Soros, Redux

In my last post I talked about George Soros and his "shock therapy" take on transforming economies. He looked at all the state-run enterprises (SOEs) in Soviet Russia and rationing systems and came up with a cutesy metaphor - something like, "you can't cross a chasm in two jumps." He advocated transforming the system overnight. It would be difficult and painful at the beginning but have good long-term results. He sent the nation of Russia into a deeper depression than the Great Depression. It was a horrible idea and the Chinese took note as confirmation of their conception of economic reform.

I think it applies to some the left-wing criticism of Obama, who came into office with financial market in a state of collapse on par with what the Russians witnessed. It made up something like half* of Wall Street profits where most of Americans were banking their retirement funds, where insurance companies of all stripes banked their premiums, and where businesses and individuals were investing in what they thought was at least marginally "safe". Obama, I think correctly, surmised that this wasn't the time for shock therapy - which is what would have happened with no TARP. These institutions were being just as "efficient" but were constructed to be just as needed by the common man as the old Soviet SOEs. There was no killing one without seriously hurting the other. It simply transcends ideas of justice that something needed to be done to at least let them die a little less violently. You don't let pillars of the economy collapse that even if they are run by idiot greedheads because they're depended upon by nearly everybody.

Health care is the same game. It's terrible and broken, but it's almost 15% of the economy. It is, right now, built around insurers in a way that you can't simply "shock therapy" rip them out and throw a NHS in without risking collapse. You have companies that provide employment to millions of people that would go out of business. Assembling the newly unemployed into the state ranks for the sake of employment would be disastrous. I think the trojan horse** of a "public plan", along with tighter regulations like price controls (which usually give me the creeps), is the way forward to gradually move to a government-run system. That said, I don't think Republicans are wrong for calling a spade a spade. If it's run with even half a brain, it will suck the lifeblood out of even "good" private (or non-profit, or co-ops) insurers trying to insure "Joe Sixpack"***. For better or worse, it would create a de facto single-payer system over time. I think the non-subsidised co-op idea is an interesting alternative that might actually do the job and get broad consensus.

The only counter-argument I have to the Republicans is that they, like the public, are perhaps not "ready" for a thoughtful debate about government-run health care and need to at least see what the system looks and feels like in America before they could support, fight, or reform the idea. There's been too much propoganda for decades lamenting the "failure" of the Euro-Canadian system that's just simply a lie. These guys have universal coverage for about half the cost as what we're paying! Despite the occasional horror stories of waiting lists for critical procedures, at least people get to wait for something they otherwise couldn't afford in America! As true as this might be, it's not terribly democratic idea to sneak "trojan horses" into policy debates to avoid the crux of the debate.

*off the top of my head

** it's a trojan horse because the Republicans are right - businesses can't compete with even a moderately competent state-run plan oiled by US treasury subsidies. The "public option", like a Soviet sprocket factory, simply can't fail no matter how much in the red it runs. In the case of health care, it would likely run into the red by doing precisely what we want it to - helping us with huge medical expenses! It just goes back to the boss, Congress, and asks for more funds that go back to "the people". AIG and other insurers fail if they run into the red for too long. Denying service is how they make a profit.

*** I promise to never use this term again. I far prefer "Laobaixing" 老百姓, or Old Hundred Names, in Chinese.

Paper Tiger Markets

I'm writing from underneath a rabbit hole I found in the Great Firewall. It's unfortunate that a barbed wire fence encircled Blogger, Twitter, and Flickr for the Anniversary That We Dare Not Mention. Two steps forward, one step back. It the same vein, a new article hit the press that there's a new regulation that all new computers sold in China must include "Green Dam", which is essentially a client-side Great Firewall. Where most spyware opens up pop-ups to sites you don't want to visit, this one prevents you from seeing what you want to see and with the advantage of keeping the bugs and gaping security vulnerabilies found in all spyware. Please, won't you try Ubuntu for your own good? Except for playing some Windows games, there's nothing you can't do with Ubuntu that you can do with Windows. Except get viruses, spyware, trojan horses, and pay for that luxury.

