I apologise for the lack of an update for 3 weeks. I’ve been busy with so many things that I’ve not been able to sit down properly to type a blog entry. I’m not done with my busy schedule, though. However, I read an op-ed piece on New York Times that I simply couldn’t resist posting on this blog.

The title of the piece is “The Dictatorship of Talent” by David Brooks. For those who can’t be bothered to read the entire article, basically, the article talks from the point of view of a Chinese national about the “corporacy” in China and how the Chinese system is producing elites for the corporacy. And, Brooks’ description of the system sounds uncannily close to the Singaporean system.

Here’s the part of the article that describes the Chinese system.

As you rise in school, you see that to get into an elite university, you need to ace the exams given at the end of your senior year. Chinese students have been taking exams like this for more than 1,000 years.

The exams don’t reward all mental skills. They reward the ability to work hard and memorize things. Your adolescence is oriented around those exams — the cram seminars, the hours of preparation.

Roughly nine million students take the tests each year. The top 1 percent will go to the elite universities. Some of the others will go to second-tier schools, at best. These unfortunates will find that, while their career prospects aren’t permanently foreclosed, the odds of great success are diminished. Suicide rates at these schools are high, as students come to feel they have failed their parents.

But you succeed. You ace the exams and get into Peking University. You treat your professors like gods and know that if you earn good grades you can join the Communist Party.

Singapore has been called a nanny state, and it seems that China is becoming a nanny state too. Another paragraph from the article reads:

This is a government of talents, you tell your American friends. It rules society the way a wise father rules the family. There is some consultation with citizens, but mostly members of the guardian class decide for themselves what will serve the greater good.

You should be chuckling to yourself by now at the phrases “wise father rules the family” and “consultation with citizens”.

And finally, the article concludes with something I wonder from time to time (the bolded parts) about Singapore Inc:

You feel pride in what the corpocracy has achieved and now expect it to lead China’s next stage of modernization — the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. But in the back of your mind you wonder: Perhaps it’s simply impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.

It looks like China is pretty good at copying almost anything.