“This is no different than working in a start-up in Silicon Valley,” said Ani Vallabhaneni, a member of a multi-disciplinary team from MIT that is heading to Kenya and launching the company “Sanergy” – a contraction of sanitation and energy. “Initially, yes, the salaries aren’t market rate. But you take what you need to live, right? So, in terms of student loans, rent, food and beer.”

Vallabhaneni and his team developed a business plan for turning a public health crisis into an economic opportunity. Some 2.6 billion people in the world lack basic sanitation, according to the World Health Organization, and the MIT students think they can help change that.

Some pretty important people agree: The team won the MIT 100k Entrepreneurship Business Plan Contest, a highly prestigious annual competition that brings together students from business, engineering, and architecture.

Vallabhaneni said the idea for a company was hatched when he and fellow MIT students studied sanitation conditions in places like Kenya. In parts of Nairobi, for instance, many people defecate in plastic bags, then throw the bags on the street. Others pay 6 cents to use makeshift bathrooms.

“Typically they’re just holes in the ground with plastic sheeting around,” Vallabhaneni said. “What that shows you in terms of the fact that they’re paying to use unhygienic pit toilets is that there’s a big value for privacy and dignity.”

The Sanergy team thinks people will pay that same 6 cents to use Sanergy toilets, essentially modified porta potties. They’re far from glamorous, but a huge step up from current conditions.

It will cost Sanergy about $200 to build each toilet. They’ll then turn around and sell it to a Nairobi resident for $400. At 6 cents a visit, Sanergy projects the new small business owner – essentially a franchisee – can make back his or her investment in about four months.

Then What?

But that’s just the start of the business model.

“You build a toilet and then what? It fills up, and then what? Right? There’s no way to actually treat and dispose of the waste,” said Vallabhaneni “You actually need to build out the entire sanitation value chain to effectively tackle this problem.”

It’s that phrase—“the sanitation value chain”—that perhaps sums up the inspiration behind the new company. Where others see a problem, the students behind Sanergy see a resource.

“The Sanergy employees each day would collect the waste from each toilet and bring it to a central location,” explained Linsday Stradley, another member of the Sanergy Team and a recent graduate from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Sanergy Overview from Ani Vallabhaneni on Vimeo.

The company will charge the franchisee, $6.25 a month to take the waste to a processing facility.

“Which then leads to the third part, which is conversion,” said Stradley. “So converting that waste into electricity and fertilizer that we can sell and generate the revenue for the business as a whole.”

And this is where the company believes there’s real money to be made.

Part of the waste can be converted into biogas – essentially methane – which can then be burned to generate electricity, a practice that’s currently done in parts of Europe. Some of the waste can also be converted into fertilizer. Both are badly needed resources in this part of the world.

There’s no great technological breakthrough in any of this. Instead, it was the combination of a solid business plan with solutions to numerous development problems at once that impressed the MIT judges, people who know a thing or two about what makes for a successful start-up. The contest has helped launch more than 150 companies, since the competition began in 1989, now worth some $16 billion dollars collectively.

But this is only the second time a company with a true social mission was chosen as the winner.

“We didn’t give the prize because these guys are doing something great for the world, or better for the world, than the other guys,” said Tim Rowe, a judge this year. He founded the Cambridge Innovation Center, a business incubator, across the street from MIT.

“That wasn’t our challenge as judges. Our challenge was to look at each of these as a stand-alone business and say: ‘What has the biggest chance of significant success?’ The fact that they are making money at this is what makes it likely to succeed,” said Rowe.

The Market

Rule number one in business: make money.

Conquering a problem that governments and charities have failed to solve won’t be easy. But Rowe believes that the market can stand up where other solutions have failed.

“It’s not like the old-fashioned, ‘Hey we’re going to try and give wheat to starving people in Africa.’ That works this year, but then what about next year? It doesn’t make the system work,” said Rowe.

The MIT students get this.

“One of the key things about doing development through a market-based solution vs. an aid-based solution is that we respond to the market. So if the consumers are not purchasing our product, they’re not using our product, we change. Because at the end of the day, if we don’t have profits, we don’t have a business,” said Vallabhaneni

And the students have already conquered business rule number two: Get money to make money. They have $100,000, courtesy of MIT, to get their project going.

Vallabhaneni and Stradley say they hope the innovation prize will prime the pump for other investor funding for their start-up.

For now, their plan is to work on building up their sanitation business in Kenya for the next 12 to 18 months. If it works, they hope to expand Sanergy throughout sub-Saharan Africa and India.

(image: BBC)

• BBC coverage: full speech itemized and video
• White House Facebook page
• NY Times interactive: Who sat where seating chart

Sputnik 1 - the world's first artificial satellite (Image:NASA)

President Obama’s message in the State of the Union address last night was clear. The United States needs to get its act together or risk losing its place in the world.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” said the President.

