The news that two states in India took the PISA test of 15-year-olds' school achievement in 2009 and bombed raises the question once again of China. As everybody remembers from a year ago, 2009 scores from Shanghai were released and they were higher than any country in the world. But what about the rest of China? Obviously, Shanghai is a dazzling place, but a lot of China is still stuck knee-deep in rice paddies. What about them?
I stumbled upon this year-old blog post by Anatoly Karlin of Sublime Oblivion, which relays a big hint:
As regular blog readers know, I think that educational capital and more broadly average IQ levels are one of the key – and frequently under-appreciated due to political correctness – determinants of economic development and whether or not convergence to developed country levels is even possible. Its much higher educational capital is one of the key reasons why I think China will continue doing much better than India in development, regardless of its “democratic deficit.” However, many people argue that China’s human capital must actually be quite low, because it doesn’t spend much on education, resources are bare in the provinces, statistical fudging under unaccountable governors, etc.
The recent results from the international standardized PISA tests in math, reading and science will make this an increasingly untenable position. Shanghai got by far the best results out of all the OECD countries (never mind the developing ones). . Now while you might (rightly) argue Shanghai draws much of the elite of the Yangtze river delta, the Financial Times has more: “Citing further, as-yet unpublished OECD research, Mr Schleicher said: “We have actually done Pisa in 12 of the provinces in China. Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average.””
Since countries like the US and France get scores “close to the OECD average”, this means that the workforces soon to be entering China’s economy, even from its poorest regions, will be no less skilled than those of leading Western economies (note too that the numbers of Chinese university graduates are soaring). And with China’s massive population, four times bigger than America’s, its road to superpowerdom must be all but guaranteed.
Okay, there are a few leaps of faith there, but that's still news worth knowing. At minimum, it reduces the chances that the Shanghai numbers were a con job. At median, it suggests that we check twice before reflexively equating China and India. At maximum, it suggests, as Karlin says, that "resource constraints" are going to be perhaps the big issue of the 21st Century. It's a little hard to be certain what "Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average" means, but it sounds pretty good.
The logic of using international test scores to predict future wealth is not that the causation runs only in one direction, from high test scores to wealth. Obviously, it runs in both directions. (For example, affluent Chinese have traditionally hired tutors to raise their children's test results.) But, if there are a whole bunch of poor farm kids in inland China who are scoring like kids in Europe and North America right now, well, that's worth knowing.
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Do you remember the 2008 Olympics? When Chinese officials impassively and systematically forged birth documents so that ultra-nimble 13-year-old gymnasts could participate in 16-and-older events?
And then the whole world watched on TV and was treated to a fat middle finger in the form of a prepubescent gymnast?
That's kinda what the CCP does: it's an ethos. It's why I don't trust the Shanghai PISA results. At the very least, if there was no tampering with the test itself, or outright cheating during the examination, then they probably still managed gerrymander the set of students sitting for the exam.
Seligman in his book on IQ mentions psychometricians roaming through rural China, administering IQ tests, and getting remarkably high results.
Also, Steve, was that Sorkin line correct about the existence of more genius-level IQs in China than there are people in the US?
Probably multiple standards for "genius-level," but if you sort of average them? Does that line hold up?
I suspect there will be a major war conducted to curb China's rise to significant hegemony, if internal subversion methods are ineffectual, as they seem to be. The US has China completely surrounded with bases and allies that are de facto American satrapies, and it has the weaponry. Our elites may be stupid and malevolent in many ways, but they're not dumb enough to recognize threats to their hegemony and that they have to nip any potential competing hegemony before it's too late. And swaying public opinion for war against China will not be too difficult since it is not politically incorrect to be against or dislike China.
I thought the Pisa test was Galileo dropping his balls. Or Fibonacci doing his number.
Also, Steve we must remember that the Han Chinese whilst not only being genetically gifted in intelligence, have a tremendous ingrained respect for learning and scholarship (none of this rap/hip-hop shit),something that has been inculcated by centuries of rule by technocratic mandarins.Also factor in the Han capacity for hard work, discipline, cooperation and self denial, shrewdness , money making etc.
All in all you have an unbeatable and unstoppable combination.
An interesting theory is that China has been heavily populated for millenia and has ben perpetually the victim of crop failure and famine.The typical Chinese characteristics are said to be an evolved response against famine.
Although the mandarins were an elite and pretty tough managers they always viewed themselves as being, ultimately, of the same blood and race as the peasants they ruled.
The brahmins who ran India, on the other hand, considered themselves to be from completely different bloodlines and race from the broad mass of Indians.
The interesting problem, at least for HBD students, is the fraction of Chinese people who score two SDs or above the median IQ score ie the super-smart fraction with IQ's in the 130 plus range, the kind who make great inventions or start up great institutions. This fraction will have a big influence on the PRC's chances for global hegemony.
Does anyone have some reliable stats on this?
Anyone who would equate development potentials of China and India is a fool. I have been to both countries, not extensively but enough to get a feel of it.
When I hear 'India is the next China' I just roll my eyes and if I'm takling to someone trustworthy I go into gross detail describing India, and there's plenty of gross detail. For a Westerner, India is simply unfathomably filthy.
I would go as far as sign in blood that the gap between the two countries will only widen, in China's favor.
That's fascinating.
Since China and India are at each other's throats, fighting for dominance of the region, would that be what tips the balance in favour of China?
Or is India better at getting the best out of the highly intelligent people it does have? I can't see the Chinese authorities being too happy if lots of educated, intelligent people start getting notions.
Anecdotal evidence, but maybe worth something. I traveled extensively around Indonesia and China 20 years ago. In central Java, the most developed and prosperous region of Indonesia, I would meet school teachers who didn't even seem to know basic geography. In deep rural China I met people who knew exactly how much an average lawyer's salary in New York was (and this is well before the internet). Even provincial Han Chinese on average seem pretty bright and aware of how the world works (That may have something to do with the fact that a lot of bright people got exiled to the countryside in the 1960s.) I also wasn't surprised to see articles lately on how Indonesia's growth seems to be stalling compared to China, Korea or Japan at a similar stage in their development, and no one can figure out why. I guess the obvious HBD explanation is not acceptable.
It appears that high population IQ is generally necessary for superpowerdom; as Michael Hart discusses, in all known history there is only one major case, the Arab conquests, where a possibly lower-IQ population has directly conquered higher-IQ populations of similar or larger size. And of course we don't know very much about Arab IQs in the 7th-9th centuries AD.
On the other hand, intelligence is not sufficient in itself for superpowerdom, there are other factors. But there really seems little reason to doubt that China will probably be the most economically powerful nation on Earth in the second half of the 21st century.
Perhaps the biggest question is whether China and the USA can form a world-dominating alliance, like the France-Germany alliance that dominates 21st century Europe, or whether they will be rivals, like the France-Germany rivalry in Europe before 1945.
Another hugely important issue: when china hits something between turkish (10k$) or south korean (20k$) gdp per capita levels, will millions of fecund immigrants stream across the borders? Will the communist party be able to stop them? Are they going to want to?
"Arab conquests..." or "low IQ" nomads or semi-nomads conquering or destroing superior Civilizations... Germanics and Huns in Western Roman Empire;Turks in East Roman Empire;Mongols in China and Persia;Vickings in Western-Europe,and don´t forget Hebrews in Canaa...
When I commented (in the previous PISA entry on India) that according to OECD’s Schneider that PISA scores of some impoverished inland Chinese regions were “all well above the OECD mean”. I recalled it wrongly and now it appears to be exaggerated. I apologise for this error.
As a Chinese, I am aware the following points (at least to me, beat me if you think I’m wrong):
1. Shanghai people ( of China’s historical Wu/Yue people, the same as nearby JiangSu province and ZheJiang Province) on average has one of the highest IQ scores among Chinese (including ethnic overseas Chinese in Singapore, HK and Taiwan).
2. It’s no surprise to most neutral Chinese that Shanghai people on average could best Cantonese of HK and Hanka of Singapore in s serious Maths test – since Wu/Yue people are one of the smartest stocks within Han Chinese historically ( this , together with point 1, explains why SH tops Singapore, HK, Taiwan and Koreans in PISA Maths).
3. The most rigorous nationwide test in China regarding Maths , Science and Reading is annual GaoKao (recording after the Cultural Revolution), in which Shanghai usually scores mediocre or below average to be the best, far behind many poor inland provinces.
4. One of the SH’s excuses for doing poorly in GaoKao is that it has its own AA that discriminates non-local students who are applying for SH local universities ( this explains why SH’s university acceptance % is far above the rest of China), so that SH kids are spoiled and have less incentives. Yet even within SH there must be s strong competition to go to the best local university. So this is not much an excuse at all.
Now we know that it’s likely that SH best other poor inland provinces (which usually dwarf SH in GaoKao) in this PISA. How to reconcile above apparent contradiction then?
Is it because (I can only imagine) those poor inland provinces had much less incentives to do well in PISA than GaoKao since the latter affect them in real world much more? If so, does that imply that given right incentives, those provinces did relatively poorly in PISA could have done much better to reflect their true capabilities? -- what, like monopoly the top 10 positions in PISA Maths and Science league table? I don’t know. I’d like to hear from some insiders on this.
So if the numbers are correct, how the heck has China remained so backward for the last 300 years? Something doesn't make sense. Were they not as backward as I thought? What kept them down? This must mean there is some factor besides IQ that is mighty important to Big League development.
"When I hear 'India is the next China' I just roll my eyes and if I'm takling to someone trustworthy I go into gross detail describing India, and there's plenty of gross detail. For a Westerner, India is simply unfathomably filthy.
I would go as far as sign in blood that the gap between the two countries will only widen, in China's favor."
Finally, someone who just says it. How about looking for correlations between development and religious/cultural practices?
" That's fascinating.
Since China and India are at each other's throats, fighting for dominance of the region, would that be what tips the balance in favour of China?"
This remark is patently (and very typically)only true in the eyes of diluted Western main stream media (and Indian domestic media).
