Keyu Jin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, some of it is the signaling. The culture emphasizes the signaling of is it better for everything to come easily, thereby showing that you’re a genius, it comes naturally? Or is it better to show that you worked extremely hard for the thing? But the ultimate result is there’s still competition. But I don’t know, when you’re visually displaying and explicitly stating that it’s good to be number one and it’s bad to be number 800. I think that permeates throughout the culture to where, first of all, you understand that hard work is the only way to improve, to succeed in life. And second of all, you just create this framework of early on understanding what it means to live a good life. And a part of that is to find the thing you’re damn good at and get even better at it, master it, become hopefully the best person in the world at that thing. I don’t know, that’s an extremely important lesson for society to teach. Yeah. That’s, I would say, the right kind of competition or the efficient kind of competition. I feel that in the Chinese education system, it was not necessarily efficient because it frames you and molds you to be thinking in a certain way what’s been taught to you. You don’t have the bandwidth or the time or freedom to be more creative and to think outside the box. There, it’s just the box. You maximize the box and that’s it. You don’t actually know what’s outside of the box and you never actually go there. That’s the bad part of Chinese competition. And when I got to the US, the high school teachers were asking us to question authority, to question text. I’m like, “Wow, really? You can do that?” So I started asking why. All right. So there has been this miracle in the Chinese economy from after Mao, under Deng Xiaoping, where the Chinese economy got transformed and grew incredibly. So can you explain what happened? The different transformations that happened, the different reforms that happened under Deng Xiaoping?…

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