The president’s rhetoric got us thinking about the original Sputnik moment, and what it unleashed, and whether it’s relevant to today’s challenges.

On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into space. Cathleen Lewis, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said the spacecraft wasn’t that sophisticated.

“It was simply a hollow sphere with two transmitters on board, and batteries,” Lewis said.

And it while it didn’t surprise Americans involved in the space race, it shocked the public.

“The point of Sputnik was this was the first public awareness this competition was going on,” said Lewis. “And that the Soviet Union had the capability of launching warheads to anywhere in the world.”

That realization took the cold war competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to a whole new level. Von Hardesty, co-author of “Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race”, remembers watching Sputnik move across the sky through binoculars from the roof of his college dorm.

“This was a really traumatic moment,” Hardesty said. “It ran counter to our self-image as a country, that we were always on the cutting edge and the Soviet Union was still something of a technological backwater.”

What followed was a period of national soul-searching that resulted in major increases in spending on scientific education and research. Jim Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the most important part of the federal response to Sputnik was probably the National Scientific Education Act.

“It created a whole generation of scientists and engineers,” Lewis said. “And we’ve lived off that bulge, that big pile of scientists and engineers that were created through the last few decades. These guys are just hitting retirement now and they’re going out of the work force and we’re not replacing them.”

Lewis says he groaned inwardly when he heard the Sputnik analogy being used once again last night. Not because he doesn’t support the President’s call for investment and innovation, but because the context is different now.

“The problem with the Sputnik analogy is that Americans were afraid when they woke up and realized that the Soviets had this immense new capability that we couldn’t match,” said Lewis.

“If you can orbit a satellite, you can land a warhead anywhere in the planet. That’s what people realized and it scared them. I don’t get that sense of fear, that sense of urgency today.”

Nor is there a specific focus like Sputnik according to Cathleen Lewis of the National Air and Space Museum.

“There’s nothing as discrete as Sputnik,” said Lewis. “There’s no discernible beeping in the sky.”

And there isn’t one overarching goal like the race to put a man on the moon. Instead President Obama spoke of a variety of clean energy Apollo projects, not one dramatic unambiguous finish line. Still, Von Hardesty thinks the President’s analogy works in a broad sense.

“The country has a perceived need to kind of reorganize ourselves,” said Hardesty. “To redeploy our resources, to once again gain a momentum or cutting edge in various spheres of life, including technology.”

Hardesty said in that sense President Obama is echoing some of the same feeling that rose out of the Sputnik area. Feelings are one thing though, action is another. Hardesty wonders out loud whether the United States has the economic and popular will to mount the kind of technological effort it did 50 years ago.

Clark Boyd on Laika’s mission (Sputnik II)

• ‘Created in China’ series page
• Mary Kay’s 2007 series on ‘Young China’
• Pictures of China’s anniversary celebration

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  And this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston.  China’s Communist Party is celebrating 60 years in power this week.  The Party has shown an ability — through the years — to reinvent itself and adjust to changing conditions, without letting go of control.  That’s the general idea behind China opening up its economy — with limits — and under the watchful eye of the Party. But now Chinese leaders say they want to transform their country into a more innovative society.  The question is how can they innovate without allowing a freer flow of ideas, and more checks and balances on their power?  From Beijing, The World’s Mary Kay Magistad has the final report in our series, “Created in China.”

[SOUNDS OF A TV PROGRAM IN CHINESE]

MARY KAY MAGISTAD: This week, China’s state-run television has been trumpeting how much the Communist Party has achieved during its 60 years in power:  There have been impressive gains in health and literacy, in technology and prosperity…and openness.  But this week’s celebrations have skipped over the dark side of the history of Communist rule – the political movements and persecutions that destroyed or ended tens of millions of lives.  Try to find information about them online here in China…

[SOUND OF TYPING ON COMPUTER KEYPAD]

MAGISTAD: And you’ll find that many sites that mention these things are blocked.  So are Youtube, Facebook and other sites the government isn’t sure it can trust, sites with information the government doesn’t want Chinese people to see.  The government also tries to silence its critics.  Lawyer Li Heping has been detained and beaten up for taking on human rights cases:

LI HEPING: [In Chinese]

MAGISTAD: Li says there are a lot of problems in Chinese society, and government leaders should realize they can’t solve all the problems by themselves.  At the same time, he says, Chinese citizens have a growing awareness of their rights.  More than 300 million Chinese now use the Internet and twice that many have mobile phones.  So the government can’t easily control things anymore.  In fact, it’s paying more attention to public opinion.  It monitors chat sites and blogs, and even asks for public feedback.  That approach may help China’s leaders reach one of their goals.  They say they want China to become an innovative society, one that will come up with new inventions that those outside of China will be willing to pay for.  But Arthur Kroeber, the editor of The China Economic Quarterly, doubts all this can happen without political change…because you can’t have cutting edge innovation without a free flow of ideas:

ARTHUR KROEBER:  …Because essentially innovation is unbounded.  You can’t set up a system that says it is fine for you to innovate in areas A, B, C, but areas D and E, hands off. Because an awful lot of innovation is essentially about sticking different ideas together and making combinations of ideas from different fields that no one had previously thought of.  And this is something that people who are in the planning mindset never get, right?  You can’t plan innovation.  That’s a logical impossibility.