On to what I wanted to talk about:

A controversy is brewing in Shenzhen lately. It deals with the fact that almost half the housing in this fair city doesn't legally exist in the sense that it can be bought and sold. The back story first: China and Russia were both de facto "communist" countries in the same way that David Koresh was a "Christian." It's Marx stripped of social-justice and straight to the command-economy part that has the tendency to nations to the brink of insolvency. And it did. China started re-thinking the whole think about a decade before the Soviets got around to it. China started by replacing a few cylinders first in the crank engine by establishing some special economic zones like Shenzhen to be spiced up with higher octane fuel in the form of foreign investment, then threw off some extra baggage like the state-owned enterprises, and has just completed replacing all four tires all while never stopping. Russia followed the "shock therapy" advice of Jeffrey Sachs who had the axion, "you can't cross a chasm in two jumps." He advised replacing the engine and tires instantly and without stopping for the net effect of creating a localized depression several times worse than the Great Depression.

The point is, China has slowly been dismantling parts of it's communist legacy as it deems appropriate and expedient. Strange relics remain, like the hukou system (which I'll write about later) that works almost like an internal passport. If you don't have a local passport, you're not privileged to local services... like education for your children or subsidized healthcare. This in a country with the largest and fastest peaceful human migration in history as people leave their farms for the cities.

The relic that's haunting Shenzhen right now is that even though all of Shenzhen's official residents were declared "urban" some years ago, land reform didn't catch up and their plot of land remains "rural." One of the relics I admire as a crypto-commie myself is that the farmers are unable to undo one of the better things Mao did for them, namely sell the land their family acquired in post-liberation land reform. They're stuck to it. You can't mortgage the farm no matter how shiny the factory job offer is or how sick Uncle Luo gets. This has created an invisible social safety net that China needs as an estimated four million people loose their jobs this year. It's nice to go back and live rent-free on self-sustaining land when your Taiwanese boss decides to catch the last weekend flight to Taipei with six month back wages owed to you and your coworkers in tow.

Back to Shenzhen - so land reform never caught up with Shenzhen and now you have neighborhoods, like mine, that are more than half illegal. For a quick picture, it looks like this: we have a couple 25+ story high-rises with nice little gardens around them inside a gated community. The rest of Baishizou is a people zoo. It's likely even denser than Mong Kok, itself one of the densest places in the world. We have "handshake" buildings, usually eight stories tall with no elevator and about five or six feet apart from one another, often with restaurants or other storefronts at the bottom. They're built illegally on "rural" splotches of land where the millionaire "farmers" are just responding to market demand for affordable housing. It's not uncommon to find 3-4 people living in a 50m apartment. They pay no taxes for these illegal buildings and suffer no safety inspections. Residents lucky concrete is only combustible during nuclear blasts.

The net market effect of having only half the cities housing units legally available for sale is a massive housing bubble wherein the apartment I live in now sells for about $130000 USD (but rents for $500/m). That's insane. Truly, deeply, regrettably insane in a country where home ownership is usually a prerequisite for marriage and a good salary is about $1000 a month and the average college grad is lucky to make half that. Families are understanding, I believe, as I just witnessed a good friend marry into an exceptionally conservative family without owning a home.

The government is in the unfortunate position of having to untangle this mess. The idea has been floated to let the "farmers" pay back taxes and legitimately sell their property. The problem is that's going to burst a large bubble of wealth quickly by flooding the market with cheap housing and punish investors who played by the rules. Do nothing and the bubble just gets bigger and even more people live in unsafe housing. Razing half the city, though attractive on paper, isn't such a popular idea for the (more than) half of the city that lives in these buildings.

Here's a good review and probably the best op-ed I've read this side of the border crossing.

Have ideas? Leave them at the mayors office in a box marked, "Suggestions".

Chinese Higher Ed, Part II

Peter is a friend of ours who lived in Shenzhen about two years ago. He came from an education college in the UK to work with what was supposed to be one of the best schools in Shenzhen. We both had a pretty jaded experience working there, but he was much more a part of the school than my organization was. He was sent there, if I recall, to more-or-less evaluate the school and offer suggestions for improvement. As I remember, he simply stopped writing them because nobody was reading them.

Responding to my letter to James Fallows blog, he writes:

Thanks for this. I think you underestimate the importance of the introduction of the gaokao in reintroducing the idea of fairness. It marked the end of political criteria into access to education - even children of landlords could sit it. In theory! The numbers being able to progress through the Imperial exams were tiny.

Good point on the end of politicization. I bring up the imperial exams because every time I read about them, they sound exactly like an earlier version of the gaokao. It was, of course, more difficult and far fewer people got through - but the overall idea of having a static body of knowledge to be studied that can be memorized and tested with precision because of it's absolutism and rigidity is the essence of both. I think both exhibit the same idea of "fairness" that it's supposed that most people are flunk out, even the ones who come from rich and powerful families. Those who do rise to the top come from all over the mid and top levels of society.

