese, and not a by-product of China’s economic growth model.

Yes, the People’s Liberation Army with song and dance did inspire peasants to join the Communist Revolution, but China today is no longer fighting against oppressive landlords and foreign devils, but rather itself; specifically, the much vaunted Beijing Consensus, a political arrangement in which the Party promises “prosperity and stability” if China’s middle class shuts its political mouth.

The Beijing Consensus has given the Party short-term political legitimacy at the long-term cost of China’s economic development and social fabric.

To understand how, consider Enron and Wall Street, both of which seemed to take pride in appealing to their employees’ greed. For a while their profits reached dizzying heights, but eventually Enron went bankrupt under the weight of its own lies and scams, while Wall Street would have gone under as well if Washington hadn’t intervened. And China’s economy, with its insolvent banks and staggering local government debt, may be the biggest house of cards yet.

Daniel Pink in his book Drive argues that appealing to people’s utilitarian instincts leads to people being unhappy, uncreative, and unethical short-term thinkers addicted to making as much money as possible. This is evident in many of China’s middle class today, and the Chinese middle class obsession with accumulating Louis Vuitton bags is neither good for China’s economy, nor for its soul.

Fourth and finally, in rhetoric, tone and spirit, Hu’s essay is a remarkable contrast to Premier Wen Jiabao’s speeches calling for China to develop “democracy” and “creativity.”

Such calls represent an understanding that, in the new reality of the Internet, globalization, and the free market, unleashing the citizenry’s creativity and letting them open their political mouths are one and the same. If governments refuse to do so, not only will that hamper economic growth, but they could also lose political legitimacy and authority – as is increasingly the case with the Communist Party today.

Unfortunately, China’s Communist Party is so because it lacks political imagination and because its obsession with maintaining power makes it blind to new realities. So expect more scary rhetoric and censorship, especially in China’s social media, in 2012.

What Finland Shows China, U.S. (The Diplomat)

In his new book Class Warfare, Steven Brill profiles the American public education reform movement, which is promoting charter schools, standardized testing, and performance-based pay. This reform movement includes: Yale-educated Dan Levin, co-founder of Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, which specializes in getting poor minority children to do well on tests to get into college; Cornell-educated Michelle Rhee, who as Washington DC education czar, is alleged to have tried to “bribe” teachers to quit the union and to have offered them cash to try to encourage them to boost their students’ test scores; Harvard-educated Barack Obama who is forcing state governments to emphasize standardized testing if they are to obtain federal education dollars.

Because the education reform movement combines the determination of Ivy League-educated educators, the power of Ivy League-educated politicians, and the money of Ivy League-educated financiers, “accountability” in the form of standardized testing will increasingly become the raison d’etre for U.S. public education.

Just as the United States is learning from China, the reverse is true as well. Recently, the non-profit Washington-based Institute for International Education (IIE) reported that there are now 158,000 Chinese students on the American college campus, and a popular trend is for Chinese students to attend American private high schools. Middle class Chinese parents are increasingly aware of the gaokao’s limitations, creating a market for elite private schools based on the U.S. model.

Over the next 5 to 10 years, the education landscapes of the United States and China will likely converge: standardized testing for the majority of students, elite private schools for the wealthy. This education trend is merely a reflection and a reinforcement of the vast socio-economic inequality in these two societies, and the unwillingness or inability of both governments to address this problem.

But instead of emulating the worst tendencies in each other, the U.S. and China would benefit from studying Finland’s education system. Writing in the Atlantic, New York-based Finnish journalist Anu Partanen argues that Finland’s education achievements derive from its focus on compassion and equality, not on competition and excellence. She criticizes America’s system of private schools, its use of standardized testing to sort students, and the trend towards “accountability,” and thus the Ivy League values of competition, testing, and elitism.

The reformers believe that standardized testing will bring rationality, accountability, and meritocracy to public education – to use short-term rewards to motivate students to learn better, and teachers to teach better. Many Ivy Leaguers became so because they’re motivated by short-term rewards, and so they naturally believe that everyone is motivated to perform their best if offered short-term rewards.

But the existing evidence argues against this. In their book Sway, Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman tell the story of Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a public school that was Finnish in its mission and values. The school had high standards and few rules; most students thrived intellectually and creatively, while a minority skipped class. To induce those slackers to stop being so, the school instituted a pilot program in which teachers would be paid bonuses if their students completed the course. At the end of the school year, the course completion percentage jumped, and the teachers were paid their bonuses. Yet another success story of Ivy League thinking, right?

Not quite. Upon closer inspection, administrators discovered that the low-performing students, despite completing their courses, continued to skip classes, and their grades had declined dramatically.

Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman explain how Community High’s dedicated teachers became less so:

“Once the pilot study was introduced, in order to secure their bonuses the teachers began concentrating their efforts on enticing students to show up who would otherwise have cut class…All of a sudden the teachers had a bonus carrot dangling in front of them. Instead of focusing on teaching their students, they began chasing after their reward. To keep the students coming back to class they ‘included activities such as more field trips and in-class parties’ – probably not what they had in mind when they entered the profession.”

In his book Drive, Daniel Pink, citing copious scientific research, lists the seven consequences of using carrots and sticks to motivate:

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.

2. They can diminish performance.

3. They can crush creativity.

4. They can crowd out good behavior.

5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.

6. They can become addictive.

7. They can foster short-term thinking.

The Finnish model works not because Finnish teachers are rewarded and punished depending on performance, but because they are trusted and respected. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that for an individual to excel in his work he needs mastery, autonomy, and purpose. And it’s because Finnish teachers are experienced, have control over their classroom, and aim to develop the uniqueness of each of their students that Finnish education is considered the best in the world, and helps contribute to Finland being to one of the best places to live in the world.

That’s yet another life lesson that the Ivy League just can’t teach.