The Fading Appeal of Cubicle Training

In these tougher economic times, there are some early indications that young Chinese people are not as interested in taking part in China's university boom.

From China's Xinhua News:

Image from Ernop's Flickr page

BEIJING, May 31 (Xinhua) -- China expects fewer students to participate in the upcoming three-day annual college entrance exam this year, according to Sunday version of China Daily.

The college entrance exam has been seen as the make-or-break benchmark for millions of Chinese young people since 1977.

Minister of Education Zhou Ji had predicted that the overall number of applicants would exceed 10 million -- last year's total was 10.5 million -- but figures from local governments suggest the number of students taking part may be far fewer, the newspaper said.

In Shangdong, a provincial economic powerhouse, education officials said they received 100,000 fewer applicants this year than they did in 2008 -- a drop of more than 10 percent.

...

"Since the financial crisis last year, the grim employment situation has broken the 'employment myth' for those with a college degree. Some students changed their minds about getting a good job through higher education. They simply quit (from taking the exam)," an anonymous recruitment officer with the Beijing Institute of Technology was quoted as saying.

Read the Entire Article

This kind of news isn't surprising. I hear all the time from young people in Xi'an about graduates from last year's university class who still can't find work. There are about to be several more million fresh graduates entering the job market in a few weeks also looking for jobs. Times are looking bleak for educated Chinese young people trying to find work doing what they studied at university.

This phenomenon of people questioning the value of high-level education is not limited to China. America is currently undergoing a similar debate.

An article from last week's New York Times' Magazine - "The Case for Working With Your Hands" - does a great job talking about the more academic life young Americans have been molded for and the more labor intensive jobs that they are told to avoid.

Here's the beginning of the article:

The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another,“Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics' trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren't buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

Read On

This article's author, Matthew B. Crawford, makes some really keen observations and criticisms of the life Americans, and more and more Chinese, idealize as "getting ahead."

In the not too distant past, I meditated (or was it ranted) about the idea of "getting ahead" in contemporary society. I came to the conclusion that the dreams and idealizations that I'd been fed from the time I was a child may have been the product of a society that had lost complete touch with reality. Based on the state of the the US' economic system and the state of its people, I feel justified in questioning how involved I want to get with "The American Dream": a house with a white picket fence and a mortgage, 3.18 children, etc.

I did participate in America's university system. I even got a worthless degree: a bachelor's degree in philosophy. I have student loans still to pay off.

I don't regret my decision to pursue a higher education. In getting a degree that fostered independent thought and developed my mind, I feel as though the education I received was invaluable. My degree isn't going to knock down to many doors in future job applications, but it was a very beneficial thing for my life.

At this point in time though - the summer of 2009 - I completely understand a young adult at the crossroads of life deciding against spending four years of his or her life in a college or university that wants to prepare him or her for a life of sitting in a cubicle.

As the NY Times article posits, skipping a traditional four year university doesn't mean one has to stop learning. I'm very much in support of learning a trade or specialized skills if one chooses against the more cubicle-based path. I'm definitely not against education and learning.

I do feel that the current status of the world and its economic systems calls for young people to reassess the assumptions about where they will fit in the world economy in the years to come though.

My Stone Reflexology Sandals

One of the presents Qian gave me for my birthday was these stone reflexology sandals. Pretty crazy, eh?! To answer your question, yes, they take some getting used to. But honestly, after wearing them for a few days, I can wear these sandals around the apartment for extended periods of time. My feet adjust to them after a few minutes and I hardly even notice them after a while.

These shoes are a manifestation of the ancient Chinese belief that the bottom of one's feet is the key to one's qi and health. These shoes seem to mimic walking paths like this one, which can be found in public parks all over China and Asia:


Photo from Ummabdragmaan's Flicker account

Here is the write up on Reflexology form Wikipedia:

Reflexology (zone therapy) is an alternative medicine method involving the practice of massaging, squeezing, or pushing on parts of the feet, or sometimes the hands and ears, with the goal of encouraging a beneficial effect on other parts of the body, or to improve general health.

There is no consensus among reflexologists on how reflexology is supposed to work; a unifying theme is the idea that areas on the foot correspond to areas of the body, and that by manipulating these one can improve health through one's qi.

