<p>"“It was a lecture about following rules.”"</p>
<p>The above is only one side of the coin. The other side is defiance of the government from the Chinese people, seldom mentioned in the western media. There is even a common Chinese phrase, “The top has policies, the bottom has strategies”, which is also real-life practice. To a good extent, the Chinese people are accustomed to finding workarounds, similar to what I have mentioned earlier about the Chinese Firewall. Even corruption is a backdoor to defying the government authorities. As a matter of fact, this is a major underlying reason about the lack of compliance to official rules in China. It is somewhat like a beach ball floating on water, the harder the push down, the swifter the bounce up. So far, it is the Chinese government that has been gradually adapting, as more reforms will come along with the stability budget steadily becoming unmanageable.</p>
<p>"“I wouldn’t say the rule is entirely “benevolent” but it is certainly no longer malevolent as it so often was in the days of Mao…”"</p>
<p>I was playing with the description of “benevolent dictator”. 
But it should be clear within context that “benevolent” was referring to government policies which are efficient in allocating resources across China. Mao was an egocentric madman, willing to destroy whatever threatening his political dominance. That is another story.</p>
<p>"“Thing that people don’t get about China is it has a long history of rewarding merit…”"</p>
<p>One of the five bottons of the Zhongshan Suit (Zhongshan as in Sun yat-sen), often mis-named as the “Mao Suit”, represents “examination”, referring to the ancient process of recruiting government officials through a system of examinations from the village all the way toward the central government.</p>
<p>"“They also teach things differently, specifically in math and science. A more typical Chinese school would teach by rote while a US school aims at teaching underlying understanding… They try to identify those capable of knowing more and push them further. Our approach has the advantage of generating more creative people but at the cost of generating fewer people, allowing for population size, who know the basics. To be blunt, their math instruction is boring but it works.”"</p>
<p>I have direct and indirect experience in both systems. I would say the Chinese system works more efficiently upto at least the middle-school level for these reasons.</p>
<p>A. Many teachers at middle schools and below, don’t have enough training in math to genuinely teach the subject in terms of understanding;
B. The talented few simply have their own minds running independent of the math taught in class.</p>
<p>For example, I have to personally teach my kids math, despite the so-called “understanding” taught in class. And when I was a kid, I didn’t even need to pick up any math textbooks, until the equivalent of Calculus I. Similarly for physics. At least for me and a few others I knew as classmates, we could generalize on the so-called “rote-learning” and grasp the “understanding” on our own. It came rather naturally and didn’t need to be taught at these earlier stages. Individualized instructions would be the best, which is the reason that I personally teach my kids aside from school. But on the national scale and with a limited budget, the so-called “rote-leaning” would be more efficient for the entire class, because the talented few can still educate themselves on their own. By the way, SAT Math, including Level 2, is a joke. :-)</p>
<p>As a minor digression, I even refrain from teaching my kids with my own understanding in math and science (research level at some areas, graduate level at others). Most of the time I just assign them appropriately-challenging materials and let them explore on their own. Only when they got stuck would I give them a nudge. As a result, they have been developing their individual thinking patterns, which can be crude (from an adult’s PoV), sometimes brilliant, and occasionally astounding. But more important, they run their enquiring minds on their own and I only serve as an occasional crutch. So individualized instructions would still be the best, but the so-called “rote-learning” may temper less on the talented few (as boredom is also a motivator for creativity) than actually feeding them with “understanding” (which may be half-baked to begin with).</p>
<p>"“We can talk about free markets, etc. but much of what drives China comes from the top down…”"</p>
<p>Merely coming from the top is far from enough for practice, because the information costs for efficient resources allocation are non-negligible. As an analogy, a guided missile can destroy a target with one shot, but merely dropping bombs from the top would take a squadron of B-29’s. There should have been an abundance of stories around, about some factories under communism, endlessly crunching out non-marketable items, just enough to make the workers busy. But a market economy has provided crucial signals for the Chinese government (which is only communist by name but capitalist by nature) to construct policies with economic efficiency. For example, a manufacturing plant in China is constructed with the guidance of a plethora of market data, as to what, where, when, how to be built; what, where, when, how to be marketed; and what, where, when, how to whatever else; such that wasteful spending can practically be minimized. And similar economic efficiency applies to other endeavors.</p>
Mine talk about anything in private occasions, from Mao organizing party sex; the Tank Man (still my hero) at Tiananmen Square; to which performers have been Jiang’s mistresses… Cultural Revolution? It is really no big deal, as long as you don’t draw a following on the Internet like Ai.</p>![http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__rQoK9r_ycs/TSTgeKAd-ZI/AAAAAAAAAFM/Lvh00XYkSck/s1600/PLA+J-20+匿蹤戰機+(171).jpg]Chengdu](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__rQoK9r_ycs/TSTgeKAd-ZI/AAAAAAAAAFM/Lvh00XYkSck/s1600/PLA+J-20+%E5%8C%BF%E8%B9%A4%E6%88%B0%E6%A9%9F+%28171%29.jpg%5DChengdu){kind=link}
![http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/J9VI-IIproject.png/300px-J9VI-IIproject.png]Chengdu](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/J9VI-IIproject.png/300px-J9VI-IIproject.png%5DChengdu){kind=link}
