by Yong Zhao
23. J. Xu, “Wangyou zhiyi 21 sui nvsheng fuzong jianli, dangshiren xiaofang jujue chengqing” [Internet users question the vice president title of a twenty-one-year-old female student; university refuses to clarify]. December 14, 2006, http://news.sina.com.cn/s/2006–12–14/161711791583.shtml.
24. “Fifteen Seconds of Fame: The Story of Yingying Wu and Pseudo Human Events,” High and Low, January 2, 2007, http://cheztracey.blogspot.com/2007/01/15-seconds-of-fame-story-of-yingying_02.html.
25. J. Lu, “Who Is Making Junk Patents?” May 4, 2011, http://www.chinaipmagazine.com/en/journal-show.asp?id=690.
26. Y. Wu, China Patent No. CN1331016, China Intellectual Property Net: State Intellectual Property Office of the People's Republic of China, 2000.
27. M. Wang and J. Qu, “Zhishi chanquanju: Muqian zhuanli zhiliang hai chuzai xiangdui bijiao di shuiping” [State Intellectual Property Office of the PRC: Current patent quality is still relatively low], April 25, 2013, http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2013–04/25/content_2390297.htm.
28. Ibid.
29. D. Prud'homme, Dulling the Cutting-Edge: How Patent-Related Policies and Practices Hamper Innovation in China (Shanghai: European Union Chamber of Commerce in China [European Chamber], 2012), 5.
30. Jane Qiu, “Publish or Perish in China.”
31. Louisa Lim, “Plagiarism Plague Hinders China's Scientific Ambition,” NPR, August 3, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hinders-chinas-scientific-ambition.
32. X. Jiang, “Yixue lunwen zaoyu 16 ge danwei 25 ren 6 lun lianhuan chaoxi” [Six rounds of serial plagiarism of one medical science paper by twenty-five people from sixteen organizations], March 24, 2010, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/sd/2010–03–24/052319927382.shtml.
33. Y. Wu, “Zhongyang Renmin Guangbo Diantai jiu keji lunwen shuliang yu zhiliang duiwo caifang” [China National Radio's interview with me on the quantity and quality of science papers], September 30, 2013, http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1557–729177.html.
34. L. Li, X. Wu, and X. Chu, “Tongxue pingjia: Ta shi gongren de qiangren, dan juli henyuan” [Classmate judges her: She is recognized as a strong person, but aloof], December 15, 2006, http://news.sina.com.cn/s/2006–12–15/022011793953.shtml.
35. Prud'homme, Dulling the Cutting-Edge.
36. Y. Liu, K. Wen, and J. Guo, “Influence Factors Analysis of Chinese Patent Quality Based on the Process Management,” Scientific Research Management 12 (2012): 104–9.
6
Hell to Heaven: The Making of the World's Best and Worst Education
No one, after 12 years of Chinese education, has any chance to receive a Nobel prize, even if he or she goes to Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or Cambridge for college,” blogged Zheng Yefu, a professor at China's Peking University and author of The Pathology of Chinese Education, a popular Chinese book published in 2013.1 “Out of the one billion people who have been educated in Mainland China since 1949, there has been no Nobel prize winner,” Zheng wrote in an article. “This forcefully testifies [to] the power of education in destroying creativity on behalf of the [Chinese] society.”2
Zheng was talking about the same education that made China the envy of the world. Just a few months after Zheng's comments, results of the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) were released. For the second time in a row, Shanghai, the most developed and cosmopolitan city in China, led the world in math, reading, and science. It was not the only Chinese entity that earned outstanding PISA scores. Although their data were not included in the official PISA report, students in Zhejiang Province, most of them from rural schools, performed almost as well.3 They topped the scores of every other educational system except Shanghai's.
The PISA scores don't necessarily disprove Zheng's point, because test scores are not the same as creativity, and Chinese students have been known for being great test takers at the cost of creativity. However, Andreas Schleicher, the de facto spokesperson for PISA, has been trying. He points out that a lot more of “Shanghai's 15-year-olds can conceptualize, generalize, and creatively use information” than can American or European students.4 In Shanghai, more than 30 percent of the students demonstrated such abilities through the PISA, Schleicher says, compared to only 2 percent in America and 3 percent in Europe.5 He insists that students in Shanghai were not simply good at taking tests: “The biggest surprise from Shanghai to the world was not that students did well on reproducing subject matter content but that they were very very good in those higher order skills.”6
Armed with PISA scores, Schleicher has helped create another wave of Sinophilism some four hundred years after the Jesuit missionaries. However, just like the Jesuit missionaries and their fellow European Sinophiles who were fooled by shallow observations, Schleicher was deceived by his PISA, which, regardless of the claims of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), is still a test: it measures students' ability to come up with answers deemed correct by the authority. Moreover, PISA is confined to three subjects. There is far more to life's success than what can be measured by standardized tests in three subjects. Even Schleicher concedes that “the kind of things that are easy to test in an exam like this are becoming less relevant.”7
Yet he and his fellow Sinophiles are not entirely wrong in pronouncing China's—or at least Shanghai's—the best education system in the world. Chinese students have consistently been top performers on international assessments, have collected a remarkable number of prizes and awards in international academic contests such as the science and math Olympiads, and have demonstrated academic excellence in many other ways.”8 But the Sinophiles forget that China also has the world's worst education system in terms of its capacity for cultivating creative inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. It has not produced Nobel winners in science, transformative technological inventions, or groundbreaking scientific discoveries in proportion to its population. The majority of its patents and scientific papers, despite their impressive quantity, are of relative low quality, as we discussed in the previous chapter.
