I have never lived nor been educated in China. :) I do take interest in global affairs and enjoy developing big picture analysis esp about the future.

I feel like I can agree that the education system, based on observation from afar, could possibly be weak on "creativity" as traditionally defined.

However, if you look at their Gaokao math questions, it requires much more creativity to solve than SAT Quantitative. For example, https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-examples-of-hard-Chinese...

Creativity has broad meanings, and each culture may value and support its expression in different terms.