More tech experts, but fewer scholars

People in China often lament that far fewer Chinese professionals are likely to end up becoming leading executives in multinational corporations than those from India.

But there may be a cultural explanation for the phenomenon. The Chinese may, as it were, still carry the shadow from their tradition of small family farms.

In overall terms, according to a recent survey about human resources in California's Silicon Valley and nearby areas, China's contribution is larger than that of New York state and many countries in the world.

China is a main supplier of technical talent to developed industries, after all. Bespectacled Chinese programmers seem to have built an established brand name for themselves. The need for technical talent will rise steadily in the next few years, with the world on the threshold of a new round of industrialization.

In contrast, however, the country's technical and vocational education has been a subject of heated debate and even harsh criticism. According to a recent report on the people.com.cn, website of the People's Daily, for the last eight years, the success rate in job hunting for polytechnic graduates in Beijing has been 78.1 percent, higher than that of university graduates, whose success rate is 75.5 percent even though they would have achieved much higher scores in college entrance examinations.

The latter group included graduates from the city's top institutions of higher learning, such as Peking and Tsinghua universities.

The situation also reflects a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon - the society's otherwise unexplainable bias for government or office jobs and for supposedly higher cultural pursuits.

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