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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

China’s pool is smaller than it seems. China has pursued a development trajectory that focuses on the leading provinces first. That is reasonable. Better to get Beijing and a few other key places to the leading edge first, instead of trying to incrementally move all 1.4 billion people together at the same pace.

But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.

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This is not true at all. China’s education system is nationally standardized. Although economic development is uneven with far greater investment concentrated in major cities than inland regions, the structure of education itself is consistent across the country. Schools follow the same national curriculum and use the same core teaching materials.

Income disparities may have some impact on teacher quality, but the difference is often less significant than people assume. Broad access to education tends to matter more than whether a particular middle-school teacher is exceptional. In fact, students in some inland provinces frequently achieve very high scores on the national college entrance examination, driven in part by strong incentives to gain admission to top universities and pursue opportunities in more economically developed regions.

Among younger generations, illiteracy is virtually nonexistent. With nine years of compulsory education mandated nationwide, basic literacy rates are effectively at 100 percent.

But even if you combine Tier 1 and New Tier 1 Chinese cities alone, their populations are around 200M. That's close to 66% of the US. Besides Tier 2 cities like Xiamen, Hefei, Foshan and Zhuhai are still excellent.

So quantitatively, China’s pool is still very strong.

Those third world provinces have the potential to be improved up to the standard, especially when you have first world provinces to draw talent/knowledge from.

Having the people is important, the IS needed immigrants to have people, china already has enough people, it just needs to bring them up to par, which will only taoe a generation or two, and china is patient

US pool is also smaller than it seems. US doesn't have world / 8B to draw from, it has ~1B English speakers where 400-500m where EN is primary, another 600m where English is proficient. Shared with other advanced economy / Anglo institutions. Vs PRC has 1.2B Mandarin. US pool is also immigration gated, even with PRC's shit TFR, PRC will still knock ~2x new births for the foreseeable future vs US 3m newborn+immigration... and PRC can push that 6m disproportionately into STEM.

But PRC's actual talent pool is their 20 year back log of 10-15m per year births (100m+) that hasn't gone through tertiary, i.e. about another 40m+ STEM assuming they don't increase tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%). The worse case scenario for PRC is they will have ~OCED combined in STEM (not including other tiers of technical talent), or 3x+ more than US, assuming US pre Trump immigration patterns.

> tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%

E: sentence meant 60% tertiary enrollment of which 40% is STEM... aka they're "only" throwing 1/4 of cohort into STEM with 2 denominators to raise.

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