Searching For a Chinese Steve Jobs

Earlier this month, at schools across China, eighteen-year-olds endured, arguably, the worst nine hours of their lives. Gaokao, the Chinese-university entrance exam, is a gauntlet that knows almost no equivalent in the West (grades, recommendations, and extracurricular activities have little bearing on the admissions process). It is capable of determining a life?or destroying it, as only 6.85 million spots are available for more than nine million applicants. And those lucky few who do well enough to get in to a good school will do so knowing that their country is desperate for at least one of them to do better than mere greatness.

While American parents have been concerned with their lack of tiger discipline, the Chinese are looking for tips on raising their young from this side of the Pacific. China wants its own Steve Jobs, and it?s not sure how to find?or create?one. At times, the quest has reached the level of national campaign, with the government promising its prioritization and vowing to spend four per cent of the country?s G.D.P. on comprehensive education reform aimed, ultimately, at producing a Jobs to call its own.

The latest effort along these lines took the form of a game show of sorts, an episode of the program ?Brainstorm??a baffling blend of Oxford-style debate and ?America?s Next Top Model? that takes on the hot-button topics of modern China?titled ?How to Create Today?s Chinese Genius.?

Jazzy characters spelling the episode?s title spun onto the screen as a portly man with gelled hair and heavy, dimpled cheeks, filled the screen. As the camera pulled back, stiff, studious men and women in desks to the host?s left and right were revealed. Why, he implored them, can?t the Chinese education system produce a Steve Jobs that belongs to us?

Introductory remarks were not so much a discussion of Chinese education as they were a wistful lament of the way in which China had allowed itself to fall short?how had we, faithful attendants of Middle Kingdom, come to lapse behind them? Jobs and Gates assumed, in the moderator?s voice, the status of prophets?prophets who should have belonged to China, but were lost to another. (The wounded pride here was something familiar. Recently, as I flipped through the pages of second-grade textbooks my mother had brought from China some two decades earlier, I noticed a similar sense of injury marking depictions of Chinese fortitude in the face of Western incursion?many of which I had been obliged to commit to memory as a child.)

All of this made the young contenders up for the title of genius seem rather like an afterthought. Five high schoolers, dressed in matching navy-blue uniform jackets, sat behind Jeopardy-style counters, looking prim and coolly impervious as their elders bickered about where the fault lay. One had been dubbed ?the young Han Han? (the literary superstar who was the subject of a Profile by Evan Osnos). Another, the only girl of the bunch, was hailed as a possible Warren Buffett in the making. A Newton was also in the mix, as well as an erect-backed polymath who, in the manner of a young Leonardo, used drawings of space-time configurations to demonstrate his intended career trajectory.

One by one, they were all judged less than truly worthy. Han Han was dismissed mainly on the basis of his failing scores in math and the sciences, as well as his penchant for reading fantasy. (In his defense, his lone supporter had quipped sourly, ?Haven?t any of you heard of Harry Potter??) Buffett fared better, largely on account of her professed love of money?a sentiment that surely caused Mao to turn in his grave. The budding physicist was criticized for not knowing exactly what he wanted to do with his life. ?Uncertainty of career direction necessarily precludes one from the ranks of genius,? one judge said solemnly. The polymath said he would be fine being an administrator?a fatal mistake. Surely armies of bureaucrats do not win battles, or design iPhones.

The questions raised by all of this have been plaguing Chinese intelligentsia for more than a century: Must we become Western to beat the Westerners? Which intrinsically Chinese principles should we take care to safeguard?

As early as the mid-eighteen hundreds, when the Manchu government could no longer resist the assault from abroad, a prominent political advisor to the emperor had wondered, ?Are Chinese wisdom and intelligence inferior to those of Westerners? If we have really mastered the Western languages and in turn, teach each other, then all their clever techniques of steamships and firearms can be gradually and thoroughly learned.? Another member of the court hastened to clarify: ?What we desire is that our students shall get to the bottom of these subjects? for we are firmly convinced that if we are able to master the mysteries? this, and this only, will assure the steady growth of the power of the empire.?

Some things, of course, have changed. The Westerners? ?clever techniques? are now related to infotech, rather than weaponry. But still, the quest to manufacture a Chinese Jobs is as misguided as a search for the Yankee Confucius. As Malcolm Gladwell writes in ?Outliers,? ?It?s not enough to ask what successful people are like. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn?t.? Innovators prefer a more liberal climate than China?s, and no wonder?they are usually the product of one. They need the freedom to explore, without being yoked to the responsibility of nation-promoting and world-transforming.

And the show seemed to miss this point. Jobs himself would have been dismissed out of hand by the ?Brainstorm? panel, which was focussed on the contestants? education?he, like Gates, dropped out of college.

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