Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World
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Much has changed, but only on the periphery. China remains China at its core. The Confucian tradition runs deep, and the government remains adamantly opposed to Western forms of government and cultural values. In fact, with its newly accumulated wealth and thirty years of miraculous economic growth, China has gained the confidence to once again assert that it has a superior culture and form of government. An article published in the Qiushi (Hongqi Wengao) magazine of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in March 2013 argues that the Chinese political system is the best of the world. Rather than basing this claim on Marxist doctrines, the author points to Shanran, an ancient practice of power transition in China:21
The mechanism of power change at the highest level in China today has the characteristics of the “Shanran” tradition but it removes the limitation of life-long occupancy through one-party rule, national selection, long-time cultivation, age-limit, and term-limit…This model basically combines the merits of the Western and Arabic systems and avoids their problems. One-party rule can avoid the risks of the contracted agents and enable long-term strategic planning. National selection and long-term cultivation maximizes the ability to identify the best talent and thus avoid mediocre leaders resulted from democracy. Term-limits enable an influx of new blood, eliminating he risk of having political strongmen.22
The article expresses what the Communist leadership has in mind, which is what the Qing emperors and their scholar-officials wanted: the innovations that brought the West technological and scientific advancement, combined with the authoritarian political system and culture that have been the tradition of China. The concept of “harmony and innovation” originates with Hu Jintao, who was China's top leader from 2002 to 2012. The concept is no more than a fresh package for the same content that has dominated China's thinking since 1840. “Harmony and innovation” has proven to be an impossible combination.
China's 150-year quest for modernization has been a frustrating one because using Western technology to defend the Confucian tradition didn't work well. When Western culture was kept out, so was Western technology. When Western technology came in, so did Western culture. In the future, China needs to move to a new stage, one where it can innovate rather than simply borrow or improve on existing technology. Can Confucian harmony breed Western innovation?
Notes
1. S. Bieler, “Patriots” or “Traitors”? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students (New York: East Gate, 2004); L. Leibovitz and M. Miller, Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization (New York: Norton, 2012); E. J. M. Rhoads, Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872–81 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011).
2. G. Qian and J. Hu, Daqing Liumei Youtong Ji [Chinese Educational Commission students] (Beijing: Dangdai, 2010), 75.
3. J. A. Litten, American-Educated Chinese Students and Their Impact on U.S.-China Relations (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 2009).
4. T. T. Woo, “Chinese Educational Commission,” Hartford Daily Courant, April 1, 1880, http://www.colebrookhistoricalsociety.org/PDF%20Images/Chinese%20Educational%20Mission.pdf.
5. Z. Tian, Zhongguo Jiaoyushi Yanjiu: Jindai Fengjuan [Study of Chinese education history: Modern period] (Shanghai, China: East China Normal University Press, 2009), 42.
6. J. K. Fairbank and M. Goldman, China: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 213.
7. Ibid., 217–18.
8. Tian, Zhongguo Jiaoyushi Yanjiu, 29.
9. Fairbank and Goldman, China: A New History, 217.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Bieler, “Patriots” or “Traitors”?
13. Fairbank and Goldman, China: A New History, 404.
14. The Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program was a scholarship program funded by the indemnity money paid by the Chinese government to the United States. In the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, US Secretary of State John Hay had suggested that the $30 million plus Boxer indemnity paid to the United States was excessive. After several negotiations, President Theodore Roosevelt obtained congressional approval in 1909 to reduce the Qing government indemnity payment by $10.8 million, on the condition that the fund was to be used as scholarship for Chinese students to study in the United States. The program supported over a thousand students, many of whom became influential scientists, engineers, and social leaders.
15. Y. Jiang, “Jiaoyu daguo de jueqi: Gaibian guojia mingyun de zhanlue jueze” [The rise of a powerful nation of education: Life changing strategic decisions], October 7, 2008, http://edu.people.com.cn/GB/8137271.html.
16. G. Ma, “Jin Guantao: Bashi niandai de yige hongda sixiang yundong” [Jin Guantao: A grand intellectual movement of the 1980s], April 27, 2008, http://finance.sina.com.cn/review/essay/20080427/11264806521.shtml.
17. X. Deng, Deng Xiaoping Wenxuan Disanjuan [Selected works of Xiaoping Deng] (Beijing: Renming Chubanshe, 1993), 195.
18. X. Su and L. Wang, Heshang [River elegy] (Beijing: Xiandai Chubanshe, 1988), 98–99.
19. Editorial Team of Biography of Wang Zhen, Wang Zhen Zhuan [Biography of Wang Zhen] (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo Chubanshe, 2001).
20. Bao Tong and Chen Yizhi were two of Zhao Ziyang's top aides and were viewed as supporters of the liberation movement. Bao was sentenced to prison after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and Chen escaped to the United States.
21. Shanran means that a living monarch willingly passes the throne to a younger and more capable successor, regardless of his background or family linage. The practice is referenced in Chinese legends, but historians do not agree that it ever actually happened.