...

Many civilizations have practiced reflexology. Evidence of this has been documented on four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America. The most common theory is that the earliest form of reflexology originated in China, as much as 5000 years ago. The early Taoists are credited with originating many Chinese health practices. The Cherokee tribes of North America to this day practice a form of reflexology that they continue to pass from generation to generation. Reflexology traveled across India, Japan, Asia, and China. Traditional East Asian foot reflexology is called Zoku Shin Do. This is the foot portion of the Japanese massage technique. The roots of Zoku Shin Do go back to ancient China and are over 5000 years old. Many changes took place in zone therapy, or reflexology, as new knowledge was added. In China, reflexology reached a new level. The practice of acupressure using the fingers turned into the practice of acupuncture using needles. The study of the reflex points still existed, but the knowledge was linked or added to and taken in a new direction—the direction of meridians. The Chinese concept of meridian therapy is an important part of the foundation of reflexology.


Image from Lattiss.com

At the bottom of the reflexology Wikipedia page, it notes that reflexology was featured on Penn and Teller's TV program "Bullshit!" I can only imagine what those guys had to say about the practice. I've also done a Google search on reflexology and there seems to be a large segment of the world's population who think that reflexology is a complete sham.

Personally, I'm happy to wear these sandals around my apartment for a few minutes a day. Do I think that my life is going to be changed significantly by wearing them? No. Do I have faith that these sandals might help my qi out in some way that could possibly have positive benefits on my life? I'm not counting on it.

But hey, Qian gave me the sandals, I find them reasonably comfortable, and I'm going to continue wearing them. If I find that my qi is all groovin' in the coming weeks or months, I'll be sure to share my experiences with all of you.

North Korean Tests

China, North Korea's strongest ally, is getting fed up with the county's latest nuclear tests.

From The New York Times:

Image from nti.org

WASHINGTON — The United States is pressing China to consider taking a variety of severe sanctions against North Korea, including the inspection of suspect ships and planes, as it tries to ratchet up the global response to Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test, administration officials said Thursday.

But it is not clear that the Chinese government has the stomach for a heightened showdown with North Korea, these officials said, even though its criticism of the underground test on Monday was unusually vehement.

...

The administration is also seeking China’s cooperation in a global effort to disrupt the flow of money to North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong-il, and his family, officials said. Some of that money is suspected to be held in Chinese-owned banks, making such an effort diplomatically sensitive.

Still, a senior official said he was “pleasantly surprised” by how open China was to cooperating with the United States. China has historically tolerated the erratic behavior of Mr. Kim, worrying more about a calamitous collapse of his government than about his nuclear ambitions. But the recent test and missile launchings, the official said, may have crossed a line with China’s leaders.

“At the level of Chinese irritation, this is historic,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “Normally, the Chinese urge us not to react. But they are reaching a point where they could be agreeable to using more of their own weight.”

Read On

China's hands-off attitude towards China may finally have reached an end. The Kim Jong Ill post-stroke, nuclear testing era appears to be crossing too many lines.

The first thing I learned about North Korea in geography class in high school was that its people had resorted to eating tree bark. In addition to that lovely piece of information, I was just about as disgusted to hear that North Korea's largest industries are counterfeitting US dollars and producing heroin and crystal meth. North Korea can also put another hat in its feather for having produced the worst piece of architecture in the history of man.


Image of Pyongyang's half-built Ryugyong Hotel from Esquire

North Korea is a "fascinating" place. In the same way that the holocaust was a fascinating event in history. I'd be happy to see North Korea lose its friends, well friend (China), over its latest nuclear testing. I'm not sure how the logistics would work, but seeing a 180 degree change of direction in that country over the coming years would be a wonderful thing.

Geithner: The China Hand

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's coming to China in a couple days. Although Geithner hasn't arrived yet, China's already begun the meeting.

From Forbes:

Days ahead of U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's visit to China, Beijing has already shut the door for discussion on the appreciation of China's currency, the yuan, pledging it will keep the currency stable to help Chinese exporters.

