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Comment by azurezyq | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently working in the bay area but I got my master degree in China and never attended any colleges in the west.

I was born in a city ranked 45th in China by population (from wikipedia). K-12 is 100%. My grandpa lives in a very small village with annual income just a few thousand dollars, K-12 is also 100%. My close cousins come from the same small village, now bank staffs and doctors.

I have friends who's family so poor that the roof got torn away by a typhoon. And I have friends whose parents are simply peasants.

My friend group is definitely biased since I graduated from one of the top universities, but they are selected by exams, so many families are actually not wealthy. In China money usually cannot help you directly on exams, people need to study hard.

Hmm, another thing I'm curious is that what gives the original post the impression that "Chinese people are uneducated". That's a rare heard haha.

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>what gives the original post the impression that "Chinese people are uneducated"

Propaganda? The stats I have seen all state that Americans are the uneducated ones in this comparison.

Maybe? Another possible explanation is that some people try to correlate income in USD to education levels.

It's not a direct comparison since the cost for education is also cheaper in China. Also since K-12 is almost free (at least meals are not included 20 years ago when I was a kid), parents just send kids there.

In recent years the trend is that even assembly factories require high school education, bachelor preferred... That's another interesting topic though.

The top 45 cities are what, 200 million people? So 85% of Chinese people live somewhere more rural than where you grew up, and in China that's correlated with poverty and all sorts of negative things.

This is exactly what I mean; the relatively advantaged Chinese are under the impression that they are the average. They're not at all. The average Chinese person lives no place they're likely to escape for the Bay Area. Most people can't even escape to a normal life in a tier 1 city within China.

Hmm, I just say from my personal experience. If you have numbers support "China is uneducated.", please paste the links.

I mentioned my grandpa, he lives in a small village (1~2k people?), I would say it is something like rural Fresno maybe.

If you can have supporting numbers, I can help explain.

Rural China is the opposite of many rural places in the West. In the West, there are small towns seen as desirable, where you go to live when you're richer and have kids or just want more space. In China rural is almost always poorer.

I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve.

I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant. China has maybe 2 or 3 such universities, so saying it's equal and fair because you have the gaokao or whatever doesn't make much sense. The biggest intake for world class universities is rich Chinese kids going to the West, not poor kids from the village going to Tsinghua. If you managed to do that then great for you, really, but it's not an average story.

Even if we don't want to go that high-end, tertiary educational attainment at any calibre of university in China is much much lower than in the US.

I think there are good things about the Chinese approach to education, but it's kind of silly to say they've caught up to the US and others.

Not the OPP, but you say:

> I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated.

and then eventually switch to

> I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve

> I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant

This seems like a major shift in goal-posts. If your concept of "uneducated" means not going to a world-class university, then most of the world, including most people in the US are "uneducated".

I didn’t say that; that’s not me. And I gave an intermediate option for using a ‘tertiary education if any kind’ stat.

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