China has ended its one-child policy, but many analysts believe it’s too little, too late to address China’s demographic time bomb (China will grow old before it grows rich).
An article I read (was it in the WSJ or NYT?) mentioned that it’s unlikely that many Chinese will even want more than one child because it’s too expensive. The article mentioned that urban parents are spending 15% of their income on education for their one child.
I agree that this is true. However, I think the emphasis of “family ties” at the highest level of management in SOME (not all) Asian corporates could be one weakness.
A friend of mine who came from Asian culture once told me that it is extremely important to form “friendship” with not only coworkers within the same company, but also your clients at other companies your company have business with. Until these people almost “like” you at the personal level, they do not want to have anything to do with you at all and you will go nowhere.
The establish of inter-personal relationship, “let others take the glory and credits” instead of self-promoting yourself is extremely important in this social and corporate context. Self-promoting yourself runs the risk of being perceived as being selfish, or self-centered. Being able to be accepted into a group as a welcomed member is much more important than being able to “stand out” or showing that you are better than others. Arguably speaking, some may argue that this could be a weakness in Asian’s corporate culture but this is how the system there works. Humility and fitting into the group are much more important. So there are a lot of efforts on establishing relationship out of the business context. It is almost like “let’s see if we can be friends to each other on the personal level first.”
@GMTPlus7, Regarding the last statement in your post #300, sometimes I think this is one of the major advantages of Asians who happen to be from a family who are willing to devote so much of their family resources to them. Too much family’s “sacrifice” for them could also result in the pressure placed on these youngsters, if not handled properly and/or “skillfully”. Good parenting skills are more important here.
It’s not selfless altruism that propels parents in China to devote so much of their family resources to their one child. That kid is their Social Security policy in old age.
^^ For professionals in urban areas, that’s an “old age” long gone. Parents still expect their children to take care of them when they get old but not necessarily financially, but it’s not limited to families that invested heavily on children’s education. As a matter of fact, taking care of elderly parents is part of the government propaganda because of the lacking of a well established social welfare system at this time.
As for comments regarding “family ties” or personal connections in some Asian corporates, couldn’t the same be said about SOME American corporates when it comes to highly coveted positions or promotions?
While I agree with you about the “social security policy in old age” reason, there is also a downside of this if it is not handled properly: The kid may resent it especially when the parents’ expectation is set too high and/or the child believes, correctly or just his illusion, that he fails to meet his parent’s expectation.
The win-win situation is that the child is really convinced that his/her parents do this without any expectation, especially without the expectation of the return in the form of social security payment (there is even a word for this: parent tax. LOL). In the end, it could still be a social security policy. But the perception of the child toward his/her parents’ motivation for doing this for him/her is very important.
I also heard that one reason why this “generational intra-family social security contract” is common in certain Asian culture is that for many recent centuries, their government have been anything but the Confucius idealism: citizens serve their leaders in the government (“parent-like government official”) and in return these leaders take care of them as if they were their “parents.” Therefore, each family, between generations, take care of themselves. The family structure remedied what the government failed to do.
@panpacific, I fully agree with you on what you posted in the first paragraph. As the economic conditions improve for many of these families, the Asian style “parent-child relationship” could have more upside than downside.
As regard to your second paragraph, even though they (eastern vs western worlds) are similar, the extent of “family-centered large business” could still be somewhat different. (Look at the top 10 largest business in S. Korea for example.)
Another observation here (related or not) is that it is more likely that the super-rich parents in the western world (esp, in the super rich country like the US?) tend to not pass all or most of their wealth to their offsprings. (Bill Gates is an example and there are many others.) This could be a reason for this: The rich in the US have been so for much longer as compared to the rich in Asian countries.
I am glad the discussion has veered to comparing the cultures here, not the people. As long as we realize that we are all different you can see that what works there MAY not work here. If our (US) corporations work more on merit than family ties, more on your ability and not where you go to school ( see the economist ranking of colleges), your ability to fit in ( socialize -Asia or work in teams-US) people will see what matters most, realizing there are round and square pegs and at least for right now, different holes to fill
Forcing American kids to ascribe to Asian standards of learning may not serve them well if they continue their careers in the US and the converse for Asians.
FYI, a newly released study by UC Berkeley on SAT’s racial impact.
