by Lenora Chu
“As human beings,” Amanda told me, “we have a psychological need to give our lives some meaning.”
For every handful of Darcys rationalizing his place in the system, there was an Amanda scrabbling to get out.
* * *
Every child is born with an imagination.
It’s this innate faculty that enables the process of creativity—which in turn gives rise to works of art, musical compositions, game-changing inventions, medical breakthroughs, new industries, or any novel or original approach that also has value.
As a toddler Rainey would dig for snails and root for stones, which he would scatter about in no discernible pattern as his giggles emanated across the lawn of our Shanghai complex. I reveled in watching him make discoveries. As Rainey’s journey in Chinese school continued, the days of snail-digging and stone-throwing shriveled into a distant memory, and I grew more and more anxious that his environment might quash this innate quality of curiosity and exploration. Does Chinese school destroy creative and independent thinking abilities, or does it only temporarily discourage their expression? What are Chinese graduates like later in life, in high school and college, and after they enter the workforce?
May Lee teaches courses on innovation and entrepreneurship to Chinese university students in Shanghai, and she likes to try an exercise early on in a new class. The Chinese American instructor will invite ten students—all graduates of the Chinese school system—up to the front of the class. She gives each a paper bag and asks them to put the sacks over their heads.
“Then I ask them to take one minute to remove something they don’t need,” Lee says.
Blinded by a sack and standing before a hall of their peers, most Chinese students proceed to remove a watch, a shoe, or a coat. Others might take off their glasses underneath the bag, a piece of jewelry, or a sock. Meanwhile, their classmates in the audience are hooting with laughter, themselves unsure of anything but the humor in the spectacle.
After the minute is up, Lee will ask the students to remove the bags, and they do, standing at the head of the class, blinking under the lights of the room.
“I’ll ask them, ‘Why didn’t you take the bag off your head?’” May Lee says. “And they’ll look horrified, because it had never crossed their minds. There’s an ‘Aha’ moment.”
May Lee has conducted this exercise with thousands of Chinese students. By her estimate, only three of every hundred Chinese throw off the paper bag. Most students didn’t have the mind-set to recognize, much less challenge, their basic assumption, she says: The teacher told them to put a bag on their heads, and therefore its removal was off-limits. May Lee didn’t offer a control group, and the exercise itself could be considered something of a trick. Still, it got me thinking.
Would a teenage Rainey remove the bag from his head?
As concerned as I was about my own child, China’s leadership was, too, about the students coming out of its schools. Creative and independent thinking skills are crucial to participating in the global economy, and many an economic expert says China risks stagnating as a second-rate world power if it cannot reform its schools and workplaces accordingly. The same series of global tests that gave Shanghai students top honors in math, reading, and science also found their performance slipped when it came to creative problem solving. “Could China ever produce a Steve Jobs?” is a lament that surfs the wave of many a Chinese conscience. “How much money have the foreigners made from us because they have better technology,” a Chinese manufacturing executive bemoaned on national television in 2015, about China’s failure to develop homegrown technology to produce ballpoint pen tips (triumphantly, a state-owned steel manufacturer declared in early 2017 it had precision-engineered the solution).
What did all this mean for my family? As I pored over research reports and talked to innovation experts, I discovered something sobering for Rainey’s situation: The process of creativity cannot be separated from its social and cultural context, and, in fact, a person’s environment is “more important than heredity in influencing creativity,” as researcher Lorin K. Staats wrote. “A child’s creativity can be either strongly encouraged or discouraged by early experiences at home and in school.” I was also interested to learn that practicing being creative is critical to the process of creativity, ideally inside a setting that encourages its expression. Other academics purport that new experiences and a richness of stimuli are just as important to a child’s mental development as good nutrition is to her physical growth, and that curiosity is a fragile thing.
Obstacles to the creative process litter the Chinese education landscape: Domineering teachers who discourage open questioning; exam metrics that keep children studying rather than exploring; social collectivism that promotes conformity; little time to practice being creative; and Confucianism’s impact on the culture. In fact, the philosopher’s very tenets discourage the “openness, opportunity, and cooperation that is necessary to continue to release creativity in China,” writes Staats. A British professor who teaches law in China told me, “By the time the Chinese students get to me, they’re not raising their hands. They don’t even know how to frame a question. Their exploratory period has come to an end.”
Furthermore, taking risks is punished inside Chinese education. My Shanghainese friend Ophelia learned her lesson very early on. Her first-grade math teacher asked the class to practice tracing equal signs with two perfectly parallel strokes. At six, Ophelia had trouble, so she tied two pencils together with string. Voilà! A single stroke yielded two perfect lines each time. Ophelia had taken a creative risk, but the teacher was livid. “She tacked my paper to the front wall and shamed me in front of the entire class,” said Ophelia. An American friend of Rainey’s had a similar experience. While tracing out a turtle in class, Myah swerved to draw a little flipper before looping from number 18 to number 19. Deviant appendages have no place in a Chinese kindergarten, and the teacher slashed up her worksheet with fat, red strokes. At home, Myah cried to her mother. “God wanted this turtle to have a foot,” she said. Her mother thought for a moment and wisely replied, “God may want this turtle to have a foot, but in the school the teacher is God. So, in school you draw the turtle from number 18 to number 19.”
