Earthquake!

As you may have heard by now, there was another big earthquake in China, this time just west of the area hit by the Sichuan Earthquake that did so much damage. This time, it was Qinghai. This story gets posted on this blog for a number of reasons. I've been going to Qinghai regularly as a board member of the Surmang & Amara Foundations. The Surmang Clinic is in Yushu Prefecture, the very area at the epicenter of this latest major quake. Our Beijing office is in touch with the clinic in Surmang and with representatives in Yushu City, also known by its Tibetan name. Jyekundo. Needless to say, help is urgently needed. If you are interested in doing something NOW, in real time, click on the Surmang Foundation link to the left of this screen or click on the embedded link. If you can contribute, do it. People are suffering & you can help!

A Skirmish in the War of Words

Ripped off from my FaceBook posting earlier today:

Heh, heh! Whether to rise or not to rise, that is the question. Is it better to resist the evil Americans and persist in acting only in China's self-interest or "diaotou" (turn around) and do what is the normal state-of-affairs for global economic leaders? The proof of whether the RMB is or isn't undervalued is twofold: 1) whether or not the RMB would rise in value if allowed to float, with value set by supply & demand; and, 2) Purchasing Power Parity: Does RMB 682 go farther in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou than US$100 will go in major American cities? In both cases, I'd suggest, the RMB is way under-valued. But this isn't just an economics debate. If it were, we'd all be bored silly (unless we were currency traders, importers or exporters, central bankers, or economists). This is, in a very big way, a political debate. And a debate about the (unfortunate, IMHO) rising nationalism of many Chinese (a recurring event) and the accompanying over-confidence that is evident in Chinese attitudes toward events of the last decade, That this influences foreign policy and expectations for the near future shouldn't be a big surprise.

Why Chinese University Grads Can't Get Jobs

There's an interesting series of short opinion pieces in today's New York Times on why Chinese University grads have such a high level of unemployment (and, one presumes, underemployment). The unfortunate fact is that universities here don't provide the skills to its students that most employers want. The article, Room For Debate: Educated and Fearing the Future in China is here.

And here's my comment. This has been submitted to the Times, but one of the privileges of having your own blog is that I decided what what to publish. And so, here it is:

As a former dean at one of Beijing University's business schools (it has two, believe it or not) and a former professor of business at another top university in China, I can tell you that, by and large, only one of your commentators actually gets what's going on in China with university graduates. Huang Yasheng has hit the bull's eye with his comments. The Chinese educational system and, in particular, its top universities are culturally and politically incapable of delivering an education that prizes innovation, critical thinking, intellectual independence and strength of character, let alone the personal confidence to weave all of those characteristics (all closely related) together in any set of functional skills. I often tell people (including officials in China's educational hierarchy) that the Chinese educational system most closely resembles a game of "Whack-a-Mole"; any attempt by students to stick their heads up out of the obscurity of the masses is likely to get them whacked over the head, intellectually speaking. The sad fact is that the system repeatedly asks for those very characteristics that it actively discourages in its students. And given China's history of punishing cultural and intellectual outliers, this is not likely to change anytime soon.