NPR - Religion and One Child Policy in China

My beloved National Public Radio has run a couple of excellent stories over the past few weeks. I was only able to catch bits and pieces of them as they happened live on the radio. But I found time today to catch up on the both of the series - New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China and China's One Child Policy.

The first series - New Believers - was in five parts. The following clips ran Monday through Friday on the program, All Things Considered:

In The Land Of Mao, A Rising Tide Of Christianity
China’s Divided Catholics Seek Reconciliation
Female Imams Blaze Trail Amid China's Muslims
Beijing Finds Common Cause With Chinese Buddhists
China's Leaders Harness Folk Religion For Their Aims

All of these contain either audio slide shows or photos, so be sure to check those out along with the audio.

This is a worthwhile series. It covers a lot of the bases that should be covered in a China religion discussion. In particular, I found the story on the female imams of Henan Province informative. I was not aware that China had such a unique sect of Islam. There are no female imams outside of China.

The second series - China's One Child Policy - was also a week-long series. It ran on the program, Marketplace by American Public Media:

How China's one-child policy came to be
One-child workers: A generation of 'little emperors'
China's only children carry family hope
In China: More kids or more stuff?
Chinese labor pool on the decline
Back Story

Also be sure to check out the "Cast of Characters" at the bottom of the page. It profiles some of the 老百姓 - normal Chinese people - covered in the stories.

These programs too were all very good. I want to highlight one section from the third one, "China's only children carry family hope," that particularly resonated with me:

Scott Tong: For sixth grader Fang Jin Xue, the day starts at seven, sharp, with a...

Fang Rong: Baobei kuai dian!

Hurry up! From her mom. The 12 year-old grunts a word of compliance. And then pulls on her clothes: Green hoodie sweatshirt, black cotton pants and pink eyeglasses. The morning hustle feels like my house on a school day -- but this is a Saturday.

Fang Jin Xue explains why: Tutoring class, every weekend.

Fang Jin Xue: First, two classes of English. Then one science, one writing, one Chinese. Then two math classes. It goes late, so we eat dinner at the school.

Mom Fang Rong nukes some sesame porridge. They wolf it down. And scamper down seven flights of stairs -- no elevator here. It's hectic, mom says. Every family is racing to get its one child ahead.

Fang Rong: Competition is fierce, so we all feel we have to do something, right or wrong. If parents don't put kids in tutoring classes, they panic.

Fang Rong, the mom, is a factory quality control worker, making $7,000 a year, about the median income in urban China. Dad works at a factory too. Together, they spend 10 percent of their income on their daughter's schooling. Surveys suggest other families shell out as much as 50 percent.

It makes for a thriving education market, says Tom Doctoroff at the marketing firm J. Walter Thompson.

Tom Doctoroff: Anything that helps a kid become smarter, and able to compete in an increasingly dog-eat-dog landscape is a priority for the parents. Whether it's English lessons or piano lessons, parents are gonna spend money and time in making sure their kids are equipped to rise.

Read/listen to the entire story

I saw this kind of stuff first-hand. In fact, a huge chunk of my time in China was spent working at a private English training school first as a teacher and then later as a manager.

The school I worked for, which was one of many that the American-owned company operated throughout China, was a weekend "training schools" like the one described in this program. Chinese children would attend a two hour session of classes at the "school" every weekend for 24 weeks (two weekends off every six months). The parents would pay about an average of $200 for a semester of classes.

The classes' costs were based upon how much time was spent with the foreign teacher. If a foreign teacher taught the entire two hour block, it cost $200 a semester. If a foreign teacher only taught thirty minutes of the class, then the classes would be about half that price.

I'm not real crazy about the kind of English training schools that I'm describing. I don't want to say these kinds of training schools are completely worthless. They aren't. I saw some incredibly talented students take great advantage of their weekend English classes. But, in general, the teachers were poorly trained, the books terribly-designed, and the students nearly impossible to control. I would probably not recommend the school, or any like it, to a Chinese family wanting the best for their kid.