The Chinese classroom encourages conformity and discourages experimentation, which can mean death for the creative process. The cultural fear of losing face, or mianzi, also rears its oppressive head: A Hangzhou high school principal surveyed his teenagers and found that most equated “thinking outside the box” with “not respecting teachers.”
Such an environment can also percolate at home.
My parents certainly could have fashioned a more open childhood environment, as nurturing creativity and independence didn’t much enter their thoughts. Independent children were disobedient children, and art, literature, or writing classes didn’t figure into my parents’ exacting calculus of how I’d get into an elite university. When we traveled, we rarely visited museums or art galleries, and European philosophy had no seat at the dinner table. For my parents—scientists with six college and graduate degrees between them—artistry was found in the curve of the sine symbol, melody in the memorization of the digits of pi, and free expression in the liquid nitrogen beads that scampered across the floor at my mother’s chemistry laboratory. The liberal arts figured into my mother’s life prominently as a hobby; she pored over British classics as well as science fiction and fantasy, but such things weren’t considered something worthy of class time or career pursuit.
When it came to subjects that piqued my interest, my parents had their own ideas, rooted in the practicality of the job market.
“I want to study psychology,” I announced during my sophomore year in college. I’d heard a fascinating lecture by the psychologist Anne Fernald, and I was enthralled by the study of mind and behavior.
“What kind of job are you going to get with a psychology degree?” my father replied.
“Well, how about sociology? Sociology
is interesting, too,” I responded.
“And where will sociology lead?” he rebutted.
A month later, I thought I’d found the perfect solution. “IE—industrial engineering!” I’d declared via telephone, naively triumphant. It was a field with enough study of human behavior to capture my interest, and plenty of math and hard science to placate my parents.
“Hmmmph—we chemical engineers joke that IE stands for imaginary engineering,” my father replied. He’d fashioned exactly the type of environment to win that particular battle, and I spent many units at Stanford learning to design spillways for dams and calculate loads on truss bridges. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil and environmental engineering.
My Chinese and Chinese American friends who became sociologists, artists, and writers tell me that they had home environments that were nurturing and open, they said, which worked to negate the impact of school. (Or, like me, they found their path only later in life.) Unfortunately, many students who end up at China’s top-tier schools are skilled at following a well-defined pathway to success, which means many of the country’s best first-year students haven’t yet failed at anything (though this probably holds true at top universities worldwide).
In fact, some of China’s highest-profile personalities insist they were successful because they had a third-rate—rather than a top-tier—Chinese education. Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, failed the gaokao three times and credits his inferior college education with his entrepreneurial success today. “If I’d gone to Tsinghua or Peking University I might be a researcher today,” he’d said in a speech. “Because I went to Hangzhou Normal University, I got my cultural education by having fun. Kids who know how to have fun, are able to have fun, and want to have fun generally have bright futures.”
Han Han is one of China’s most popular bloggers. He’s also a high school dropout. In a newspaper article that was reposted many times, Han Han likened Chinese education to “standing in a shower wearing a padded coat.” “The very likely result of performing at full development (in Chinese education) is fully mediocre.”
But is the Chinese education system all bleakness?
The creative spirit of the Chinese—while it may not always be on display inside the classroom—is buzzing inside China’s marketplace, insist friends and colleagues who work in China. After years of oppression and decades of restrictive economic policies, the Chinese have been raring for opportunities to build a better life for themselves and their families, and even the tiniest bit of encouragement can unleash the floodgates of creative activity. The proof is a spirit that thrives in public chat rooms and inside start-ups, spurred by government policy that boosts venture capital funds and provides incentives to entrepreneurs. Out of the buzzing swamps of the Chinese tech world has emerged Tencent—which owns the WeChat messaging platform—and Alibaba, one of the most watched companies in the world. And when highly skilled Chinese migrate overseas, the results can be impressive: researchers studying entrepreneurship discovered that Chinese or Taiwanese immigrants founded 13 percent of Silicon Valley’s start-ups and contributed to 17 percent of America’s global patents, at a ratio disproportionate to their percentage in the general population.
I’m a product of American culture and, like my fellow Westerners, I romanticize the concept of a lone, eccentric genius in the model of Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs, who invented the personal computer inside a garage or went on to disrupt entire industries. Who wouldn’t want their kid to retreat with a couple of circuit boards and emerge with the foundations of a product that would revolutionize the way we live or work?
The Chinese way forward may be more interdependent and group-oriented at the moment, and change can be more incremental than earth-shattering all at once. Consider that Chinese painters are taught to model early work after a famous painter, and copy it over and over until the techniques are ingrained in the muscle memory. (Once the basic skills are mastered, true creation begins.) The Chinese companies considered most revolutionary today arguably took someone else’s model, made incremental improvements, and eventually became uniquely Chinese. Is that not innovation, defined through a non-Western lens? For now this works. As a professor of entrepreneurship told me, if a Steve Jobs–like visionary is truly what China seeks, it needs only one. (In truth, there aren’t many “Steves” in the West, either.)