MAGISTAD: Filmmaker Chen Li has come up against the Chinese government’s ambivalent attitude toward the free flow of information.

[SOUNDS OF CHEN LI'S FILM PLAY IN BACKGROUND]

MAGISTAD: He recently made a film that explores some thorny issues of village life -such as coercion to enforce the one-child policy, and party manipulation of village elections.  Chen says the original script passed the censors – who must approve every film before it’s shot in China.  But the censors didn’t like the finished film:

CHEN LI: And they told me that there is no way to rectify it. They offer no suggestion for me to rectify the film.

MAGISTAD: So they said, “Just forget it?”

CHEN LI: Forget it and wait.  Wait for, I don’t know. Wait. They told me to wait.

MAGISTAD: Chen’s professional partner, actor Nick Li, says it’s not just the censors in China’s film world who resist controversial, politically-charged films:

NICK LI: Like sometimes, we deal with a bunch of artists and when I think about something, I think it is creative and original they will just question me and ask you know, “Why are you doing that?”  They have never done before.  So is that a risk or something, and is that weird or something?  And I said, you know, we are born to be weird.  Really, as a true artist, you have to be.

MAGISTAD: As an innovator, you sometimes have to be weird, too.  Internet entrepreneur Jin Xiaofeng says in her lifetime China has become far more open to new ideas.  But there’s still room for improvement, especially in a culture that shows little tolerance for failure:

JIN XIAOFENG: I think to certain degree, innovation requires the courage to make mistakes, the courage to break what the society said is right.  If you still have a strong a frame in your mind:   “This is something I don’t want to touch it, otherwise I will be in big trouble – not like small trouble,” that will have certain kind of limitation in terms of speed, how long it’s going to take for you, for the whole generation, for the whole society to become more innovative.

MAGISTAD: The good news for China’s leaders is that China’s economy can still grow for a decade or more, just by doing the kind of low-level innovation China does now – cutting costs, developing efficient supply chains and tweaking existing products for the Chinese market.  Economists say this will both drive China’s growth and pull Chinese innovators up to a higher level.  Dan Brody heads the Chinese social networking site 360-quan.  He says there’s also another dynamic at play that could help boost Chinese innovation in the future:

DAN BRODY: If you look at the annual list of richest Chinese businessmen, you know, the Internet sector probably accounts for a larger proportion than any other industry.  The average age is much younger.  So it’s cool to have these young, successful Silicon Valley types, many of whom are now funding the next generation of Chinese Internet entrepreneurs, because they are now so wealthy themselves.  So if we look at the founding teams of the big Chinese Internet companies, whether their Internet company itself was innovative or not might not be the most important thing, the most important thing is you have this young, very innovative person who now has enough wealth, they can begin investing in the next generation, in the next round.

MAGISTAD: China’s leaders hope that will happen before China’s baby boom generation starts to retire, and the working age population shrinks.  It’s then that China may have to start relying on innovation to drive economic growth.  Meanwhile, the Party has time to do a few things.  It could better protect intellectual property, and allow courts to become independent of Communist Party control.  It could – and is already starting to – strengthen the social safety net, so Chinese consumers feel confident spending more and saving less.  And it could take the brakes off of free speech, and the free flow of ideas – so Chinese innovators can access, discuss and debate ideas freely, like innovators anywhere else in the world.

DUNCAN CLARK: I think there is a debate going on about what the limits are, how far should China liberalize to allow innovation to happen.

MAGISTAD: Duncan Clark is the chairman of the hi-tech consulting group BDA, in Beijing:

DUNCAN CLARK: But the end goal is, the Communist Party in China knows they can only stay in power provided that it can deliver on the economy.   There is nervousness, certainly, with the Party about how far liberalization can go.  And if the Party can’t deliver, as a result of its own attempts to control, then I think there are many in the Party who realize that it’s “game up.”