To any Chinese, this remark sounds as ridiculous as saying "Since the US and Mexico ( or France and Morroco) are at each other's throats, fighting for dominance of the region, would that be what tips the balance in favour of the US (or France) ?"
On the ground zero, the Chinese have NEVER taken India as a serious challenge, intellectually or economically or millitarily or otherwise, for pretty much entire history. Even at the weakest point in China's history right after Mao set up PRC, an imporverish country with nothing, China easily squashed India's attempt of land grab at the border in a short 1962 border war, even though India troops were then equipped by the US and backed by USSR - both (and only) nuclear superpowers at a time.
Few modern Chinese these days think or talk about India, which is not in their radar at all, but mostly focus on the US, and Japan to a much lesser extent.
Only Western main stream media and Indian Media drum up ridiculous "India Vs.China - a match of 21st century" fairytales.
"I thought the Pisa test was Galileo dropping his balls."
No, Galileo dropped his balls later when he caved to pressure from the Church.
Among adults IQ falls with age, especially with extreme old age. Since the median age of India is much lower than that of China (and the difference will get more pronounced) doesn't that affect the practical results of the PISA (children-tested) IQ results?
Steve already wrote an article here showing what James Watson did with aging reasearchers (and why) at his lab. Now imagine a whole country with that problem.
Steve,
OT but here is a great article over at NewGeography.com (Joel Kotkin's website) about robotics and immigration. Very interesting....
http://www.newgeography.com/content/002578-the-robotics-census
Unlike the last PISA post, this doesn't help any investment strategy since the popular notion among investors now is that China will keep on growing.
"will millions of fecund immigrants stream across the borders? Will the communist party be able to stop them? Are they going to want to?"
China will be surrounded by poorer countries but has a lot of natural borders.
It borders Vietnam, Laos, and Burma to the southeast and there's already migration to Guangdong.
Half of the border of Burma all the way to Afghanistan: a lot of mountains that essentially form a long fence.
In the northwest there is Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. The Kyrgyzs and Tajiks will try to migrate to Xinjiang.
The northern Chinese border is shared by Mongolia and North Korea. Not many North Koreas can make it over and Mongolia has just a few million people.
So I guess China will have immigrants in the southeast and northwest but the numbers won't be unmanageable.
What Wes said. Yes, IQ is certainly important to development, but maybe as a prerequisite rather than a proportional factor. In other words, to develop a decent civilization, let's say you need a mean IQ of 100. Maybe without at least that level of cognitive ability, it's just not possible. But that doesn't necessarily mean that a mean IQ of 105 will cause you to develop faster or better than one with the bare minimum of 100. Maybe it's like being able to reach the cookie jar on the top shelf: if you're tall enough, you can reach it; but if you grow six more inches, you can't get more cookies. You can reach it or you can't.
Maybe if you have this theoretical minimum IQ, then other factors determine how prosperous you'll be and how fast your civilization will advance. Things like religion, culture, and dominant personality traits like ambition, creativity, criminality, risk-aversion, artistic ability, etc. -- most of which have some correlation to IQ, but the level of correlation differs between groups, and is weaker than the correlation with more straightforward academic abilities. Or maybe, as others suggested, along with a general population that's smart enough to live in houses and make it to work every day, you also need a certain number of geniuses to do the inventing and imagining that moves the society forward. It might also help if those geniuses weren't clustered in a specific cognitive ability like math, but were spread across all areas, so you'd get advancements in science, manufacturing, art, literature, philosophy, etc. all happening at once and inspiring each other.
The same evolutionary famine high population pressures that moulded the typical Han Chinese characteristics of thrift, frugalness, hardwork, application, cooperation, intelleigence etc, affected India but the evolved response differed.I India the behaivoral tendency was sharp practice and duplicity and for caring only about one's immediate kin and no one else.
"So if the numbers are correct, how the heck has China remained so backward for the last 300 years?"
IQ is necessary, but not sufficient, for industrialization. It is hence not the only variable that matters.
"Probably multiple standards for "genius-level," but if you sort of average them? Does that line hold up?"
If you say that China has a mean of 105 and the US has a mean of 100, you can basically get whatever calculation you want. In general I would use 115 as the cutoff for smart and 130 as the cutoff for very smart. Genius seems like more of a fluffy term.
"This must mean there is some factor besides IQ that is mighty important to Big League development."
You don't say.
My impression is that the Chinese education system is turning out graduates in excess, both in numbers and qualifications, of China’s immediate industrial needs. For example, many Chinese engineering graduates start work as aircraft mechanics. This is a skilled blue-collar job in the U.S., but in China it is a well-paying job that may eventually lead to a career in aircraft engineering, which is what these graduates prepared for. Reports are they are very dedicated mechanics. Only about 1 in 150 candidates drop out of maintenance training, a much smaller attrition rate than among Western candidates.
"This must mean there is some factor besides IQ that is mighty important to Big League development."
Wow, somebody's getting it. Dear IQ fetishists, IQ is part of the picture, but it's not all of the picture. How about culture, religion, morals, foreign invasion, social cohesion or a lack thereof, work ethic, a collective sense of destiny, a number of X factors that will never be readily quantified, but which anyone with their eyes half open can see.
This is precisely why libs and libertarians come across as stunted. They don't see the evil genius in things. They've watched life badly, and are wide eyed when something happens off their radar, and when it does, all kinds of conspiracy theories or alternate, revisionists histories try to explain it away.
As someone of Indian-Chinese parentage, I can star with a disclosure of not having an axe to grind ;-)
I doubt that India will ever be a serious competitor to China in Asia as it is just too undeveloped and it just hasn't reined in its population in time (i.e. population growth has slowed but will still keep growing at a historical juncture where the global scramble for resources, energy becomes critically acute). As such, the IQ disparity is rendered somewhat irrelevant.
By the same token, China will not dislodge the US from its top-dog position (or only transiently if so) as it will experience a loss of demographic vitality due to its ageing population and is just too cramped and resource poor, all of which will act as a brake on its development sooner or later. Notwithstanding its current economic straits, the US still has demographic vitality (although the quality may be doubtful) in a relatively sparsely populated and resource rich country (half a continent, in fact).
So look on the bright side, smile and have a Merry Christmas to all American co-posters on this forum!
I would imagine it's a simple case of only testing those who would do well. I also surmise that the Chinese government or perhaps even the US government finds it efficacious to present the Chinese as the pinnacle of human evolution.
In the real world, however, something obviously isn't adding up. The Chinese aren't a superior people achieving superior outcomes in any measure of quality of life (as a people). Most of the rest of us still wouldn't want to be Chinese.
Average IQ of Chinese. 99 to 100. Nothing more needs to be said.
But InQ--individuality Q--is lower than that of Jews and whites.
Does the discrepancy between India and China in IQ testing and standardised tests point to some flaw either in sampling or conceptually? If the former, then this is a trivial methodological bug to be ironed out but if its the latter it would suggest that IQ levels alone are not a great predictor of intellectual achievement but other factors such as creativity may be equally vital.
I raise this point as India has contributed to world mathematical development (zero, decimal numbering system, Ramanujan) while China has been the dog that didn't bark. Despite the higher IQ in China, it has singularly failed in coming up with any earth shattering discovery or development in the last 1000 years, which is a pretty long time to be unproductive. The well known Chinese discoveries are extremely useful, practical inventions but hardly argue for a subtle and profound national genius.
For example, Ramanujan was a self-educated mathematical genius of the the early 20th century.
Even in insular Tokugawa Japan, a lone genius like Seki Kowa, who independently developed calculus in the 17th century (how strong this claim is I am not competent enough to judge), could sporadically emerge.
Is there something about chinese culture or society that holds back otherwise extremely intelligent people from making a bold leap of imagination?
Chinese PISA scores should be treated with a ton of salt . . . The real distortion with Chinese PISA scores is the fact that the bottom of ladder is effectively cut out of mainstream education in major cities - the effect is like having a test of New York city that excludes any schools in the Bronx or the bad parts of Brooklyn.
Many of the low end work is Chinese cities is done by peasant migrants whose children stay behind to be educated with the grandparents in their home villages, that chunk of the population isn't taking tests to begin with.
Similarly, the internal passport/residency requiresments (hukou in CHinese) excludes the children of peasant migrants from schools where they aren't registered.
Also, people with learning disabilities and such are not "mainstreamed" and never take these tests either, which also brings up the averages a bit.
All in all, it means that the PISA scores are highly distored - not through intentional manipulation, but through a broader system which excludes people who would do badly at them
re: "super-smart fraction of Chinese" jack strocchi
Ah, that is the rub.
Where is the data to show the SD of the Mean in IQ of the Han Chinese males and females?
It is known that some white populations have male SDs at 16 IQ units. If Chinese SDs are less than 12 or 11, there potential for IQs over 150 become marginal at best.
Dan Kurt
Vague at best...examining a PDF someone linked to earlier , I noticed charts correlating ESCS and PISA scores of different schools, of, I think, Tinjiang, and the lowest calibre schools were close to 320, ~1.5-1.8 SD below OECD. Tinjiang is developed and the poorer provinces would end up at the level of Tinjiang's lower schools, so I doubt the statement's veracity.
Sorry, the province is Tianjin - re : the earlier post.
There's another graph in the same PDF with higher scores, probably of another subject.
Ok, let's parse Mr. Schleicher's statement.
"Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average.
"Some" areas? How many? And what about the other areas?
"Close" to the OECD average? How close? At any rate, we can safely infer that "close" means "below".
As the author of the blog mentions, the OECD average is very close to the US results. A spectacular result it is not. So what Mr. Schleicher is really saying is that the best parts of the non-Shanghai China score below the US (with all of its glorious diversity). What kind of scores a typical Chinese student gets is anybody's guess but it's clearly below even that.
Karlin is worth reading on the topic of Russia, which he knows something about. He does a good job puncturing myths about Russian demography and corruption (neither is as bad as you are told.)
But he knows very little about China, as he himself admits. His pro-Chinese cheerleading is the result of his studying the language and the general sympathy for the Commies.
