43 China
Roberts
43.1 Education
The chinese are smarter than us
Though we eagerly compare heritable traits like height, appearance, and athletic ability, we rarely compare intelligence, yet we boast that America’s Ashkenazi Jews, one percent of the population, have won forty percent of our Nobel Prizes. Chinese women are unambivalent. For millennia, they have refused to marry unintelligent men,’dry branches’, and thus culled their DNA from the gene pool. So ancient is this process that Ron Unz 28 found Chinese intelligence almost immune to socio-economic factors. Healthy Swiss are fifty times richer and receive twice the schooling of ill-nourished rural Chinese children who have carried a heavy disease burden for generations, yet Chinese IQs are consistently higher, “The reported Chinese PISA scores are far above those of the United States and nearly every European country, many of which are almost totally urbanized and have incomes ten times that of China. It is almost unimaginable that any non-East Asian population of rural villagers with annual incomes in the $1,000 range would have tested IQs very close to 100 [the US median]. We would certainly expect Chinese numbers to rise further as the country continues to develop. Still, my point is that East Asian IQs seem to possess a uniquely high floor compared with those of any other population”.
What does that mean in practice? Seventy percent of us have IQs between 85-115: we are smart enough to lead happy, productive lives. Five percent of us IQs are above 125 are smart enough for medical school, but only one of us out of two hundred, with an IQ of 140, can handle a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. And one in ten thousand have 160 IQs and can do groundbreaking work in any discipline. The US, with an average IQ of 100, has thirty-six thousand of these super-geniuses while China, with four times more people and a national IQ of 105, has three hundred thousand 29 . Anatoly Karlin predicts 30 that a combination of the Flynn effect 31 , poverty elimination and improved rural education and nutrition will lift the national IQ average to Shanghai’s 108, thus doubling the pool of super-geniuses. Since virtually all Chinese super-geniuses work for the government, it is not surprising that Henry Kissinger 32 concluded, “The Chinese are smarter than us”.
Basic literacy in Chinese demands a working memory capable of handling at least three thousand characters, and mastery requires the use of contextual variables to extract their meaning from millions of possible combinations. Children’s working memory skills at five years of age were the best predictor of reading, spelling, and math outcomes six years later. Analogous to computer RAM; working memory is the part of short-term memory devoted to immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing.
43.2 Leadership
As has been the case since the birth of Christ, China is governed by a Confucian just hierarchy that is designed to weed out sociopaths and recruit able, compassionate people willing to sacrifice their lives in service to the people. So it is not surprising that, instead of viewing the State as intrusive, untrustworthy, and threatening, the Chinese see themselves belonging to a family-state and view their politicians as family patriarchs. Under such leadership, they value collective over individual wellbeing, the future over the present, pragmatism above ideology, and outcomes over promises–a value system that provides social cohesion and has made China the richest, strongest nation on earth for most of its existence.