Global Strategies

Li Na: China’s first tennis grand slam finalist

Li Na put China on the global tennis map.  She lost in the Australian Open to Kim Clijsters, who won 3-6, 6-3, 6-3. More from the NY Times article “Clijsters, While Not at Her Best, Is Still Too Much for Li’ by Christopher Clarey (here):

“She had more experience than me, because she played many finals,” Li said. “Hopefully next time if I play final, I do better.”

 In the early 2000s, Australian Open officials began marketing their tournament as the Grand Slam of Asia Pacific in an attempt to connect their event to the region and defend against the possibility of being usurped by an Asian Slam.

Though the label initially elicited skepticism, it has taken hold with many Asian players, and China has had considerable success here in recent years. In 2006, the women’s doubles team of Yan Zi and Zheng Jie became the country’s first Grand Slam champions, and Li and Zheng reached the semifinals in singles last year.

Li, a 28-year-old from Wuhan in central China, took a major step this year, and she will always be the first Chinese — or Asian for that matter — in a Grand Slam singles final.

 “Obviously over the years, it’s been America, it’s been Europe,” the third-seeded Clijsters said. “It’s all been very kind of divided between those two continents. It’s nice to kind of see that Asia is starting — and especially China — starting to get recognized in this sport, too.”

 Though the crowd was pro-Clijsters, Li had pockets of support at Laver Arena, with dozens of Chinese flags on display and Chinese fans waving signs. But their presence was not all good news for Li, who tired of their running commentary.

After losing her serve in the second set to fall behind, 3-4, she said to the chair umpire, Alison Lang, “Can you tell the Chinese, ‘Don’t teach me how to play tennis?’ ” Lang asked the crowd several times to not shout out during play or use flash photography.

For Li, feeling irritated during matches is nothing new. She often admonishes herself in a regional dialect and delivers wounded glances to her husband and coach, Jiang Shan, in the players’ box..

From the China mainland-based Global Times (here):

Meanwhile, the final received blanket media coverage in China, despite tennis' relatively low profile, prompting Li to dream of a Russian-style boom in the world's most populous nation.

"I hope after three to five years maybe China will be like Russia and have many players coming through," she said.

Russia had 18 women in the singles draw at Melbourne, while China had just three: Li, Peng Shuai and Zhang Shuai.

China's tennis chief hailed Li as a "pioneer" and drew comparisons with basketball superstar Yao Ming and idolized hurdler Liu Xiang, as the Wuhan native's face adorned major Chinese newspapers and websites.

In a further boost, Peng also reached the fourth round, the second year in a row that two Chinese players had made the last 16.

And, again from the Global Times, some thoughts on the larger implications of Li’s personality (here):

Despite losing the final at the Australian Open, 28-year-old Chinese tennis player Li Na is all the rage in the foreign media. This is related not only to her identity as the first Asian to play in a Grand Slam singles final, but also her courtside humor and bubbly personality.

Women's Tennis Association CEO Stacey Allaster said that on the global stage, Li represents the image of the Chinese people.

Every successful athlete, on certain occasions, becomes a symbol of his or her nation. Previously, Chinese sports players had a strong sense of "representing China," and often appeared conservative and overcautious. Foreign journalists used to find it hard to distinguish among Chinese athletes due to their lack of individuality in their eyes. Li is breaking that stereotype.

Li's impressive performance on the court was driven by her own personality and it represents a social change in China during the past two decades. Mainly, the constraints on self-expression have been shaken off. This forthright girl represents a different China that allows her to "just be herself."

Some foreign media outlets regard Li as a "Chinese tennis rebel." Indeed, she has many characteristics to validate this new title - she wears a rose tattoo on her chest and employs her husband as personal coach; she first thanked her sponsor at the award ceremony, and even asked the chair umpire during the tense second set: "Can you tell the Chinese don't teach me how to play tennis?"

In fact, such "rebelliousness" didn't upset the Chinese, because they've been fed up with clichés like "thank my leaders" or "thank my comrades." Furthermore, being reminded to behave with great care is probably the last thing they want while watching a game.

Chinese society and its people need to relax. They need a little humor and open-mindedness to cope with small mistakes, and imperfection should be allowed from time to time. Being excessively "correct" can lead to untruthfulness and pressure. China is not as "correct" as it was in the past. However, isn't this China more lovely and real?

The story of "Chinese tennis rebel" Li Na becoming the first Asian to play in a Grand Slam singles final has enriched the narrative of China's rise. Nowadays, many Chinese like Li are going global and pursuing their life goals with their vivid personality. They are not obliged to represent China, but they demonstrate a more natural and realistic profile of the nation.

