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Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

That seems a bit made up tbh. I’ve worked with a fair number of Chinese overachievers (both in domestic China and abroad) and family background/affluence weren’t even remotely as much of a factor compared to the US or India (except for the IITs). Also, I noticed there were many many cases of brilliant young people rising through the ranks of the academic system in China compared to India for example where teachers often simply would not show up in public schools.

Personal background: I worked and studied in the US, I worked in China and I studied in India

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I think they mean historic (as in pre-1911 China).

And they aren't wrong, as even major China scholars like Yasheng Huang and Yuhua Wang point out that the Imperial Civil Service in China was stacked against merit due to structural issues that biased in favor of incumbents.

That said, similar issues continue to persist in China to this day due to the Zhongkao.

Specifically, if you didn't attend a academic high school (which only accepts around 45-55% of Zhongkao takers) you wouldn't be prepared for the Gaokao unless it was out of pocket at a cram school (which are now technically banned, but were anyhow exorbitantly expensive in a country where the median household income is $4,000). And if you couldn't pass the Gaokao, you couldn't attend university.

Furthermore, Academic High Schools tend to be few and far between, yet take the lion's share of resources unlike Vocational High Schools which most Chinese attend - but not the ones you meet in an air conditioned office unless you order from Meituan. In the vocational schools you see similar issues of teacher absence and lack of pedagogy.

The failure of the VET system in China has been a major sticking point in Chinese policymaking recently and a lot of domestic research is being done to understand why it failed [0][1][2]

[0] - https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/ET-09-20...

[1] - https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/lnep/article/view/9075

[2] - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125949173.pdf

Thanks for the additional details.

In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university after two-years of exams that determine your final grade (and chances). There are literally only public schools.

I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”.

Thanks for sharing additional detail and it resembles what I remember - but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.

Imho a 30% ratio for university graduates is a sweet spot for society. We have great (free) vocational training programs in Germany that empower all those who did not go to university to make money quicker and they more often that not end up in financially better situations. University often pays off only for top university graduates once they pass 35/40 years of age.

The main difference is Germany actually puts money in vocational education and values it socially.

China does not.

China's education spend is only 4.1% of GDP, and much of that is diverted to academic high schools and universities. Furthermore, vocational students are viewed as "bad students" and good faculty prefer to join academic high schools or private high schools due to a better salary and social standing. Furthermore, even SOE factories (the traditional hirer of vocational students) in China now prefer hiring college graduates instead of vocational students because of a glut of college graduates due to cultural shifts in the 2000s-2010s, anti-vocational student bias, and college graduates trying to get a stable "iron rice bowl" (to use the Korean term) government job.

> I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”

I think that was the aim of the legislation, but in action it didn't help social mobility much, because upper income households just resorted to private or online tutoring, and everyone ignores it.

It's not like legislators send their kids to vocational schools - they also prefer to send them to academic or top private schools so that they can then attend university (either domestically or abroad).

> but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.

In face value it doesn't, but in action urban academic high schools and primary schools get the lions share of funding, and until recently those are gatekept to people holding a hukou for that city.

This meant that urban migrants who weren't able to convert their rural hukou to an urban hukuo (because that meant losing their rural landholdings which is the only asset of worth they have), and their kids were stuck either in underfunded rural schools or crappy private primary schools in an urban area.

This has a significant impact on social mobility to this day, and is a major reason why China's median household income remains very low. Urban China's median household income is $6,000, but rural China's is around $3,000. This means the bottom half of urban society in China and much of rural China's society does not have much of a chance of upward mobility because they can't pay for private tutoring nor can they afford a good private high school if their kid fails the Zhongkao.

Thanks! That’s a lot of additional information. I appreciate the effort!

> In Germany only about 30% of high-school kids qualify academic high-school (merit-based) and are eligible to apply for university

Overall 50% of the population are eligible to apply for university since completing higher tier education at a vocational school or completing specialized courses at "lesser" schools can also fullfill the acceptance requirements for related fields of study.

There are additional paths people can beyond high schools and we have different tiers (allgemeine Hochschulreife; Fachhochschulreife) for different tiers of universities (academic further qualifying for a PhD career / practitioner); as the original post was referring to Chinese high school students specifically I tied it back to Gymnasium where give or take 30% of students go (probably a tad higher today because they lowered the bar).

There isn't a significant division between a a Gymnasium and Fachoberschule, because a Fachoberschule student can choose to get an Arbitur as well via an optional 13th year. And because German universities are de facto open entry, an Arbitur is all you need to be admitted.

China's vocational high schools on the other hand don't open the same doors to tertiary education that a Fachoberschule student has because they are structurally segregated away from academic students.

Abitur is 30% of students roughly which was the point of my discussion: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiturientenquote

This should include the students who do Abitur via FOS.

Made up how?

It’s still more merit based and class mobile than caste anything.

But the tests are the tests and require massive prep, eh?

And the tests require massive amounts of memorization and time to prep for, compared to western tests - even now.

Historically it was orders of magnitude worse though.