...also what is wrong with 'tenacity' - I despair sometimes with the level of work /commitment/intellectual curiosity in the 'West'. Does it produce 'creativity'? What is the benefit of not actually knowing anything???

I think most foreigners wish we had the same attitude towards studying as the Chinese. If I put half the time into Chinese that my average student puts into English, I'd be nearly fluent by now I think! That said, it does say something bout Chinese education that students can "know" so much about English but perform so low. Even my students who have studied English for eight years (almost all of them) struggle to hold a conversation.

Modern education theory draws heavily from Piaget, but Piaget seems a lot less interested in hard work for the sake of hard work, but rather students feeding their own curiosity that leads to self-discovery. In this sense, hard work feels a lot more like play... like spending an hour jumping through Wikipedia links after watching Star Trek and accidentally discovering what Einstein's theory of relativity was all about. Ramming uncontextualized, inert, and isolated "knowledge" down students throats and having them spend hours mindlessly repeating it until it sinks in is indeed hard work but it's also the "banking" that Freire warned us about. It's the "creation and recreation" of ideas and concepts, using facts, that constitutes learning.

In some ways the access to English teaching is the worst aspect - the emphasis on reading and writing is damaging to modern pedagogy. At Nanshan [Foreign Language School] there was a trial of creating two ability sets from two classes. It was abandoned - it was a Y8 class- after a few weeks because the bottom set (?) was 'unteachable', There is a fear of disorder and chaos out there.

This is bit over my head. Peter saw a part of Chinese education I've never seen: a public school taking English education seriously. We worked for the same school at the same time, but my colleagues and I worked in the primary school, he was in the high school. The only other teacher in my company with prior educational experience wanted to quit within two weeks of being starting work there. Hera told me she would cry through her First Grade classes where students never bothered to sit down when the bell rang and other teachers would walk right past without trying to help. This is the same school that left her out of a picture at the front gate of that was supposed to show the parents the "waijiao" teachers working there. Her Chinese colleagues never acknowledged her existence and never even gave her the English book they were using until I went in one day to demand it. if I remember correctly, several teachers told students to do their homework during our classes there.

I think maybe that "fear of disorder and chaos" that drives a lot of the English teaching practices we see. It's unfortunate that what I think the single easiest and more important change to Chinese curriculum - placing students in a class that fits their skill level - goes so against the grain of Chinese culture and the idea of "face." Instead of using common-sense educational ideas, like step-by-step learning (which are translated into educational theories like the Zone of Proximal Development), where the top and bottom 20% are effectively learning nothing.

It's all the more unfortunate that that bottom 20% (the "unteachable"), and top 20% (who often have English at the same or higher level as their Chinese English teacher), could learn so much if they had classes designed around their needs instead of whatever it is schools are assuming about fairness, face, or effectiveness.

Chinese Higher Education

A letter to James Fallows, for his excellent China blog:

-----

One of the things I've taken from my experience in Chinese education is that issues of efficiency and real-world usefulness play second fiddle to an entirely different concept of fairness than what Westerners are used to. It's hard to spot unless you ask the right questions. A case in point is shoving 50 students into a classroom with huge variances in ability simply because they all happened to be ranked, sorted, and placed in a homeroom-style class studying a major they cannot change and may not have actually chosen. I have nearly fluent students mixed with those who melt when asked how their weekend went.

When I've asked the local teachers why this is, and why not have foreign language classes based on ability (Conversational English I/II/III) that students work their way through, they looked genuinely shocked. It would be unfair - how could you think to punish a struggling student by putting him into a bad class? All students deserve the best possible English class.

If you look back at the old imperial exam system, it had in in-built check against nepotism. Theoretically, anybody could memorize a vast amount of nearly useless texts written in an obscure non-vernacular language and rise to the highest ranks of government. It was mindless meritocracy at it's best, measuring tenacity and at least one sort of mental skill.

I think we're witnessing the same thing today. Though my students *hated* the Gaokao and know it has little correlation with intellect, I get that same shocked expression when I ask if it's the same as in America - richer students get higher scores, getting into better colleges, repeating a cycle. Most of my students got fairly low scores, but blame it on break-ups, stress, or simply being lazy. Despite everything, they do believe it's fundamentally fair and most students at the top schools did, legitimately, earn their way to the top however ridiculous the contest was.

How not to introduce a topic...