The school, started by Americans in the late 1990s, is a huge success financially though. That's just it, the school cares more about making money than the kids learning anything. Because of their $uccess (and the $uccess that other competing schools are finding), these sorts of cash cows schools are going deeper and deeper into the heart of China and millions upon millions more children are going to have the opportunity to attend them. They aren't going away any time soon.

My disillusionment for these kinds of schools surely results from me having worked in one for a while. But it also has to do with the fact that Chinese children have no lives outside of studying. I really wish Chinese kids were given the opportunity to act like kids.

So many of the children I saw on the weekends at my school were worn down. They were being forced by their parents to attend English class, math class, Chinese class, piano, etc. etc. On top of that, they were drowning from homework from their Monday through Friday school, which they usually attended in the morning from 7AMish until noon, in the afternoon from 2:30 to 5:30, and then in the evening from 7:30 until 9:00 five days a week (and sometimes either on Saturday morning or Sunday evening).

I would sometimes tell older Chinese kids about the way I grew up in America. I went to school from 8:30AM until 3:10PM. I played on soccer, basketball, and baseball teams outside of school. I did stuff outside - went swimming, made snowballs, etc. I aimlessly rode my bike. I watched too much TV. I was basically an average, generation-Y, suburban kid. That sounds like heaven to the Chinese children of today.

There are a lot of reasons why Chinese kids face such pressure. More than I can quantify. But there are two things that I feel contribute.

I'm convinced a large part of what I and the NPR story are describing has to do with China's civil society, or lack thereof. China is just barren in so many ways in this area. I'm sure that as China improves, its civil society will improve. But at the moment, during this time of massive change for every person in China, things like community groups, organizations, or even, gulp, religious infrastructure just haven't fully developed. Contemporary China, in many ways, is just too Darwinian and every-man-an-island. This will change. But it will take time.

I'm also confident that the one child policy has a lot to do with the heavy burdens placed on Chinese children. Nearly every young child in China is the hope, joy, and treasure for its parents. It's all or nothing.

Given where China is today, one can understand why Chinese children face the pressures they do and Chinese parents smother their children.

Cheating Crackdown

A few days before Chinese students' make-or-break 高考(college entrance exams), China is very serious about curbing cheating this year.

From Xinhua News:

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BEIJING, (Xinhua) -- As millions of Chinese students gear up for the national college entrance examination, education and police authorities Thursday issued stern warnings against cheating.

The Ministry of Public Security has instructed police departments across China to make detailed plans to ensure the security of the exam, which falls on June 7 to 9 each year.

The police would be on high alert for any cheating, such as the use of electronic devices by both students and people outside the exam site to exchange questions and answers, said a statement from the ministry.

The Ministry of Education Thursday announced four investigations that involved the production and sale of devices to be used during the exams, using them as a warning.

The police in northeastern Jilin Province uncovered four underground workshops late last month, where more than 100 sets of devices were found. At least seven people involved were detained.

Read On

In addition to investigations and raids, the crackdowns are also getting high-tech.

From the BBC:

In China, video cameras are being installed in almost 60,000 examination halls to prevent cheating in next week's national college entrance exams.

In the past, some students have been caught using hi-tech equipment, including tiny radio receivers, to get help with exam questions.

For three days next week, more than 10 million Chinese students will sit exams to determine their college entrance.

The exams are seen as potentially life-changing and the competition is fierce.

Some students have been using increasingly sophisticated cheating methods to get ahead.

Read On

It's easy to chide the ring-leaders of these cheating circles and the cheaters themselves for being immoral and tainting the Chinese tests. But I think one should really look at the system before one throws all of the blame on the cheaters and the people helping them.

If Americans think that the SATs are stressful, that test is nothing compared to the 高考. Honestly, one's entire future is determined by these tests. Students' future universities are largely chosen for them and their majors are largely influenced by their exam mark. If one gets a poor score, he or she can forget about going to a good university. No matter how good his or her grades in school were.

