Sichuan University’s English Corner is one of Chengdu’s biggest. In winter a canopy of umbrellas protects the crowds from the steady Sichuanese drizzle. Spring brings bigger crowds and fewer clothes; the corner felt much more like happy hour than a language group. Humidity weighs on the summer learners as they fan themselves through dense hours of small talk in English. Fall brings the new school year and, with it, new faces. Without fail, Friday nights roll by with accented accounts of global warming, basketball games, World of Warcraft, or different processes for making noodles, and there’s always the ironclad fallback—“Have you eaten dinner yet?”—depending on the level and bent of the speakers.
Almost everyone there was chasing a dream. A twenty-two-year-old senior studying chemical engineering at the university explained, “Study abroad in America has been my dream for years. I must study hard, work diligent, if I am to pass the TOEFL [test of English as a foreign language] and become admitted.” A seven-year-old, still in her blue-and-white school jumper, stood with her mother at the edge of the circle. “I too want to go to America!” she exclaimed.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because … I like pizza!” The dozen or so crowding around us laughed. Her mother nodded approvingly.
* * *
The first time I went to Tsinghua University, the first student I met, an undergraduate named Zhou Jia Li, told me not to apply. “You’ll hate it,” she said after I mentioned I was considering doing graduate work there.
I asked her why. “All the students here are test monsters,” Zhou said.
The common complaint among Chinese students, parents, educational professionals, and, later, these students’ bosses is that the culture of rigorous testing creates only exceptional test takers. Chinese students have more incentive to be terrific test takers than to be problem solvers, to be better bubble fillers than innovators, better crammers than creators. Too many of China’s young minds have been, as Ju Chao put it, dancing in shackles.
The Chinese college admission system relies solely on gāokǎo scores. The system doesn’t expand to incorporate other factors because of the difficulty of finding an alternative method of comparing the qualifications of nine million college applicants every year. At best the process is geared to producing what people were increasingly calling test monsters. The retired boss of a Sichuan engineering firm once complained to me, “Tests are meant to reflect an understanding of a specific topic. All my engineering graduates used to understand was how to take a test on engineering.”
The Chinese Communist Party is a party of plans, so it seems natural that it would plan how to make young Chinese more innovative. The Party’s thirteenth Five-Year Plan charts China’s trajectory from 2016 to 2020. The first section after the introduction is titled “Implement Plan to Propel Development of Innovation.” The articles within the section are:
1. Strengthen Science and Technological Innovation
2. Deepen Advancement of “Masses of Entrepreneurs, 10,000 Innovations” [this is a directive designed to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship]
3. Construct a Systematic Mechanism to Encourage Innovation
4. Implement [the Plan] “Development of Outstanding Talent”
All of China’s economic plans express a desire to change the economy from one that boasts “Made in China” to one that brags “Created in China,” and the plans envision that Chinese will be both the administrators and employees of these companies.
China’s problem is that its education system doesn’t produce innovators, so the government is sending top students to the schools that do.
The personal dreams of Lin Lin, Ju Chao, and the hundreds of thousands of others who hope to study abroad fit into China’s national dreamscape. As part of its mission to develop “outstanding talent,” the Chinese Communist Party explicitly discusses creating opportunities back home for study-abroad students to incentivize them to return. At least for now, study abroad has become an indispensable part of China’s pursuit of innovators.
China has plenty of precedent for looking abroad to gather the tools for economic reinvention. In the early 1980s, China wanted to become a self-sufficient, modern industrial country. But it knew nothing about modern industry. It had spent the previous three decades lionizing the farmer-peasant as the bedrock of society under Mao. Although farmer-peasants know a lot about hard work, they know little about smelting steel—or making sneakers, clothes, computers, and appliances. China then opened its doors and invited the world’s top industrialists into the country. Volkswagen, Nike, and Gap came into China with all their manufacturing know-how. Apple, Samsung, and General Electric moved in too.
In the short term, these companies got China’s inexpensive labor. In the long term, however, China got all their manufacturing techniques. The Western press called it intellectual property theft. China called it speed-learning the industrial and technological revolution it had missed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
China is now doing the same with international education. Just as Chinese learned industrialization from the world’s industrialists, they are trying to learn innovation from the world’s foremost innovators.
It’s not new, either. Since the late 1950s, foreign universities have played an indispensable—and intentional—role in China’s development plan. Wang Lang, an exchange student from Suzhou who was studying in Australia, put it this way: “For core technologies like rockets, guided missiles, and even higher-tech railroads, countries obviously would not send their scientists and technicians to teach us, so we had to send our students to developed countries to study.”
China has championed these study-abroad students as pioneers of change. Deng Jiaxian, the father of China’s nuclear program, or the “Two-Bomb Forefather” as he is known in Chinese history books, developed China’s first uranium and hydrogen bombs. He received his doctoral degree in physics from Purdue University in 1950 and is credited with giving China a basic sense of safety, despite its being surrounded by nuclear Russia, North Korea, India, and Pakistan, as well as US-supported countries.