A for-profit education executive told me that as much as Westerners—and many Chinese themselves—denigrate the authoritarianism in China’s social, political, and education systems, it might actually prompt risk taking (though, it also clearly promotes breaking the law). “The Chinese are used to navigating brick walls—you build a wall, and they will have figured out how to get around it even before the cement is dry.” A tendency to shun planning may also encourage the experimentation that gives rise to innovation; even cement in China is considered less permanent than it is in the West. Crews in China pour roads, only to have the cement chopped up two weeks later to install pipes. In this anecdote is a sense that anything is possible and the usual norms don’t apply: Break, then pour again, and again, and again.
A strength of the Chinese marketplace is that change happens quickly, at a pace and fashion astounding to most Westerners who work here. In this environment, perhaps individual creativity, so valued in the West, is trumped by determination and opportunity. “If it’s doggedness, the Chinese have that in spades, and willingness to try-fail-try-fail,” said an American investor friend who’s worked in China for fifteen years. Does this all mean that China can’t produce a Steve Jobs . . . or does it simply mean the type of revolutionary change will just look a little different? A Western education professor who’s been coming in and out of China since 1983 told me, “China’s getting innovative and it’s happening very, very fast.”
For those who work in China, there’s a consensus that this “no creativity” argument is a fallacy. The classroom certainly poses barriers to expression, among other problems (to be fair, educators around the world are also concerned about this problem in their own schools), but the Chinese are working to overcome these obstacles. If it’s not happening in school, opportunities might come in the workplace. “Coaching and training are my top priorities,” says a Chinese chief technology officer in Shanghai who has worked with thousands of young Chinese programmers and engineers. “It’s my job to unwrap the chains. Some of them are extremely quick studies, and they become the cream of the crop.”
Indeed, at its most effective, creativity and outside-the-box thinking require a solid foundation of technical skills and discipline, which holds true whether you’re a painter, writer, or tech entrepreneur. When I think about Rainey’s education in China, I know he’ll come out with a strong foundation in math, science, and other academic disciplines. Ideally, he’ll also have all those wonderful soft skills and an education in the humanities (which we may have to work on later). If the school environment emphasizes one side of this equation, as Chinese school often does, the other must be encouraged at home or outside the schoolroom.
I wanted my son to be conversant on all sides of the equation.
Rainey was making huge leaps in the areas that we liked about the Chinese system: He was a disciplined and polite child, and he was making progress with numbers, with more to come in primary school.
“Rainey’s got a pretty amazing sense of self-control now,” Rob said on the second day of Operation Decision Opt-Out.
“Yes, but have you ever seen him color?” I said. “He just can’t seem to draw outside the lines, and he keeps drawing dinosaurs over and over again. Repeatedly.” Though, some days I’d fret about Chinese education, and other times Rob would take a turn.
“That’s not true at all,” Rob said. “Rainey draws all kinds of things. And we’re making sure he’s getting opportunities to be creative at home.”
“What about blind obedience?” I asked.
Rob laughed. “Does he seem like a weak-willed child?”
Just that morning Rainey had emerged at breakfast in an outfit he’d chosen himself. His brown corduroys clashed with his blue-and-white-striped shirt, and I was bothered by his sartorial choices.
“Morning, Rainey! Can you change your pants?” I asked, as I went to the kitchen to deposit my coffee mug. “You don’t match.”
“No,” he responded, trailing me defiantly into the kitchen. “Did you hear what I said? I said, ‘No.’ I won’t go change my pants.” He planted himself in the doorway, holding my gaze.
Rob and I rejoiced in this display of will. “See?” Rob said. “And yesterday, he arranged all his dinosaurs in the form of an army to face off against his Star Wars characters. He called it ‘Dinosaur Star Wars.’ How do you make Star Wars even cooler than it is? Throw in dinosaurs. How creative is that?”
“You’re grasping,” I told my husband.
In truth, all seemed to be going fine. The longer a child stays in the Chinese system, I knew, the harder it might be to “undo” some of its more oppressive effects, and there might even be a point of no return for some Chinese children, but we simply weren’t there yet. It’s also possible Rainey is an outlier personality who might emerge from a Chinese environment with these qualities intact.
Not only had Rainey figured out adults sometimes lie—cue in Teacher Song’s empty classroom threats—but by four years of age, he was already Santa sleuthing.
“Are reindeers afraid of Santa?” he’d asked earlier in the winter. We’d been decorating a pine tree from Oregon. The Chinese had begun to adopt Christmas wholesale, though they were more likely to celebrate commercialism than the birth of Christ.
“No, reindeer are not afraid of Santa,” Rob responded.
Rainey thought for a long while, hanging a sleigh ornament on our tiny, ocean-container-shipped tree.
“But deers are afraid of people,” Rainey challenged. “Does this mean Santa is not a person?”