While cheating is obviously wrong, it's easy to see why young teenagers with tons of pressure on them (largely because they are single children) would resort to cheating to get a good mark on the exam.

America, which traditionally has not had that strong of an influence on testing, has started going this testing route in recent years. I'm very discouraged by this trend.

Maybe it is the philosophy major in me talking (my college career mostly consisted of writing essays), but I believe training students to be test takers is a very narrow-minded and depressing view of education.

The Fading Appeal of Cubicle Training

In these tougher economic times, there are some early indications that young Chinese people are not as interested in taking part in China's university boom.

From China's Xinhua News:

Image from Ernop's Flickr page

BEIJING, May 31 (Xinhua) -- China expects fewer students to participate in the upcoming three-day annual college entrance exam this year, according to Sunday version of China Daily.

The college entrance exam has been seen as the make-or-break benchmark for millions of Chinese young people since 1977.

Minister of Education Zhou Ji had predicted that the overall number of applicants would exceed 10 million -- last year's total was 10.5 million -- but figures from local governments suggest the number of students taking part may be far fewer, the newspaper said.

In Shangdong, a provincial economic powerhouse, education officials said they received 100,000 fewer applicants this year than they did in 2008 -- a drop of more than 10 percent.

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"Since the financial crisis last year, the grim employment situation has broken the 'employment myth' for those with a college degree. Some students changed their minds about getting a good job through higher education. They simply quit (from taking the exam)," an anonymous recruitment officer with the Beijing Institute of Technology was quoted as saying.

Read the Entire Article

This kind of news isn't surprising. I hear all the time from young people in Xi'an about graduates from last year's university class who still can't find work. There are about to be several more million fresh graduates entering the job market in a few weeks also looking for jobs. Times are looking bleak for educated Chinese young people trying to find work doing what they studied at university.

This phenomenon of people questioning the value of high-level education is not limited to China. America is currently undergoing a similar debate.

An article from last week's New York Times' Magazine - "The Case for Working With Your Hands" - does a great job talking about the more academic life young Americans have been molded for and the more labor intensive jobs that they are told to avoid.

Here's the beginning of the article:

The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another,“Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics' trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren't buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

Read On

This article's author, Matthew B. Crawford, makes some really keen observations and criticisms of the life Americans, and more and more Chinese, idealize as "getting ahead."

In the not too distant past, I meditated (or was it ranted) about the idea of "getting ahead" in contemporary society. I came to the conclusion that the dreams and idealizations that I'd been fed from the time I was a child may have been the product of a society that had lost complete touch with reality. Based on the state of the the US' economic system and the state of its people, I feel justified in questioning how involved I want to get with "The American Dream": a house with a white picket fence and a mortgage, 3.18 children, etc.

I did participate in America's university system. I even got a worthless degree: a bachelor's degree in philosophy. I have student loans still to pay off.

I don't regret my decision to pursue a higher education. In getting a degree that fostered independent thought and developed my mind, I feel as though the education I received was invaluable. My degree isn't going to knock down to many doors in future job applications, but it was a very beneficial thing for my life.

At this point in time though - the summer of 2009 - I completely understand a young adult at the crossroads of life deciding against spending four years of his or her life in a college or university that wants to prepare him or her for a life of sitting in a cubicle.

As the NY Times article posits, skipping a traditional four year university doesn't mean one has to stop learning. I'm very much in support of learning a trade or specialized skills if one chooses against the more cubicle-based path. I'm definitely not against education and learning.

I do feel that the current status of the world and its economic systems calls for young people to reassess the assumptions about where they will fit in the world economy in the years to come though.

Shifting Economic Tectonic Plates

Lots of thought-provoking articles on China today.