"how the heck has China remained so backward for the last 300 years?"
Inertia. They simply followed a different track. You can argue that the Chinese/Japanese/Korean model of development from say 1500 to 1900, while backward technologically certainly reflected a high IQ population. Those cultures all developed very sophisticated aesthetic practices in poetry, painting, ceramics, design, etc. that not coincidentally continue to appeal even today to high IQ Westerners. In technology and science East Asians fell behind, probably because there simply was not enough external pressure on the elite to change and innovate. They all lived pretty well for a while. And once the West showed up and changed the game all three of these cultures showed a remarkable ability to catch up. Even China, despite being sidetracked by devastating civil wars and outside invasions for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
People love to compare China and India. I think historically the difference is this:
India was a diverse subcontinent ruled a homogeneous imperialist master, the British.
China was a homogeneous(relatively speaking)empire ruled by diverse number of imperialists.
So, the homogeneous British elites played divide-and-rule among diverse Indians.
So, homogeneous Chinese played divide-and-play-for-time among the diverse imperialists(Russians, Brits, Americans, Japanese, Germans, French, etc).
The current elites love India more cuz they love diversity among goyim that are ruled. They too have divide-and-rule as an ideal way to rule the world.
I don't much doubt that China pretty much throughout would demonstrate relatively high g -- at least comparable to that of Europeans.
But this gets us to what everybody is aware at some level is the crucial point: does g by itself really capture every cognitive ability important to intellectual achievement?
I think that the answer to this is almost certainly no. Creativity and originality, for example, really do seem to be only loosely correlated with g, beyond a certain point. Does anybody seriously question, as just one example, that the ability to produce jokes is pretty poorly correlated with IQ, above a certain minimum IQ? Are the best comics also potentially the greatest physicists?
Unfortunately, unlike g, creativity seems to be largely unmeasurable -- and, worse, it may be that there may be many forms of creativity: the most creative comic isn't the most creative mathematician, who isn't the most creative composer, who isn't the most creative novelist, who isn't the most creative philosopher.
The problem for the Chinese is that evidence of their creativity strictly speaking is very hard to come by -- neither in China, nor here among Chinese-Americans.
If that apparent lack is based on something largely genetic, then likely China is never going to become a superpower competitive in any basic way with the US. They will always lag in both hard and soft science, technology, the arts and entertainment.
Wes:
The obvious guess is that China (and Russia, for that matter) has probably been held down by lousy government. Getting English law and civil service procedures and military organization and government was probably a huge benefit to India, relative to a godawful Communist regime with crazy shit like the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.
I have a friend who was sent off the some rural area with her highly-educated parents to do peasant farming for a couple years, under that government. She was eventually allowed to go to college, and ultimately ended up as a mathematician with a PhD from a Western university. When you're sending your potential mathematicians out to work in rice paddies, or sending your rocket scientists out to chop down trees in Siberia, you don't get the full benefit of your peoples' talent.
China doesn't look like it plans to ship all its smart, educated people out to farms and appoint illiterate peasants to be doctors and engineers these days, so despite corruption and repression, they're probably getting more of the potential of their people to come out now.
"China is still stuck knee-deep in rice paddies"
This is good for math skills according to Gladwell. But Indians eat a lot of rice too so..
"...as Michael Hart discusses, in all known history there is only one major case, the Arab conquests, where a possibly lower-IQ population has directly conquered higher-IQ populations of similar or larger size."
The Mongols conquered China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, among other countries, in the 13th century. Modern Mongols are somewhere around 90 IQ. Culturally medieval Mongols lagged behind medieval China, Russia and Eastern Europe. Later the Manchus, another warlike, but thoroughly unintellectual people, conquered China.
the fraction of Chinese people who score two SDs or above the median IQ score ie the super-smart fraction with IQ's in the 130 plus range, the kind who make great inventions or start up great institutions.
And isnt this where we hit the limitation of IQ. Lots of Chinese hit those high IQ thresholds but where are the great inventions and institutions?
To any Chinese, this remark sounds as ridiculous as saying "Since the US and Mexico ( or France and Morroco) are at each other's throats, fighting for dominance of the region, would that be what tips the balance in favour of the US (or France) ?"
the Chinese have NEVER taken India as a serious challenge, intellectually or economically or millitarily or otherwise, for pretty much entire history.
Good comparison. As we all know, Mexico is a nuclear equipped nation with a strong IT industry. Mexican immigrants also do well as skilled (US) immigrants, unskilled (Singapore), and moderately skilled (UK).
Brahmins are physically indistinguishable from the masses.
China has become an economic power because it has an unlimited supply of obedient slave labour and is willing to destroy its own environment. IQ has nothing to do with it.
It's not Japan Inc.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/scireason.htm
Researchers tested nearly 6,000 students majoring in science and engineering at seven universities -- four in the United States and three in China. Chinese students greatly outperformed American students on factual knowledge of physics -- averaging 90 percent on one test, versus the American students’ 50 percent, for example.
But in a test of science reasoning, both groups averaged around 75 percent -- not a very high score, especially for students hoping to major in science or engineering.
The Chinese appear to do vastly better on knowledge-based tests than reasoning tests. Perhaps the reasoning tests more strongly correlate with worker productivity. It could explain why they can kill on the PISA (also skewing to the knowledge-based side), but still their college graduates end up making the same salary as migrant workers.
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/11/22/value-of-a-chinese-college-degree-44/
Despite entering a robust economy that seemed to weather the financial crisis as if were it a middling squall, China’s college graduates on average make only 300 yuan, or roughly $44, more per month than the average Chinese migrant worker, according to statistics cited over the weekend by a top Chinese labor researcher and reported today by the Beijing Times
Re "psychometricians roaming through rural China administering IQ tests",could ne a good carrer move for Jerry Sandusky,what?...
Re: More on Science Tests
The first test, the Force Concept Inventory, measures students’ basic knowledge of mechanics -- the action of forces on objects. Most Chinese students scored close to 90 percent, while the American scores varied widely from 25-75 percent, with an average of 50.
The second test, the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment, measures students’ understanding of electric forces, circuits, and magnetism, which are often considered to be more abstract concepts and more difficult to learn than mechanics. Here Chinese students averaged close to 70 percent while American students averaged around 25 percent -- a little better than if they had simply picked their multiple-choice answers randomly.
The third test, the Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning, measures science skills beyond the facts. Students are asked to evaluate scientific hypotheses, and reason out solutions using skills such as proportional reasoning, control of variables, probability reasoning, correlation reasoning, and hypothetical-deductive reasoning. Both American and Chinese students averaged a 75 percent score.
I'm copying and pasting a very insightful comment by Sineruse on Steve Hsu's blog that nobody has rebutted yet.
"You have that backwards. East Asians underperform at the higher level selections relative to credentials, for the same reason that their absolute performance is higher on the earlier and lower-level metrics (such as SAT, grades, HS graduation rate, college admission results). This is unavoidable no matter whether E.Asians have more or less ability than whites, as long as they tend to "work harder" at any given level of ability. The Asian discrimination complaints would have us ignore this phenomenon, as though all Asian high performance is a result of pure ability with no group differences in effort or investment biasing the results when compared to whites. It is a popular gambit to claim that "ETS studies show" that test prep rarely improves scores by much, even though every East Asian immigrant enclave has a thriving multitude of test prep centers based on the opposite experience. Examples of how this works out in reality on objective measures harder than the SAT:
- declining East Asian-American to white ratio in US math competitions as you follow a cohort from grade 8 to high school to college. e.g., proportionally fewer E.Asian than white US IMO team selectees get gold medals; the number and ranking of US E.Asian high scorers relative to whites (even within the same set of students, so as to control for dropouts from the pipeline) takes a sharp decline from USAMO to the Putnam; no E.Asian winners of the Morgan Prize (top national undergraduate math research award) even though most white and Indian winners are former competition winners.
- the same for grad school fellowships (compare the tiny proportion of Hertz fellowship East Asian American recipients to the 60+ percent share of Siemens AP scholars or high school science contest winners); Ivy League valedictorians and Phi Beta Kappa numbers relative to the Asian share of the selection pool (e.g., the top 200 students per year by SAT+ high school GPA, at each university); or professional prizes and tenure appointments in theoretical math/physics/CS.
- a mountain of Law School Admissions Committee studies (see their website) on LSAT, law school GPA, and bar exam passage (and failure...) rates. Combined LSAT + GPA regression overpredicts bar exam pass rates for Asians. Asian GPA gets lower year by year in law school compared to whites. High verbal SAT scores are 2x more common for Asians than whites in high school, but this advantage disappears on the LSAT, and the Asian LSAT distribution as a whole is well below that of whites, both for the 1990's and much more recent data. The distribution looks like a mixture of two subgroups, gen-1 immigrants + native English speakers, but this does not explain why the latter category that has the same upper LSAT score distribution as whites, lost its huge advantage from the high school verbal SAT results. That is, Asian verbal SAT scores "overpredict" LSAT performance, and Asians underperform their college-level credentials in law school and beyond..........
continued ....
- As with the LSAT, immigration and socioeconomics does not account for the bar passage rates. Whites in the lowest income level considered passed the bar exam at rates higher than the wealthiest category of Asians. Control for difficulty of bar exam in different regions did not make any of the negative Asian effects go away. The Asian disadvantage in LSAT and LGPA and bar passage has been a robust pattern for as long as LSAC has asked the questions. The implication is that a meritocratic admissions policy would apply an Espenshade-style penalty to Asian LSAT scores. I assume this is illegal, but it is a politically incorrect academic reality if the past 20 years of studies, all singing the same tune, are correct.
- medical licensing exam pass rates (USMLE step 1) are overpredicted for Asians based on GPA and MCAT score. Authors of one of the studies that pointed this out suggested to use a different medical school admissions formula for Asians, so as to avoid the disastrous scenario of several years' med school plus loans followed by a failure on USMLE. Those authors were mostly East Asian, and their proposal amounts to applying yet another Espenshade-style penalty of some number of virtual MCAT points for Asians to more truthfully assess their prospects after medical school. Whites not being able to compete under a meritocracy was not a concern of the study.
