Dennis wrote: The Chinese do have one big advantage. That is that their culture values education highly. I would hope that is education for education's sake, not just for the added income that it might produce. However as they 'modernize' and 'Westernize', that may suffer just as it has in the Western countries. Ohiyo, Dennis. My global Chinese friends (that is, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) were definitely upbraided about their schooling as part and parcel of their future income-earning potential, not how learned they were to be. In most cases, they had very little choice about their individual careers. They were to learn skills that would support the family enterprise, directly or indirectly. No fooling around "finding themselves". That was the late 60s and early 70s. Same with the Japanese I know today, except in the case of Japanese women born above the working class.
It took me years to let go of my Pearl S. Buck impressions of China*, but the aristocratic leisure class was probably the last to relish education for education's sake. In modern times it has become much more a tool of survivability, as we see in current coastal China (as Keith was correct to distinguish from inland China), but then again, they are very practical, energetic and dynamic people. Mao changed a lot more than politics, but not those qualities. However, one insults Asian sensibilities if slighting the intrinsic value they place on education. I suppose this distinction is about as palatable as that of taking art classes to learn to paint versus taking art classes in order to sell paintings. At least they are studying art, and generally, they are ahead of us on both. - Karen Watters Cole * In recent years, one of these old friends who lived and worked in SE Asia for fifteen years until just recently, doing business for his US company all over SE Asia and China, would reach a place in our conversations where he had to tell me to "get those romantic old notions" of China out of my head. I thought I was current and appropriately curious but nothing beats being there, coughing on the air pollution from old fashioned grilled food stalls amidst towering skyscrapers, practicing traditional strict family rules along with sexy western clothes, making critical international deals that take years to finalize, negotiating ancient paths in modern shoes. Speaking as an American, China still thinks in timelines we have no patience for, they have perspectives we don't have due to our relative youth. If you know something of the old paths, the new shoes will still get you there. For too many of us in the West, China might as well be the moon.