From The Asia Times:

Cartoon from Truthdig.com

In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a new world order is emerging, with its center gravitating towards China. The statistics speak for themselves. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts the world's gross domestic product (GDP) will shrink by an alarming 1.3% this year. Yet, defying this global trend, China expects an annual economic growth rate of 6.5% to 8.5%.

During the first quarter of 2009, the world's leading stock markets combined fell by 4.5%. In contrast, the Shanghai stock exchange index leapt by 38%. In March, car sales in China hit a record 1.1 million, surpassing sales in the US for the third month in a row.

"Despite its severe impact on China's economy, the current financial crisis also creates opportunity for the country," said Chinese President Hu Jintao. It can be argued that the present fiscal tsunami has, in fact, provided China with a chance to discard its pioneering reformer's leading guideline. "Hide your capability and bide your time" was the way former head of the communist party Deng Xiaoping once put it. No longer.

Recognizing that its time has indeed come, Beijing has decided to play an active, interventionist role in the international financial arena. Backed by China's US$2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, its industrialists have gone on a global buying spree in Africa and Latin America, in neighboring Russia and in Kazakhstan, to lock up future energy supplies for its economy. At home, the government is investing heavily not only in major infrastructure, but also in its much neglected social safety net, its healthcare system, and long overlooked rural development projects - partly to bridge the increasingly wide gap between rural and urban living standards.

...

All signs are that Washington will be unable to restore the status quo ante after the present "great recession" has finally given way to recovery. In the coming years, its leaders will have to face reality and concede, however reluctantly, that the economic tectonic plates are shifting - and that it is losing financial power to the thriving regions of the Earth, the foremost of which is China.

Read the Whole Article

This whole lengthy article is worth reading. It goes through the list of reasons why China is prepared to fight the economic crisis: low urban unemployment, high savings rate, state-controlled banking system, energy expansion and security, and the rise of its currency, the yuan.

While some of the arguments the article makes can be debated, it makes compelling arguments for why, on a whole, China is going to be much stronger when the world economy "recovers."

There is another article out today, from the Financial Times, that discusses the eventual rise of China and why it will establish itself at the top of the post-crisis world. This article focuses more on financial matters:

Emerging economies such as China and Russia are calling for alternatives to the dollar as a reserve currency. The trigger is the Federal Reserve’s liberal policy of expanding the money supply to prop up America’s banking system and its over-indebted households. Because the magnitude of the bad assets within the banking system and the excess leverage of its households are potentially huge, the Fed may be forced into printing dollars massively, which would eventually trigger high inflation or even hyper-inflation and cause great damage to countries that hold dollar assets in their foreign exchange reserves.

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Ethnic Chinese, including those in the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas, may account for half of the foreign holdings of dollar assets. You have to check the asset allocations of wealthy ethnic Chinese to understand the dollar’s unique status.

The Chinese love affair with the dollar began in the 1940s when it held its value while the Chinese currency depreciated massively. Memory is long when it comes to currency credibility. The Chinese renminbi remains a closed currency and is not yet a credible vehicle for wealth storage. Also, wealthy ethnic Chinese tend to send their children to the US for education. They treat the dollar as their primary currency.

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America’s policy is pushing China towards developing an alternative financial system. For the past two decades China’s entry into the global economy rested on making cheap labour available to multi-nationals and pegging the renminbi to the dollar. The dollar peg allowed China to leverage the US financial system for its international needs, while domestic finance remained state-controlled to redistribute prosperity from the coast to interior provinces. This dual approach has worked remarkably well. China could have its cake and eat it too. Of course, the global credit bubble was what allowed China’s dual approach to be effective; its inefficiency was masked by bubble-generated global demand.

China is aware that it must become independent from the dollar at some point. Its recent decision to turn Shanghai into a financial centre by 2020 reflects China’s anxiety over relying on the dollar system. The year 2020 seems remote, and the US will not pay attention to something so distant. However, if global stagflation takes hold, as I expect it to, it will force China to accelerate its reforms to float its currency and create a single, independent and market-based financial system. When that happens, the dollar will collapse.