In 2006 China graduated 4.13 million college graduates. 1.24 million never found work. That was with GDP growth rate three times higher than America's (10.1% to 3.4%)With the current economy the way it is, a lot of people are worried that number might increase substantially.

The government has been trying to convince students to not expect jobs out of college and to instead think about being entrepreneurs instead. I think it's a wonderful idea. I decided to have groups of four students design and start a fictitious business. Hopefully I can stretch it out over several weeks. Today was the first week.

My first two classes study h0tel management. I get them warmed up by talking about what, exactly, it is they study. "Cooking," says one student. "Mixing cocktails," says another with her head popping out of the dictionary. "Management," says another. Sounds like an interesting major. The first class got really rolling when I drew on the board a vertical arrow with "resort" on the top and "guesthouse/hostel" at the bottom and described the best characteristics of each. I had hotel as an offshoot in the middle with various star rankings lined up. Their task was to list three business ideas, like "A five star hotel in Italy" or "A motel in Xili." They got really into it. Their homework was to have a name, logo, and motto in a small powerpoint by next week.

My second class, not so well. After a little start up, I asked, "What's the #1 problem in China right now?"

Silence.

"No one?"

"Pollution," says one girl.

"Well, yes... but I'm thinking of something else..."

I started on the wrong foot. Ooops...

"You are!" I said. Shock. "I mean there's just not enough jobs for you guys, right? Too many college students, too few jobs... right?"

Silence. The foot in my mouth was beginning to twitch.

"I mean... what do you think? Am I right? Why won't you talk?," I asked

"This is a very serious problem. We think about it all the time," one of my girl students said.

"Well, we're going to fix it today! We're going to be entrepreneurs," I said as I lodged my foot deeper into my throats, "in English class!"


Yes. Trey is going to fix the problem of college graduate unemployment. In English class.

Now I know how not to start this subject off, at least.

First off, some goodbyes

Our school-provided apartment is named Yashi Lou which means elegant poetry building. But like how most of us usually doubt the Chinese sense of aesthetics, one can only be confused in trying to find the elegance or the poetry in our Yashi Lou apartment. Nevertheless, the white bathroom tiles that cover the building facade, the stained and peeling walls and the pipes lining the bathroom have actually been home to Trey and me for the past two semesters in Shenzhen Polytech. The calm lake outside our building, contrasting the hustle and bustle of student life within the campus is not something that anyone gets even in tall, gleaming high-end apartments in Shenzhen.

But endearing as campus life is, Trey and I have to live the life of a married adult couple with a real home. Tomorrow we will be moving to Baishizhou--a neighborhood that displays China as raw as it is, with narrow roads cramped with noodle shops, Chinese fastfood, children's toys, hardware stores and brothels all in one strip. Men in suits spit on the street and mothers let their babies take a dump in the public thrash bins. And this is the real China that we've come to know, accept and love during our first year in this country. And tomorrow we go back to this neighborhood, but this time, we live in the white, gleaming apartment that towers the entire neighborhood. A 75 sqm two-bedroom place on the 29th floor will be our new home. Our small balcony overlooks a golf course, an amusement park and all the other apartments in Baishizhou lined along a main highway.

Maybe next time I'll talk about color swatches, curtains, couch pillows or the inconveniences of having no hot water in the sink. Or maybe help my husband deconstruct my being a narrow pit, whatever that means.

First Light

I always liked the term "first light." I borrowed it from my long dead astronomy hobby. It's how you describe the first time you use a telescope - the "first light" that hits the mirrors and lenses.

Hera and I, a Filipino and American just married, will be running this blog. It will be a running commentary or our life in China. Going back to that astronomy hobby, it's kind of like using g
Hopefully you'll get to see us disagree often. There's truth in those sparks, no?

For the record, I'm going to avoid the stories and long posts of my old blog Treyopia. The Daily Dish is the model I'm after. I don't know what Hera intends, as this is more my idea than hers.

For the record, Deep Ditch is the direct translation of Shenzhen, the city we live in. "Narrow pit" comes from the poetry of one King David in Proverbs 23:27, "For a harlot is a deep ditch; and a foreign woman is a narrow pit." Shenzhen is, no doubt, the Harlot of Middle Kingdom. I don't know if my foreign woman is a narrow pit, because I have no idea what that means, but it sounds cool, right? Like that Samuel L. Jackson "path of righteousness" line in Pulp Fiction. Maybe as a last post I can get all reflective and deconstruct the meaning of my wife being a narrow pit :-)