Link to the actual research paper. Refer especially to Figure 2 and Figure 8.
THE GROWING CORRELATION BETWEEN RACE AND SAT SCORES:
NEW FINDINGS FROM CALIFORNIA
October 2015
Saul Geiser
Center for Studies in Higher Education University of California, Berkeley
http://www.cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/shared/publications/docs/ROPS.CSHE_.10.15.Geiser.RaceSAT.10.26.2015.pdf
Is race a proxy for culture? Could the achievement gap be the effect of racially segregated schools? Since asians don’t have the population critical mass of URMs, asian kids often end up in the same public schools as white kids.
^^^ That’s a very important study, and it confirms what has been apparent for some time - SES is less important than people think in determining testing gaps.
See also this chart (http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.gif) of 2008 College Board data compiled by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which shows that whites from families earning under $20,000 score about the same on the SAT as African-Americans from families earning over $200,000. Unfortunately the problem of test score gaps runs even deeper than SES.
Is there another factor that is not under control in this research? That is, the self-selection factor for different racee (e.g., Asian, Black, White) could be quite different. For example, Asians have a higher percentage of new immigrants (and they were from the top of people from their country of origin before immigration) and therefore they tend to put more emphasis on quantifiable academic merit like SAT, occasionally at the expense of EC achievement. If we compare the white and the Asian at the relatively “higher capability” population of both races, the former may pay more attention to other non-numeric, less quantifiable aspects of merit which results in a higher percentage of whites with the same quantifiable academic merit attending private colleges instead of public colleges. (Also, isn’t it a fact that Asians generally need higher SAT scores to get into the school of the same caliber due to its real or perceived weakness in other personal qualification (and/or a factor like being more homogeneous in their EC achievements) - per that famous research result from a professor at Princeton? This could be especially true for the very top private colleges, so more academic capable whites in terms of quantifiable measures like SAT may go to the elite private college instead of public college.)
If you read San Jose Mercury News over the past 3 decades, you must have read some report about the "whites leaving in droves from the public high/middle schools in the “best” public school district like Cupertino, etc., and heading to prestigious, high quality private high/middle/elementary school. Maybe a similar thing happens here at the college level, only to a less extent.
I argue that there could be sampling bias at play here due to hard to control factors.
Please read the UC Berkeley study. It addresses things like sampling bias.
The study acknowledges that family income & education level of parents do have an impact on scores-- those factors would relate to self-selection of immigrants. But race has an even BIGGER impact.
Could it be just be that white & asian kids of all income levels & parental education level spend more time, on average, on test prep? Sure it might. But then we’re back to culture again.
Or black or Latino kids, depending on who is the local majority population. Or a mixture of kids in an ethnically mixed school.
I admit that the 40+ pages of pdf file are too demanding for my eyes.
Your theory of more test prep has some merit, from my limited experience of a small sample size. In my child’s high school graduation class, the Asian kids who got into one of HYPSM were ranked from 1-3. The white male kid who got into one of HYPSM was ranked 18. While in high school and middle school, it was very apparent that these top Asian kids spent well more time on academic merit that is measurable by numbers like GPA, or PSAT/SAT, thus the difference in the GPA and class rank. The top white kid (he was actually the white male who ranked the highest among all white males in that graduation class – white females could be more similar to Asian Female in term of their willingness to spend more time on academics and thus the class rank) actually scores a slightly better than those Asian kids on SAT scores (all in the range of 2300-2400 though) but he definitely loses out by not willing to spend too much time on “grinding” – the amount of efforts he was willing to put in could be similar to the Asian kids around the rank of, say, 50, so he is likely more academic gifted than Asian kids with about the same rank as his (but he just does not want to go to such an extreme in “hardcore” studying at least at the somewhat meaningless high school level.)
At the post-college education level at the some top grad schools, oh boy, those true internationals (but still received education for most of their K-12 education in English, the quality of which could be comparable to the elite prep school here in the US) is yet another league which is arguably a notch more intense than the Asian kids who grow up in the US. (e.g., could possibly finish the writeup of a quite lengthy research paper, almost the thesis sized, in less than, say, 5 days!)
Just a very small sample, and it could be a very biased sample here. The key observation here is the different extent the students of different backgrounds are willing to devote to study due to whatever the reasons it may be.