Read On

I found this article's discussion of Chinese peoples' love of the US Dollar to be interesting. I can understand that when the trillions of dollars that are now flooding the US market in the not too-distant future will cause debilitating inflation and, thus, turn off the Chinese, whose massive savings in US dollars will be rendered worthless.

It only makes sense that the Chinese are itching to get the world's financial systems working in the "Chinese way."

I'm going to feature one more article today, an editorial from The Los Angeles Times, that talks about the "Chinese way" and why the Chinese are going to run into a whole different set of problems when it is their turn to be leaders in the twenty-first century:

Which country -- the United States or China -- will make the 21st century its own?

When President Obama recently called for American young people "to be makers of things" and focus on subjects such as science and engineering, it was partly a nod to China's rapid growth. Had he lived, taught and consulted in China for the last 33 months, as I have, he might have urged American students first to follow his example and study the liberal arts. Only technical knowledge complemented by well-honed critical and creative thinking skills can help us regain our innovative edge. China's traditional lack of emphasis on teaching these skills could undermine its efforts to develop its own innovative economy.

I once challenged my Chinese MBA students to brainstorm "two-hour business plans." I divided them into six groups, gave them detailed instructions and an example: a restaurant chain. The more original their idea, the better, I stressed -- and we'd vote for a prize winner. The word "prize" energized the room. Laptops flew open. Fingers pounded. Voices roared. Packs of cookies were ripped open and shared. Not a single person text-messaged. I'd touched a nerve.

In the end, five of the six groups presented plans for, you guessed it, restaurant chains. The sixth proposed a catering service. Why risk a unique solution when the instructor has let it slip he likes the food business?

Though I admitted the time limit had been difficult, I expressed my disappointment and reiterated what I had expected -- originality -- and why. But they'd been so enthusiastic that I couldn't deny them a winner. After a polite discussion of the merits of each idea, the Haagen-Dazs gift certificates were awarded, but not without controversy. Runners-up later complained that an identical concept had been featured on CCTV the night before.

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Ultimately for China, becoming a major world innovator -- and by extension, a robust economic power -- is not just about setting up partnerships with top Western universities or roping off elites and telling them to think creatively. It's about establishing an intellectually rich learning environment for young minds. It's about harnessing the same inventive energy of the street markets and small-time entrepreneurs and putting it in the schools.

The Chinese don't need expensive free-agent scientists. They need a new farm system -- and about 10 million liberal arts professors.

Read On

Just like the world has faced problems because of the way the US has run itself, the world will surely face problems because of the issues China has. As I've discussed a few times recently, China's education system has some very serious problems. The Chinese system just has not figured out how to get its students to think creatively.

From the articles I've referenced today though, the conventional wisdom is saying that the twenty-first century will be China's. At this point in time, it's pretty hard for me to imagine a world going forward that doesn't have China on top.

In terms of people, land size, location, and development, China rising to the top of the world's pecking order seems to be a pretty natural move to me. It's the most populated nation on Earth. It's the heart of Asia. It has tons of natural resources. It's infrastructure is finally reaching the point where it can really take off.

Indeed, it's almost impossible for China to not overtake the US at some point in the coming century in terms of economic prowess, influence, and everything else that goes along with being a superpower.

China is not quite a "super-power" yet. But if one thinks that it's more than a decade or two from being one (or the one), I don't think that that person is looking at the facts. And for the US or any other countries that don't like China's rising, I don't see how the Middle Kingdom can be stopped.

An Admissions Officer's Dream

With the development of China's economy, American universities are seeing a massive influx of applications from Chinese students.

From The Washington Post:

It's an admissions officer's dream: ever-growing stacks of applications from students with outstanding test scores, terrific grades and rigorous academic preparation. That's the pleasant prospect faced by the University of Virginia and some other U.S. colleges, which are receiving a surging number of applications from China.

