College is for losers

A handful of friends and I have frequently commented that it seems like the most successful people in China are the ones with the least education. Of course, we don’t actually have any substantive data to support this belief; we just know of a few successful Chinese friends here and there who happen to have not finished or gone to college, and it also seems like a lot of the entrepreneurs who appear on those China “Rich Lists” are a fairly uneducated bunch as well.

If you believe as I do that innovative/creative/”big” thinking is necessary for success (and I admit there’s something a bit American-centric about that view) then one explanation is that the education system here squashes creative thinkers. Anyone who’s taught English in China has probably made the observation that the best students (academically) are often also the biggest tools, and indeed they’re the ones often recruited early in the party & thus the most likely to have the most indoctrinated worldview.

However, I’m currently reading China Shakes the World by James Kynge (which is awesome and amazing and brilliant and wonderful, by the way) and just came across a much more obvious explanation:

Some seven million educated young people who had been sent to the countryside to “learn from the peasants” during the Cultural Revolution were by the late seventies and early eighties flooding back to the cities. As they were assigned to work units, many of those with lesser educational achievements could not find a job. Beijing felt it had no choice but to allow them to indulge in minor private businesses.

Thus did the unemployed — and in some cases the unemployable — of the early 1980s get their foot onto an escalator that would within two decades deliver some of them to the highest echelon of wealth.

That passage is then followed by a laundry list of one after another example of people whose lack of education and poor employment prospects were what not only spurred, but necessitated, their becoming entrepreneurs. Lots of interesting accounts of people who started out shilling things on the street, or spent time in prison, or borrowed money from relatives to buy a couple chickens, or whatever, and within a decade or two were wildly rich and successful (of course, a lot of these tales are followed by subsequent spectacular downfalls in which said entrepreneurs were imprisoned or executed for various illegal activities, but we’ll just ignore that bit for now.)

That doesn’t exactly account for the many younger Chinese I feel like I know of, in their 30s or so, who didn’t go to college and are doing pretty well for themselves now, but it is a good explanation for how a precedent may have been set.

And back on the topic of the awesome and amazing and brilliant and wonderfulness of China Shakes the World, I highly recommend this review of the book on Peking Duck.