-China has an incredibly large population base. A decline from 1.4 billion to 1 billion or slightly less still leaves China with a huge population.
You've attempted to distill an extremely complex sociological phenomenon into a simple-minded inversion of the overused "China big, has many people" cliché.
-The middle class, highly educated population in China which was tiny a few decades is still growing at a fast rate, and will continue to grow. Those are the people who will be driving China's future.
Key figures in recent history:
- 1998: Approximately 1 million new college graduates.
- 2017: A record 8 million graduates.
- 2023: 11.6 million graduates, representing 63% of the relevant age cohort, a dramatic increase from the 6% in the early 2000s.
- 2025: A projected 12.22 million graduates, with another 12.7 million expected in 2026.
- 2021-2025: The higher education system has produced over 55 million graduates during this five-year period.
China is growing their middle class rapidly, which is an excellent achievement. Having improved the treatment of their children is perhaps even a greater stride, so good on them.
The Chinese path to a comfy, middle class life does require college education, but it's important to keep in mind that it's perfunctory and not functional, which has become more true in the USA as well. By this I mean the quality of the education is not at all important and it shows, for example in the USA with the proliferation of <women's/black/oppressed person> studies degrees.
I saw countless examples in China while I was there, but one was a Chinese girl I knew with a Masters in chemistry who literally knew absolutely nothing about chemistry. Not one thing. She didn't know what the periodic table was, what a mole was, electron shells, nothing. She said she had almost gone insane from the pressure of memorizing rubbish and nearly dropped out before her second degree, but managed to hold on.
The Chinese education system relies on a series of tests that determine the next school for which you're eligible and begin in 6th grade for your middle school assignment, then for your high school, and most importantly your last such test in high school, the
Gao Kao, which determines the school and types of majors for which you're eligible, and directly connects to the job you'll get after.
Posted by
Josh Rudolph | Jun 21, 2013
Chinese students cram and learn to cheat from the age of 8 until their final year in high school with almost no free time for recreation or proper nutrition, much less sleep. Once they take the Gao Kao and get into college, that's the end of the mental torture for the vast majority of them, and they can just coast along and cheat a bit until their graduation because their job eligibility is mostly pre-determined and not dependent on whether they get A's or B's in university, which they can cheat for or purchase in various ways.
Chinese diplomas were never recognized outside the Middle Kingdom for ages because they're pretty much all fake. I'm sure there have been some improvements as I know it's not quite as easy to totally fake your medical doctor university degrees as it used to be, but it's crap, which is one reason why Xi Jin Ping sent his daughter to the USA for college and why perhaps a million wealthy Chinese do every year to schools in the West.