MAGISTAD: So we’re back to an important question.  Can the Party keep delivering, without allowing more pluralism?  A study at Harvard University has found that in society after society, pressure for more pluralism grows once the average income hits about $13,000 a year.  China’s average income now is just $3,000 a year.  But it’s closer to $13,000 in China’s big cities, where many of the best minds are drawn, and where much of the innovation happens.  Premier Wen Jiabao has pledged repeatedly that China will allow more pluralism.  He said it at again at this year’s National People’s Congress in March:

PREMIER WEN JIABAO: [In Chinese] We will strengthen the development of democracy and legal system, carry out political restructuring in an active yet prudent manner, and develop socialist democratic politics.  We need to improve democratic institutions, enrich the forms of democracy, expand its channels, and carry out democratic elections, decision-making, administration and oversight in accordance with the law.

MAGISTAD: But censorship continues, the courts remain under the Party’s thumb, and intellectuals are still jailed for speaking their minds.  If China’s leaders really want to foster innovation, they’ll have to make a game-changing move.  It’s something previous Chinese leaders have done.  Mao Zedong saw he couldn’t follow the classic Marxist strategy of rallying the working class, because China didn’t have much of a working class.  The vast majority of Chinese were farmers.  So Mao innovated.  He rallied the farmers, and led the Communists to power.  Thirty years later, Deng Xiaoping saw the mess Mao’s policies had made, and he innovated.  He allowed capitalism back into China.  He just camouflaged it by calling it “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” and the Chinese economic miracle began.  China’s current leaders have yet to take so bold, so innovative a step.  They could.  They could take the chains off the curiosity and creativity of China’s best young minds, and unleash the true potential of Chinese innovation.  For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• ‘Created in China’ series page
• Mary Kay’s 2007 series on ‘Young China’
• Pictures of China’s anniversary celebration

• Illustrated transcript of part III
• ‘Created in China’ series page
• Mary Kay’s 2007 series on ‘Young China’

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WBGH in Boston.  Innovation doesn’t just come from infrastructure and investment; it comes from a culture that encourages originality and creativity.  One that rewards risk taking and tolerates failure.  That doesn’t describe China and that’s partly because of China’s educational system.  It teaches Chinese children to think what they’re told.  But some Chinese educators are trying to change that.  The World’s Mary Kay Magistad has part three of our series, Created in China.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD:  Walk into a Chinese classroom and you’re likely to hear this.  Students recite their lessons together.  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 tenth grade classes in a Beijing high school, for a thesis she’s doing at Harvard.  Lushi Li says one thing struck her about the students in the high school and at the university.

LUSHI LI:  They don’t have very much opportunity to voice their opinions.  The teachers do try to engage the students but mostly what they would do is they would ask yes or no questions or they would ask questions with a definite answer so there’s very little opportunity for the students to answer open ended question.

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 students, for the college entrance exam.  Li says this is how one teacher would get her students ready for the exam.

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, even to the point where at the end you know, she would say oh, if you’ve run out of things to say, that you could always just praise the Communist Party and you know, this is how you would 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 instant willingness to want to create something that everybody had.  The soil is the education and your history of this nation or something and the temperature and the moisture or something probably is the opportunity so the bottom line, if the seed is healthy or not so through the years you just didn’t take good care of it and I think eventually they don’t even know how to think 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 sitting there and listen and we have just all the different opinions and after class I just asked the teacher, are you going to give us some standard answer or something or final answer and he’s look at me and just like I am so weird.  He said so what do you think about the topic and I said each person have their own good part but ridiculous part and then he said yeah, that’s my answer, too.  You know, whatever you think and I just feel like wow, this is really a 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.  It’s a bilingual school called Kinstar.  It has Chinese and Western teachers.  The school 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 fourth grader, says it works for her.

TEA LI: Well, the Chinese teachers teach a good way.

MAGISTAD:  What’s good about it?

TEA LI:  They don’t like yell at you like that strict but it’s kind of like good strict.

MAGISTAD:  And how’s it different from how the English language teachers teach?

TEA LI:  The English teacher usually does like more fun stuff and the Chinese teacher’s kind of not as fun as the English teacher.

MAGISTAD:  Fun stuff isn’t all that common in most classrooms in China.  One of the Kinstar schools founders is Hui Jin.  She was raised in Shanghai and got her Ph.D. in neuroscience in the US.

HUI JIN:  So I was raised and educated in the Chinese system so of course I have a very firm foundation of skills and the knowledge of the basic knowledge but later when I find I was doing researching, graduate school and then doing researching workplace and one thing I find that was lack in my traditional education is the self-confidence.  It’s a very common of people educated in China then went overseas to studies.

MAGISTAD:  So at the Kinstar School, 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 the Chinese teachers are a little more orderly and at times, sound more like what you’d find in a Chinese school.  But the Chinese language teacher, Meng Qin Fen, also 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.  She says in those schools, students sit in neat rows.  They listen to the teacher and they memorize what the teacher says.  Here it’s more casual and a little hard for her to get used to.  She worries that if a teacher teaches ten things here, the kids really only learn six but Meng 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.  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.  The result is that Chinese schools are not yet graduating innovators such as scientists and engineers at a pace the government would like.  Bill Kirby heads the Fairbanks Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.  He’s been working with Chinese educators who would like to make the transition to a more innovative curriculum.