A "performance compact" for Oregon Higher Ed?

SB 242 has been introduced and will have a hearing in Salem this week as the legislative session opens. SB 242 will reorganize public higher education and free it from some state regulations and oversight.

In a previous blog post (here), I wondered how the university system would be “held accountable” for the state funds it will receive. That is still not clear. But SB 242 does sketch the political process through which that accountability will operate.

There will be a “performance compact” between the universities and state government developed as follows (here):

SECTION 21. { + (1) For the purposes of this section, 'performance compact' means an agreement between the State Board of Higher Education and the State of Oregon to achieve certain performance targets in order to enhance the success of Oregon University System students in exchange for consideration of the appropriations sought in a funding request submitted by the State Board of Higher Education to the Oregon Department of Administrative Services.

  (2)(a) On or before May 1 of each even-numbered year, the State Board of Higher Education shall submit a draft funding request to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission for the Oregon University System, applicable to the biennium beginning on July 1 of the following year. The draft funding request must include a performance compact.  

(b) If the Higher Education Coordinating Commission approves the draft funding request and performance compact, or approves the draft funding request and performance compact with modifications, the commission shall take such action prior to August 15 of the same even-numbered year.  

(c) If the Higher Education Coordinating Commission rejects the draft funding request and performance compact, the commission shall take such action prior to June 15 the same even-numbered year. In returning the rejected draft funding request and performance compact to the State Board of Higher Education, the commission shall give specific direction to the board regarding  the changes necessary to earn commission approval. 

(3) On or before September 1 of each even-numbered year, the State Board of Higher Education shall submit the funding request and performance compact to the Oregon Department of Administrative Services for the Oregon University System.  

(4) The department shall include the funding request as part of the Governor's biennial budget submitted to the Legislative Assembly. Any funding request approved by the Legislative Assembly must direct the moneys appropriated to the department for allocation to the Oregon University System.  

(5) The funding request must, in addition to the proposed performance compact, include a report on performance from the previous biennium's performance compact. The State Board of Higher Education shall submit the performance report on or before December 1 of each even-numbered year to the Legislative Assembly.  

(6) The State Board of Higher Education shall, by rule, establish a framework for the development of a performance compact that must accompany the funding request to the department.  

(7) The State Board of Higher Education is authorized to:   (a) Request, as part of the funding request, state appropriations for budgetary items, including but not limited to education and general operations, statewide public services, state funded debt service, capital improvements and other special initiatives and investments; and   (b) Allocate moneys from its state appropriations and other available moneys among the office of the Chancellor of the Oregon University System, public universities listed in ORS 352.002 and offices, departments and activities under the control of the board.  

(8) The State Board of Higher Education is not required to seek expenditure limitation approval from the Legislative Assembly to spend any available moneys, including but not limited to moneys from enrollment fees collected pursuant to section 20 of this 2011 Act. + }  

First, I’d like to see the “performance compact” for FY 2011-12, even a draft or sample. I’d like to know if progress towards the following “Goals for Oregon Mandarin Programs” could or would be adapted to the compact (here):  

(b) 10% or more of the students graduating from Oregon public universities have studied Mandarin for at least two academic years, and (c) 50% of the students graduating from Oregon public universities have spent at least four weeks in China.  

Second, it is unclear what latitude the legislature has in changing the compact as it may change the funding level.  

Third, I still do not see any strong accountability features. A report on the previous year’s accomplishments and/or failures will help. But really, if, for example, the “performance compact” calls for “3% of the graduates having studied Mandarin for two years” and the previous year reports finds only “2%,” what might happen?

China's Times Square Ads

China’s latest public relation effort is lighting up Times Square. As the NY Times article “China’s Publicity Ads Arrive in Times Square” by James Barron reports (here):

China has established an extra large, extra red beachhead in Times Square. In an advertising push the state news agency Xinhua described as a “public diplomacy campaign” that coincides with President Hu Jintao’s visit to the United States this week, China is running a 60-second video on a series of billboard-size screens on Broadway. Some of the screens stay red — with Chinese characters in white — while the video is playing on the other screens with images of Chinese celebrities like the martial-arts movie star Jackie Chan; the basketball player Yao Ming; the astronaut Yang Liwei; and the pianists Lang Lang and Yundi. Xinhua said the video would be shown 15 times an hour, 20 hours a day, through Feb. 14, and on CNN through Feb. 13.