"It's this perfect, beautiful island of people who are immensely motivated, going to great high schools," marveled Parke Muth, director of international admission at U-Va.

A decade ago, 17 Chinese students applied to U-Va. Three years ago, 117 did. This year, the number was more than 800 out of almost 22,000 candidates -- so many that admissions officers had to devise new ways to select from the pool of strong applicants.

Chinese students' growing interest in U-Va. is partly a result of the school's outreach and strong reputation. But even some schools that don't recruit in China have seen a rapid increase in applicants.

Until fall 2007, the number of Chinese undergraduates in the United States had held steady for years, at about 9,000, according to the Institute of International Education, which promotes study abroad. But that year, it jumped to more than 16,000.

Experts say China's increasing wealth, fewer delays in obtaining visas and technology that makes it easier for Chinese students to learn about U.S. schools have helped fuel the boom. It shows no sign of letting up.

Read On

Globalization has made life easier for a lot of Americans. It's opened up doors for American companies abroad and allowed its citizens to buy products at bargain-basement prices. While there have certainly been drawbacks, Americans, on the whole, have had at least a fairly positive view of how globalization has affected their lives.

With globalization and its opportunities are a whole new set of challenges though.

I talk with Chinese students all the time. A huge percentage of them tell me that they want to go to the US to study. Chinese universities have very deep and significant problems. It makes sense that China's best students with the means to go abroad would want to get out of its university system.

A few years ago, going to America to study would've been a pipe dream for nearly everyone in China. But as China rises and more and more of its families have the means to pay for such an endeavor, this dream will certainly become more of a reality for Chinese students.

This increased competition abroad from Chinese students at American universities is one of the things that comes along with a more open and balanced world. It will make things more stressful for American students.

But America, being a largely meritocratic country, should embrace the idea that its universities should be filled with the best students. Even if those students come from China.

Worthless Degrees

Last month, I talked about the acceptance of cheating and the general poor quality of many of China's universities.

Today, The Wall St. Journal has provided an excellent article on the crisis that many Chinese universities face. The problems go much deeper than cheating:

University students at a job fair in Nanjing

NANJING, China -- Zhang Weidong has been making the rounds at this city's weekend talent fair for more than a month now and can't understand why he hasn't landed a job.

"These companies are looking for employees, and I have a degree," says the 22-year-old computer major, clutching a plastic organizer stuffed with résumés, business cards and company information. "I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

Unemployed university graduates used to be rare in China. But now their ranks are ballooning to critical levels just as the country suffers its worst economic slump in two decades. Up to one-third of last year's 5.6 million university graduates are still looking for work, and this year will see another 6.1 million hit the labor market. Finding jobs for graduates is suddenly a national priority: Earlier this month, the central government ordered local governments and state enterprises to hire more graduates to maintain China's "general stability."

China is suffering from a higher-education equivalent of the global credit bubble. On government orders, China's universities -- most of which are state-controlled -- boosted enrollment by up to 30% a year, year after year for most of this decade, and built vast new campuses. Financing was considered a cinch: New students would mean more tuition to pay off the loans that funded the expansion. But those plans were wildly optimistic, leaving hundreds of universities across China crippled by debt.

More serious for China's long-term prospects is that the expansion was so fast, and the pressures to pay off the debts so intense, that many of the schools turned into diploma mills, churning out poorly qualified students. Mr. Zhang got his degree from a school of traditional Chinese medicine with no history of teaching computer sciences. He looks back ruefully, recalling overcrowded classrooms and a lack of materials: "I wonder if this education was of any value?"

Read On

The article goes on to talk about how universities have built massive "university cities" and the problems some of those schools are having. This phenomenon of "university city" building has happened in Xi'an.

Xi'an has an incredibly large university population. It is the third biggest in China after Beijing and Shanghai. I don't know if every university in Xi'an has done it, but almost all of Xi'an's universities have built secondary campuses in the suburbs of the city. This has made places like the small town of Chang'an a major hub of university students. In many cases, thousands upon thousands of students are now going to school next to farms.