In an executive meeting of the State Council presided by Premier Wen Jiabao, the leading comrades reiterated their determination in guarding the yuan. "We have to maintain the exchange rate basically stable at a reasonable and balanced level," an official statement declared after the Wednesday meeting.

The Chinese yuan has been hovering around 6.83 per U.S. dollar since the middle of 2008. Analysts said China has virtually repegged the yuan to that level. Over the past two years, the yuan has steadily risen against the dollar, as U.S. officials have been demanding. The Chinese currency surged 7.1% against the greenback last year after gaining 6.9% in 2007 and after rising 3.8% in 2006.

China's trading partners, especially the U.S., have been urging China to allow the currency to further appreciate to ease global trade imbalances. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner might put the topic on his agenda to discuss with Chinese officials in his trip to China from May 31 until June 2.

Yet, China regards the sharp fall in its exports as the biggest difficulty in keeping its economic on growth track. Because a stronger Yuan would crimp exports further, there is not much hope Geithner would find willingness from China to engineer a rise in its currency - particularly when Beijing blames excesses in the U.S. for the global financial crisis that has slowed Chinese growth.

Read On

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine ran an informative and interesting article on China and America's relationship going forward. The lede of the article talks a bit about Geithner and his ties to China.

On Timothy Geithner’s first day as a Dartmouth freshman, while he was walking across campus on his way to register for classes in the fall of 1979, he heard a man speaking Thai — swearing in Thai, to be precise — from a balcony. Geithner found this amusing, because only a couple of months before, he left his home in Thailand, where his father worked for the Ford Foundation, to move to Hanover, N.H. So he stopped to talk to the man, who turned out to be David Keenan, a Chinese teacher at Dartmouth. The two quickly realized that they had a lot in common; among other things they attended the same schools, about a decade apart, in Bangkok and Delhi. (The cause of Keenan’s swearing, alas, has been lost to history.) Having established a rapport, Keenan then decided to do a little salesmanship. He urged Geithner to take Chinese, the only Asian language that Dartmouth offered at the time.

Geithner did, and found that he liked it. Learning another Asian language, he told me recently in his soaring office at the Treasury Department, “was a nice little piece of continuity for me.” He ended up majoring in government and Asian studies and taught basic Mandarin classes to make some money. After Dartmouth, he attended the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. He then spent three years at Kissinger Associates, working with Brent Scowcroft, the future national security adviser, and helping Henry Kissinger write chapters on China and Japan for one of his books. From there, he joined the Treasury Department and began a meteoric rise through the bureaucracy.

In the five months since Barack Obama introduced him as the next Treasury secretary, Geithner has already run through what seems to be a career’s worth of images: the brilliant technocrat whose appointment caused stocks to soar; the neophyte public figure who flopped in his debut; the regulator who has grown too close to Wall Street; the Obama adviser with the same unflappable nature as his boss. One image that hasn’t yet attached itself to him, however, is his original professional image. By training, Tim Geithner is a China hand. And though the immediate financial crisis is likely to dominate his tenure at Treasury, the economic relationship between the United States and China may ultimately prove just as important. It could be crucial to preventing the next crisis.

Read On

Geithner has a big week ahead of him. Placating the Chinese on the stability and viability of US dollars while at the same time trying to work on China and their currency, uhh, that "m-word," is going to be a tight-rope walk to say the least.

Hopefully Geithner really is a "China hand" and will perform well in the contradictory and confusing world that is Chinese politics. The US is going to need China to stay on board with them over the next few years. If Geithner could somehow turn out to be a gifted negotiator with the Chinese (yeah, I know it's a stretch), that would cancel out a lot of the stumbles he's made so far in office.

The Vegas of the East

Macau, a former Portugese colony in southern China, is setting itself up to one day overtake Vegas as the gambling capital of the world.

From Forbes:

Photo from macau.a2zcasino.eu

HONG KONG/LOS ANGELES, May 26 (Reuters) - The world economy may be slumping, but don't tell that to Macau -- the former Portugese colony which is set to trump Las Vegas heading out of the worst global downturn since the Great Depression.

In the smoke-filled gambling halls of Macau's MGM Mirage casino, hundreds of Chinese gamblers were crammed around tables flipping cards, playing roulette and rolling dice on a recent day, seemingly unaffected by the slowdown.