In addition to objective underperformance, there has been no subjective sign of any CCNY-style overperformance from East Asian-Americans at the UCs where, if discrimination existed, many highly qualifed Asians locked out from Stanford and the Ivy Leagues would find refuge. From the data I looked at (admittedly not complete), it does not appear that Asians at Berkeley are even reaching their population share of NSF fellowships and academic prizes compared to whites. Note that to assess population share you need not the W:A ratio of enrolled students but the one for students with high average SAT score, where the Asian proportion is much higher."
My own comment on Siserune's analysis:
I do believe Indians have low mean IQs, but I also suspect Indians perform (in terms of productive research) about the same as Whites of a similar IQ. As you go from elite contests to elite research awards, Indians and Chinese in the US are about equal in numbers (Hertz winners, IEEE Fellows, ACM Fellows, ACM Doctoral dissertation winners, Morgan Prize winners, Cole Prize, etc) and are dwarfed by Jews/Whites. Yan Shen will continue to claim that Asians are uber geniuses, but there is little evidence for such overconfidence. Here's what I think is true: for a Chinese to perform as well at research at a White/Jew, he/she needs significantly more cognitive horsepower as measures by g. To quote Christopher Chang, Asians are good at optimizing, not theory building. Something RKU once worried about on a Mangan's thread, but refused to repeat on Steve Hsu's blog :)
Also, Steve, was that Sorkin line correct about the existence of more genius-level IQs in China than there are people in the US?
No. Chinese population is ~4x that of the U.S. Even by a pretty sliphsod, idiomatic definition of genius (+3STD) we're talking only ~1/740th of the population. Assuming a Chinese mean IQ of 105, that's still only 1/260th of the population at +3STD, which even with the 4X multiplier for size still leaves you almost a couple orders of magnitude off.
And we're not even talking about significant material resource "nurture" problems that would depress IQ's among the poorest from their theoretical natural levels. In other words, mean IQ may be less than the expected 105 given food shortages in rural areas, etc.
I would tend to take the fantastic Shanghai scores with a big grain of salt. Cheating for the purposes of face and national pride is a very ingrained vice in East Asia. Remember those faked results by the South Korean cloning expert (undoubtedly a brilliant scientist, who still could not resist fudging his data)?
So China will definetely be a superpower soon, but it will never become an unstoppable hegemon unless U.S. statecraft is so maladroit that it alienates natural allies like Japan, Korea, etc. that would normally seek a U.S alliance against Chinese domination (never know, though, given the stupidity of our leaders).
Personally I think the whole "India-Brazil going to be the next superpower" thing is the liberal version of the Axis-of-evil.
Right now china has too much cheap labor, in a century or so, they'll have too much diversity.
You'd have to be daft to not notice the Chinese are a smart people.
Those smarts guarantee them a shot at being a superpower, if they want it anyway.
However unless they develop really good institutions, more respect for the individual and more importantly high social trust in time enough to prevent an ecological holocaust they'll never get there.
"So if the numbers are correct, how the heck has China remained so backward for the last 300 years? Something doesn't make sense. Were they not as backward as I thought? What kept them down? This must mean there is some factor besides IQ that is mighty important to Big League development."
Simple. Big authoritarian government and hindrance to free market.
It's really no different than whites complaining nowadays about not making as much money as before because bad ole' Obummer and his White House croonies are keeping them down.
To me, the real tell-tale sign that Chinese and Koreans (the Japanese seem to do better here) are missing something critical to high level success is their strangely low numbers in any list of top achievers, even in the STEM fields they very much favor.
I spent a little time perusing the list of lists of award winners in the sciences and technology found on Wikipedia, and the scarcity of Chinese and Korean names could hardly be more obvious.
Take a look for yourself (go to the section on awards in science and technology).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes,_medals,_and_awards
While I didn't go through the lists systematically, I'm not sure that there's a single such list on which Chinese/Korean names exceeds 10%; I'd guess that the overall average might be 5% or less (if you think it isn't so, I'd be genuinely interested in hearing your report).
Contrast these numbers with the numbers of Asians at elite universities -- 15-20% overall, and likely closer to 25-30% in STEM majors.
Now this Asian category presumably includes more than those of Chinese and Korean ancestry, but likely they together dominate the category -- let's say 20% of STEM majors.
So what happens to those students as they make their way into the world? What makes their numbers decline from 20% (probably at the lowest value) in elite STEM programs, all the way down to perhaps 5%?
They are, I think, missing something crucial to success. Creativity very likely is a sizable component, but there may be others.
"High verbal SAT scores are 2x more common for Asians than whites in high school, but this advantage disappears on the LSAT, and the Asian LSAT distribution as a whole is well below that of whites"
I'm not too familiar with stats but I think there's a simple explanation for this observation.
At my law school there were probably 2-3x more East Asians than their % of the state population.
So I assume at Asians are taking the LSAT at a 2x-3x greater rate than whites. Most 17 year olds take the SAT so Asians don't take it at much of a greater rate.
"to avoid the disastrous scenario of several years' med school plus loans followed by a failure on USMLE."
I don't think USMLE passage is much of an issue. For first timers:
92% - U.S. M.D. medical school graduates
81% - U.S. D.O. osteopathic medical school graduates
This must mean there is some factor besides IQ that is mighty important to Big League development.
The adage goes, "Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration”, but without the inspiration, all you have is a sweaty worker. Anyone who has ever tried a brainstorming exercise with Asian American teens working as summer camp counselors can vouch for the lack of creative ability displayed. “Give me some creative ideas for activities we can do with the campers,” is met with a blank stare. When creative ideas are finally put into place by others (truth be told – in my experience, invariably by white male counselors), the AA kids are the ones asking, “Well, what do we do?” “What do we do after that?” “Can we have a schedule?” All the i’s must be dotted and all the t’s crossed. AA kids are rule followers, and seem utterly unable and / or unwilling to wing it.
If there is more racial mixing, then that will be a different story. A nation full of Tiger Woods would be a viable world beater; and, due to the historically warm welcome that China gives people of other cultures (eye roll goes here), that outcome is vastly more likely to take place in the States than it is in China.
China may one day have the same revelation about the US that Clive James talked about Germany having in regards to Eisenhower during WWII; "not only did the Americans have better music, they had better Germans."
"The Mongols conquered China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, among other countries, in the 13th century. Modern Mongols are somewhere around 90 IQ."
Sure maybe modern Mongols - they're blood has been diluted by taking foreign women from the lands they conquered (Turks, Russians, etc.) with lower IQ. Original Mongols of Genghis Khan's time? probably much purer the very prototypical model of the East Asian race.
However unless they develop really good institutions, more respect for the individual and more importantly high social trust in time enough to prevent an ecological holocaust they'll never get there.
One of the problems the Chinese have is that what made them smart is not particularly conducive to social trust.
Chinese society developed as a collection of patriarchal clans with complex hierarchies based on both birth order and achievement. It's too complicated to outline in a few words, but Confucianism, in stressing respect for elder males, ensured that older brothers had primacy, but were also responsible for the younger males. Then, the emphasis (also Confucian) on cultivation and ritual helped encourage an imperially enforced meritocracy.
So what you had was competing, agnatically-organized kinship groups, each of which was trying to produce and promote illustrious males by one means or another, because this would raise the entire clan's status. This trend was strongest in the south (Shanghai and below), as repeated invasions by Altaic peoples in the north wrecked the stability required to maintain clans for many generations.
I'm fairly sure that inter-clan competition had a strong influence on the development of Chinese smarts, particularly because, unlike India (and the ME to some degree) there was no real consolation prize for second place (or third, fourth, etc.). However, it also created the kind of clannish culture and outlook that precludes high-trust societies. So, in a sense, the Chinese are dealing with a problem that is something like what plagues the cousin-marrying Arabs, and if even Chairman Mao couldn't change them, I highly doubt a more liberal, tolerant society will either.
But yes, they are smart.
"By the same token, China will not dislodge the US from its top-dog position (or only transiently if so) as it will experience a loss of demographic vitality due to its ageing population and is just too cramped and resource poor, all of which will act as a brake on its development sooner or later."
I doubt it. China still has 1.3 billion people, no matter how much it ages, it will have vastly more people of working age than the US; more importantly, China is NOT A WELFARE STATE - in other words, if you're old and poor in China with no family you will die in the streets. They won't be a burden to the state.
US has no chance. If a tiny island country like Japan can have that much power (that can compete with the US though not quite), China which is populated by the same genetically and culturally identical people with 20 times the resources will easily beat the US.
This is easy. 10,000 years of rice culture in East Asia has selected for a population that applies ingenuity and diligence to individual tasks that are inextricably part of a greater whole that is not to be put at risk.
Everyone has their own little portion of this giant waterworks system for which they are responsible. It takes some brains to keep this up, but also some prudence that you don't screw it up for all your neighbors, especially downstream ones.
W/out some sort of external driver, East Asian societies naturally gravitate back to a fat, dumb, happy state of keep the machine rolling, as in Edo period or even nowadays, Japan is sort of clamming up again.
There is more to this than simply raw problem solving ability. Japanese TV is always showing the most clever little things, phenomena, etc. My impression is that these folks are truly transfixed by details, which supports the rice culture hypothesis.
As for China, fuhgeddaboutit. Can anyone name even one big, famous Chinese company that is doing anything innovative? Even given the relative paucity of creativity in Japan/Korea, at a similar stage of development, (70's in Japan, 90's in Korean), the average schmoe could name a couple of big Japanese/Korean outfits like Toyota or Samsung.
China isn't anything other than a giant sweatshop. When the foreigners go home, the driving function disappears and they will revert the the navel gazing, semi-autistic fascination w/shiny, whirling objects, natural state of east asian societies.
India isn't even worth a laugh...
The biggest question is whether the Western societies will survive the diversity onslaught enough to remain the sole drivers of the modern world such as they have been for the past 500 years.
I expect not, and like at the end of the Roman Empire, another victim of diversity, there may be a period of regression where things get sorted out a little before forward momentum is regained.