It's not too surprising that universities, like so many other institutions, went a little crazy with over-expansion and are now facing debt problems. While China's push to allow more of its students the chance to get a higher education is certainly noble, because of poor execution, there are now millions of students with "worthless" degrees. The story of the Nanjing Chinese Medicine University in the article above is disgraceful.

It's not just Chinese universities that have problems though. American universities also rode the bubble a bit too hard and now their endowments are tanking. From Reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO, April 27 (Reuters) - Top U.S. universities, whose endowments have been hit hard by fallout from the global financial crisis, are selling bonds to raise money to shore up their financial positions.

Stanford University became the latest top university to sell taxable debt to make up for recent losses in its endowment, the third largest of any U.S. university.

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Stanford expects its endowment, which provides about a quarter of the university's operating revenue, by the end of August will have declined at least 30 percent from $17.2 billion a year earlier, shortly before financial markets began to crater.

Stanford's projected loss would be in line with the average loss of about 25 percent in university endowments in 2008 and the first part of 2009, said Matthew Hamill, a senior vice president at the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

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"Assumptions institutions made about how to invest their money short term, medium term, long term all of a sudden got turned on their head when the markets went down," said Hamill.

Read the entire article

While I understand that Stanford and all other American universities needed to do something with their giant pools of money, it doesn't seem right to me that an endowment should lose 30% of it's value in one year.

Ji Wenhui, a scholar and librarian at the Nanjing University quoted in the article above, put it well:

"The reason for expanding had nothing to do with society's needs," Mr. Ji says. "The educational system was pursuing economic benefit."

I'm not sure what the solutions to these problems facing Chinese and American universities are. But I suppose it'd be a step in the right direction if educational institutions were run less like private businesses concerned with expansion and growth and were, instead, primarily focused on providing quality education.

The Culture of Cheating

In China, primary school and high school are difficult and college is a breeze. Ridiculously easy. Nobody is forced to think or do anything and everybody cheats.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

BEIJING - Three professors at a leading Chinese university – including one of the country's top experts in traditional medicine – have lost their jobs in a new plagiarism scandal. And the government finally seems to have been jolted into tackling the academic dishonesty that plagues many faculties here.

Experts are not holding their breath, though. In a culture where knockoffs are normal, from sportswear to DVDs, it will not be easy to expunge deep-rooted academic habits, they warn. But some say hope may lie with a new generation of internationally trained teachers.

The latest fraud to rock Chinese academia centers on He Haibo, an associate professor of pharmacology at the prestigious Zhejiang University. He now admits to copying or making up material he submitted in eight papers to international journals and has been fired, along with the head of his research institute.

The affair has drawn particular attention because a world-renowned expert in traditional Chinese medicine, Li Lianda, lent his name as coauthor to one of the fraudulent papers. His tenure will not be renewed when his contract expires soon, the president of Zhejiang University has said.

"This biggest-ever academic scandal is for sure a wakeup call that the Chinese universities are facing a crisis of credibility," editorialized the state-run "China Daily."

Read On

When I first came to China, I taught an adult class at the English training school I worked at. The class was a higher lever discussion class. Most of the students were university students. They all were very eager to practice English and take part in discussions.

Every class, I assigned the students "homework." I'd ask them to write about whatever topic we'd discussed that class period. It was not required, but if they wanted a foreigner to look at and correct their writing, I'd do it. Most of the students took advantage of the opportunity and wrote a few hundred words a class to turn into me.

Despite most of the students very good oral English, most of their written English was pretty poor. Tons of grammatical mistakes and poor language usage.

There was one student who wrote nearly perfect English though. Every class, I was more and more impressed with what he was writing. I'd write comments like, "Have you ever considered writing for an English publication? Your writing is incredible!"

Then one day the work that he turned into me had nothing to do with the topic that I'd assigned. This was very strange. And then the next class, he did the same thing again.