China’s various titans of modern entrepreneurship also trace their company’s beginnings to time abroad. Robin Li, the CEO and founder of Baidu and sixth-richest man in China, got his master’s in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo and worked at a company that was developing an early search engine before he returned to China. Jack Ma says he was inspired by his first exposure to the Internet during an extensive stay in the United States. (He had wanted to study abroad but famously received ten rejections from Harvard.) Zhang Xin, cofounder and CEO of the commercial real estate development company SOHO and the third-wealthiest self-made woman in the world, got her master’s degree in development economics from Cambridge University and worked at Goldman Sachs in New York before moving home and changing the way buildings are constructed in China’s biggest cities.
Chinese students are no longer the test monsters of the past decade, since Chinese higher education underwent reform in 1998. Mauro Ferrari, president and CEO of the Houston Methodist Research Institute, which is in the forefront of cancer research, told me half his researchers are Chinese. “The language of science has already changed to Chinese. Obviously, written publications still remain dominated by English, but in the actual lab, doing the actual research, Chinese is on top.” This is in Houston. “There is an illusion that Chinese testers are rigid and not innovative. That used to be true. The students we are getting now are simply not that way.”
The more professors I asked about the Chinese students they were teaching, the more I found professors in awe of their students’ combinations of talents. Although Chinese students remain notoriously insular on US campuses, their exposure to the outside world and Western-style classes had helped them couple their famous diligence with curiosity and intellectual dynamism.
The study-abroad bargain means that China forfeits close control of its young peoples’ intellectual di
et. It also means losing money when some of its wealthier citizens leave China. In the short term US universities are also getting a major boost from the tuition paid by Chinese students; the Yale Economic Review estimates that in the 2011–12 academic year alone, Chinese students spent approximately $5.4 billion on tuition and housing at American universities.5 American institutions also benefit by hosting some of the most dedicated students in the world because they facilitate research and amp the competition among researchers. In the long term, China’s best minds are learning to innovate, which puts China closer to realizing its dreams.
* * *
A month after I interviewed Lin Lin, I spent several days about three hundred miles outside Chengdu in a friend’s small hometown in the mountains. I was there for several days to celebrate a holiday with my friend’s family, but I ended up spending much of my time taking part in a funeral procession for their next-door neighbor. Much of the town had come out take part in guarding the soul, 守灵, shōu lǐng, of this respected member of the community. Chinese keep vigil over the body of the deceased until they have been buried, alternating who keeps watch day and night. During the procession joss paper—冥币, míng bì—the currency of the afterlife, is burnt almost constantly so the deceased can prosper after death. (Chinese believe in the afterlife more as a continuation of their life on Earth rather than either a heaven or a hell. Practical as always, Chinese tradition knew they’d need money for their activities after death.) The immediate family puts in the longest hours during the vigil, but they invite the entire village to take part. I couldn’t help but think of Lin Lin and her dreams. A dozen mahjong tables were set up throughout the house. The sons and cousins walked around offering mourners trays stacked with food and expensive cigarettes.* They held an extravagant banquet for practically the whole village. On the day of the funeral, the professional grievers they had hired wailed and shrieked and played horns to send off the deceased. All in all, the funeral costs were more than the family’s annual income.
“Funerals and illnesses. These enormous one-time expenses can ruin the fragile livelihoods of people living out in the village,” Lin Lin had said. “I want to help them solve that.”
America is a sort of dream incubator for Lin Lin, a place to learn, push, and grow. Her goal remains back in China with the poorer people of the countryside. China’s top 1 percent owns a third of the wealth in the country, according to a recent report from Peking University.6 China’s Gini coefficient, the metric used by the United Nations to measure internal inequality, was 0.49, far above the “warning line” of 0.4 and just a hair away from the 0.5 demarcation line of “highly unequal.” (The United States is 0.41, and Germany is 0.3. Of the big countries that the World Bank tracks, only Brazil and South Africa have higher Gini coefficients than China.) A bevy of national directives, including China’s most recent Five-Year Plan, identifies the wealth gap as a primary area for China to seek to improve in the near future.
Lin Lin’s dream is in sync with China’s. Because she grew up watching Chengdu become a first-tier city while the humble wood houses and tilled earth of the rice paddies in her grandparents’ hometown remained the same, the wealth gap was a problem that affected her personally. Her success would be the country’s success.
Ju Chao’s dream was a little different: “I want to go anywhere where I might be involved in a space program.” China’s commitment to space exploration is part of its determination to become a global tech leader. When Ju Chao watches TV, whether the news or science fiction, China’s space program looks more and more formidable. If he had to make a decision today, he said, he’d like to work for Elon Musk, but he is open to opportunities back home.
The fear for China has been brain drain, which is what happened in the 1980s and 1990s when the best and brightest who went to study abroad didn’t go home. China was then at the beginning of its modern development. Wages were low by international standards, and the government was not supportive of people who wanted to innovate—researchers, academics, creative entrepreneurs, and thinkers. The opportunities for them were better in the United States.