The ace up the sleeve of Macau, the world's biggest gambling market, is this steady influx of risk-loving Chinese flocking to the only place in China where casinos are legal. Las Vegas, on the other hand, is saddled with a stagnant U.S. economy and glut of new casinos preparing to enter the market.

"We've seen better-than-expected performance in the overall gaming market of Macau," said Credit Suisse ( CS - news - people ) analyst Gabriel Chan. "Vegas is still suffering and will take a longer time to recover, but in Macau, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel."

Read On

One of the most amazing stats I've heard about Macau is this: there are approximately 3.1 billion people within a five hour flight of Macau. That is incredible. Talk about a primo location.

In the past several years, Vegas' image has been revived. People of my generation have really lionized the place. I'm a little bit confused by this actually. My home city, Kansas City, has a number of casinos. I've never been to Vegas and I'm not completely aware of everything it has to offer, but this kind of competition has to hurt the place. Kansas City is no Vegas, I know that. But there are a wide selection of places one can choose from if he or she wishes to go gambling in Kansas City. For this reason, it's not surprising to me Vegas is being hit hard during the current downturn.

The fact that gambling is illegal in China is going to be great for Macau. That, combined with China's rise, and Macau's close proximity to the masses of Asia is going to make Macau a Mecca of gambling going forward.

Teacher Ma's Last Class

Today was a sad day for me. The Chinese teacher I've had for the past two years and I had our last class. 马老师 (Teacher Ma) is going to South Korea later this week to work and to live with her boyfriend. She will be back in Xi'an in a few months, but I'm most likely going to be back in America at that time. Regardless, we had our last tutoring session today.

I began having class with Teach Ma in the Spring of 2007. I met her at a school in Xi'an that specializes in teaching foreigners Chinese (the school is particularly popular with Xi'an's buzzing missionary community). I enjoyed her classes a lot, but the school was way too expensive. The missionary aspect of the place also weirded me out a bit. I told her that I wanted to continue having classes with her, but outside of that school. She told me that such an arrangement was against the rules of her contract, but that she'd be quitting the school in a few months. So after I visited America in the summer of '07 and got back to Xi'an that fall, we began meeting again.

Teacher Ma and I met for one-on-one lessons four hours a week for the better part of the past two years. Over these two years, I went from being a really shoddy beginner to the lower-intermediate speaker I am now. We went through the first two books of 发展汉语, the books from the Beijing University Press that Shaanxi Normal University uses to teach foreigners Chinese, and had begun a third intermediate book. We definitely didn't move at a break-neck pace - it took me two years to study what university students study in a year - but we moved at the right pace for me considering that I've been working a job thirty hours a week in addition to studying Chinese during this time period.

Over the two years, we discussed tons of things outside of the books.

One of the things I was able to do was pick Teacher Ma's brain on questions regarding Chinese politics and history that I didn't feel comfortable asking most Chinese people. Teacher Ma is from Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the far west. She's half Uighur, half Han. Hearing her unique perspective on China's development, its history, and its future has been fascinating (and has surely contributed to this blog in many ways).

It's also been helpful for me to have a female Chinese teacher for the simple fact that it's helped me understand my own Chinese girlfriend better. Qian and I have always had a generally smooth relationship, but when there were any rough patches or questions regarding what we're doing, Teacher Ma, who is our age, was able to help me understand the psyche of a twenty-something year-old Chinese woman a great deal.

I've said before that having a Chinese girlfriend doesn't necessarily help one's Chinese. Qian's English is so good that we hardly ever speak Chinese. It's just not worth the effort when English is there for us to use. We're speaking Chinese more often, but still no more than 15% of our total conversation. Having a Chinese girlfriend also acts as a crutch when we're out on the town and Qian can just do all the talking for us. Indeed, having a Chinese girlfriend who speaks English can actually hinder one's Chinese ability.

Having Teacher Ma, who speaks very little English, has been so important for me. All the conversations that we've had have been in Chinese. Our two-hour-at-a-time lessons are probably 99% Chinese, with English only being used a word or two at a time to clarify new words or complex grammar structures. Not being able to revert back to English with Teacher Ma has been so important. I've truly needed someone in my life to force me to use Chinese.

