Keyu Jin: evaluation

Transcript context

…So just to go back to something you said, there is a value for competition culturally. So on the business side, on the economic side, there is a cultural value of people competing in a meritocratic way? Competition is ferocious in China, especially when it comes to Chinese companies, but also in education. I should be thankful that I’m not born later that I am because I thought China was pretty competitive already going to the schools and studying for the exams. It is a different level today. Competition is not necessarily in the culture, I’d say, it’s driven really by the changing economic and social circumstances of the day. The Chinese companies are all hardworking. They’re all going after the market share. They all kind of want to do the same thing. It’s not quite like in the US where you open a coffee shop while next door I’m going to open a bagel shop. In China, if the coffee shop does well, everybody wants to open the same coffee shop. And I think, again, I’m sure we’re going to get to this, but there’s a lot of that kind of competition, which really drives the world sometimes crazy of replication. But it’s because it’s not easy. It’s not easy to make money. In the education system, there are not enough jobs for the young people. So how do you get ahead? Let’s say if you’re part of a lower stratum society, how are you going to make sure that your children are going to have a better life than you? You invest in education. So everything is about competition. In a country with 1.3 billion people, that’s somewhat to be expected. Let’s go back to the roots of that. So you described the China’s economy model is rooted in its history. So can we talk about Confucianism? Can you explain to what degree those roots run back to Confucianism and in general to other parts of Chinese history?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.