BILL KIRBY:  Chinese engineers, the critique is, are too often trained in the last best technology.  They’re not trained to be critical thinkers, not trained to have the capacity to solve the problems that have not yet been posed.  It’s one of the reasons perhaps that they have a much higher unemployment rate than some who have graduated in other disciplines in China.

MAGISTAD:  Kirby says that’s one reason an increasing number of Chinese universities are moving away from having students concentrate on one narrow field.  Instead, they’re starting to require students to take 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 higher education over time, particularly after 1950 toward the interests of the state, the diminution of the humanities, really the near extermination of it, the humanities in higher education, took place in the Maoist period and really it is only in the last decade that one sees a 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 would 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 is whether a liberal education at the end of the day, a truly liberal education, is possible in a political liberal 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 can challenge the party.  But 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 and history.  Already, there are signs that many Chinese are developing new habits of critical thinking.  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 shuts down offending publications and has jailed journalists, bloggers, lawyers and intellectuals.  The Party also tries to counter the critics with its own messages.  To celebrate sixty 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 sixtieth 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.

JEB SHARP:  Tomorrow, Mary Kay Magistad explores how innovation in China is coming and will have to come from the private sector.  One inventor says that’s where you can encourage the most creative thinkers in a group.  Say you identify two people from the group.

SPEAKER:  What you do is you take those two guys and you bring them in and you sit on a white board and you just talk about creative, whacked out ideas that would never happen anywhere else, right?

SHARP:  That’s part four of “Created in China,”  tomorrow on The World.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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.

• Illustrated transcript of part II
• Created in China Series page
• Mary Kay’s 2007 series on “Young China.”

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp; this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  China’s ruling Communist party wants to build a more innovative economy but it’s used to governing through decrees and five year plans and that’s a hard habit to break.  The party has spent billions in the past decade on research labs but it’s given scientists strict guidelines to come up with new ideas.  The results have been mixed at best.  China does innovate but rarely in a way that’s compelling enough for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice.  The World’s Mary Kay Magistad has the second part of our series, “Created in China.”

MARY KAY MAGISTAD:  One of the success stories of China’s push for greater innovation is a company called CapitalBio.  Framed patents line the walls of the company’s reception hall.  A glass display case shows off its biochip products for use in medical care.

SPEAKER:  There’s a sperm viability assessment chip, electromagnetic cell chip, cell network electrophysiological monitoring chip, lab on a chip.

KEITH MITCHELSON:  See, it’s using these advanced tools for manipulating cells.

MAGISTAD:  Keith Mitchelson is CapitalBio’s Vice President for Marketing and the company’s sole non-Chinese employee.  He says CapitalBio is working on a technology that would allow doctors to use these bio chips in their clinics, to conduct tests normally done by large machines, with long waiting times for results.  CapitalBio is located in the government built Zhongguancun Science Park.  Z-Park as it’s known, is in the same leafy corner of Beijing where some of China’s top universities are based.  In fact, CapitalBio is a private company spinoff from one of them, Tsinghua University.  Xia Yangqui is a Beijing municipal government official and the deputy director of the science park.  He says the kind of innovation you see at Capital Bio is what the government had in mind when it created the Zhongguancun Science Park.

XIA YANGQUI:  Z-Park is the high tech concentration area and also serves as an incubator of high tech businesses.

MAGISTAD:  Xia hopes that China’s version of Bill Gates comes out of this park.  He says many companies, Chinese and foreign, have opened research and development centers here and total production value has increased fifteen fold to one hundred and fifty billion dollars during the past decade.  There’s no denying that China has made sizzling economic progress in recent years.  Most Chinese now have mobile phones and that includes farmers, even some living in caves.  More Chinese are now online than Americans and when new technologies come up elsewhere, Chinese are quick to copy them or tweak them for the home market and get them out to the masses. It happened so quickly that some Chinese can get confused about who created the technology in the first place.  Here’s what Chinese Academy of Sciences official Lu Yonglong said when I asked him what major inventions have come out of China in the past couple of decades?

LU YONGLONG:  DVD, the first generation of DVD was developed in China.  CDMA.  And flash disk.

MAGISTAD:  Actually, the DVD was invented by a consortium of Japanese, European and US companies.  An Israeli developed the flash disk.  But the Chinese did embrace both technologies early and enthusiastically.  And Chinese innovators have found ways to improve many such technologies for the Chinese market.  That’s reflected in the fact that China had more than eight hundred thousand patent applications last year and granted almost two hundred thousand patents.  The problem is that very few of those patents were for break through technologies.  Yin Xintian heads the legal affairs department of the Chinese patent office.