Now, China is putting a tremendous amount of effort into creating an environment that will lure the innovators to return. Ferrari, of Houston Methodist Research Institute, explains: “Chinese researchers come on a two- or three-year deal, a type of exchange, and then they go back. It is already a well-developed exchange system that has their top researchers cycling through our system. We train them and benefit from their great skill. Then they go home.”
By 2015, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education, 70 to 80 percent of Chinese students were returning, a believable number, considering the small number of US work visas available after they graduate.7
When the possibility of getting a visa to work in the United States began to look precarious, Robin Li of Baidu encouraged international entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to go to China.8 For Chinese students looking for opportunities at home, the government has created policies to help them start businesses and receive funding. Or, in the case of someone like Ju Chao, funding for China’s national space program is increasing faster than the other major space programs in the world, particularly those of Russia and the United States, and makes far more launches per dollar spent than NASA, despite the latter’s funding still dwarfing China’s.9 It is an appealing choice.
Chinese students have returned home for pragmatic reasons. Zhou Jia Li, the young woman who told me not to apply to Tsinghua University, was then in the process of applying to graduate schools in the States. She wanted to see the world. Two years later, and six months shy of her advanced degree in mathematics from New York University, Zhou felt she had gotten what she came for. “America’s population is small. Comparatively, the playing field isn’t as happening as it is back home. In terms of opportunity, China’s market is so big, and there are so many consumers, it is kind of a no-brainer. Once I’m finished studying, and maybe after an internship getting knowledge and experience, I will move back. I want to raise a little capital and start my own business. I’m not sure what to do yet, but anything is OK as long as I’m working for myself.”
An opinion piece that circulated widely in study-abroad WeChat circles described the temptation of the start-up scene back home. “Even if we could graft the channels of resources and networks of contacts to our lives abroad, we’d still have to tack on a major markdown in value,” the writer noted. Whereas these young Chinese would be seen as the best and brightest back home, abroad they’d be just normal college graduates, young workers with accented English who need a hard-to-get visa that allows them to be employed. They’d always be outsiders abroad, wrote the author, an international student who planned to return to China after graduation. His peers’ lives abroad had a discernible upper limit.
Also, the opportunities back home felt big and real. The opinion piece continues, “The surging waves of start-up frenzy back home will, one after the other, trigger inner turbulence for those of us abroad. Open up your WeChat Friend Circle and see, today, that an old classmate has started a business; tomorrow, a former colleague has gotten several million in funding. They can do it—why can’t I?”
* * *
Against my advice, Columbia University rejected both Lin Lin and Ju Chao. I asked the admissions office why. Near-perfect testing is expected of Chinese, Korean, and Singaporean students, I was told. It is what they do to set themselves apart that makes the difference.
That was tough to take: Lin Lin was a self-published author with her own charity, and Ju Chao had been the student ambassador to Michelle Obama and was a self-motivated student of astrophysics.
Maybe they both looked like test monsters. Also, Lin Lin and Ju Chao had applied the same year that major cheating scandals were making news in Korea and China. The Chinese students accepted by Columbia that year all came from more recognizable high schools, places with well-established credentials. The two students I’d championed had also applied for financial aid, and C
olumbia’s admissions are not need-blind for foreign students.
Lin Lin was upset, even angry. When she got in touch with me, she asked why she had been rejected. Did Columbia have a quota system for Chinese students? How was this decision fair? She had worked hard to be able to study at one of the world’s elite universities and believed she had earned her spot.
Lin Lin’s mother attributed her daughter’s rejection to the murkiness of the admissions system. She wrote to me, “[An SAT score of] 2400 has little advantage over 2300 or 2200 in admission officers’ eyes. In fact, 2200–2300 is an easy grade that could be earned by many ordinary Chinese students, so how can they judge and pick really excellent students by using an easy test?” She echoed a popular belief that Western universities have far higher standards for Chinese students applying in the arts than in the sciences. Popular reasoning had it that the latter were more likely to become distinguished in their field and reflect well on their university.
The successful Chinese candidates I met after I returned to New York were all exceptional in their own right. Each came from one of the handful of Chinese high schools whose names I recognized. They were in international schools with International Baccalaureate programs; from an admissions officer’s perspective these are the most transparent and trustworthy schools, least likely to pass along a bogus transcript, but they also are the most expensive and the most exclusive.
After getting rejected by Columbia, Lin Lin couldn’t decide whether she should go to a Western school with no reputation in China or the University of Hong Kong, widely regarded as the Harvard of Asia. She asked me what I thought about the University of Hong Kong, where I had studied abroad. “Are the education styles similar at all?” They’re not, I regretted having to inform her.
Lin Lin eventually chose the University of Hong Kong and began her study in economics and political science. “The best American universities didn’t want me,” she said. “I wanted to be in a community with some of the smartest people, even if they’re just the best in Asia.”
Young China Page 16