泛读翻译 Unit 1 fast reading

Unit 1 fast readingThe Effects of China’s Push for EducationJANUARY 21, 2013The Chinese government is investing deeply in higher education, trying to create an educated work force to expand the economy beyond manufacturing.Is China becoming more of a competitive challenge to the United States, Europe and Japan through its rapid expansion of education? Will the nation’s focus on technical fields be a strength or a weakness?Good for China, and the Rest of the WorldWang Huiyao is the director general of the Center for China andGlobalization and a senior visiting fellow at the Harvard KennedySchool.The investment in education will expand the middle class in Chinaand will increase the consumption of goods and services from all over the world.The Chinese government in recent years has given unprecedented attention to the development of talent, hoping to combat emerging development issues and maintain the Chinese growth engine. The government’s plans are a blueprint for developing a highly skilled national work force within the next 10 years. Among the goals is the transformation of China from a manufacturing hub to a world leader in innovation – a grand objective. One step is to increase the pool of highly skilled workers, to 180 million by 2020 from the current 114 million. Another is to ensure that by 2020, 20 percent of the work force has had a college education. That would be 195 million people.For the past 30 years, 225 million migrant workers have made China into aworld-manufacturing powerhouse. The same principle will apply: nearly 195 million college graduates by 2020 will certainly change China and the world. This is apositive change, not only for China but also for the United States, Europe and Japan. The investment in education will expand the middle class in China and will certainly increase the consumption of goods and services imported from all over the world.Also, China for the past 30 years has sent 2.5 million students overseas, mainly to developed countries. Nearly two-thirds of them are still in these countries, and are contributing t o their work forces rather than China’s. Some, however, become “seagulls”(flying back and forth), which promotes economic and social exchanges between China and the outside world. This movement of Chinese talent will continue to benefit China and the rest of the world.China’s focus on education in technical fields will certainly be a strength as the nation strives to be more innovative. The technical work force has been falling behind and needs to be upgrade d. Nevertheless, China should also focus more on the social, public and humanities areas in order to have well-balanced development.China Wasn’t Trying to Take On the U.S.Zheng Yongnian is the director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.The huge investment in higher education began as an effort to stimulate domestic demand.Will China, with an ever-expanding army of educated workers, beat the United States, Europe and Japan in the global competition for human resources? From our recent study on China’s higher education, the answer is "very unlikely" -- if no fundamental institutional reform is introduced.For one thing, the government-sponsored expansion in higher education was never meant to improve the general quality of higher education. When the policy was hastily put forward in the late 1990s, the goal was to raise domestic demand, relieve fiscal strain and delay young people's entrance to the labor market, rather than lifting the quality of the labor force. Later, the wholeexpansion drive developed into a government-sponsored tournament among the universities for administrative ranks, government money and sheer size of enrollments. Subjects that expanded fastest were not engineering, but cheap subjects like applied social sciences and management. The worst expansion mostly occurred among the lower echelon of the higher education system, whereas elite institutions like Beijing, Qinghua and Fudan have hardly expanded their undergraduate enrollments. As a result, graduates from second- and third-class institutes often end up earning a salary similar to or even lower than those of uneducated migrant laborers.In addition, China’s higher education expansion has not helped much in strengthening the country’s technical capacity. Technical schools have always been ranked at the bottom in China’s higher education hierarchy. In a country where the ideal career for youth is still the civil service and general degrees are the basic requirement for taking the civil service examinations, a technical degree is often associated with low social est eem. Not surprisingly, China’s best technical schools have in fact atrophied while higher education expanded, causing a nationwide shortage of skilled workers and technicians and bottlenecks in manufacturing. Although China’s good research universities tend to produce more engineers and scientists than humanists and social scientists, they do not help to improve the weak technical base of the nation's overall labor force.Luring Back the Chinese Who Study AbroadDavid Zweig is the associate dean of the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the director of its Center on China’s Transnational Relations.If China wants to bring back the best, it needs a fundamental reform of its academic and scientific institutions.China is not only cultivating its own college graduates and experts, but also trying to bring back the sons and daughters who left China for higher education. While the number of Chinese students returning from overseas hasincreased dramatically, three nagging issues remain. First, the rate of return has remained approximately 30 percent for decades. True, in 2009 the numbers of returnees jumped to 115,000 a year, a threefold increase since 2007, but that increase is largely because in 2009, more than 240,000 Chinese students went abroad to study at all levels — high school, undergraduate and graduate degrees, a tenfold increase over 2004.Second, the return rate among Chinese who rec eived Ph.D.’s in the United States is shockingly low. Approximately 92 percent of all Chinese who received a science or technology Ph.D. in the U.S. in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007. This rate was well above India’s, which is in second place with 81 percent.Finally, China’s universities and scientific research institutes cannot draw back the ―crème de la crème‖ of its overseas talent. In late 2008, the Chinese Communist Party began the ―1,000 Talents‖ program, aimed at these supremely talented Chinese. Through a wide variety of terrific incentives —sometimes as much as $1 million — the party has encouraged academic and research institutes, as well as municipal governments, to ―bring back the best.‖The 1,000 Talents program has met with some success. As of summer 2011, 2,100 people had returned under this program. Entrepreneurs are much more willing to move back permanently; the academics and scientists in the program prefer short term visits and are reluctant to sail to China with all their belongings.So, why do the scientists and academics not return permanently, and what must the Chinese leaders do?If China wants to bring back the best, it needs a fundamental reform of its academic and scientific institutions. Most important, it must weaken the power of academic and scientific administrators. Too much money passes through the hands of these administrators, rather than being distributed through open, competitive, peer-review procedures. Similarly, in many institutions, promotion depends on your relationship with the dean or senior faculty and not your academic pedigree. Returnees, or those who hesitate to return, often say that in China, ―personal relationships are too complex‖ – a code for the backstabbing and petty jealousies and the need to cultivate ties with leaders in your own field.Not all institutions suffer from these foibles. Shanghai Jiaotong University has blind votes for tenure decisions; senior faculty get only one vote and no veto.Nationwide, more and more funding is being allocated on a competitive basis. Moreover, people in the next generation of leaders advocate more ―relaxed, tolerant and lenient‖ institutions.Today, China's leaders recognize the dilemma: Chinese who went abroad for PhDs, and have since become leaders in scientific and academic institutions overseas, will not return unless the system changes. The lack of reform, not funds offered by the state, determines where the really talented will settle.。