Students striving to be the best English speaker in China
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Incidentally, years ago the national CCTV English competitions were broadcast live, but after my friend Justin completely forgot his speech and fluffed everything they changed it to a pre-recorded (or time delayed perhaps?) broadcast instead. He was the only person in that final stage who didn't grow up in America or have 100% international school upbringing.
This is why such competitions has always been BS. They've been around for 15+ years. At first I admired those kids (back then my "peers"), but later on realized that the education they received could only have been afforded by a very small "elite" class. English was far from a foreign language to the vast majority of the final-rounders and this applies to every single competition and every single age group. Totally fair huh.
In this sense, it is the same, if not worse, than the competitions in math, physics, chemistry, etc. I refused to continue the intensive and monotonous trainings for these competitions after I had a taste of it in a summer camp when I was in high school. Don't get me wrong, I love math and science. I didn't like the info-dump and repetitious natures of the training. I want to take time to think and think deeper. Or I might simply be a slower thinker than the other kids. Anyway, I spent time in reading extensively, and played basketballs when my brain got tired.
Edit: BTW, I have utmost respect and admiration for Mr. Zhang Yitang.
China is making strides, ya, but it is still quite behind the west. Take the educational system for example: it is great if you are middle class with money, but it doesn't work well for most of the students who go through it (whose parents lack those resources or even city hukou to attend a decent school). And there is nothing magical about it, many of the upper class send their kids abroad for education (and the parents often follow eventually).
Anyways, we said the same thing about Japan in the 70s/80s, and they really didn't blow past us. If you want to see where China could go tomorrow, look at Korea or Taiwan today, and that would be an ideal outcome.
Now, I think very few people are actually making the argument that China is going to be the most developed country on earth in per capita terms (the U.S. isn't, by most accounts that title belongs to one of the Nordic countries). What most people expect is for China to become a developed high-income country, which is pretty damn significant when we are talking about the most populous country on earth. More than one fifth of humanity joining the developed world is no small deal. It will have and is already having a massive impact in the economy, politics and environment world-wide. That said, whatever the challenges, it's hard to paint over a billion people going from poverty to developed-world-wealthy in about half a century as anything short of impressive. In general we are nearing the tipping point after which most of the world will count as a "developed" country by the metrics of the previous century, and China rising is a big part of that.
It will be interesting when China reaches Russia's level of GDP/person ($15K/year vs. $7k/year now), which should happen in a decade or so.
> More than one fifth of humanity joining the developed world is no small deal.
Income inequality is quite bad, that wealth is not spread out very evenly. It is not a fifth of humanity joining the developed world, but maybe a tenth or even less. China has huge challenges in lifting the boat more evenly, or there will be a lot more instability during the rise. Rooting out corruption and nepotism (under the guise of guanxi) is key to that.
China is technically proficient, and has been one of the top countries for much of its history, so this it's re-rise is to be expected and is definitely not unprecedented.
Income inequality seems indeed like a big issue. When discussing rising inequality in China, authors describe it as "quickly approaching Latin American levels of income inequality". I am from Mexico. I can tell you that reaching that bar is not a good idea. Also, I am sure that is one of plenty of challenges, not the only one by any measure. Still, given past performance and historical precedent, developing past those challenges is, as you say, expected and not unprecedented. Also, as far as I understand, income inequality within nations is quickly rising all over, but global income inequality is in general narrowing because of the gap between developed and developing countries closing, no?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-i...
But if you look at China or India, which are getting richer, I think you'll see a lot of people not really benefiting from it. So while the middle class reaches some parity with the rest of the world, there are many people getting left behind.
The fundamental reason I believe that is the same Deng Xiaoping did, he looked around Asia and the only place the Chinese weren't getting rich was China.
That sounds very much like school systems in the US, UK and Australia.
Completely different levels of dysfunction (by at least an order of magnitude). How many kids in the US have to worry about dying in Tofu schools during an earthquake or in an accidental explosion because their teachers forced them to make fireworks?
