The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World (19 page)

However, test scores do not measure an understanding of information or the ability to use it to develop something useful. They are merely a tool to quantify and standardize a child’s performance in a certain pool of students. Moreover, Wadhwa’s examples of top Chinese were actually Taiwanese and ethnically Chinese Americans who studied in America.

Proof that the American educational system still trumps the Chinese one is in the admission numbers, not the test scores. Since China opened up in the last 30 years, one million Chinese students have studied abroad. In the last five years, more than 30 percent have returned to China.

More and more Chinese will study outside the country as Chinese families become wealthier and begin to send their children abroad at an earlier age, like the students I met during my niece’s private-school interview. These parents want to expand their children’s awareness of the world, not unlike programs run by American universities for students to spend a year abroad. Another, more practical reason is that parents think that holding a prestigious foreign degree will make their children better candidates in the Chinese job market. Eighty percent of my firm’s Chinese hires in the last three years went abroad to get master’s degrees before returning to start their careers in China.

Parent after parent tells me the main reason they send their child abroad is their lack of faith in the Chinese educational system. Even China’s top leaders send their children abroad. The daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s presumptive next president after Hu Jintao, is an undergraduate at Harvard. The grandchildren of past leaders like Hu Yaobang, Chen Yun, Deng Xiaoping, and Bo Yibo all studied at Yale, Harvard, and Duke. Can you imagine Barack Obama sending his daughters abroad for their undergraduate studies? If the very top of Chinese society is looking abroad for education, it is clear something is lacking at home, no matter what the test scores, or alarm by pundits like Wadhwa, indicate.

After the Cultural Revolution, when many scholars were harassed and universities’ doors were shut, China’s intellectual capital was so far behind in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship that the government actively promoted leading scholars’ studies abroad. They hoped that Chinese students would bring Western management prowess and technological knowledge back to China. For example, they sent the scholar Zhu Min to America, where he received a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University before returning home. He now is the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. Many of my Chinese classmates from Harvard are now working for the government or have high-paying academic positions at elite universities like Peking University.

Even with the number of scholars the government sent abroad, China’s skill set is still far too weak. Companies recognize this educational deficit in their Chinese workers, and are spending massive portions of their budgets on internal training. My firm interviewed 100 human resource officials at large and medium-sized companies in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai in late 2010. The vast majority said they were increasing their training budgets by 30 percent a year because their frontline executives were demanding better-trained and more highly qualified talent. One human resource executive in a state-owned oil company told me, “Our people are not trained well enough.” He repeated a common joke, “We have great hardware but bad software,” referring to human capital at his company. He told us he was planning to spend more on employee training, because the major problem keeping his company from achieving higher profits was the lack of qualified executives.

Young professionals are even willing to pay out of their own pockets to compensate for perceived skill-set deficiencies and to become more competitive for higher bonuses and salaries. Out of several hundred 24- to 28-year-olds in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing, 70 percent told my firm in 2008 that they would be willing to spend 10 percent or more of their disposable income on extra training and education. An astounding 10 percent responded they would be willing to pay 20 percent or more. One junior analyst at an information-services firm told me he was spending the equivalent of four months’ salary on English classes at night because he needed to have better foreign-language skills to communicate with colleagues at his company’s headquarters overseas. “I took English in school since I was five years old, but I still cannot talk well,” he said to me with an odd accent that I could not quite place. “I learned my English from a Russian.”

The demand for better-trained white collar workers will only increase as the population ages and the economy shifts from manufacturing and exports to domestic consumption and services. Although Chinese companies and graduates themselves are spending money and resources to make up for their lack of applicable skills, these channels are merely short-term fixes. China needs to establish a better educational system, starting from pre-kindergarten all the way through postdoctoral programs. It must create its own centers of excellent learning if China is to grow into and maintain international superpower status. Under the current educational system, this position cannot be attained.

All of the great superpowers have had bastions of learning that attracted the world’s best students. When the British ruled the world, students flocked to Eton and Oxford. America has St. Paul’s and Harvard. China currently has . . . nothing. The government needs to implement a stronger educational system, not only to train its own citizens, but also to draw top students from abroad. Achieving this level of international prestige is China’s best chance to create a strong source of soft power, and will be far more effective than any advertising campaign in Times Square or on CNN. Foreign students studying in China will not only bring Chinese know-how back to their home countries, but also a respect for and understanding of Chinese values, culture, and way of life.

Why doesn’t the government reform the system more swiftly? Even though everyone knows there is a problem, it will not be easy. Not a single Ministry of Education official or teacher I have spoken with has admitted to liking the current system, and often they, too, try to send their children abroad to study.