Worse yet, the Sinophiles fail to realize that what makes the Chinese education the best is precisely what makes it the worst. In their efforts to propagate the secrets that brought China its great PISA performance, they don't talk about the downside of Chinese education or “the costs of Shanghai's education success story” that have been pointed out by Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Tsinghua University High School, and many others, including the Chinese government.9
The most damaging aspect of Chinese education is its effectiveness in eliminating individual differences, suppressing intrinsic motivation, and imposing conformity. The Chinese education system is a well-designed and continuously perfected machine that effectively and efficiently transmits a narrow band of predetermined content and cultivates prescribed skills. Moreover, the system determines people's livelihood. Because it is the only path to social mobility, people follow it eagerly. As a result, it produces great performances in areas the authority determines to be worthy—and PISA happens to test skills and content in precisely those areas. Unless and until the system changes, Chinese students will continue to top the PISA rankings—and China will continue to lack the pool of diverse and innovative talents it needs. Thus we have this paradox: while many Western observers such as Andreas Schleicher envy China's PISA performance, the Chinese are working hard to dismantle the factors responsible for that success.10
The cultural legacy that has shaped China's educational system is reflected in the saying, “All life's pursuits are worth less than [the] scholarly quest.” In China, there has been only one heaven on earth: a socially recognized profession that brings honor, fame, and respect.
One Heaven
“I have disgraced, dishonored my alma mater,” Lu Buxuan said, his voice choked, in a public lecture at Peking University in 2013.11 A graduate of the university, Lu had become a well-known and controversial figure a decade earlier when he was discovered working as a butcher in Xi'an. In 1985,
he was admitted to Peking University as the highest-scoring student in his county. He was assigned a post after graduation, as it was the policy that all college graduates were assigned a job by the government. But in 1999, he was not earning enough in his post so he decided to open a butcher shop. To reflect his scholarly background, he named the shop Yanjing Roudian—The Butcher with Glasses.
Lu's story caused a national uproar in China. Opinions varied, but most felt butchery was not a decent profession for a graduate of the most prestigious university in China. People roundly criticized the government for not having taken care of its well-educated scholar. A few months after the story broke in the national media, the local government gave Lu a job as an editor in the Archives Department. “We had talked with him way before his story was reported in the media,” said a local government official in self-defense. “In 2001, we offered him several positions, but it did not work out. Last year when the media were all over his story, we offered him several positions again…Considering his interest and strength, we think he should work in the Archives Department.”12
Lu turned his shop over to his wife and began to work for the government, but a few years later, he returned to the shop. He met another graduate-turned-butcher from Peking University in 2008 and teamed up with him. Now he has written a book, The Study of Pork Marketing, and opened a butchery school. He and his fellow graduate have also started a large chain of meat stores. They were honored with an invitation to speak at their alma mater in April 2013, when China's 7 million college graduates faced the toughest year for finding jobs.13 Yet despite his apparent success, Lu still thought himself a failure and a disgrace. “I am the textbook of what not to become,” he told his audience.
Lu's story exemplifies the first factor that contributes to both China's educational success and its failure: the cultural values that narrowly define worthwhile accomplishment. For thousands of years, government positions have been sold as the only respectable job in China. Ranked by status, the professions proceed downward from shi (government officials) to nong (farmers), gong (craftsman), and shang (merchants). Confucius said that “the student, having completed his learning, should apply himself to be a government officer.”14 With social status come material rewards: political power, job security, handsome income, housing, and other fringe benefits. Even today in a drastically transformed and far more diverse China, the most prized jobs remain government positions. In 2013, about 1.5 million people competed for approximately 20,000 government positions in the Chinese national civil servant exam.15
The fact that Lu has not achieved a high-level government job or a scholarly position that puts his literary skills to good use is a disgrace not only to him but also to his alma mater. Lu is a victim of traditional Chinese education, blogged Shi Yuzhi, a professor at Singapore National University and author of Why Cannot China Have Grand Masters.16 “Lu Buxuan has surrendered to the traditional value of Chinese education…According to the Chinese value system, selling pork is a job for the illiterate,” not the educated. Conversely, the purpose of education is to obtain a government position or another highly ranked job that hovers well above the struggle for daily necessities.
