Chinese Teen-Girl Chess Champion

[monk222]

Nicholas Kristof gives us another piece on China's future domination:

If there’s a human face on Rising China, it belongs not to some Politburo chief, not to an Internet tycoon, but to a quiet, mild-mannered teenage girl named Hou Yifan.

Ms. Hou (whose name is pronounced Ho Ee-fahn) is an astonishing phenomenon: at 16, she is the new women’s world chess champion, the youngest person, male or female, ever to win a world championship. And she reflects the way China — by investing heavily in education and human capital, particularly in young women — is increasingly having an outsize impact on every aspect of the world.

Napoleon is famously said to have declared, “When China wakes, it will shake the world.”

Maybe it's best that I'm getting on in years, because I am not learning Mandarin.

Though, rereading that, I just noticed that she is the women's world champion. At first, I thought it was for both men and women. That's not to say I'd care to play her, but the news is a little less sparkly. Maybe world domination is still some decades away.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was reading about the Chinese education system quite recently and it is really not that sparkly at all. No disrespect to this teenager at all - it's a stunning achievement - but I would hesitate to cite her as an advertisement for Chinese education. It's quite likely that her talent was spotted early and she was given leeway that other children her age didn't get.

Chinese education, as I understand it, is all about cramming facts into children. There is a fiercely competitive culture among parents, as a result of which most children are made to work long hours outside school and get very little leisure time. The bulk of what they do is memorising. Now I'm not against memorising in some areas - everyone needs to memorise certain things like the multiplication tables, and it isn't a bad thing to have a few poems committed to memory either - but in China they memorise just about everything. The end result is a bunch of adolescents who can tell you all sorts of interesting facts but are notoriously poor at thinking for themselves or exercising any kind of critical faculty. We get this at work - not so much in our department because we're postgraduate only, and any Chinese student who joins us has already managed to adjust well enough to do a first degree, but you do hear about it elsewhere in the University. Many of the students who have the most difficulty adjusting to the idea that they are responsible for a significant amount of their own learning are Chinese.

It's good to emphasise the importance of education, but I don't agree with putting education before children.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Just considering the strictures on their political expression that the people must live with is enough that we needn't really be envious. But it is no doubt a good thing that the material life of more people is rising appreciably, even if the competitive pressures do pinch us a little. It has been long hoped that rising prosperity will relentlessly give rise to greater freedoms.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I hope so. It seems intuitive that it's harder to crush people who aren't forced into effective slavery by economic circumstances.

Though I'm not sure it always works perfectly in practice.

Gujarat

[poovanna.livejournal.com]

It doesn't :( And a great example is the state of Gujarat in my country, India.

This region leads the country in all kinds of economic metrics (foreign investment; per capita income; quality of infrastructure etc.), but is governed by a repressive establishment which instituted state-sponsored attacks on Muslims in India.

However, the people of the state didn't care & voted it back to power. More than equality & freedom of speech, they seemed to care more about economic issues. It was very disappointing :(

Chinese education

[poovanna.livejournal.com]

I find myself agreeing with miss_next's assessment of China's educational system. However, this is not because of personal experience, but rather because:
- her analysis describes the Indian educational system well; &
- Chinese educational culture is generally similar to India's (pushy parents; very intense competition; student burn-out etc.)

On a tangential note: I've never understood why there has to be a seperate Women's Chess division! So idiotic! :)

Re: Chinese education

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Well, no pain, no gain, right? It seems to be serving you guys alright as asecendent nations. We, on the other hand, just keep getting dumber and more vacuous, interested more in celebrity gossip than anything else.

Re: Chinese education

[poovanna.livejournal.com]

Not really. This is just an illusion because for a long time, kids here had no choice but to take the "harder" subjects & become engineers or doctors because that was the only place where jobs were at!

At least a US kid has (perhaps the right word is "HAD", since you guys are in a recession now :)) a choice - he could choose to study music; become a lawyer; or go into some other liberal arts domain if he cared about it.