22. Song, Ziyou Qu Zhongguo Caineng Kandao Weilai [You can find the future in China].
5
Fooling the Emperor: The Truth about China's Capacity for Innovation
It came down like pink snow falling from the sky,” one witness said. “Like pink butterflies,” suggested children playing in their Beijing backyards. “They came down and landed everywhere, the lawn, the flower bed, and bushes.”
As it turned out, the “pink snow” or “pink butterflies” that floated to earth on September 1, 2013, were three thousand pink hundred-yuan bills with Chairman Mao's portrait on them. The 300,000 RMB (about $50,000) were thrown out of the window of a fifteenth-floor apartment during a police raid. Dressed as workers from a gas company, police officers had raided a fake publishing ring, giving them no time to hide their profits.1
Led by a young man and his wife, this group of seven offered to publish scientific papers in their fake medical science journals for fees ranging from 2,000 to 4,000 RMB. Thousands of medical professionals from more than twenty provinces had sent in their payments and had their papers published. In some cases, the ring also offered to write the papers. The three thousand pink butterflies were just a fraction of the millions the ring had received since the start of their operation in 2009.
The ringleader, identified by his family name, Li, was a twenty-seven-year-old high school graduate. He was a good writer, and at first he'd made a living by ghost-writing research papers. But his ambitions exceeded the pay. He ventured into a far more profitable business when he realized just how many medical professionals were in desperate need of publications in order to get promoted. Li found partners and established a bogus press to publish “medical journals.” At first, he wrote the papers himself or produced them by copying and pasting from papers he found online. But his business grew so quickly that he couldn't meet the demand. So to increase his stock of papers, he conducted a public contest for the best medical research papers. He then sold the entries and made a handsome profit, completing his transformation from laborer to capitalist entrepreneur.
Academic misconduct and dishonesty exist everywhere, but rarely do they become opportunities to create a billion-dollar industry. A team of researchers led by Sheng Yang, a computer scientist at Wuha
n University who develops antiplagiarism software, estimated the fraudulent-publication industry to be worth about 1 billion yuan in 2009.2 It's a full-service business, ghost-writing academic papers that report the results of fictional research studies as well as getting papers published in both legitimate and not-so-legitimate journals. The team at Wuhan University identified about eight hundred websites dedicated to providing such services. Together they received over 200,000 hits a day, and over three-quarters of those hits came from universities and institutions, according to a 2010 report in the British science journal Nature.3
The Emperor's New Wishes
The billion-yuan market in fake publishing is a direct result of China's eagerness and determination to rapidly develop its own scientific and technological innovations, actualized in the traditional Chinese-style mass campaign. In the Great Leap Forward and similar mass campaigns, when the emperor (or, more recently, the Chinese central government) desires something, the people make it happen at any cost and in all sorts of ways, including fabrication. Back in 1958, when Chairman Mao wanted China's steel production to surpass that of Western countries, the people made his wish come true. Whether the steel was real or not didn't matter, nor did its quality, just so long as they made enough of it.
After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Chinese leaders began to acknowledge the power of science and technology. The new mind-set dramatically shifted the role and status of intellectuals, who had been considered dangerous and counterrevolutionary during the Mao era. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping made the obvious (but at the time radical) point that science and technology are forces of productivity. In 1988, he went a step further, calling science and technology the primary forces of productivity. The leaders who followed him all believed that science and technology would drive China's future. Xi Jinping, China's new leader, recently emphasized that innovation must be at the “core of national development.”4 And so to turn China into a nation of innovators, the government set forth highly specific and ambitious goals. In the National Planning Framework for Long and Short-Range Science and Technology Development released by the State Council in 2006, China announced that by 2015, it wanted to be one of the top five countries for the number of patents filed and the number of research papers cited.
The emperor can never be disappointed. Lo and behold, the goals have already been achieved, well ahead of schedule. In 2006, China replaced the United Kingdom as the second largest producer of scientific papers published in English, surpassed only by the United States. “China could overtake the United States as the world's dominant publisher of scientific research by 2013,” the Guardian had noted in 2011, describing a Royal Society study on global trends in scientific research.5 Sure enough, in September 2013, China became one of the world's top five countries for the number of times its authors' scientific and technology papers were cited.6 Two years earlier, in 2011, it had become the number one nation for patent applications.7 And beginning in 2008 and continuing to 2012, it was number three for patents granted, far exceeding its goal to be in the top five by 2015.8
China's achievement is even more extraordinary when you consider just how quickly the transformation took place. In 1998, just over 20,000 papers published in journals included in the Science Citation Index (SCI) database were authored by Chinese nationals. A decade later, more than five times that many papers were Chinese, and the total reached 116,000 in 2012. While China's number of SCI papers grew exponentially, most other countries' output remained stable, and the number of US papers grew by about 30 percent. The relative growth of China's number of science papers since the 1980s is stunning. According to a 2009 Thomson Reuters report, if the volume of publications included in the database was 100 in 1981, China's volume would have risen above 5,000 while the total output for the rest of the world, including the United States and the European Union, remained under 500.9
Chinese patents grew just as fast, jumping from 12,672 in 1991 to 415,829 in 2011, a thirty-two-fold increase.10 In the decade between 2001 and 2011, Chinese patent applications increased by more than thirteen times, from 30,038 to 415,829. The number of patents granted to Chinese residents grew even faster. In 1997, China ranked twelfth in the number of patents granted to residents: 1,532. That number increased by more seventy-three times, rising to 112,347 in 2011.