YIN XINTIAN:  In American history, Edison invented the light bulb and it changed how people live and also Morse telegram and nowadays it’s not easy to find such kind of Chinese inventions. In China, it’s more about a specific technique and improving the current technique.  It’s also important to specific development and to explore a completely new field, I can’t recall any of that.

MAGISTAD:  Yin says modern Chinese innovation has come a long way since he started working in the patent office thirty years ago as a young engineer.  He believes more important inventions will come as more Chinese get up to speed with international knowledge and international standards.  He says it helps that the government is committed at the highest levels to making this happen.  Premier Wen Jiabao has said as much just this month when he spoke at the world economic forum in the northern Chinese city of Dalian.

WEN JIABAO:  We should see scientific and technological innovation as a powerful engine of economic growth and rely on it more to make economic progress.  We will transform China into an innovative nation.

MAGISTAD:  China has made innovation a priority for a simple reason.  It provides more sustainable growth than just manufacturing innovations from other countries.  Duncan Clark is chairman of BDA, a high tech investment advisory firm in Beijing. He points out that IPODS are made in China but China doesn’t make much money from them.

DUNCAN CLARK:  For example, on a two hundred dollar sale of an IPOD, perhaps five dollars of value is left for China.  Most of the value goes to Apple for the brand, for the distribution.  Some of it goes to the components suppliers who mostly are Japanese, in the case of IPOD.  So China rightly, I think has been saying we don’t want to be just the manufacturing workshop where pollution is left behind and labor unrest when the economy of the US turns down.  So China is struggling to move up the value chain and they’re absolutely right to be focusing on greater value.

MAGISTAD:  But Clark thinks they’re less right in how they go about it.  The government throws lots of money at science parks and infrastructure.   Researchers are ordered to innovate on deadline and file patent applications and journal articles if they want to keep getting funding. That leads to quantity but not necessarily quality.  The pressure had led some researchers to plagiarize, fabricate data and generally cut corners.  Another problem is that government run research labs have a hard time staying current with what consumers want.  On top of that, some of the government led effort is infused with a nationalistic Chinese innovation for China approach.  Clark says that’s self-defeating.  He cites as an example the Chinese government’s costly effort to come up with a new high speed mobile broadband standard.

CLARK:  China, about ten years ago, was frustrated with the dominance of companies like Ericson, Alketel and Motorola in the Chinese market and thought that we could never compete head on in Western technology.  We need to create our own indigenous standard and by effectively walling off the Chinese market; we would be able to create a big enough market for a national champion or champions to emerge and then they could export based on the size of the Chinese market.  This was the plan.

MAGISTAD:  The reality, Clark says, is that the plan has failed miserably because nobody outside of China has made phones that use the Chinese standard.  Liu Jiren is the chairman and CEO of China’s largest software development and IT company, Neusoft.  He told an audience at the world economic forum in Dalian that it’s time for China to change its approach.

LIU JIREN:  That is most important today that we need to change original innovation way.  Especially for Chinese company.  We always want to try to create something by our self.  I don’t think you have enough resources, you have enough time, you have enough talent.  If you can integrate with global resources, you can share IPR with others, you also can share success, share risk with others.

MAGISTAD:  Entrepreneurs like Liu say there’s a better way forward than just pouring money into infrastructure and staking national prestige on whether China comes up with its own exclusive standard.  They say the government should focus on improving the climate for innovation.  Ramp up intellectual property protection so the inventors reap the rewards from what they create, rather than the pirates.  Improve how the stock market functions so start-ups can get the cash they need and put more effort into understanding the needs and the strengths of the private sector.  A gap in that understanding became apparent when a Chinese journalist asked China’s minister of science and technology, Wang Gang, a question at the world economic forum.  She said small private companies don’t have as much capacity for innovation as big companies so what are you doing to help them?  Well, he said, we’re encouraging them to work with universities and we’re encouraging the universities to receive them with open arms.  He said we pay special attention to the smaller private enterprises because their capacity for innovation is lower.  That prompted this response from James Turley, the chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young.

JAMES TURLEY:  My experience around the world is not consistent with the premises of the question.

MAGISTAD:  Turley said from what he’s seen, it’s the small private businesses that innovate more than the big bureaucratic ones.

TURLEY:  I think the magic of progress is when we can in a collaborative style, bring together the innovation and the vision that comes from nimble entrepreneurs with the power and the education in both the academic community and the state sector.

MAGISTAD:  Minister Wong nodded politely but he didn’t look convinced.  After all, when China’s one party state decides it’s going to do something, things generally happen, like now when the government is throwing its effort into building renewable energy as a leading industry.  China’s Communist party has come a long way since its hard line Maoist past.  But some habits die hard like a lack of faith in the private sector and a preference to let the state sector lead.  For China to become the innovative nation its leaders want it to be, it will have to do more than build infrastructure and graduate engineers.  China will have to rethink old assumptions and find new ways to fertilize the roots of innovation.  For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

SHARP:  Tomorrow, Mary Kay examines the ways China’s educational system thwarts innovation.  One former student says one teacher’s instructions to prep for an exam are typical.