These things seem to happen in waves.
Anonymous: To quote Christopher Chang, Asians are good at optimizing, not theory building. Something RKU once worried about on a Mangan's thread, but refused to repeat on Steve Hsu's blog :)
Hmmm... I'm afraid the memory escapes me.
Matt Strictland: You'd have to be daft to not notice the Chinese are a smart people...However unless they develop really good institutions, more respect for the individual and more importantly high social trust...they'll never get there.
Actually, I think a crucial issue is the distinction between warranted and unwarranted "high social trust."
The U.S. today is a relatively high social trust society because this is generally warranted on the local level and for most of the last century was probably also warranted on the elite level as well. However, I strongly question whether this latter assumption is still correct.
Consider that just a couple of months ago, a leading brokerage firm run by a former Senator/Governor/Goldman Sachs CEO suddenly went bankrupt due to highly leveraged bets on government debt. At that time, over a billion dollars of customer funds disappeared, and now after eight weeks no one has yet been able to figure out what happened to the customer funds. If that's an example of a "high social trust" economy, Nigeria must be Fukuyama's poster-child.
And don't forget it was just a couple of years ago that a sixty-billion (!) dollar Ponzi scheme exploded, which had been operating for over thirty years under the nose of the authorities and despite endless detailed accusations to SEC officials and the media. More high social trust, Nigerian-style?
I suspect that part of what makes American society somewhat confusing to outside observers is the bifurcated nature of the social trust parameter, which is directly opposite to that in many parts of the world. Most low-level government clerks, school teachers, or police officers don't take bribes; it's just their highest-level superiors who do, though this is usually done under a different description. As near as I can tell, I think a case can be made that America today has the most totally corrupt and incompetent ruling elite of any developed nation in the world. This has had important consequences in the past, and will probably have more in the future.
An interesting model to consider would be be a country like Sweden ruled by a tiny branch of the Sicilian Mafia. Until the Mafiosi were eventually dislodged, such a society would behave in strange and peculiar ways, and generate very unusual results under standard metrics of social trust or corruption.
Someone mentioned British divide and rule in India.
Lets be clear here, India didnt even exist before British rule, so comparison with China falls down a bit there.
And of course divide and rule was easy for the British as 'India' was already divided before they arrived.
Germany and the Netherlands are the smartest countries.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-381057/European-IQ-map-proves-Brits-brainy.html
"Simple. Big authoritarian government and hindrance to free market.
It's really no different than whites complaining nowadays about not making as much money as before because bad ole' Obummer and his White House croonies are keeping them down."
Further, even under "bad ole' Obummer and his White House croonies", you can freely chat/argue on all ideas, own guns and occupy the WS, etc. In both current CCP China and Imperial China, you would be shot by firing squads or got head cut off quite literally if you are a highflyer too out the mainstream official line.
If you assume a genetic component to mean IQ of a population, in the absence of contradictory data, it is reasonable to assume that the mean IQ of Chinese people will be similar to that of the other East Asian populations such as Japan and Korea. It seems to me the burden of argument is on those who want to argue that the mean IQ of mainland Chinese people is significantly different than these other groups.
Has no one ever heard of selection bias? Combing through an English language collaborative wiki created by laymen for awards given out primarily by English language organizations based in accomplishments circulated through English language academic circles.
So if the numbers are correct, how the heck has China remained so backward for the last 300 years?
If figures I remember from one of Fernand Braudel's books are correct, China wasn't backward 300 years ago, or even 250 years ago. Acc. Braudel, the world leader in per capita GDP the late 18th century was the United States, followed by China. But Chinese incomes were very unevenly distributed, with the masses living at Malthusian levels.
Weirdly, and horribly, the worst-off peasants lived in the most productive areas. More surplus = more bailiffs etc. to extract the surplus for the benefit of the elite. Three harvests a year = you work that much harder. The common people lived better in semi-wastelands like Mongolia.
Of course, China underwent a collapse in the 19th and early 20th centuries, while the West leapt far ahead, so by the time of Deng's reforms it was indeed very backward in terms per capita income.
Cennbeorc
"So I assume at Asians are taking the LSAT at a 2x-3x greater rate than whites."
Why would you assume this? When math and science careers are basically barred whites from the moment they graduate high school, whites are going to be entering law school in greater numbers since this is a field you can enter even with a liberal arts major.
Standardized tests have become somewhat of a crutch, don't you think? We were sorting people by ability level pretty accurately before we had SATs and PISAs.
Besides, the US shouldn't have to absorb so many "deserving" immigrants that we have no open countryside left. Create your own standardized tests to get into your own universities, please. Then go forth into your own countryside to build factories and skyscrapers and such. Become the envy of the world while starting a flood of wanna be citizens pouring over your borders. Immigration really shouldn't be a zero sum game in which there's only room for the new, super-successful ethnics or where there are only a handful of countries in which everyone and their cousins want to live.
OpenID Aaron Baugher said.. 12/19/11 5:50 AM
You're in the neighborhood of my hypothesis. But I don't think the other thing is "geniuses" so much as it is inventors/innovators and the conditions that nurture them. East Asians seem remarkably conformist compared to West Europeans. They seem to prefer a conservative approach to life where a consensus must be reached before rocking the societal boat. Kinda like when they burned their boats after exploring the Pacific. It seems the opposite of what Western Europeans would do. They never did much with their printing press (though their language was the opposite of the Europeans' in terms of lending itself to the PP). They never did much with gunpowder. Didn't it take Japan an inordinate amount of time to ditch the swords and pick up the guns? In a sense, western Europeans had to drag east Asians into the modern world kicking and screaming. Their record of exploration is pitiful compared to western Europe's.
WE history is rife with stories of individuals bucking the status quo, and society's feelings and traditions be damned. It helps to compare China to Europe, rather than any individual country. Could China even be an individual country today, if it had been peopled with WEs rather than EAs? I doubt it. It would probably be a patchwork of competing states and peoples, like Europe is today. It's hard to imagine Europe taking the route China did. The closest they ever got was Rome, and Europe promptly cannibalized the western half as soon as doing so became viable.
I think we can take a stab at this using OCEAN; higher Euro Openness, higher Extraversion, lower Agreeableness.
But it's just an hypothesis...
Right now china has too much cheap labor, in a century or so, they'll have too much diversity.
Right. China has a looong time before they have to start considering Inviting the World. They still have 700m peons to burn through first.
OFF TOPIC:
Nicholas Wade is apparently leaving the New York Times.
A step backwards for HBD in the MSM.
http://www.observer.com/2011/12/new-york-times-buyouts-leaked-12192011/
Some information I found on Chinese website regarding PISA 2009 China， Participating provinces:
Rich provinces:
Shanghai
Beijing
Tianjin
Zhejiang
Jiangshu
Middle and lower income provinces：
Hebei
Jilin
Hubei
Sichuan
Poor provinces：
Hainan
Yunan (Including dozens of minorities)
Ningxia （Predominately muslin minorities)
According to the following website (local media report), for Zhejiang province,
http://www.anhuinews.com/zhuyeguanli/system/2011/01/11/003654070.shtml
Reading: 525
Math: 598
Science: 567
Schools include 80% schools from rural areas and small towns, 20% from big cities in Zhejiang Province.
Average of 12 Provinces:
Reading: 486
Math: 550
Science: 524
I've read on Halfsigma that for thousands of years the Han have competed for survival based on being more efficient farmers which helps them dominate low cost production nowadays but limits innovation as risk-taking was not selected for as it is was with pastoralists such as Germans.
In addition, surplus food creates central authority to enforce rules so personal integrity is less important. If you don't care about your relationship with faceless strangers you can't build a brand. Sooner or later almost every Chinese company will destroy their brand equity to make a short term profit by taking advantage of the user's trust in the brand to sell them junk. The same lack of integrity means that employees work for their own benefit, rather than for the group good which prevents a company for becoming a world beater.
As for innovating, women don't innovate either. I read a comment once that said that creativity has two well springs. First is IQ. Smarter people are able to innovate because they can better link separate ideas into something new. Second is hormonally-driven competition between males. Poor black men could invent Jazz, R&B and Hip Hop in one century although they have an average IQ one standard deviation below white men. Perhaps the same instinct combined with higher IQ in white men drives them to innovate in areas other than the arts such as science and technology. Chinese men have less testosterone than White men at puberty (although higher T in the womb gives them their maths advantage).
Anyway, they don't need to because they have their own skill of withstanding more pain than everyone else while they can always copy the useful innovations from abroad.
The USA and China are complimentary and Simon in London's French/German analogy is a very good one. If we head in the post WWII relationship direction things will work out o.k. for the world.
"For example, Ramanujan was a self-educated mathematical genius..."
It's true Ramanujan was self-educated and apparently a rather aspie mathematical genius, but it is not true that he received no math training, likely quite the opposite. His parents took in lodgers, I believe the most important who was a young first-year college math teacher who practiced his lectures at the house (though wikipedia just says "two college students who were lodgers"). Due to this he also had access to key math books and people who knew why they were important. This was when he was 10-13.
"East Asians seem remarkably conformist compared to West Europeans. They seem to prefer a conservative approach to life where a consensus must be reached before rocking the societal boat."
This may be changing with the rise of political correctness. How many independent minded Westerners do you come across these days? I suppose there are some in hightech but in culture and politics? No.
"As for innovating, women don't innovate either."
That would have been news to Stevie Nicks.
Besides, even if 'women don't innovate', they are the inspiration that drives men to compete and innovate.
"Chinese men have less testosterone than White men at puberty (although higher T in the womb gives them their maths advantage)."
I dunno. Japanese cinema of the 50s and 60s was one of the most innovative in the world, second perhaps only to France and US but sometimes eclipsing both in sheer audacity and power of expression.
Hong Kong cinema of the 80s pretty much redefined action filmmaking.
“Give me some creative ideas for activities we can do with the campers,” is met with a blank stare.
