Over the past two years, 620,000 Chinese have gone abroad to study, which is more than a quarter of the total number who have studied overseas since the start of China’s reform policies in 1978.
China’s overseas student body has traditionally been dominated by only the very best, who have chosen to study as undergraduates at China’s top universities before doing postgraduate studies abroad. The latest data from the Council of Graduate Schools, released on Tuesday, showed an 18 per cent increase in those applying to US graduate schools in 2012 compared to last year.
But the number of undergraduates heading abroad is rising far more rapidly. Those going to the US soared 43 per cent last year, according to the Institute of International Education.
It’s interesting to project how a growing cadre of Western-educated Chinese will be changed by the experience:
A survey of Chinese alumni from UK universities conducted by Nottingham, Birmingham and Tsinghua universities found that Chinese students rarely find western friends at university, partly because they feel uncomfortable when their European classmates openly talk about sex or invite them to go clubbing. And yet, most of them feel that their few years abroad change their lives forever.
“Chinese live in a monocultural context, and studying abroad helps them first understand that and then discover commonalities with people from other cultures,” says Qing Gu, one of the authors of the alumni study. Her research has shown that many young Chinese become more critical of their own country after returning from university overseas.
So, they may be the start of large-scale social change in China.
New research shows that China’s rural population is getting onto the mobile web:
Jon Russell via The Next Web
the country’s rural population drove an annual 8 percent increase in mobile-only Web usage, which accounted for 38 percent of China’s Internet users in 2011. On Device found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, rural Chinese are most likely to be mobile-only Internet users, as they are less likely to own a computer than their urban-dwelling equivalents.
What I found most interesting, though, is not just growth, but the rise of mobile banking: 25% of Chinese mobile users (and 30% of smartphone users) are banking via phone.
Two pieces in the NY Times raise serious questions about China and its pivotal position in the world economy:
China Takes New Step to Prime Its Slowing Economy - David Barboza via NYTimes.com — China cuts the reserve ratio requirement for the biggest Chinese banks to 20.5% from 21%, hoping to free up capital for investment. However, there is a large and growing amount of unreserved debt in China which could be a bubble that would burst in a serious economic downturn, a point that Barboza does not make.
Chinese Labor, Cheap No More - Michelle Dammon Loyalka via NYTimes.com — Growing numbers of China’s migrant workers — essential to the growing manufacturing industries of China — have failed to return to work after the Spring Festival, whenmore than 100M workers traditionally return to their home towns to visit relatives. This will drive up wages, and indirectly, prices for export goods. Again, this will have a braking effect on China’s economy.
These, and other factors, like the economic crisis in Europe and the slow rebound in the US, could combine into a serious problem for China. In the long-term, the growing number of older Chinese poses a demographic challenge to the country, which has historically provided almost no services to citizens.
Stowe Boyd
