New York Times Magazine article "Re-education" by Ann Hulbert is about Tang Meijie, a current sophomore at Harvard from China, and about the changes in education in China. The article ends:
Applications for undergraduate study abroad are rising (six times as
many students from the People’s Republic of China, 256, applied to
Harvard College in 2005 as in 1999, for example), and more foreign
degree holders are now coming back to put their educations to use at
home. But perhaps as promising a sign of the momentum behind
educational change in China is an Hsylc participant like Neal, master
of the wryly raised eyebrow, who said when I spoke with him that he was
planning on staying put but who was still thinking big. The most
caustic critic of Chinese schooling among those assembled for tea, he
had already spent time in Germany. But he was inspired to find that his
Chinese schoolmates, “known for diligence, silence and obedience, thick
glasses as a symbol,” in his words, could be “most vigorous” in a
setting like Hsylc.
As he explained to me in an earlier e-mail
message, composed in breaks from gaokao cramming, he said he needed “to
watch and feel the system by my personal experience” — endure the
burdens at their worst in the third year, the “endless homework, strict
discipline, frequent exams and the peer pressure.” If he chose to stay
in China, he would know how to push toward a new system in which
students’ “curiosity is well protected to learn knowledge.” At the
teahouse, Neal was already rallying the troops behind a vision of
prodding change along at home. “At Fudan University” — which has just
inaugurated a less specialized curriculum for freshmen and a house
system modeled on Yale
and Harvard — “I can take a lecture, and if I want to be more active, I
can ask questions, I can tell my friends to ask questions and then
students will change the system,” he said. “When a university is eager
to change, the vital power is students.” Neal raised both eyebrows, a
boy looking ready to rebel against the bookworm stereotype. “People
say, ‘Whoa, you’re from China!’ Yes, I’m from China.”
A
generation of more independent-minded students with wider horizons — a
generation of Neals and Meijies, busy networking and innovating: it is
a prospect that may inspire some trepidation as well as optimism among
Chinese leaders. After all, campus unrest has left scars, and vast
challenges loom, from the environment to rural discontent. The proof
that the recent educational changes go deeper than a proliferation of
newfangled curricula and degrees will not be merely how China’s
economic future plays out; it will be what kinds of political and
cultural repercussions unfold, most immediately among the lucky few who
are currently benefiting most from the new opportunities. Will it be
enough if a bolder breed of the best and the brightest — as Xu
predicted — form a cosmopolitan elite whose roots in China help make
them the imaginative hybrids that global enterprises need? Over dinner
with his wife and daughter (who was busy doing her homework while she
ate), Xu was hopeful. At the same time, in a recent Foreign Affairs
article, Xu’s friend John Thornton, a former president of Goldman
Sachs, who has been directing a new Global Leadership program at
Tsinghua University for several years now (and who also gave a rousing
talk at Hsylc), points out a serious problem. In a country whose
cutthroat educational system was famous for selecting successful
bureaucrats, top talent these days goes just about anywhere but the
government, clogged as it is with corrupt insiders. If creative,
critical-minded outsiders aren’t given a reason to enter the public
realm, the prospects for a world-class, more democratic future for all
are only more precarious.
Right now, it’s quite unlikely that
Meijie would even think of ending up as a mandarin. She was, though,
full of plans as the spring semester of her sophomore year got under
way after a somewhat dispiriting fall — her Harvard friends worrying
about grades, her Fudan University friends in China panicked about
careers. “Now I feel I am back again,” she wrote in a late February
e-mail message, sent at — some things never change — 3:55 a.m. “Life is
so hectic and overwhelmingly exciting!” With two Harvard friends,
Meijie had just founded a company — Strategy Alpha International
L.L.C., whose mission is to advise Chinese and American enterprises on
carving out niches in the other country’s markets. (She and her team
were already talking to a top Chinese financial magazine in search of
an American partner.)