So, what creative camping stuff is there? I don't even understand the question. There's hiking, boating, fishing, and etc when you go camping. If you wanna be creative, sign up for art school.
But you gotta admit Chinese cooking is a lot more creative than Anglo stuff. Fish and chips is good but not very creative. I just wish Chinese weren't so creative with certain animals like dogs and cats.
American creativity today:
Kid comes home from school.
Father asks, 'so, what did you learn today?'
Kid says, 'we learned something about Michelangelo.'
Father says, 'so, what did he do?'
Kid says, 'I don't know but he was gay.'
This was on Frontline show once on a special about California schools.
Population in participating 12 provinces:
Rich provinces:
Shanghai
23,019,148
Beijing
19,612,368
Tianjin
12,938,224
Zhejiang
54,426,891
Jiangsu
78,659,903
Middle and lower income provinces：
Hebei
71,854,202
Jilin
27,462,297
Hubei
57,237,740
Sichuan
80,418,200
Poor provinces：
Hainan
8,671,518
Yunnan (Including dozens of minorities)
45,966,239
Ningxia （Predominately muslin minorities)
6,301,350
Total: 486,568,080
US Population: 312,805,000
"To quote Christopher Chang, Asians are good at optimizing, not theory building."
I dunno. This may be true of modern economics, but I think the problem of China was maybe its over-enthusiasm for theory building. There is Taoism and the whole yin yang business. There's the I Ching. There's all sorts of stuff about the 'science of spirits'. In the West, science is science, and spirituality is spirituality. The Chinese turned spirituality into a kind of art-science which could be understood through a web of theories. Western medicine is mostly science. There was miracle healing, but that was seen as divine.
But look at acupuncture. Chinese have an elaborate theory about spirits in the body and how it should be regulated. It's scientifically caca, but it's not simplistic. And the reason why Chinese go for bear bile, tiger dicks, and rhino horns is cuz they have all these theories about how the essence of the animal mingles with your own body. Maybe this mixture of spirituality and science made Chinese into muddled theorists, but Chinese have loved theories. Even Confucius's fortune cookie mottos were turned into elbaborate theories. And there was the school of legalism as developed by Han Fei Tzu, someone I had to read in college. (A totalitarian nut).
And Chinese art theory was pretty elaborate and actually may have held back innovation. Chinese scholars were so deeply into the theoretics of art--what is and isn't art, what is proper, what is wrong--that Chinese artists became overly conscious of the correct the theoretical approach to art. This could be why Chinese music lacks spontaneity.
In the 19th century and 20th century, it was said Germans were heavy on theory whereas Anglo-Americans were heavy on pragmatism. Germany created the modern university while America produced inventive wizards. Germany gave us Heisenberg and Einstein. US gave us Henry Ford and Edison. Germans were supposed to be deep thinkers. Americans were supposed to be big doers.
With the German emigre--heavily Jewish--into America, the nature of American intellecual culture changed from the pragmatic and empirical Anglo-American model to the more theoretic model of Germans(and Central European Jews).
One difference between US and China is American intellectual tradition is a continuation of the WEstern model. For China, there's a been a break from a thousand yr tradition in Chinese theories to the Western one. It may take time for Chinese to really get used to things.
I lived in China briefly. Even in Beijing, it was my impression most Chinese were fairly dumb. Those in Xian were even dumber.
Fairly typical was a conversation with a high-up at Tsinghua University. Now, to get to the office I had to go up three flights of stairs in the Engineering building (this was late 1990s). I nearly killed myself -- the lights were all off, the stairway had no handrail AT ALL, and the steps were crumbling. This at basically China's equivalent to MIT/Stanford, mixed with Yale. I had to use my penlight (fortunately I always have it handy) just to CAREFULLY make my way up the steps and not kill myself.
The conversation centered on the Power Ministry's desire to build a massive network of wind-farms. I said they were quite useful for the extreme West, where two hours of intermittent power beats no power at all (it was extremely unlikely any power lines would be run there). But with a cost at approx. 28 cents per kilowatt hour, vs. say 6 cents for coal, would not most places realistically opt for coal, particularly for manufacturing (requiring guaranteed power?) Her answer was that the ministry had decided, so that was that. Everyone would fall in line.
Think about this -- since liberalization in the late seventies, not a SINGLE INNOVATION has come out of China. Not a single one!
More China stories. I toured the big cement plant outside Beijing, about twenty miles away IIRC. A hell-hole if ever there was one, with coal and cement dust literally covering houses on the way to the plant. Hell if I ever saw one. The place was a co-owned joint venture with some SOE.
The Western manager told us he had to deal with Chinese peasants. Used to pooping in the fields. They liked to urinate and defecate in the stairwells, so he told us to mind that as we toured the place. They also prepared food in the restrooms.
For those interested in the historical record on China, the Barbara Tuchman book on Stillwell in China is a good read. Short version: Stillwell was not convinced that the Chinese were very smart at all, on average, in his very extensive dealings with them before and during WWII.
Both China and Japan faced Western imperialism, but Japan much smaller though more cohesive became a giant while China was a disaster. Russia is another example, of a few very smart, gifted people (Korolev, Kalashnikov, etc.) in a mass of idiots. Historically those who dealt with average Russians from Catherine the Great onward have found them fairly dumb.
Tacitus remarked that the average German shuddered at the thought of a neighbor's fire (there was not much food in Northern Europe at the time). Only the break-through of the Moldboard Plow allowed real farming to support large populations around 800 AD or so (during the Dark Ages ironically). In many ways the European character is formed from low-density populations, you can see this in how the New England colonies immediately set about recreating East Anglia with low density instead of urbanization and farmland.
Historically, the kind of society that produces: relatively high trust, but individualistic, and prone to revolutions at corrupt elites, tends to be a winner. IF that holds, the current crop of corrupt elites may be in for a global Western shock.
Eliot Cohen of "Conquered into Liberty" asserts that the colonists felt they could win against the British in revolt because they'd seen in the Seven Years War (aka French and Indian Wars) how incompetent the British were militarily, and rising anger at corruption by the Royal officials coupled with lack of fear made revolt inevitable.
“ According to the following website (local media report), for Zhejiang province,
http://www.anhuinews.com/zhuyeguanli/system/2011/01/11/003654070.shtml
Reading: 525
Math: 598
Science: 567
Schools include 80% schools from rural areas and small towns, 20% from big cities in Zhejiang Province.
Average of 12 Provinces (* with total population : 486,568,080 )
Reading: 486
Math: 550
Science: 524"
Thank you very much! If it turns out to be true and verified officially, then the 12 provinces ( with total population 486,568,080 ) rank like this on global stage:
Reading: #28 (Italy #29)
Math: #4 (Korea #5)
Science: #11 (Netherlands #12)
The results fit common sense quite well, I would say : on Maths, ahead of Korea and Japan, alone the line with other ethnic Chinese states such as Singapore , HK and Taiwan. Science scores were generally in the line as well I reckon. Why Reading was so low?? Any explanations?
Steve’s “puzzle” solved then?
What surprises me is that traditional Math powerhouses such as JiangSu and ZheJiang for instance, which are almost always quite ahead of Shanghai in GaoKao, fell several points below in PISA this time… No surprise that the rural kids could beat rich counterparts in cities on Maths and Science, since it’s quite common in GaoKao.
The scores across the board also offer a further evidence that Han Chinese in their heartlands, being in richer cities or poor rural areas, are largely homogenous with similar IQ.
China right now is South Korea in 1983 so I wouldn't expect too many innovative companies.
I can name just 1: Huawei.
From out of nowhere it became the best telecom equipment manufacturer, even conquering the Nordic home market the of old order of the telecom equipment industry.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/global/30telecom.html?pagewanted=all
I see no comment here on what I believe to be China's biggest weakness - that their one-child policy discriminates against the Han in favor of China's ethnic minorities (to which said policy does not apply). The fact that China would have a self-destructive policy that encourages lower-IQ minorities to have more children than the higher-IQ Han seems contradictory to the supposed high-minded long-term central planning that China's government is known for. That is, until you remember that China's government is still communist and socialist at its core. And nothing is more anathema to communism and socialism than nationalism and ethnic solidarity.
Now I see it – regarding to my previous surprise "why traditional GaoKao Math & Science powerhouses such as JiangSu and ZheJiang fell several points below Shanghai in PISA", here is the explaination:
1. GaoKao is a universal test of ALL children at that age group, giving a complete and accurate picture;
2. Whereas PISA is a sample thereby has sample errors. Perhaps most importantly PISA artificially selected 80% rural and 20% city in case of ZheJiang, which twisted the accuracy.
(* another non-trival factor is that questions PISA in general are much easier than those in Gaokao,. This negatively affects results of the best and the brightest – a different topic though)
In light of this, I would say that if PISA has done random selection( as in ShangHai and most other countries) in ZheJiang , its Maths score for instance would have been most likely in the ball park of 620vÃs-a-vÃs Shanghai’s 600, according to their respective GaoKao track records on Maths and Science for the past decade.
Dito with JiangSu.
As I said last year that if Shanghai could score #1 in Math, or HK /Singapore score #2 and #3, then JiangSu and ZheJiang must be off the chart.
"I can name just 1: Huawei"
Another one just off my head: BGI
- world's largest and the leading genetics researcher -- doing some discrete and pretty cutting edge stuffs... - just see Steve Hsu's lastest blog entry on that.
As someone who has taught as an English prof in East Asia for a while, I must mention that with regard to Indians and Chinese you need only look at Malaysia, which has minorities of both. The Straits Chinese completely dominate Malaysian business, while the Indians complain that they don't have a fair share of the economic pie. Granted the Chinese outnumber the Malaysian Indians, but if the latter were so smart there'd be more in dominant positions.
I did have some quite bright Indians in my classes during my year in Malaysia, but I also saw an Indian neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur, and it wasn't a pretty sight. The Straits Chinese that I knew, by contrast, had great homes in nice suburbs.
There's a lot I could say of my own opinions of what Chinese intelligence really amounts to, but I'll just point out that all the East Asian countries never got past medieval level on their own and were trying to hide inside themselves when the West opened them up. They owe pretty much all that they've got to Westerners.