Here is the video with its sound track (which was not broadcast or heard at Times Square):

 

American reaction has been mostly critical. For example (here):

"If the intent is to teach Americans about the Chinese, the campaign falls woefully short," says Isaac Stone Fish in Newsweek. While "hardly offensive," it's "unlikely" that 60 "boring" seconds of smiling Chinese celebrities will "inspire Americans to learn Mandarin."

 The blog Peking Duck opines (here):

According to the FT it was created by the global ad agency Lintas, but I’m willing to place bets it was conceived and produced in China, and it wasn’t run by any US focus groups.

The golden rule for this kind of messaging is to speak in the voice of your audience. I don’t think this ad does that. It calls out for localization, and I’m afraid it’s going to backfire, if it hasn’t already, raising cries about “Red China” and its creepy propaganda.

And the blog China Geeks get even more specific (here):

Actually, on the face of it, I sort of like the principle I imagine they started with: China has some cool, and unique, people, and Americans don’t really know that because China is some faceless “othery” place to them. This is true. However, this approach to introducing Chinese people to the US is, well, dumb.

First of all, regardless of what the audio says, the people are doing absolutely nothing in any of these shots, which makes them unmemorable and pointless. They don’t serve to illustrate anything other than that Chinese people exist, which was something Americans already knew. Seriously, you got together sixty of China’s most beautiful, famous people, and then asked them to stand around for a while?

(If you’re curious who, exactly, is standing around, check out this list the Baidu Beat folks have put together from the footage we have so far.)

Secondly, I wonder about the use of celebrities at all, given that 95% of the people in the video aren’t people Americans know or will be impressed by at all. I don’t think anyone is going to see that video and think, “Wow, Tan Dun is Chinese!” Most people have no clue who Tan Dun is, and those who do know him already know that he’s Chinese. As the one woman they ask about it in the news report above says, “I know Yao Ming, and uh, some of the supermodels…”

It is also worth pointing out that they obviously didn’t attempt to rework the ad at all to make it fit on those Times Square screens, so in many of the shots half of the names are obscured, people are cut out, etc. Bush league.

A comment by Christopher C. Heselton on the Chiba Geek blog has this perspective:

Although on the surface it looks like a PR attempt to gain the attention of the American public, in reality, it looks to me more as a method to gain the attention of Hu Jintao and the Chinese public as a mark of prestige – “Look, we got an advertisement in Times Square and on American television.” The selection of Chinese celebrities makes the point ever more poignant. They were chosen not to be recognizable to the Chinese viewing audience, not an American audience.

 

Barnett: "There needs to be a balance"

As budget cutting gets serious in Washington, the intra-Pentagon struggle between ground forces (Army and Marines targeted at current wars) and the air and sea forces (Navy and Air Force targeted a future peer competitors like China) heats up. Tom Barnett urges keeping a balance. Starting at minute 3:25 of the following video, he says.

There needs to be a balance. Obviously, if America gets too fixated on so-call “imperial” projects, trying to maintain the world security, and if it insists on running every show and simultaneously dominating any potential challenger out there, it’s going to get exhausted. And yet, if it pulls back from that, and gets too fixated on high-tech, fantastic wars with fantastically rich opponents, kind of the current image of China, that international system is going to decay. Maintaining that balance is difficult in Washington with its who’s-up-and-who’s-down culture, but we think it is absolutely essential if America is going to remain an important and preeminent player in the international security system.

Then there follows (at minute 4:04) an assessment of Hu’s visit to the US.

 

Has Xi Jinping visited Oregon?

China’s President Hu Jintao just completed a state visit to Washington, DC. It was probably his last. His heir apparent is waiting in the wings. As the NY Times article “China Grooming Deft Politician as Next Leader” by Edward Wong and Jonathan Ansfield explains (here):

President Hu Jintao of China returned home this weekend after a trip intended to repair relations with the United States. But the next time the White House marches out the honor guard and polishes the crystal for a Chinese leader, it is unlikely to be for Mr. Hu.

Following a secretive succession plan sketched out years ago, Mr. Hu has already begun preparing for his departure from power, passing the baton to his presumed successor, a former provincial leader named Xi Jinping, now China’s vice president. While Mr. Xi is expected to formally take the reins next year in China, the world’s second-largest economy and fastest-modernizing military power, he remains a cipher to most people, even in China.

 Of interest to us in Oregon is whether Xi has had contact with Oregonians or visited our state. The Chinese province of Fujian has had a sister state relationship with Oregon since about 1984 (during Governor Atiyeh’s term). Lots of visiting delegations have gone both ways over the years. Xi spent 17 years in Fujian Province. Maybe he has come to Oregon? How well mioght he know us?