This narrow definition of accomplishment is a powerful way to homogenize individuals by discouraging any pursuit that does not serve the emperor or government. This is one of the reasons China didn't have the industrialists, naturalists, technologists, inventors, and entrepreneurs it needed to start an industrial revolution. These professions were all considered disgraceful compared to the scholar-official. Education, in the traditional Chinese perspective, should not be applied to help cultivate these less honorable professions. Education in China is, in essence, a process through which those willing to comply are homogenized and those unwilling or unable to comply—but quite possibly talented or interested in other, nonscholarly pursuits—are eliminated.
This narrow definition of success also undergirds the widespread belief that Chinese culture places a high value on education. “For centuries, Chinese people have believed in the value of education for the nation's well-being as well as for their own personal advancement,” wrote the late Harold Stevenson and his team of researchers at the University of Michigan twenty years ago.17 “China has a long tradition of valuing education highly,” notes a document from the OECD that explains China's top performance on the PISA.18 New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof maintains that “the greatest strength of the Chinese system is the Confucian reverence for education that is steeped into the culture.”19 “Mr. Schleicher says the [PISA] results reveal a picture of a society investing individually and collectively in education,” a BBC reporter wrote after interviewing Andreas Schleicher in 2012.20
The Chinese do indeed value education, but out of necessity, not out of choice. Valuing education is simply a survival strategy. It evolved to cope with an authoritarian system that had instilled a very narrow definition of success: there is only one heaven, and education is the only way to get there.
One Small Heaven
The number of socially respected professions and positions in China is small, making the heaven a tiny place that millions of young people have no way of reaching. The few who do then climb mountains carved from another Chinese value: hierarchy. As a historically authoritarian society organized around the Confucian philosophy, China gives a hierarchical order to every facet of life. Value is always positional, established by comparison to other persons, places, or things. Moreover, there are socially recognized and sometimes government-imposed criteria to judge relative value. For example, China's national leaders sit atop a multilayered pyramid in which the premier is above the vice premiers, who are above ministers and provincial governors, who are above vice ministers and deputy governors, who are above director-generals of ting or ju (departments), who are above their deputies, who are above the leaders of a county, then villages and townships. This hierarchy is used to distribute everything from power, authority, and compensation to the location of one's seat at a dinner table. Thus, it is not enough simply to enter the right profession; one must then climb to the top in order to show accomplishment. There is no intrinsically valuable position, because there is always the next level to reach—hence the popular saying, “There is no best, only better.” Being good means being better than others.
The concept of hierarchy and ranking is so solid in China that whenever a choice needs to be made about anything, the Chinese people want to know if it is top-ranked. This applies to fashion brands, restaurants, tourist spots, and of course educational institutions. When they decide which college to attend, domestic or overseas, Chinese parents and students are much more concerned about the ranking of the institution than what it actually offers or whether it suits them.
One consequence of this hierarchical view is that China will never have enough good universities, no matter how many new universities it adds or how hard it tries to improve equity. For example, the number of higher education institutions grew from 598 in 1978 to over 2,100 in 2012. The annual intake of college students increased from a mere 400,000 in 1978 to nearly 7 million in 2012. As a result, the rate of college admissions jumped from around 6 percent to almost 70 percent. Yet the competition for college has only become fiercer because it is not good enough to attend just any college. Rather, one must attend a famous college. Those who graduate from famous colleges are more respected and are given entirely different treatment in society. For instance, it has become common practice for employers, even state enterprises and governments, to openly deny and exclude job applicants based entirely on their alma mater. Job advertisements explicitly list a bachelor's degree from non-985 and non-211 universities—a small group of universities designated by the central government—as a basic qualification.21 This open discrimination is worse than saying only a Harvard or Yale graduate can be considered for a job in the United States, since the government controls the designation. This kind of discrimination has become so rampant and caused such social dissatisfaction
that the Chinese Ministry of Education had to issue an executive order forbidding it.22 However, that order has had little effect.
Many traditional practices flow from China's hierarchical model, including the educational system's reliance on ranking. Schools are ranked by governments, then given resources according to their status. When people protested the inequity, officials stopped designating key schools and changed the category to “demonstration schools,” but the change was of no practical consequence. People know the schools are still ranked at the national, provincial, and municipal levels. Students in “good” primary schools still have a better chance of entering a stronger middle school and then an even stronger high school, then moving onward to one of the 985 or 211 universities.
Classes are ranked as well. While different names are used to disguise the differences, classes are ranked from slow to fast with such euphemisms as “rocket class,” “extraordinary class,” and “experimental class.” Often the inferior classes are simply called “slow class” or “poor student class.”
Students are tested regularly and frequently: every term, every month, and in some cases every week. They are then ranked based on their test scores, and their rank is publicized. These everyday rankings have significant consequences. It is widely known that students are sorted into different classes and schools based on their rankings, but it is less well known that such sorting can happen on a monthly or even weekly basis, and the consequences can be devastating for those with lower scores. Qiangqiang, a fourteen-year-old student in a school in Hohhot, committed suicide for fear of being moved out of the “rocket class” (the fast track) because his ranking had slipped from 290 to about 600 in the class.23