Giant bicycle from Taiwan is the only really "A" brand in a consumer business that I can think of. There's a story of when they first used carbon fibre which at the time was a very expensive material. As is typical based on my 16 years manufacturing in Taiwan and China, the factory screwed up the production the first time around. The founder got in a digger and buried all the useless frames in the front of the factory so the staff had to walk over the "dead bodies" on the way to work every day. He was tapping into the Chinese aversion to waste which I believe is genetic and also equally genetic, imo, sensitivity to shame. Perhaps also a cultural belief in ghosts and the spirits of inanimate objects.
The amazing thing is that up to now so few Chinese business people can build a consumer brand despite making so many consumer products and having a massive home market.
"I lived in China briefly. Even in Beijing, it was my impression most Chinese were fairly dumb. Those in Xian were even dumber."
Rotfl. What every Chinese village needs is a Lee Kuan Yew.
China really needs inspired and imaginative leadership. Some of its leaders are capable men, but most are mediocrities and their main emotions are fear and anxiety.
Also, there needs to be some kind of harmony between the governing ideology and socio-economic reality. Modern China's ideological foundation is Maoism but China hasn't been Maoist in practice for decades. There's something weird about a regime that extols the greatness of Chairman--who also killed tens of millions--and tells people to get rich(and has stuffed its own pockets). It didn't really matter when poor Chinese were scrambling to make some money in the 80s and 90s, but China has produced a lot of thinking, questioning, educated people since then, and so this fiction cannot go on forever.
It's kinda like modern Japan up to WWII embracing both modernization and maintaining the myth of the divinity of the Emperor(and how his family was descended from gods).
Whatever one may say about the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan, there was no great contradiction between what Chiang stood for and how he governed Taiwan. He was for modernization, business, westernization. He wasn't opposed to democracy either in principle; he just thought it would take time for it to be possible.
Mainland China still officially maintains the ideology of Marxism-Maoism but follows the Singapore model. All this is gonna lead to is a lot of cynicism among its best and brightest.
"was that Sorkin line correct about the existence of more genius-level IQs in China than there are people in the US?"
That line was just Sorkin playing on yellow peril. SOCIAL NETWORK is about a ruthless smart Jew destroying the competition--especially against the wasp Winkles--and taking over the internet. People are likely to get the impression, "Jews are taking over the world." Partly, Sorkin is very proud that a Jewish guy won and triumphed. But he also fears this draws too much attention to Jewish power. So, he wants the audience to feel that there is LOOMING China with lots of hostile geniuses. So, we should embrace Jewish-American geniuses like Zucker because we'll need them to save our economy against the Chinese. Sorkin may fool a lot of people but not me. It's a part of the Jewish policy to divert American anxieties at Asia(or Muslims). It's like WAR OF THE WORLDS begins with some blue collar worker saying Asian goods are invading American docks. Invasion of space aliens, invasion of yellows. You can't make negative movies about Jews, blacks, or gays, so who else is there but Muzzies and Asians(especially since both communities are small and not vocal)>.
Last night, I heard Mitt Romney yammering about China on Charlie Rose show: how it manipulates its currency, how it steals intellectual property, etc. Now, Chinese are a hostile bunch, and I wouldn't trust any of them. They are also a cruel people.
But there's something wrong the argument that US is a poor victim of China. The biggest profiteers from free trade with China have not been Chinese or even the Chinese elite but American globalist elites. Companies like Walmart have made a killing. Apple makes huge profits by using cheap Chinese labor. In most deals between Chinese and American companies, the latter gets most of the profits.
It was not the Chinese who created the globalist free trade order. Americans did, and China joined in and was welcomed in because American corporations and Wall Street figured they could make a killing from the NWO. Companies could ship factories where workers are paid $1 a day and there are no enviro regulations. And there's a lot of money to be made from transactions all over the world, which is why Wall Street and Soroses of the world love the NWO. Romney gives the impression that China forcibly shut down all those factories in America and built them in China. In fact, American business elites willfully shut down factories here to take full advantage of cheap labor in China. And Romney was in the business of making this possible. So, his playing the Chinese card is really full of shit.
Btw, I wonder what other nation stole a lot of intelligence from Americans. It starts with 'I' and ends in 'L'. So, where is Romney on that?
If a tiny island country like Japan can have that much power (that can compete with the US though not quite), China which is populated by the same genetically and culturally identical people with 20 times the resources will easily beat the US.
lol. This is definitely not the case, and anyone banking on it will be sorely disappointed.
Look at the Admixture runs here, with their multiple Japanese and Han datasets. Dienekes' full post here.
Anyway, you only have to look at them to know that Japanese and all kinds of Chinese are worlds apart. There's no group of Han that produces faces like this and this with any kind of regularity.
There are Han populations with sub-10% Caucasoid admixture in places like Gansu, which is a different matter (the pseudo-Caucasoid look in Japan is attributable to a strong Jomon element). They're poor and intellectually undistinguished, scraping out a peasant existence in something like a colder Sahel.
Whiskey: I lived in China briefly. Even in Beijing, it was my impression most Chinese were fairly dumb. Those in Xian were even dumber.
Well, I admit I usually just skip past the endless yammering of our good friend "Whiskey", since he's such a notoriously pathological liar. But maybe thi sis a mistake.
I suspect we'd could all derive a pretty fair understanding of our world if we just read his claims carefully, and then simply multiply everything by negative one...
Question: were the majority of Indians imported into Fiji, Malaysia, South Africa (ex-plantation colonies) mainly from India's Untouchable Castes? I'm curious: does this alter our perception of the average skills of Indians? Do India's abilities segregate along caste lines?
I have no doubt that China will continue to far outpace India, due to the average differences in IQ mainly. Also India is far more bureaucratized and even more corrupt than China.
Question: were the majority of Indians imported into Fiji, Malaysia, South Africa (ex-plantation colonies) mainly from India's Untouchable Castes? - also caribbean
--
About 50% untouchable dalit castes, as these people were imported for coolie labor
-
Do India's abilities segregate along caste lines?
--
Yes, 12 of the 18 atom scientists in the 1974 Indian nuke test were South Indian Brahmin, who are 1% of the total Indian population
Question: were the majority of Indians imported into Fiji, Malaysia, South Africa (ex-plantation colonies) mainly from India's Untouchable Castes? - also caribbean
--
About 50% untouchable dalit castes, as these people were imported for coolie labor
-
Do India's abilities segregate along caste lines?
--
Yes, 12 of the 18 atom scientists in the 1974 Indian nuke test were South Indian Brahmin, who are 1% of the total Indian population
"Whiskey: I lived in China briefly. Even in Beijing, it was my impression most Chinese were fairly dumb. Those in Xian were even dumber."
If they've read your posts the feeling is mutual.
"Do India's abilities segregate along caste lines?
--
Yes, 12 of the 18 atom scientists in the 1974 Indian nuke test were South Indian Brahmin, who are 1% of the total Indian population "
Of course there´s a ability segregation along Indian caste lines, yet not as much as people generally would believe. Current Indian nuclear technolgy sophitication is quite primitive, to be blunt, comparable to what the West, Soviet and Mao had achieved in late 60´s.
(BTW, Indian´s first nuke tech was not developed indigenously, but an `intentional` leak from Canadian civilian nuke tech at a time.)
So, what creative camping stuff is there?
Turning one of the cabins into a maze with sheets, building a (very rudimentary) covered wagon, pulling it up a slope and trying to steer it downhill, rumbling wildly, until it finally broke apart, laying an elaborate series of booby traps in a designated wooded area and attempting to sneak through without getting caught by one, and several counselors dressing like Indians, rowing across the lake in canoes and staging a solemn, completely made up camp ceremony for wide eyed kids are a few of the activities that I've seen.
China got significant help from the Soviets, for their nuclear program. They've also been successfully engaging in massive tactical espionage against America for at least two decades.
The People's Republic of China began developing nuclear weapons in the late 1950s with substantial Soviet assistance. The order for the Chinese nuclear weapons program, designated by the codename of "02", was given by Chairman Mao Zedong himself, who believed that without a nuclear weapon China would not be taken seriously as a world power. The events of the First Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954-55 cemented Mao's belief that unless China had nuclear weapons of its own, it would constantly be under the threat of nuclear blackmail from the United States.
Prior to 1960, direct Soviet military assistance had included the provision of advisors and a vast variety of equipment. Of the assistance provided, most significant to China's future strategic nuclear capability were an experimental nuclear reactor, facilities for processing uranium, a cyclotron, and some equipment for a gaseous diffusions plant.
Turning one of the cabins into a maze with sheets, building a (very rudimentary) covered wagon, pulling it up a slope and trying to steer it downhill, rumbling wildly, until it finally broke apart, laying an elaborate series of booby traps in a designated wooded area and attempting to sneak through without getting caught by one, and several counselors dressing like Indians, rowing across the lake in canoes and staging a solemn, completely made up camp ceremony for wide eyed kids are a few of the activities that I've seen.
Well, despite my considerable admiration for the Chinese, I have to admit that Americans have been beat flat when it comes to "camping creativity."
So when our country is broke and miserable and theirs is rich and successful, they'll probably hire a few of us as really creative camp counselors...
Peter A.
In deep rural China I met people who knew exactly how much an average lawyer's salary in New York was (and this is well before the internet). Even provincial Han Chinese on average seem pretty bright and aware of how the world works
I dunno. That makes them seem kind of materialistic.
A better example would be, even provincial Han Chinese knew who Rembrandt is?
Whiskey says:
"SINGLE INNOVATION has come out of China. Not a single one!"
Good for them. And I hope it stays that way. There really SHOULD be one innovator country. The idea that there needs to be competitive innovation is absurd. The US is it. Laboratory of the world. Americans are the lab rats. But you know this already sport. Why am I telling you?
"In deep rural China I met people who knew exactly how much an average lawyer's salary in New York was (and this is well before the internet). Even provincial Han Chinese on average seem pretty bright and aware of how the world work."