As Wong and Ansfield continue to report:

By the early 1980s, party elders had identified Mr. Xi as one of a brood of prospective future leaders. His first provincial post was in Hebei, where he promoted local tourism and rural enterprise, but ran up against the conservative provincial leader. The party then sent him to Fujian Province, across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan. Mr. Xi bounced through three cities over 17 years.

There, he courted Taiwanese investors. For 14 years, he also supervised the local military command. His exposure to the Taiwan territorial issue “may shade his views on cross-strait relations in the direction of flexibility,” said Alice L. Miller, a scholar of Chinese politics at the Hoover Institution.

Thank you, Representative Dembrow!

Oregon should have a statewide system of online education. It would both save public money and offer expanded learning opportunities to students. Mandarin, and lots of other minor languages, should be available online to every student in Oregon. Plus a wide variety of other courses.

To preserve teaching positions, teachers unions have  fought the expansion of online education in most of its forms. They have been largely successful, leaving most schools technologically inefficient (as in costing more than necessary). It is a form of feather bedding.

So it is refreshing to see at least one Democratic legislator pushing the issue. Kim Melton’s Oregonian article “Oregon schools Superintendent Susan Castillo begins her third term with a new approach and an uncertain future” reports (here):

Susan Castillo and her legislative adviser share a couch in Rep. Michael Dembrow's office. Castillo leans forward, a small notebook and pen in her hand. Dembrow leans back in a rolling office chair facing the two.

For the first time in her eight-year tenure, the state schools superintendent is making the pre-legislative rounds with lawmakers.

"We want to hear your priorities going into the session," Castillo says. "Let us know your goals, what things we should be aware of or looking at."

The Portland Democrat ticks off a list, ending with a request about virtual schools, a source of controversy for three legislative sessions.

"It would be great if your office could show leadership on that issue," Dembrow says.

Thank you, Representative Dembrow!

"In all fundamental respects the 21st century is the Asia Pacific century"

This nineteen minute youtube produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies consists of an interview with Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Zhang Yesui and Kurt Campbell, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific on the importance of educational exchange for the U.S.-China Relationship. They discuss the implications for the long term US-China relationship of the 100 Strong Initiative.

Secretary Campbell says (at minute 6:25 ):

What we are committed to doing over the course of the first four years of the Obama administration is to get to a level over those four years of about 100,000 students having gone and studied in China. We think that this is essential on so many levels that as there is an increasing realization in our country that in all fundamental respects the 21^st century is the Asia Pacific century, and at the center of that is an extraordinarily dynamic China.

We want very much to have a new generation of American students who increasingly speak Chinese Mandarin, who can travel confidently, who understand commerce and all the issues culturally that are important in China. This cadre of students will play a critical role in our businesses, in academia, and in our non-profit organizations. We think that to be successful, to be effectively entrepreneurial in the Asia-Pacific context creating this next generation of students and people who are deeply knowledgeable and committed to the US-China relationship is essential.

 

McCrystal: "Americans must engage the world"

While I was outside Schnitzer Concert Hall last week (here), retired General Stanley McCrystal was inside calling for Americans to become more engaged with the world. Oregonian reporter Rich Read writes in his article “Retired Gen. Stanley McCrystal, unbowed by Rolling Stone, tells Portlanders Americans must engage the world” that (here):

For most of U.S. history, McChrystal said, the nation’s location and more recently wealth and power allowed Americans the luxury of ignorance. But now the United 
States is engaged and involved practically everywhere. “It means we actually have to know where Waziristan is. What happens in North Korea matters in North Dakota.”

“Really our power status was an aberration. We are shifting back to an era where we’re going to  have to be more thoughtful and more engaged.”

Only 5 percent of the world’s population speaks English as a first language, McChrystal said. Less than one in five Americans speaks a foreign language, he said, while 46 percent of Europeans speak a foreign language and 16 percent speak more than one.

Well, yes, Americans need to be more engaged. Our schools could strengthen foreign language learning opportunities (more immersion and more online foreign language programs, and a high school study abroad programs). They could do so without spending more. School boards, administrators, and teachers unions are holding such programs back.

Sanger on China and the "Thucydides Trap"

NY Times reporter David E. Sanger has a Sunday opinion piece “Superpower and Upstart: Sometimes It Ends Well” on the theme of whether conflict between China and the US is inevitable. Sanger writes of the “Thucydides Trap" (here):

For a superpower, dealing with the fast rise of a rich, brash competitor has always been an iffy thing.

