Postcards From Tomorrow Square

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One thing I have learned through travel is that every country is unhappy with its school system. The reasons for unhappiness in America are familiar. In Japan, China, and South Korea, the complaint is that memorization for national university-admissions exams creates a generation of unimaginative zombies who are so overstressed by the time they reach college that they sleep, shop, or play video games through the next four years. “America is heaven until you are eighteen,” a Chinese professor said, using a slogan I later heard from others. “China is hell.” Despite a memorization-and-exam system as onerous as any country’s, South Korea is enjoying a vogue right now as a source of creativity. Its cartoons, its televised soap operas, its clothing fashions, even its Samsung mobile phones are popular in both China and Japan. South Korea’s recent pizzazz, however it has been achieved, has only intensified long-standing and often-voiced dismay in China and Japan over how to make their students not just technically competent but also “imaginative” and “creative.” The distress is particularly acute in China, because, contrary to what most Americans would assume, the Chinese government spends so little on education, and so much of what it spends is concentrated on a handful of elite schools. Overall, China spends just over 3 percent of its gross domestic product on education at all levels, about half as much as the average for developed countries. “Most of the money goes to the top ten schools, and what goes to the top ten mainly goes to the top few,” a professor at one of the favored schools told me. This makes getting into the “best” name-brand schools—like Tsinghua and Peking universities in Beijing, and Fudan and Jiao Tong in Shanghai—all the more important, which in turn increases the need for students to cram for tests and the advantage for those who go to high-fee private high schools.

I think I’ve seen the answer to China’s education problem—and in a way, to America’s. It is to make sure that young Chinese people keep coming to the United States—some for college, and very large numbers for graduate school and for work.

It is possible to feel an abstract generational envy—oops, I mean a vicarious excitement—for educated Chinese in their teens through their early thirties. They know that their country is on the rise, and while its political problems are enormous, their prospects are brighter than for any previous generation in the long history of their culture.

Within this favored group there is a smaller set that seems particularly fortunate. These are the native-born Chinese who have spent a few years studying or working in the United States. An American software entrepreneur I met here (when he was visiting his company’s subsidiary in Hangzhou) explained his theory that modern economies and cultures are driven by “tribes” of people on the move. The tribe of Jewish scientists and intellectuals who fled Hitler transformed America’s intellectual life after World War II; the tribe of graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology is heavily represented in Silicon Valley and has greatly contributed to innovation and enterprise there. Young Americans who served overseas during World War II or in the Peace Corps in the 1960s had a lasting effect on America’s relations with the world—and the hordes of young Mandarin-speaking Americans I keep bumping into in China could do the same.

The tribe of “returnee Chinese” seems very important to today’s China. My impression may be skewed, since I have met so many of these people at universities and in technology or financial companies. But I think anyone would find them, on average, a formidable group. From growing up in China, they learned (apart from the language) how to operate in this culture. From being in the United States, many of them learned (apart from the language) traits still very difficult to cultivate in China itself. These include professional managerial skills; the idea of open academic debate, even with one’s elders; techniques for funding start-up firms and other organizational structures that encourage innovation; and a sense that bribery, petty or grand-scale, is at least in principle wrong.

And most of them seem to have liked the process. The African students who trooped to Moscow and Beijing in the 1960s and ’70s often returned grumbling about mistreatment and racism; Americans who spend time in Japan often come away with love-hate feelings because of that culture’s exclusiveness. Chinese returnees, based on all available evidence, are at least subconsciously pro-American. They have made friends and followed sports teams; many have raised culturally Americanized children. Despite obvious differences of culture and language, and despite obvious exceptions to the rule I am about to propound: on the whole Chinese people get along with Americans, and vice versa. Because returnees have usually been part of either a university or a company in the United States, when they come back to China they’re more likely to think of working with General Motors (a huge success here and the leading automaker, with the locally manufactured Buick its most prestigious brand) or UCLA than with the counterparts from Japan or Europe.

If I were China’s economic czar, I would recycle as many of the country’s dollar holdings as possible on grad-school fees in the United States. And if I were America’s immigration czar, I would issue visas to Chinese applicants as fast as I could, recognizing that they will create more jobs, opportunities, and friends for America than the United States could produce any other way for such modest cost. Many Americans will nod along with this point in principle. I would have, too, a few weeks ago. I’m saying that I feel it viscerally now, having met some of these people and begun to see their role in China. And to hear them say that their younger counterparts are going instead to Australia, England, or even Japan because of U.S. visa restrictions makes me want to say: America, wake up and watch out!

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