China already leads the world in human capital.

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

China leads the world in human capital not only because of its huge population-size (second only to India) but because China’s Government has, ever since Deng Xiao Ping came to power in 1978, developed that natural human capital better than any other large country has done — by means of its educational system, social services, etc. Furthermore, whereas Western countries tend to be burdened with anti-scientific religious prejudices — such as equating eugenics with only the bigoted evil forms of it that were practiced by Hitler’s Germany and other such countries (including the United States, with its high rates of racial prejudice) — China (both its people and its Government) do not, but instead recognize that reducing the frequency of genetically hereditary diseases is good, not at all to be viewed as intrinsically bad because “unnatural” (like many in The West do). In other words: there are also cultural differences that are now providing advantages to China in international economic competition, by leaving open some methods of human-capital development that encounter much heavier prejudicial barriers in Western nations.

For example, consider that, in August 2021, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology headlined and documented that “China is Fast Outpacing U.S. STEM PhD Growth”. And it’s not merely of academic interest. On 8 April 2020, Reuters bannered “China knocks U.S. from top spot in global patent race”. On 2 March 2021, Reuters headlined “China extends lead over U.S. in global patents filings, U.N. says”. Then, on 16 January 2023, China’s Global Times headlined “China leads the world with 4.2 million valid registered patents in 2022”, and reported that:

China had registered 4.212 million valid patents as of the end of 2022, making it the first country to pass the threshold of 3 million. The number manifests that the nation has been ramping up efforts to become a global innovational power.

Of the patents there are 1.324 million high-value patents, up 24.2 percent year-on-year, data from the National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA) showed on Monday.

The number of high-value patents per 10,000 people, a major indicator of economic and social development, has reached 9.4 in 2022, compared to 6.3 at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020).

Furthermore, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) issued their latest comprehensive study on student performance worldwide that included China in 2018, and it was titled “PISA 2018” in PISA’s full 64-page pdf report. It examined scores on reading, science, and math. Of course, every country tries to score as high as possible in the results, and in no country is the score based upon a scientifically randomized selection of students; but, still, these are the most trustworthy comparative data that exist on this crucial factor, a nation’s educational system. The students in China scored #1 on each one of the 3 of its parts (Reading, Math, and Science). America’s overall score was ranked #22. On 12 June 2019, a scholar associated with America’s Brookings Institution and Harvard’s Kennedy School, both of which are top academic centers of liberal neoconservative thought and propaganda (meaning that such findings terrified them), criticized China’s scoring at the top because the sample of its students was unscientific, but their article ignored that none of the samples had been scientific. That article criticizing China’s score was titled “Why China’s PISA scores are hard to believe”. It might more honestly have been “Why PISA Scores Are Hard to Believe,” because in that entire 64-page PISA report, there is no “Methodology” section, and there isn’t even once an appearance of that crucial word. But PISA is better than nothing, and it has no competitor. (Furthermore, in the 2-volume 966-page 2015 PISA report, there are very detailed explanations of methodology, which explained the limitations of their findings. In that report, China scored far lower: #3 in math, #7 in science, and #24 in reading, but among large-population countries, it was #1. So, even then, in 2015, China already was the richest nation in human resources.)

Because Harvard is one of the U.S. empire’s most prestigious institutions, and the PISA organization is itself part of the heavily U.S. Deep State influenced if not controlled OECD, the decision was made to not include China in the next report, PISA 2022, and there was also no public issuance of the full 2022 study, nothing at all like the 2018 study’s 64-page report (much less the 966-page 2015 report — which PISA made so difficult to access so that I was the first person successfully to copy its Volume 1 into the Wayback Machine, which copy I made is linked-to there); so, the 2022 report wasn’t published, but only small separate articles were made available based upon the 2022 study, such as “Science: percentage of students with adequate learning”. The top two countries this time (2022) were Singapore and Macao, both of which were cities. In the 2018 report, Singapore (population 7 million) was #2 to China’s #1, and Macao (population 700,000) — which is actually a Chinese province, not a country at all — was #3. (Of course, China’s population is 1.3 billion.)