The Miracle Makers
China has delivered a miracle. The sheer number of its patents and frequency of its paper citations in recent years—not to mention the rate of its growth—are awe inspiring. And the miracle becomes even more extraordinary when you consider its makers.
An advanced degree is not required for conducting scientific research and publishing research papers or for technological innovations. Plenty of geniuses have made great scientific discoveries and technological inventions without possessing extended formal education. However, with the explosion and accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological advancement over the past few centuries, the likelihood of anyone making such discoveries and inventions without extended formal training is slim to nonexistent. Nearly all professional researchers in developed countries have gone through extended formal training and qualified for advanced degrees, typically at the doctoral level. As a result, doctoral degree holders are the primary producers of scientific research papers.
In 1982, China granted its first doctoral degrees to six individuals. There were only a handful of doctoral degree programs in the country, and annual admissions of doctoral students remained under ten thousand until 1994. Fewer than forty thousand doctoral students were admitted each year until 2003. Then the number of doctoral students dramatically increased in 2004, and now China boasts the largest number of doctoral degree programs—and thus doctoral students—in the world.11 But China's boom in science papers and patents happened around the same time as its dramatic increase in doctoral students. It's unlikely that the newly admitted doctoral students had much to do with the miraculous growth in science papers and patent applications since they were just beginning their training in scientific research.
Of course, China does not have to rely on only doctoral graduates from its own institutions. Instead, it has taken measures to attract researchers trained in foreign countries, especially Chinese nationals who left home to study overseas. Those strategies have not been successful in attracting individuals with doctoral degrees, however. Even in 2012, the year when a record-breaking number of Chinese students with overseas educations came home, only 5.8 percent of the 160,000 returnees had doctoral degrees.12 Although no data are available to count the exact number of foreign-trained individuals with doctoral degrees who are now working in China, the number can't be significant judging from the small percentage in 2012.
A more telling figure is the proportion of advanced-degree holders on university faculties. Universities are the primary institutions producing scientific research publications. They are also the most active recruiters of advanced-degree holders. In 2012, out of nearly 1.5 million full-time college teachers in China, fewer than 20 percent (255,799) held a doctoral degree, according to statistics from the Chinese Ministry of Education.13 And that was a remarkable change from 1998, when only 18,921 college professors in China held a doctoral degree. In 2003, when China's research publications and patent applications began to skyrocket, only 53,612 of the 724,658 full-time teachers in China's higher education institutions held a doctoral degree.
In other words, the majority of China's science and technology workforce did not have anywhere near the level of education found in developed countries such as the United States, where a doctoral degree is a prerequisite for holding a university faculty position in virtually all institutions of higher education and typically for professional research positions as well. Yet China produced millions of research publications and patent applications. What's behind the miracle?
Publish or Perish
The billion-dollar industry of fraudulent publication points to one of the major reasons for China's achievement: competition.
The central government—the modern equivalent of the emperor—dictates career pathways for virtually all professionals, from college professors to professional researchers. There is a national career ladder that puts professionals into different ranks of positions, with corresponding salaries, social status, and other benefits. Traditionally these ranks are aligned with the ranks of government officials. For example, an associate professor is the equivalent of a deputy director in a government department. A full professor is about the same rank as a department director. Although in the United States, professionals have different ranks and fall into some sort of a salary schedule, what a particular rank signifies varies with the institution. The Chinese system, in contrast, is highly centralized, and the same criteria apply to everyone. The central government also controls the distribution of such positions in each institution, allocating a certain number of slots for each level. In other words, one institution may have many qualified candidates for promotion to the next level, but the number of positions at the next level is limited. As a result, only a certain number can advance, creating an intense mechanism for competition.
Moreover, the Chinese government dictates the criteria for career advancement. And one of its primary criteria is publication. In a fiercely competitive situation in which publication has become a professional necessity—both to keep a job and to move ahead—the motivation to publish is naturally high. China has more than 17 million K–12 teachers; 1 million college teachers; over 5 million engineers and scientists in state enterprises; 300,000 professional researchers; 700,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians in agriculture; and 3.6 million medical professionals, all of whom need to show publications in order to keep their jobs or seek promotion. Most of these individuals are not engaged in research and have not been trained to be researchers. Publication is not their passion, and it does not lie at the core of what they do. Yet if they want to survive professionally, they have to publish.