My Chinese is not the best. My tones aren't very good and I don't spend enough time studying outside of the four hours a week we have class to really boost myself into a more fluent level of Chinese. But I'm at a very "conversational level" of Chinese. I can chat with Chinese people about all kinds of different topics, particularly in a one-on-one setting. This ability is most certainly due to the fact that I've been engaged in lessons with Teacher Ma over these past couple years.

I've joked with Teacher Ma before that my Chinese may not be the best advertisement for her teaching abilities, but there's no doubt that she's been a very special teacher. Our classes in Shaanxi Normal University's garden and/or cafeteria have been well worth the small amount of money per hour I paid her.

Assuming that I don't see Teacher Ma after she comes back from Korea later this year, I'm not sure when the next time I'll see her will be. No matter when that is, she and the time we spent together using Chinese over the past couple years are always going to hold a special place in my heart.

The China Cavaliers

A group of Chinese investors are setting themselves up to become the first foreign owners of an NBA team.

From The Cleveland Plain-Dealer:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cavaliers already have a global star. A clutch-shooting global star at that. Soon they may have a global partner that could help secure that global star's future in Cleveland.

According to multiple sources within the Cavs, franchise majority owner Dan Gilbert has a tentative agreement in place to allow a group of Chinese investors to purchase a significant stake in the Cavaliers Operating Company, the entity that owns the Cavs and operates Quicken Loans Arena. The group is led by JianHua (Kenny) Huang, a Chinese businessman who has become successful by linking American and Chinese companies.

Huang and several of his partners were in Cleveland and attended Games 1 and 2 of the Eastern Conference finals this week. He sat in Gilbert's courtside box Friday night and watched LeBron James hit a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to even the series with the Orlando Magic at one game apiece.

"Dan Gilbert has been approached multiple times over the past few years by investors that wanted to join the Cavs' ownership group," said Len Komoroski, Cavs and Quicken Loans Arena president said in a statement.

"This has recently happened again. As has been done previously, we're in the process of reviewing the possibility presented to us. Beyond that, we do not feel it would be appropriate to give further comment at this time."

Calls to Huang's company were not returned.

The direct impact of the move is securing the future of the franchise, which has been in a minority ownership flux for the last couple years as it loses millions in attempting to build a championship-quality team around James. It will not only mean an injection of capital but will open the Cavs to business in China. The move, which has been kept mostly secret in America, is being supported by the NBA as they have encouraged development in China.

Read On

This article, from a Cleveland newspaper that obviously like to see LeBron James stay in Cleveland, talks about the impact that Chinese ownership could have on James and his decision on whether to stay in with the Cavaliers or go to the Knicks in New York in 2010:

The other effect, which is surely the more interesting side to Cavs fans, is how vital this new link could be for James -- providing a huge tie-in with an economy James is eager to tap.

...

"You have to think globally," James said recently of his business interests. "I have a lot of fans in China and they're important to me."

James and Nike, by far his largest sponsor, have been on a mission to create a bond with the Chinese over the last three years in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. James has made four visits to China, one with the Cavs as part of a preseason trip in 2007.

With basketball exploding in popularity among millions of young Chinese with exponentially growing buying power, James has targeted opportunities in the Far East to make the same kind of marketing impact in modern China that Michael Jordan had in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Only the market there operates on a dramatically larger scale.

As of 2009, there is no doubt that LeBron James is the best basketball player on the planet. I'm in awe of the guy. He's massive - 6 feet 9 inches, 275 pounds - yet he's the fastest player in the NBA and has the highest vertical leap. There's never been anybody like him before.



James won his first MVP award this year. He won Friday night's playoff game with a last second shot. And he's also studied a bit of Mandarin.

I can't imagine James can say much in Mandarin or that he's taking the language very seriously, but the simple fact that he cares at all about learning Chinese shows how seriously he takes his popularity in China.

James is twenty-four years old. No matter if you're in Cleveland in Chongqing or in Chengdu, it's going to be amazing watching LeBron over the coming decade.