In the 2018 report, students in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (four provinces that together have 190 million residents — 50% more people than in all of Japan) had been tested and reported on, and, one of the most remarkable findings was that “the 10% most disadvantaged students in these four provinces showed better reading skills than those of the average student in [any one of] the OECD countries, and performed on a par with the 10% most advantaged students in some of them.” In other words: the most astounding finding was that even students in those huge Chinese provinces who were from the lowest-income households were performing better than the students from the highest-income households in places such as Singapore. PISA found that China, more than any other country, avoided the norm, which is to devote fewer educational resources to poor-performing schools than to well-performing ones. What this meant in China is that the Government was not discriminating against rural schools by devoting fewer educational resources to them. China was trying to equalize opportunity for all of its citizens. So: China was removed from the competition in the 2022 report, because the 2018 report might have indicated too much improvement over China’s performance in the 2015 report for the OECD to consider acceptable. Maybe the idea of equal educational opportunity for all in China offends them as being too ‘communistic’, not sufficiently “capitalistic.” However, I would call it simply progressive — aiming for progress.

Another way to learn about China’s performance on raising the performance of its population is to listen to someone who is extraordinarily well-qualified to discuss this in regards to comparing China with the United States (the current #1 most-influential country in the world), and for this, I refer to Stephen D.H. Hsu, the son of a physics professor who taught at the Southern Taiwan University of Science and Engineering, and whose grandfather had been a general in the Chiang Kai-shek KMT anti-communist army, and who is himself from Zhejiang China, and who is also from Ames Iowa in America, travels widely throughout the world, and is among the leading theoretical physicists, aerospace engineers, and biologists, having received his doctorate in physics from the University of California–Berkeley, then became a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a Superconducting Supercollider Fellow, and then taught physics at Yale University, before he became a biologist and founded the pioneering anonymizer service SafeWeb and sold it to Symantek (now Gen Digital) for $26 million in 2003, at the age of 37, at which point he continued active in both biology and theoretical physics, and then co-founded Genomic Prediction, the leading predictor of genetic disease risks for persons seeking in-vitro fertilization. He has never, in his 58 years, been part of either country’s (America’s or China’s) Government, but works with both Deep States, and speaks publicly and frankly about both, and might be the only person who does (or even can) do that. (Probably, neither Deep State wants to risk antagonizing a person like he, because he is a leading scientist in our time and can be of assistance to both Governments.)

On 5 February 2024, Hsu was video-interviewed at youtube by Demetri Kofinas, who for seven years himself had lived and worked in China, and who asked Hsu about his life-story in both countries; and, in this interview, Hsu said, starting at 31:00:

And that was distributed, like some of the stuff that we did was in collaboration with Voice of America, and also the National Endowment for Democracy. Now, some people even today do not realize that National Endowment for Democracy is a front for the CIA. But I will tell you, as someone who worked with CIA, who worked with those organizations to try to push information into China, I shouldn’t say this because next time I go to China maybe I’ll get arrested or something. But that’s part of what we were doing in that era in the early 2000s. So on the one hand, yes, NED is basically CIA, anybody who tells you different doesn’t know what they are talking about.

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that someone who worked with the CIA has publicly admitted anything like that “NED is basically CIA,” and so Hsu’s statement adds further confirmation to my 31 July 2024 article “What Happens When the U.S. Coup Machine Hires People Who Don’t Know that That’s Their Actual Job”.

Then, on August 1st, Hsu posted online “China Today: Myths and Realities — #65”, which presents both a summary, video, and also a transcript, of: “Steve discusses China myths and realities with … a tech founder who ran a company in Beijing for 7 years. Among the topics covered: economic growth, real estate bubble, technology innovation, human capital, freedom of expression, Confucianism and Culture.”   

Hsu presents terrific insights there into why the U.S. Deep State’s obsession (the determination by both the Democratic Party’s billionaires and the Republican Party’s billionaires) to continue into the future the U.S.’s post-WW2 dominance over the world, is futile, stupid, and counterproductive, even for the people of the United States.

If what he says is correct, then the more that the neoconservatives (America’s Deep State and its numerous agents) continue to prevail in the U.S. Government, the worse the results will be for the American people. But, in any case, Hsu knows what the human capital development path that China is on is, and what he says about it fits very well with what PISA has reported (especially in their 2018 study).

And this adds further empirical support for my 29 August 2022 “Why RussChina Will Probably Be the Dominant Nation Beyond the Year 2100” (if the U.S. neoconservatives won’t get the world blown up by a nuclear WW3 before that time, by trying to prevent it).

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.