At that time, I put two and two together and realized that this kid, whose writing was perfect yet who didn't speak in class, had not been able to find any articles about what I'd assigned on the internet and had just copied some article that he thought I'd be impressed by.

On the second essay, I wrote comments something to the effect of:

"Bruce, you are going to an English training school. Your grades here don't matter. Why are you wasting your time copying things off the internet to hand in to me? The whole point of these writing assignments is to improve yourself, not impress me."

After class, he came up to me and apologized for plagiarizing the works. He didn't really have a good explanation, just told me he was sorry.

I believe this example highlights just how rampant and ingrained cheating are to Chinese university students. This kid was paying a few hundred kuai a month so he could come to my English discussion class. The class had no bearing on his future other than hopefully improving his English fluency and possibly his writing skills. The certificate he received at the end of my course is not even worth the paper upon which it was printed.

Yet when I asked him to think and write about his feelings on whatever topic we'd discussed that class, he couldn't do it and simply copied others' work off of the internet.

My friend Richard, on his blog, has discussed the Chinese education system at great lengths. His post on "No why situations" is a particularly enlightening about Chinese students and their inability to think.

As the article I linked up to above goes on to say, Chinese universities are in a serious legitimacy crisis. Some of the quotes from the article are downright comical (or sad, I suppose):

"There is a long tradition of plagiarism in Chinese universities," Stearns wrote in an e-mail last week. "Some Chinese professors actually teach their students to plagiarize."

...

"Corruption and fraud are very common in China and academic corruption and fraud just reflect the social situation," he says.

...

Stearns says that he and his colleagues at Yale "do not believe letters of recommendation from Chinese professors, for we know that many of them are written by the students themselves," and merely signed by their teachers.

I'm so grateful that I grew up in America's education system as opposed to China's.

When I was young, I had the chance to be a kid and enjoy life. Chinese kids are given no such chance. When I was in college, I was given the opportunity to study something I loved (major in philosophy) and expand my mind in unbelievable ways. Chinese college students' minds stagnate after having spent their whole lives cramming for tests.

And I haven't even gotten into the social lives of China's college students. Instead of going out to bars and having unadulterated fun like western kids, they go to net bars and play Counterstrike or internet games with their friends. Their universities lock their gates at 11:00PM and the lights (and electricity) are cut off around that time too.

So yeah, in addition to not learning anything, Chinese college students don't even get to have fun or experimentation when they finally get to leave Mom and Dad's apartment.

I feel sorry for Chinese students.

American Colleges Want More Chinese Students

This has to be concerning for young American high-school students wanting to go to elite colleges.

From The Boston Globe:

BEIJING - Don't be fooled by the teenager's slender frame and wire-rimmed glasses. His name is Tiger - and he's an American high school student's worst nightmare.

The 16-year-old junior, as adept at proving geometry theorems as he is at defending a soccer shot, has set his sights on Harvard University. And Harvard, on him.

Just last month, Tiger and dozens of China's brightest students gathered in a five-star hotel blocks from Tiananmen Square for the final round of a math contest that planted the Crimson flag firmly in the world's most populous nation. They competed under the watchful gaze of William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's admissions dean, who has handpicked undergraduates for three decades.

Students such as Tiger, or Li Taibo in Chinese, represent the future face of elite American colleges, their greatest hope as they vie to maintain international dominance. It's especially true for Harvard, as it tries to elevate the profile of its math and sciences to be on par with its legendary humanities program.

Read On

I've been asked countless times from Chinese high school and university students about applying to American universities. They want to know which schools are the best, tips about getting in, etc.

The advice I've given out most is the following:

There are heaps of great universities and trade schools in America. Don't only focus on Harvard and Princeton since it's quite likely that you won't be able to get into those kind of schools. There are hundreds of great public and private universities outside of the Ivy League. Look at what you want specifically want to study and then find which schools have good departments in that area.