Part of the problem with reform is that the system is geared toward reducing corruption and ensuring that everyone has a fair shot at entering a university, no matter how humble the student’s background. The educational bureau tries to guarantee the highest objectivity possible for university admittance. Test scores are seen as the most transparent measurement of ability, which is the reason why they are the sole determinant of college entrance in China. Officials and the Chinese people fear that the establishment of Western-style college admission committees will only invite corruption, with parents bribing admissions committees and teachers and using as many of their connections as possible to ensure their children enter the right schools. This form of corruption already occurs with admissions to leading primary and high schools.

Another roadblock for China’s educational improvement is the immense number of people it must educate. In 2005 I had a business meeting at Zhejiang University, one of the more famous universities in the country, which is located in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province in eastern China. I took a slow, crowded train with my colleague Joe. We had an appointment to meet Ministry of Education and senior university officials to help them figure out strategies for dealing with overcrowding in classrooms.

Upon arrival, Joe and I were ushered into a room where we met a man named Professor Zhou. He was one of the first graduates from a Chinese university after schools reopened, following their closure for 10 years during the Cultural Revolution. He had experienced firsthand how poor policies at the top affected the whole country.

We sat down and started to drink lukewarm afternoon tea. Because there was no air conditioner, only a dingy, wheezing fan, our clothes clung to our backs with sweat. Between sips of tea and drags from a cigarette he gripped tightly in his bony hand, Professor Zhou began to explain his problems.

“We literally have class sizes of seven thousand students,” he lamented while smoking away in his office. I thought my Chinese was failing again, so I suggested his university look into implementing an e-learning system that could easily cover 700 students. I tried to show him how the system could automate test-score grading, when Professor Zhou grabbed my arm with his bony hand in midsentence.

“No. No. No,” he said adamantly, “I said seven thousand students. We have students connected by closed-circuit television.”

Seven thousand in one class. That is more than the entire student body at many universities in America—larger than a lot of U.S. towns, in fact. The size of that single class shows the magnitude of the issue China faces, in the educational system as well as society at large: how to deal with a population so large.

Many Western observers have difficulties grasping the sheer scale of China’s population or the implications of such population density on everything from housing and food to social instability. The population of China is five times larger than America’s, but the vast majority live squashed together in a land area roughly the size of America’s Eastern Seaboard. Much of the rest of the country, like the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts and the Himalayas in Tibet, is uninhabitable.

For Professor Zhou’s university, the government’s efforts to give more people better access to education have manifested themselves in massive overcrowding and a subpar education system. The government wrestles with the dilemma of balancing increasing the quality of education with expanding its availability. As I left Professor Zhou that day, he told me that the situation would get better, but probably not anytime soon.

The government is directing major funding to leading universities like Professor Zhou’s in their hope of fixing the system. They are actively recruiting Chinese professionals who have studied in America with pay packages rivaling those of American universities. Many of my graduate school classmates at Harvard are now teaching at universities in China, drawn by the chance to work in their homeland, but also because of the perks they are being awarded. They are given comfortable housing at heavily subsidized rates and huge research budgets, and are expected to bring international fame to their universities and to China.

Even one of my professors at Harvard University, famed Confucian scholar Du Weiming, left his position at Harvard to establish centers at Peking University and Zhejiang University.

Investing resources and recruiting international educators are great first steps in reforming the broken system, but at the end of the day, reforms need to focus on how and what students are taught. Intellectual capital needs to be spread throughout the entire population, not just the elite ranks.

Everyone acknowledges the problems, but figuring out how to fix them is more complicated. Switching from an objective, exam-based system to one that looks at more subjective metrics is fraught with the danger of increasing corruption. Parents whose children might do poorly from changes to the status quo will become angry and protest—another potential source of discord. This situation will only be exacerbated if admissions-corruption scandals engulf the country. More and better teachers need to be recruited, via improved benefits and training, to teach smaller class sizes in a more engaging, interactive format.

In order to progress, China needs to take into account what should be done and what can be done. The government needs to allow local ministry officials to collaborate with school officials to choose the educational materials used in class. It also should allow for more private schools answerable to the Ministry of Education that will be able to choose their own curricula pending ministry approval. These new institutions would create a space for foreigners and locals to study together. At the university level, the leading schools should provide a more liberal-arts-oriented education, and give students the freedom to choose majors after entering university and take electives.

All of these changes need to be made slowly, but the country cannot afford to go slowly. As China moves beyond being a low labor and real estate costs, and rises to economic-superpower status, it will need strong government officials, business leaders, entrepreneurs, and researchers to sustain its growth and solidify its global position. Human capital forms the backbone of long-term growth. To develop its next generation, China needs to establish learning centers of international excellence, invest resources appropriately, switch to a more subjective and diverse curriculum and entrance criterion, and open up greater access to education. China’s problems with the quality and coverage of its education system are multifaceted, and many of its aspects need to be reformed to keep young talent within the country, where they will be needed to develop innovative solutions to meet its future challenges.