If I have kids, I either need to pony up $30K a year for schooling, or move back to the states.
"pass" another country in terms of what? Total GDP? Or military might, or environment protection, cars per household? It's a really vague notion. There are literally one thousand and one criteria to compare two countries. "pass" or "not pass" is not a useful measure for a nation's progress, imho. For example, Sweden/Denmark/Belgium/Japan/South Korea/etc. need not to pass (in whatever sense of it) USA or UK or another country for its citizens to enjoy high standard of living and peaceful environment. I think the same will happen to China. The living standard and environment will improve tremendously in the near future, passing usa or not.
> Someday a few decades from now we'll look back and try to figure out how China surpassed everyone else.
There were real feelings in the 80s that Japan would somehow be much richer than it is today (say, "kuwait" rich without the oil)...this was before its real estate bubble popped and it went through a decade of stagflation and deflation.
I visited Japan couple of times in recent years, beautiful place and amazing culture. If _majority_ of Chinese citizens can reach the current level of Japan's living standard in, say, three decades(am I a little pessimistic?) it will be a truly remarkable achievement of the country and humanity, imho. But it's the ride that's exciting. We are living in an interesting time.
For China to be as developed as Korea, Taiwan or Japan would mean for its GDP per capita to be roughly on par. A quick calculation shows that if China GDP per capita were to be on par with that of Japan, its overall GDP would be 3.5x bigger than that of US! Which mean the ability (for instance) to spend 3.5x more on the PLA than the US on its army without impacting other budgets.
China still has a long way to go, but it actually has a shot at getting there (contrary to Japan). I think (very personal theory) that the US managed to become the de facto only superpower standing simply by virtue of being the biggest developped country in the world, by far: France, UK, Germany or even Russia are very small (population wise) compared to it. Hell: France, UK and Germany put together are still small compared to the US.
But all in all when it comes to "might", to being a superpower, it just doesn't add up. Size does matter. The EU is in the correct league, but in my opinion it's not heading in the right direction: I'd rather a much smaller, much more integrated EU, with unified defense, budget, administration, etc. The United States of Europe, in short.
On the other hand you could argue that without WWI and WWII, France and UK could have kept their respective empires united. I'll readily admit that I'm not particularly fond of colonization (unless we are talking about the video game, the first one), but you could certainly make the numbers add up.
You can't blame them at all for doing that though, if someone or another country has some technology or information that the US wants and can't access then I'm sure we would employ similar (or much more devastating) techniques to acquire it.
$1300B is quite a bit more than $600B, but indeed not 3.5x more. Two factors are at play: US defense budget is larger in scope than that of China (for instance, if I remember correctly, most rocketry stuff fall under defense budget in US, but not in China), and China just doesn't spend as much (as a percentage of GDP) as US for its defense.
Again, China has a very very long way to go.
That said, whenever I meet people with incredible English (and it happens often) I find it amazing how they did that without ever having come into contact with native speakers or even semi-decent language materials. It's a puzzling one.
I love Chinese people. I've lived in China for about two years, and speak Mandarin like a 5-year-old or so. I'm in awe of their construction projects, their facility with electronics and software, their can-do attitude, their kindness, etc. They are clearly very strong and getting stronger.
But I don't think it will be a clear case of China surpassing everyone else, at least not in everything. In my opinion, one area of weakness is education. In the US, I more often see children being raised with relatively high degrees of freedom, in ways that instill lifelong curiosity, love of learning, and self-motivated study. Education in China is much more often characterized by extreme stress and credentialism.
In my life I hope to play a very small part in building bridges between China and the US, sharing ideas. I hope we will gradually stop seeing it as a competition, start seeing it as cooperative, and no one will be concerned about who is surpassing whom, at least not on an ethnic level.
If not, why not ?
I am thinking that these competitions are formed out of people's desire to teach their children to speak English well, by talking up kids who are good at speaking English.