Created in China: part III

Innovation comes not just from infrastructure and investment – it comes from a culture that encourages originality and creativity, rewards risk-taking and tolerates failure. In the People’s Republic of China, that is still a work in progress. Today, we continue our series “Created in China” with a look at the roots of innovation, at how Chinese children are or are not encouraged to be creative, and how that’s evolving as the government makes innovation more of a priority. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Beijing.

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Magistad: Walk into a Chinese classroom, and you’re likely to hear students reciting their lessons together.

Classroom in Sichuan province

Magistad: They memorize them at home. If they have questions, it’s to get the right answer, not to raise their own ideas. Lushi Li was born in China and spent her early childhood here. Li’s family moved to the United States when she was in grade school. Lushi Li came back here to Beijing last year, to take classes at one of China’s top universities, Tsinghua. She also spent a month sitting in on 10th grade classes in a Beijing high school, for an thesis she’s doing at Harvard. Lushi Li says one thing struck her about the students at the high school and at the University:

Lushi Li: “They don’t have much opportunity to voice their opinions. The teachers try to engage the students, but mostly what they do is to ask yes or no questions or they will ask questions with a definite answer. ..so there is very, very little opportunity for students to voice, to answer open ended questions.”

Magistad: Li says, the students aren’t encouraged to learn how to analyze, or argue or think for themselves. They are taught to absorb vast amounts of material, and prepare for the next exam. – in the case of the high school kids, for the college entrance exam. Li says this is how one teacher would get her students ready for the next exam:

Lushi Li: “If you ever encounter a test question on this topic, this is how you should answer it. And she would outline exactly how you should answer it and even to the point where at the end she would say oh if you run out of things to say you could always just praise the Communist Party. And this is how you praise them.”

Magistad: Actor Nick Li says he had much the same experience growing up in China. He says that experience wasn’t exactly fertile soil for the seed of innovation to grow:

Nick Li: “The seed is the instinct, the willingness to want to create… and the soil is education and your history of the nation or something. The temperature and moisture is probably the opportunity. So the bottom is line is whether the seed is healthy or not. Through the years if you just don’t take good care of it, eventually you don’t even know how to be creative.”

Magistad: Nick Li is one of many Chinese of his generation whose creativity thrived only when they transplanted themselves into more fertile soil. Many such Chinese became Silicon Valley success stories. Nick Li went into film. He remembers his first experience at an American university being a bit of a shock:

Nick Li: “I don’t really remember what the topic was. But the teacher just like, just sat there and listened. And we had all these different opinions and after class I said, I just asked the teacher are you going to give us some standard answer or something? Or final answer? And he looked at me and was just like, I am so weird. So what do you think about the topic? And I said each person have their own, you know, good part, but ridiculous part, and he said yeah, that’s my answer too. Whatever you think. And I just felt like, wow, this is really freedom to let you think instead of boom, give you the right answer.”

Magistad: Nick Li believes that kind of approach encourages creative thinking. And that’s one reason he and his American wife decided to put their daughter into a new kind of school in Beijing.

Magistad: It’s a bilingual school called Kinstar. It has Chinese and Western teachers and students. It aims to combine the discipline and rigor of the Chinese approach to education, with the creativity of the Western approach. Li’s daughter Tea, a bubbly 4th grader, says it works for her:

Tea: “The Chinese teachers teach a good way…they don’t yell at you, like that strict, it’s just good strict.”
Magistad: “And how is that different from how the English language teachers teach?”
Tea: “ Well, the English teachers do more fun stuff.”

Magistad: Fun stuff isn’t all that common in most classrooms in China. One of the Kinstar school’s founders is Hui Jin. She was raised in Shanghai, and got her PhD in neuroscience in the US:

Hui Jin: “I was raised and educated in the Chinese system ….so, of course I have a very firm foundation, skills and knowledge of all the basic knowledge. But later I found that when I was in graduate school, doing research in workplace, one thing I found was lacking from my traditional education is self-confidence…When I encounter new difficulties, new things I always want to know whether I can do it or not…This seems to be very common among people educated in China than educated overseas. So self-confidence, creativity and willing to speak out your ideas and create new ideas, this is … not quite strong as compared to Western peers.”

