China as It Is David P. Goldman

Ambition is the glue that holds the polyglot, ethnically mixed Chinese empire. Napoleon invented the modern mass citizen army, saying that each of his soldiers kept a field marshal s baton in his rucksack. That is, he awoke the ambition of the downtrodden peasants of France and made them into a force that crushed the professional armies of the European monarchs. The Chinese are more practical than the French. Every Chinese person carries flash cards for the Gaokao, China s formidable university entrance examination taken by 13.4 million Chinese in 2024. The United States has just 3.8 million graduating high school seniors; I doubt that 5 percent of them could pass the Gaokao. China is a ruthless meritocracy. Top officials and billionaires can buy admission to Harvard for their children, but not to Peking University. For well over two thousand years, academic achievement has been the path to success for the Chinese. It should be no surprise that China now graduates more engineers than the rest of the world combined.

I do not like this system, and I do not believe that it fosters the kind of disruptive creativity that challenges established modes of thought. Western culture has inherent advantages, or at least used to have such advantages when we still paid homage to the high culture of the West. But Chinese civilization has roots that have endured for thousands of years, and will not change to suit our sensibilities.

via lawliberty.org

Let those numbers sink in. Still want to get rid of the SAT?