Keyu Jin: evaluation

Transcript context

…On the education side, a part of Confucianism is a value for meritocracy. So how does that permeate the education system in China? You’ve already spoken to it a little bit, the value of competition in that it’s already getting more and more intense. But it would be very interesting to get your understanding of the education system, its history and as it stands today. If China were relatively successful economically, a huge part of the reason is by and large, it’s been meritocratic. That is changing somewhat now, but the only way that you have still that many poor people, especially a couple of decades back, still be in harmony with society, seeing all these rich people make tons of money and you’re still belonging to that lower stratum. The only reason is that you believe that your children have a future through meritocracy. And even though it’s highly imperfect, standardized testing, all this competition, all of the hours and the tutorials to studying for standardized exams. Well, that is a very realistic scenario in China because there’s that many people. When I was growing up in school, we had 60 people per class and there were 10 classes in one grade. Now imagine that many people applying for colleges in the American way, how many essays would have been written and need to be scrutinized? But also that gives room for total corruption, if you know what I mean. Just connection based. And actually the standardized exams, as imperfect as it is, to select talent is still by and large fair. And that’s how that whole generation of entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, government officials were selected. If you look at the Chinese premiers, the presidents of the past, they all went to great schools, a lot of them were engineers. And same thing for civil servants. It has changed somewhat. The meritocracy I think is eroding in China. I’m worried about that. Because it is fine that you get into a good university based on your own merit, but finding a job now becomes much less meritocratic. People with connections get jobs more easily than others. Of course, this is not just a unique Chinese phenomenon, it’s actually everywhere. But I guess what I’m saying is that that meritocracy, which was so fundamental to the ancient Chinese education system, by the way, civil servants were selected based on standardized exams in the past. That’s always been throughout Chinese history and that relates to Confucianism. Now, the opportunities, and coming back to the competition point, is that the opportunity is getting slimmer and slimmer. And again, this is not a unique Chinese phenomenon, jobs, where are the jobs going to be? So meritocracy has become more of a problem. Do you have any memories of your own experience in terms of competition, the good and the bad of it? Maybe from that, can you pull out the thread of the value of that kind of competition? Basically, I grew up in the Soviet Union, so there’s a kind of brutality to the competition, but I think it ultimately molds really interesting people.…

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