I once saw a documentary on China and one of the interviewees was a young girl who wanted to go to Harvard. She was not a member of the "elite" or particularly educated. Don't recall her academic credentials, if any were mentioned. Her father was a blue collar worker who just laughed. When I was working in the financial aid office of a state university that had solicited application from Chinese students, I saw a letter from a young man. This letter demanded financial aid because his parents were not rich and had already helped him enough. I guess he figured now it was up to the American taxpayers to fund his education. After all, they must be rich having handed over all their manufacturing base to his country.
In 2009 or so, Lisa See, the American author who is about 1/16 or 1/8 Chinese and therefore considers herself "Chinese" (yeah, right), was in China. Taxi cab drivers and even ostensibly more educated people -- although one never knows about cab drivers -- , were convinced that Americans adopted Chinese girls for their organs. You know, spare kidneys, livers, etc. Now if these Chinese were really so savvy, they'd realize that organ matches are usually within the same race, and sometimes the same ethnic group. Nevertheless, however Ms. See tried to tell them that that was not the case, they persisted in their convictions.
Goofy white liberals just have no clue how they are perceived by their sacred, non-white victims. Mostly they are perceived as, well, goofy, working insanely against their own best interests and those of their children. At worst they are seen as sneaky hypocrites, saying one thing, acting another.
"Also, people with learning disabilities and such are not "mainstreamed" and never take these tests either, which also brings up the averages a bit."
A Chinese woman who had left China to live in America (she had married a VOA guy and that was a no-no; she'd even been a party member) told me that mentally retarded people are sterilized in China. I don't know how retarded they have to be. Physically defective people are similarly forbidded to breed if their defects are known to be genetic.
The Chinese don't need more people--yet--and don't mess around on this subject.
On a different note, they perhaps are not as bad as some people think when it comes to animals. Apparently when a sicko girl wearing high heels, stomped a kitten to death on Chinese youtube, she got quite an avalanche of condemnatory comments from other Chinese.
I hope they do not allow the kitten-stomper to breed.
You don't need Hispanics and blacks to create a HUGE housing bubble. Stupid government policy will do.
Re: Diversity in China and India
One huge advantage China has going forward will indeed be the strong homogeneity in regards to their ethnic demographics. Other than the Muslims (Hui people) in the West, most Chinese "minorities" can easily past themselves off as Han as their genes are not that far off. I'm willing to bet 95% of Tibetans, Manchurians, etc who settled in White America will simply be written off as another Chinaman.
From a diversity standpoint, this gives them a HUGE leg up on India which will continue to struggle with not only ethnic divide, but also huge regionalism and their retarded Hindu caste system. (same way US is being held down by the disparity of whites and NAMs).
"SINGLE INNOVATION has come out of China. Not a single one!"
What about chop suey? Okay, so it's Chinese-American, but it has roots in China.
Btw, I hope we were less 'innovative' with stuff like 'gay marriage', 'multicultism', 'gay pride parades', 'flash mobs', 'gangsta rap', 'open borders', etc.
Looks to me like most social innovation amounts to elites coming up with new ideas to hurt the rest of us.
Okay, China has the brains, but does it have the values, virtues, and vision to harness brain power efficiently, meaningfully, and productively?
History shows Chinese too often choose pains over brains, or confuse pains for brains.
Jews think in terms of 'take something complex and simplify it into a formula, like E = MC2.'
Chinese think in terms of 'take something simple and complicate it into useless grand theory, like 2 + 2 = 10 + 5 - 8 + 10 + 10 - 10 - 9 - 4.'
Other than the Muslims (Hui people) in the West, most Chinese "minorities" can easily past themselves off as Han as their genes are not that far off.
"Hui" has a specific ethnic designation; it's definitely not a generic term for Muslims in China and is unambiguously exclusive of Turkic Muslims like the Uyghurs. Beneath their skullcaps, the Hui are physically rather similar to the Han, though a light Caucasoid strain is sometimes evident, and you will hear them claim things like how their foreign blood makes them handsomer.
I'm willing to bet 95% of Tibetans, Manchurians, etc who settled in White America will simply be written off as another Chinaman.
That's a pretty immaterial point. One could also point to how the Japanese are apt to mix up Mexicans, Arabs, and people from the Indian subcontinent. So what?
The self-conception of, e.g., Tibetans vis-a-vis Hans owes little to how good foreigners are at telling them apart, and it's mistaken to think that your incapacity to see clear boundaries means that those peoples likewise perceive themselves to be indistinguishable. Even considerable overlap fails to exclude an opposition of somatic ideals.
Other than the Muslims (Hui people) in the West, most Chinese "minorities" can easily past themselves off as Han as their genes are not that far off.
"Hui" has a specific ethnic designation; it's definitely not a generic term for Muslims in China and is unambiguously exclusive of Turkic Muslims like the Uyghurs. Beneath their skullcaps, the Hui are physically rather similar to the Han, though a light Caucasoid strain is sometimes evident, and you will hear them claim things like how their foreign blood makes them handsomer.
I'm willing to bet 95% of Tibetans, Manchurians, etc who settled in White America will simply be written off as another Chinaman.
That's a pretty immaterial point. One could also point to how the Japanese are apt to mix up Mexicans, Arabs, and people from the Indian subcontinent. So what?
The self-conception of, e.g., Tibetans vis-a-vis Hans owes little to how good foreigners are at telling them apart, and it's mistaken to think that your incapacity to see clear boundaries means that those peoples likewise perceive themselves to be indistinguishable. And even considerable overlap in appearance can coexist with an opposition of somatic ideals.
I think the lack of differences in physical appearance between most minorities and the majority in an increasingly urbanized China will help lead to the quick absorption of those minorities into the majority.
China has a higher average IQ and higher standard deviation.
The thing that some of you speculators are ignoring (willfully or not) is that whites, Indians, etc fundamentally do not understand high IQ societies - unless they're part of that specific minority themselves.
Higher IQ people are more prosocial. This is China's major and fatal weakness. In India and any white nation, the upper class could give two shits about your average white/Indian.
There is only so much intellectual "distance" that people can tolerate before they're unable to relate. In China, the 150-160 IQ types that have been particularly influential in the last few centuries won't feel like complete aliens. Similarly gifted whites or Indians will see the typical guy on the street as a despicable moron, and feel much less generous.
In China, the elites will expend resources keeping the common man happier, safer, healthier. This is a major drain on resources for both the government and the elites. Whereas white oligarchs and high-caste Indians derive a compounding and exponentially increasing reserve of resources by raping their people, China runs a constant deficit trying to appease. Likewise, China suffered from her inability to commit genocide.
China could have easily exterminated the Mongols, Manchus and Japanese at the height of the Tang, Song and Ming Dynasties but refused to do so - instead, they stupidly aided their development (through a tributary system which ran a consistent net loss for thousands of years), transferred almost all of their technology gratis, and protected them from third parties largely at their own expense - see Imjin, Han-Xiongnu War.
Whites, on the other hand, show absolutely no remorse to other whites who are 99% like themselves save some arbitrary differences in their religious beliefs or some other BS.
Since whites and Indians feel absolutely nothing for starving co-nationals it's much easier for the smarter ones among them to amass wealth and power - especially considering how much smarter they are than the average man. Hilariously, the former hiring the latter to replace medium-high IQ white IT workers for profit domestically illustrates this point and the degree to which 140-160 IQ whites will screw even 115-130 IQ whites for 5-10% profit.
China simply lacks the "asshole factor" to "succeed" the way whites and Indians envision success - that is, to shit on everyone and everything, exaggerate your capabilities and credentials, and pursue utterly shallow goals to the death.
There are many whites and Indians who are exceptions to be sure, who channel their extra resources and talent into great works of art or innovation, but there are 100 to 1,000 asshole mass-murderers or sociopathic high caste snobs for every "great man" they produce.
Continued --
My predictions:
1) As the overall technological and scientific base in China advances, the "achievement bellcurve" will push through some wealth threshold that will allow a large number of 140+ IQ Chinese (and other East Asians) to produce more tangible results. There will be an explosion of meaningless prizes under East Asian names (something occurring in Japan as of now)
2) As science and technology as a whole evolve, requiring higher and higher IQs, East Asians will start to pull ahead as all of their 160-180s who were "wasting" their brains are put to good use
3) The current wave of new technologies, which focus on reducing resource use and rehabilitating economically worthless land will benefit East Asians more than anyone else as they are the most resource-poor region. Japanese need to import the majority of their calories.
4) As per the pervasive and recurring historical theme, both India and the West will face massive upheaval as political, religious and class warfare build, in spite of their abundant natural resources, living space and favorable demographics.
5) The higher IQ whites, Indians, etc will find themselves more drawn to a resurgent East Asian culture as they are less repulsed by the average East Asian than they are by the common man at home
"I do believe Indians have low mean IQs, but I also suspect Indians perform (in terms of productive research) about the same as Whites of a similar IQ. As you go from elite contests to elite research awards, Indians and Chinese in the US are about equal in numbers (Hertz winners, IEEE Fellows, ACM Fellows, ACM Doctoral dissertation winners, Morgan Prize winners, Cole Prize, etc) and are dwarfed by Jews/Whites"
Right, you do know Indians and the Chinese represent a small percentage of the national US population right?? That being said, there are lesser Indian and Chinese winners in this respect because of the lower population size of Asians. In terms of percentages, Asians over achieve. Asians have higher average IQ than whites, get that through your white obsessed mind, having a higher IQ, would mean surpassing people of lower IQ in every field imaginable. Any discrepancies in the results, would not be biological but cultural, or just a situation of priority.
@Whiskey
"The Western manager told us he had to deal with Chinese peasants. Used to pooping in the fields. They liked to urinate and defecate in the stairwells, so he told us to mind that as we toured the place."
* Assuming the above quote is not some made up story, then this supposed Western manager was just BSing. Either that or you are. No Chinese peasant I have ever heard of or come across would ever defecate indoors in a public area. Urinate, likely...but defecate? Sorry, that lie is too blatant.
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