Just ask the British, who a century ago were struggling to come to terms with the erosion of their status as the world’s No. 1 empire. It didn’t help that they were being upstaged by a former colony that had turned into an upstart sea-power with money, talent, and a knack for mangling a perfectly good language. Eventually they took  the hit to the national ego from those Americans and discovered there were advantages to no longer playing the role of the indispensible power.

Or ask Thucydides, the Athenian historian whose tome on the Peloponnesian War has ruined many a college freshman’s weekend. The line they had to remember for the test was his conclusion: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

So while no official would dare say so publicly as President Hu Jintao bounced from the White House to meetings with business leaders to factories in Chicago last week, his visit, from both sides’ points of view, was all about managing China’s rise and defusing the fears that it triggers. Both Mr. Hu and President Obama seemed desperate to avoid what Graham Allison of Harvard University has labeled “the Thucydides Trap” — that deadly combination of calculation and emotion that, over the years, can turn healthy rivalry into antagonism or worse.

It was striking, in fact, just how carefully both sides had used the past five months — in letters and phone calls between the presidents and quiet shuttling between Beijing and Washington — to diffuse fears that have already cropped up on both sides. The Chinese went to extraordinary lengths to avoid any message like Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you.” And the Obama White House studiously avoided signaling, “We will contain you.” It was as if each was trying to send a message to the other’s constituencies that despite all that one reads on the blogosphere, there is nothing inevitable about a clash of systems between China and the United States…..

Hu and Obama did well to defuse some of the building tensions and to strengthen communications between the two countries. Much more could and needs to be done to reduce the “Thucydides Trap.” Not all of it is at the national level. The Oregon legislature, for example, could act to increase Mandarin programs and create a statewide high school study abroad in China program.

 

Higher education as economic bubble

Peter Thiel (libertarian, venture capitalist, hedge fund manager) in an interview in National Review Online talks of higher education as a bubble (here):

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999.

Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.

It is, to my mind, in some ways worse than the housing bubble. There are a few things that make it worse. One is that when people make a mistake in taking on an education loan, they’re legally much more difficult to get out of than housing loans. With housing, typically they’re non-recourse — you can just walk out of the house. With education, they’re recourse, and they typically survive bankruptcy. If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.

There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry’s having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising. Like housing was, college is advertised as an investment for the future. But in most cases it’s really just consumption, where college is just a four-year party, in the same way that buying a large house with a really big swimming pool, etc., is probably not an investment decision but a consumption decision. It was something about combining the investment decision and the consumption decision that made the housing thing so tricky to get a handle on — and I think that’s also true of the college bubble.

One important difference between the housing bubble and the education bubble is that there was sort of a class aspect to the housing bubble: upper-middle-class people in the U.S. tend to be invested in equities, and middle-class people tend to be invested in housing, so there was a way in which the housing bubble was a way of making fun of the middle class for various sophisticated elites that ran all the way through the housing bubble. It was sort of like, “Look at those dumb people and beatniks in suburban America who are doing this crazy housing thing.” So even though it was a crazy bubble, there was at least a kind of counter-narrative; you had a bit of a dissenting narrative. Education is an upper-middle-class thing, and so something that is not questioned by elites at all, and that’s why the education market is more likely to be distorted.

You know, we’ve looked at the math on this, and I estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the colleges in the U.S. are not generating a positive return on investment. Even at the top universities, it may be positive in some sense — but the counterfactual question is, how well would their students have done had they not gone to college? Are they really just selecting for talented people who would have done well anyway? Or are you actually educating them? That’s the kind of question that isn’t analyzed very carefully. My suspicion is that they’re just good at identifying talented people rather than adding value. So there are a lot of things about it that are very strange.

The Great Recession of 2008 to the present is helping to bring the education bubble to a head. When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids’ education, to find their kids coming back to live with them — well, that was not what they bargained for. So the crazy bubble in education is at a point where it is very close to unraveling.

In early 2009, there was a question of why the stimulus money was not going to infrastructure, and a very large amount was going to subsidizing college loans and encouraging people to go back to school. The argument was that we get a higher return on human capital than on infrastructure. While that’s certainly possible, and I agree that human capital is extremely important, I think we’re not actually measuring the return we’re getting on the human capital. It is, in fact, considered in some ways inappropriate to even ask the question of what the return is. We are given bromides to the effect of, “Well, you know college education is good, but it’s good precisely because it doesn’t teach you anything specific; you become a more well-rounded person, a better citizen, you learn how to learn.” There tends to be an evasion of specificity of what exactly it is that is learned. And so these human-capital intuitions may be very far off in a lot of colleges.

I worry that Thiel is right, and that much of the public investment in Oregon’s public higher education is wasted.