SPEAKER:  If you ever encounter a test question on this topic, this is how you should answer it and if you run out of things to say, that you can always just praise the Communist Party.

SHARP:  That’s Part Three of Created in China, tomorrow on The World.

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The Party also wants to transform China’s economy into one of the world’s most creative – to reclaim a mantle of creativity and innovation that China held for more than a thousand years, before being overtaken by the West.

In this five-part series The World’s Asia Correspondent Mary Kay Magistad explores the roots of China’s creative past, and what’s being done now, with what success, to relight that spark.

Here’s is the first part:

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This was China’s national observatory for 500 years. Astronomers studied the heavens, at the pleasure of the Emperor. Lu Dishen is a researcher here:

Lu: “Chinese paid a lot of attention to celestial phenomena. Because celestial phenomena occurring in the sky was believed to mean that something happened to the emperor or to the whole empire.”

Magistad: So the masses might see a solar eclipse as a sign that the emperor had lost the favor of heaven – and that might prompt them to try to overthrow the dynasty. Researcher Lu Dishen says that’s why the emperor didn’t allow just anyone to become an astronomer – only a trusted few:

Lu: “In China, in some dynasties, if you observed the sky by yourself, you would have been punished to killed.”

Magistad: But other scientists had plenty of room to explore new ways of doing things. And over the course of 1,500 years, they came up with some of the most important inventions the world had ever seen.

The Chinese invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass. They created silk, porcelain, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the seismograph. In the 2nd century BC, Chinese were already deep-drilling for natural gas and, says researcher Lu Dishen, accurately charting the movement of the planets:

Lu: “Before the 15th century, Chinese astronomy was the most advanced in the world. But after that, after the Ming Dynasty to Qing Dynasty, we just followed the Western astronomy, because it was more advanced.”

Magistad: But why? Why was Western science able to overtake China’s substantial lead? The question has haunted China for generations.

The documentary, “River Elegy,” raised the question when it aired on China’s state-run television in 1988. “River Elegy” suggested that, since the 19th century, Chinese culture had become stultified, like the Yellow River silting up:

‘River Elegy’ film: “Is it our history of passive defeat over the past century that has conditioned us psychologically, or decades of poverty and backwardness? The spirit of a people is hurting. The cause of the pain is a civilization in decline.”

Magistad: Unlike Western civilization, the documentary said – and it argued that China needed to look to the West for new ideas, like science and democracy. The idea that only the West could save China was something Westerners had been saying about China for much of the 20th century.

A more sympathetic Westerner was British biochemist Joseph Needham. In the ‘30s, he raised the question that came to be known as the Needham Question: why had China lost its innovative edge? He devoted the rest of his life to documenting China’s great inventions, but never really answered the original question. Now, some China historians are asking, is that even the right question? Or did earlier Westerners frame it that way to reinforce a Western feeling of superiority, to justify forcing China to open to trade and modern influences?

Ken Pomeranz is the author of the book “The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy.” Pomeranz, who’s a professor of Chinese history at the University of California at Irvine, says Chinese innovation didn’t end with the Ming Dynasty – it just changed direction:

Pomeranz: “It is true that there aren’t what we might call Chinese mega-inventions on the same level of the compass, or gunpowder, during the Ming. But what ends up being a mega-invention is often not a question of how innovative it is at the time, but of how other people wind up using them.”

Magistad: For instance – he says – the early steam engine was a clunky energy-guzzling monster. It could have been dismissed as an interesting but ultimately useless idea. The only way it was worth using was if there was cheap energy nearby. The British figured that out – and used it at the head of coalmines, to pump out water and mine coal. With the coal, they could put steam engines on wheels, to form trains. The trains could take coal to factories, and power plants. One idea led to another, and the Industrial Revolution was born.

Meanwhile, China was dealing with a different set of issues. It had coal too, but it was in the landlocked north. That made it prohibitively expensive to transport to where it could have been used. So innovation went not into finding labor-saving devices that used lots of energy, but devices that saved it – like the wok:

Its thin, curved metal distributes heat quickly, so it allowed the chef to use less of that expensive fuel. There was also the fact that while Europe had lots of land and not so many people – China had lots of people, and little arable land. So, Pomeranz says Chinese innovation went into getting the most out of each acre:

Pomeranz: “So the Chinese are, for instance, quite ingenious, over the course of the 16th, 17th, 18th and into the 19th centuries, in finding ways of getting more crops out of an acre. They’re still doing well at raising yields, and their yields per acre are the highest in the world, basically. They’re not that that great in maximizing yields per labor hour, because that wasn’t a crucial problem for them.”

