I normally don't pay much nevermind to what happens way up there in the Ivy League, particularly during football season, but I was intrigued by this New York Times piece about Professor Shi Yigonga, a Johns Hopkins-trained Chinese molecular biologist at Princeton who is heading back to his old stomping grounds after eighteen years in this country, during which he won much acclaim, brought in a ton of grant money, and established himself as the head pointy-head in a big bucks research lab at Princeton. Not only is Professor Shi, a naturalized American citizen, resigning his prestigious post at Princeton, but like ol' Sarah Palin and the "Bridge to Nowhere," he is saying, "Thanks, but no thanks" to a hard-to-come-by $10-million research grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He's chucking all this, it seems, to become the dean of life services at his undergraduate alma mater, Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Shi's departure left Princeton administrators shocked and dismayed, but the boys in Beijing apparently made him more promises than Alabama offered Nick Saban, and they no doubt expect a comparable bang for their buck--or yuan, actually. This successful seduction of Shi, the Times writer observes, reflects the determination of Chinese leaders to "reverse the drain of top talent that accompanied its opening to the outside world over the past three decades." This appraisal is no doubt correct for the long haul, but for now, I'd say China is simply harvesting the fruits of having its best and brightest trained and supported in their ongoing professional development by the nation that Chinese leaders have undertaken to overtake. A Georgia Tech study, (for whatever that might be worth,) now predicts that in a decade or so China's rapidly increasing investment in research and development will vault it ahead of the United States in its capacity to turn R & D into marketable products.
Now don't get me wrong, here, I'm not about to go all Lou Dobbs on you, nor am I suggesting that Professor Shi did not more than earn his keep while at Princeton. What I am saying, however, is that anyone who has attended a graduate school commencement ceremony in the last twenty years has seen the globalization of American knowledge and expertise firsthand. Not that this is anything new. Those who can't believe that a place so "backward" as China in so many respects can actually be breathing down our necks should consider the case of the Russians who developed the atomic and hydrogen bombs and put men into space while their soldiers were still wearing coats sent to their predecessors under Lend-Lease in 1941 and the civilian population was struggling to survive on a steady diet of borscht, stale bread, and vodka. As he often did, Lewis Grizzard put the whole thing in a nutshell back in the 1990s when he demanded to know how a nation that could succeed in sending a man to the moon could fail so miserably at making toilet paper. The answer, of course, was priorities, and somehow more and better rump ribbon just didn't seem as important to the Kremliniskis as becoming as militarily powerful and technologically advanced as the United States. ( Thank goodness I'm not just your typical juvenile punster, or I might suggest here that the Russkie leaders were more interested in wiping us out than out-wiping us.)
What we're talking about here is nothing more or less than the same process by which, over the centuries, "follower" nations, not excluding ours at the outset, have managed to "short cut" the modernization process by taking advantage of the developments and discoveries achieved by more advanced, "leader" societies. If the descendants of Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone could see that that there was no need for them to reinvent the wheel, after all, then it's not exactly surprising that many centuries later the Russians would be copying everything we did or had, all the while claiming credit for inventing it themselves, of course.
The ability to speed up the process of economic modernization by learning from other societies' advances and embracing their innovations was a good thing in many ways, but not all. By the 1960s, for example, southern development leaders had begun to realize they could take advantage of the highly specialized nature of modern factory work, along with major advances in training techniques to short-cut the protracted and expensive process of developing a generally better-educated workforce by offering custom-tailored, state-funded "start-up" training programs as enticements to incoming industries. Now available in every southern state and many others as well, these programs can supply an up-to-speed labor force practically from the first day of operation.
The promise of such a program doubtless helped to allay BMW's concerns about the educational deficiencies of South Carolina workers. Elsewhere, despite Alabama's consistent last or near-last standing in national educational rankings, only a threatened lawsuit by a teachers group prevented Governor Fob James from raiding the state's school fund in 1995 to pay off the remainder of its subsidy pledge to Mercedes, whose entire workforce had already been custom-trained at state expense . Meanwhile, over in that neighboring citadel of educational excellence, Mississippi, when the state promised $80 million to train 4,000 workers for a new Nissan production facility, the cost per worker was more than four times its annual per-pupil expenditures in grades K-12. Mississippi clung desperately to forty-eighth place in a respected national ranking of state school systems in 2006, but delighted at the dramatic savings in their start-up costs, Nissan and other international employers seemed no more concerned than their domestic counterparts about whether their workers have ever taken algebra, much less written an essay or read a sonnet.
In 2007, a ranking of states according to their capacity to participate in the new "Knowledge-Based" global economy showed South Carolina and Connecticut effectively sharing the distinction of having the nation's highest percentage of workers employed by foreign companies, with North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee also placing in the top thirteen in this category. In outright defiance of what had once been the traditional wisdom, however, for all their success in attracting foreign direct investment, these four states were also among the ten southern states clustered in the bottom fourteen in rankings of the educational levels of their work forces.
Although this attempt to circumvent rather than solve the South's educational problems has brought more and better jobs to some communities in the short run, we might take a quick glance at the places where, a half-century or more ago, local leaders had decided to mortgage their town's social and institutional future by wooing footloose northern industries with promises cheap labor, construction subsidies, tax exemptions and guarantees of protection from unions or higher wage competition. These days, a great many-- probably most--such communities have long since bade goodbye to their one-time industrial benefactors who skipped town in a hurry once they heard about the even warmer hospitality awaiting them in places like Honduras or Bangladesh. In the wake of their departures, meanwhile, their former hosts are enjoying little success in bringing in new employers for relatively high-wage (by global standards) labor with only low-wage skills. Such are the fruits of trying to achieve a developed economy at the expense of a developed society.
The poster state for such a developmental approach is Dr. Shi's China, of course. Shi explained that he returned to his homeland because "I felt I owed China something," and the Times notes that like Shi, other recently repatriated scientists are also " lured by their patriotism, their desire to serve as catalysts for change and their belief that the Chinese government will back them." Given the aims of Chinese leaders, the latter belief is likely well-founded. As to the kinds of "change" they manage to catalyze, however, it remains to be seen whether they will lighten or merely increase the suffering of the sorely neglected millions of Chinese people who have thus far borne the burden of their nation's efforts to take the shortcut to modernity.