Magistad: So at the Kinstar, the English-language teachers in particular encourage students to give their ideas. This teacher got his fourth-grade class to come up with rules the class will abide by – like, be considerate, and be neat. The kids then divide into teams, and compete to show who can do these things best. The classes taught by Chinese teachers are more orderly, and sound more like what you’d find in a Chinese school, with exceptions.

The teacher, Meng Qin Fen, encourages the kids to express their thoughts, here, on the images in ancient poetry. Meng says this is quite different from how she has taught in traditional Chinese schools

Teacher Meng (right) in the classroom

She says in those schools, students sit in neat rows, listen to the teacher, and memorize what the teacher says. Here, it’s more casual – and a little hard for her to get used to. She says, she worries that if a teacher teaches 10 things here, the kids really learn only six. But Meng says she likes the fact that here, there’s more interaction between teacher and student, more getting students to think for themselves.

China’s Ministry of Education is trying to move more of China’s public schools in this direction. It’s part of the government’s effort over the past decade to transform China into a more innovative nation, one that can create its own processes and products, rather than just manufacturing those of other countries. Shen Baiyu heads the Ministry of Education’s division of curriculum development for basic education:

Shen Baiyu: “We need excellent teachers who interact with the students, and we need to find a way to assess not just what students learn but also whether they’ve learned how to learn. We need to change the college entrance exam so it measures these other abilities, and not just how well a student can memorize.”

Magistad: That kind of exam has been part of the Chinese tradition for centuries. It used to pick out the best scholars, to serve the emperor. Now, it picks out the best students, to go to universities. Competition is fierce, so parents resist changes in the classroom that might encourage creativity at the cost of memorization of the right answers for the exam. The result is that Chinese schools are not yet graduating innovators, including scientists and engineers, at a pace the government would like. Bill Kirby heads the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University:

Kirby: “Chinese engineers, the critique goes, are too often trained in the last best technology. They are not trained to be critical thinkers. They are not trained to solve the problems that have not yet been posed. It’s one reason, perhaps, why they have a much higher unemployment rate than some who have graduated from other disciplines in China.”

Magistad: Kirby says that’s one reason an increasingly number of Chinese universities are moving away from having students concentrate on one narrow field. Instead, they’re starting to offer a broader range of classes, including history, philosophy and the arts. Kirby says Chinese universities used to be very strong in those areas – before the Communist Party took over:

Kirby: “The gearing of institutions of higher education from the 1950s onward to the interests of the state, the dimunition of the humanities, really the near-extermination of the teaching of the humanities, took place during the Maoist period. And really, it’s just in the last decade that you again see the belief that the study of philosophy, the study of literature, the study of history, and the successes and failures of human beings in different times and places, is as essential to one’s long-term education as the study of mathematics, of technology, of engineering.”

Magistad: Do you think the Party’s really ready to have a nation of independent, critical thinkers who’ll be coming out of this kind of general liberal arts education?

Kirby: “That’s the key question, of course….The Party understands, and the leadership of higher education, from the Minister of Education on down, understand that China does need a new generation of critical thinkers. The question to be posed, at the end of the day, is whether a liberal education, a truly liberal education, is really possible in an illiberal society.

Magistad: What the Communist Party seems to want is simply engineers who can come up with the next great idea, not a nation of critical thinkers who could challenge the Party. It may be hard to have one without the other, to get people to innovate in the sciences, without using the same habits of mind to rethink Chinese politics or history. Already, the explosion of internet use in China has led to tens of millions of blogs and chat sites – and some can be pretty edgy. So can other writings – in journalism and academia, literature and film. The Party tries hard to silence the most critical voices. It censors the websites, and takes down critical messages from chat sites within seconds. It huts down offending publications and jails journalists, bloggers, lawyers and intellectuals.

The Party counters the critics with its own messages. To celebrate 60 years in power, the Party brought many of China’s top actors and directors together to make a film called “The Founding of a Republic.” It’s now playing in pretty much every major cinema.

Among the famous faces here are actress Zhang Ziyi from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and internationally recognized directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. Zhang Yimou has also choreographed the festivities that will mark tomorrow’s 60th anniversary of the rise to power of the Communist Party. All this sends a message, not unlike what the kids get in school — if you want to be creative and make money from it, it doesn’t hurt to do it in the Party’s embrace.

For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.