Magistad: So, China’s innovation tackled different questions from Europe’s, and came up with different answers. Ultimately, China did fall behind, but it wasn’t because it stopped innovating. What happened is that under the Ming Dynasty, the emperors became less interested in interacting with the outside world, and absorbing new ideas. Trade continued on the coasts, but china didn’t keep current on the scientific advances happening in other countries.

Meanwhile, Europe was going through the Renaissance and Enlightenment and settling of the New World. Zhang Kaixun, who heads China’s Inventions Association, says all this helped Europe pull ahead of China:

Zhang: “The Renaissance itself wasn’t about science and technology, it was about art, philosophy and religion, and it created a free atmosphere and open environment for people to think. A free environment is very important for innovation. “

Magistad: While Europe was going through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, China was embracing a kind of neo-Confucianism, with a strict hierarchy and code of behavior. It pulled the best minds into becoming mandarins and scholars of classic Confucian texts, rather than merchants and entrepreneurs. This didn’t stop innovation, but it didn’t exactly encourage it either.

There are other possible reasons scientific innovation and the industrial age took off in Europe, while China’s rate of innovation slowed. Europe’s many states fought so much they had to keep coming up with new weapons and tactics. The wars prompted many Europeans to live in the relative safety of cities – where new ideas spread quickly. These included financial innovations, says Arthur Kroeber, who edits the China Economic Quarterly:

Kroeber: “You had the rise of big diversified banking firms… You had the development of insurance which is crucial to enabling to scale up trade in the way that it was previously not possible because you could insure against loss. You had the development of corporations, later stock companies, which enable people to spread risk and become much more entrepreneurial.”

Magistad: By contrast, Kroeber says, China’s economy was made up of small family businesses. It lacked corporations that might have encouraged inventors and entrepreneurs to take risks:

Kroeber: “Because again it is a risk-spreading mechanism that enables you to take a relatively modest amount of capital and leverage it out and not risk so much personally. And it also implies there are large swathes of the economy where you can scale up business activity to any size you want, more or less, without incurring the intervention of the State. And that’s always a problem in China. Once it gets big enough, the State always wants to get involved. And it wants to control things.”

Magistad: There were other factors that held back Chinese innovation too, wars and political upheaval, throughout much of the 19th century and into the 20th. There was a search for new ideas after the last emperor was overthrown in 1912. But war overtook that too – first the Japanese invasion, then the Communists fight to take power.

When Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, many Chinese hoped this would be a new start for China in the modern world. What they soon found instead was that Mao wasn’t interested in hearing ideas that deviated from his own. He sent hundreds of thousands of intellectuals to prison camps or to their deaths for questioning him. And in the mid-‘60s, he launched the Cultural Revolution.

Mao encouraged teenage Red Guards like these to persecute so-called “counter-revolutionaries.” They included intellectuals, those with ties to the West, and anyone whose ideas clashed with Mao’s orthodoxy. It was not fertile ground for innovation. And yet, Jin Xiaofeng – who’s now an internet entrepreneur – remembers it as a time for her, as a pre-teen, of some unexpected freedom:

Jin: “My parents were sent to the countryside, and I have no school to go. But that actually allowed me to have a lot of space of my own, I could do something different, creative, and entertain myself, not going through the education system.”

Magistad: She says that experience helped her grow up to become a risk-taking entrepreneur. She worries that young Chinese in school today are under too much pressure, within too much structure, to have the freedom to think creatively. And yet, thinking creatively is what the government wants them to do.

As it prepares to celebrate 60 years in power the Communist Party is pushing to make China a more innovative nation. The Party says that’s crucial for China’s continued economic growth. There’s also something more at stake – China’s sense of itself, and its place in the world. There’s a hunger to reclaim the respect China once enjoyed, as one of the most powerful and innovative places on earth. The question is how to get there.

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

Winner of the 2009 Sigma Delta Chi Awards for Journalism
Series editor: Ken Bader
Radio production: Traci Tong
Web production: Michael Rass

Part I:

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Part II:
In the second part Mary Kay Magistad looks at how the government in Beijing is trying to spur innovation. Currently, much of the effort has focused on trying to do it all in China.

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Illustrated transcript

Part III:
In the third part of the series, Mary Kay examines the ways China’s educational system thwarts innovation.

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Part IV:
In this episode, Mary Kay Magistad explores how innovation in China is coming – and will have to come – from the private section.

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Part V:
In the final part of the series, Mary Kay reports on whether China’s Communist Party can continue to deliver economic growth and still maintain tight political control.

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• Mary Kay’s 2007 series on ‘Young China’
• In pictures: China celebrates 60 years of communist rule