Kid’s ability to make it through the ranks of academia in my personal anecdotal evidence depends less on financial ability or social standing in China compared to the US or India.

I agree that it is merit driven above anything else - not sure I would agree that this is favoring wealthy kids/certain social class in a more disproportionate way than what we see in India or the US.

Now, I will say that neither university nor high school in China or India imho prepare kinds for success in life or the corporate world. Europe (with a hands-off “you get no help and will just struggle your way through life and learn quick”) and the US (“here are actual experts dedicated to help you succeed) seem imho to produce capable graduates for the corporate world.

Eh, see alephnerds comment above - that lines up with my experience as well.

Ok, the point being though (it seems): advantages are not universal geographically across China; I agree, that I also observed that.

In that geographical advantages are expressly tied to income and ‘official ness’ in an area (the Hukou system)?

If one is a poor rural immigrant in an otherwise high end area, you don’t get to send your kids to the nice schools.

The issue with hukou is two-way.

Urban cities of course don't want to hand out urban hukou easily because they don't want an influx of migrants straining social services.

But conversely, a lot of rural hukou holders do not want to give up rural hukou because it gives retirement benefits at 55 and is a requirement in order to keep their rural landholding.

This is why you have migrants with a rural hukou working in urban China but not gaining an urban hukou.

The problem with hukou is fundamentally a social safety net problem - there is little to no social safety net in China, so the "migrant to urban area with rural hukou" is the least bad option out of multiple bad options (keep rural hukou and live in rural China barely eking a living or give up rural hukou and lose the only appreciating asset you had along with benefits at 55).

In essence, the lion's share of Chinese development is overly concentrated in a handful of urban agglomerations, and isn't spreading to rural China where 45-50% of Chinese still live to this day.

The hokou/education thing is pretty clearly one way though, correct?

Just making urban hukou easier to adopt (which is something that multiple municipalities slowly started doing in the late 2010s) isn't enough to solve the social mobility issue.

Parents won't give up rural hukou if it also means losing your landholding and early retirement stipend benefits.

If you're a migrant worker from a rural household, you are most likely an unskilled laborer and are earning around $300/month, with dad working on a construction site or Meituan and mom working in a factory doing unskilled assembly or service job.

Around $150 is spent on incidentals because living in an urban area is expensive, an additional $100 is sent back to your family (grandma, grandpa, kids because the one child policy was largely ignored in rural China) back home in your rural town, and you might have $50 left over to save for retirement, healthcare, etc.

This is not enough to buy urban property, which is the asset class that appreciated the most in China, and this means the only large asset you have is your rural landholding. Furthermore, that early retirement benefit means you're earning an additional $15-20/month while continuing to work as a laborer or a Meituan delivery driver.

Fundamentally, salaries are too low in China and the social safety net is nonexistent, and this is what is causing the issues like overproduction, deflation, and sagging consumer demand which we are seeing nowadays.

The only way to solve this problem is to either expand the welfare system dramatically (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by having to save less) or increase wages (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by allowing them to save at the same rate while spending more). Working on increasing the quality of life in rural China would also help dramatically.

Sadly, Chinese leadership at the top level continues to ignore social welfare spending and rural China due to financial and moral concerns.

Given the collapsing demographics in China, many of those rural hukou holders are obviously not going to receive the promised retirement benefits. The surplus resources to fund those payments don't exist so either the retirement age will be raised or benefits will be cut (either officially, or unofficially by just not sending payments and ignoring any protests).

Retirement benefits are the last thing the CCP touches because tens of millions of Chinese heavily rely on it already.

China is authoritarian, but the CCP absolutely does take public sentiment into account, and policies that have the chance of causing mass protests and discontent do get rolled back.

Zero Covid is a perfect example of this, as it was hastily rolled back after the wave of protests following the apartment fire in Urumqi due to Xinjiang CCP's hard Zero Covid enforcement.

And this is why China had not raised the retirement age until in the past few weeks despite trying for decades, and anyhow kicked that can down the line to 15 years.

I understand the concern over public sentiment but where will the revenue come from to pay those benefits? The ratio of workers to retirees is inevitably going to go way down and it seems unrealistic to expect that the government can borrow its way out of the problem. The retirees will have to take a hit somehow.

> where will the revenue come from to pay those benefits

A mixture of bonds/borrowing, federal bailouts, and (painful) corporate tax reform.

This is a major reason why provincial law enforcement has recently begun cracking down on unpaid corporate back taxes recently, because social spend is largely devolved to the provincial level.

The property crisis in China is itself a result of the retirement fund issue, as until recently provincial government's only financial lever was land sales, and retirement funds are largely the domain of provinces following Deng's reforms.

I do not disagree with that stance; but now we are comparing a population of 1 B people and a country the size of US+Europe+more with the US or a European country. E.g., it would sound a bit like comparing all of the opportunities and prospects kids in the EU have to the US and calling the geographic discrepancies “social barriers”. So, the “poor european families don’t get to send their kids to the fancy US schools”.

I don’t disagree there is unfairness - but it exists everywhere and China just has more people than US, EU, Canada, UK combined.

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