What's in the News

Well, I did find the answer within the allotted 20 seconds 

(I first saw the pic on my phone so it was easy an easy step from "could they be...?" to "goddamn!").

China taps tech training to tackle labor market mismatch

(Reuters) - China is waking up to a potentially damaging mismatch in its labor market.

A record 7.27 million graduates - equivalent to the entire population of Hong Kong - will enter the job market this year; a market that has a shortage of skilled workers.

Yet many of these university and college students are ill-equipped to fill those jobs, prompting the government to look at how it can overhaul the higher education system to bridge the gap. The problem is part structural, part attitude.

While most liberal arts students are still looking for work after graduating this summer, 22-year-old Li Xidong is preparing to start a job as an electrician that he landed well before finishing three years of training at a small vocational school.

Li's diploma may appear less impressive, but his coveted job in a tight labor market may hold the key to the employment conundrum in the world's second largest economy. The machinery sector alone projects a gap of 600,000 computer-automated machine tool operators this year, media have reported.

"We're trained as skilled workers, it's quite easy for us to find jobs while still in school," said Li, who is in the final stretch of a 3-year program at Hebei Energy College of Vocation and Technology in Tangshan, an industrial city 180 kms (112 miles) east of Beijing.

"Seventy percent of our class found work and some others are starting their own businesses," Li noted, as he waited for a friend at a recruitment fair in the capital, where fewer than a third of this year's university graduates had found work by end-April.

The government has said it plans to refocus more than 600 local academic colleges on vocational and technical education - replacing literature, history and philosophy with technology skills such as how to maintain lathes and build ventilation systems. Course curricula will be tailored to meet employers' specific needs.

Pilot programs will be launched this year, and 150 local universities have signed up for the education ministry's plan, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.

"NOT GOD'S GIFT"

After 13 years of aggressive policy to expand academic colleges, China had almost seven times as many freshmen last year than in 1998. That rapid growth compromised educational quality, especially in local colleges established after 1999, experts say.

"Understanding of oneself and the job market, and training and education to face the job market, these are all missing in our ivory-tower style education," said Chen Yu, director of the China Institute for Occupation Research at Peking University.

Part of the problem lies with the students, too, who harbor unrealistic expectations, especially as China's economic growth loses momentum.

Chinese graduates are less willing than their Western peers to take blue-collar jobs, work in smaller companies or start their own businesses, hoping to land steady jobs instead in the government or high-paying white-collar work, Chen said.

"College students should know they are not God's gift and it's difficult to find jobs, so they can adjust their attitude and don't necessarily have to join the civil service or big state-owned firms," he added.

For instance, China's call-center sector needs 20 million workers to cater to its vast consumer population, but currently employs just 2 million due to a dearth of trained workers, says Yako Yan, chairman of the China Call Center and Business Process Outsourcing Association. "Call centers are technical labor ... graduates often don't have the technical ability. Some think it's relatively low-end and disapprove of it," says Yan.

That attitude and the harsher reality of China's jobs market today has left many graduates feeling helpless. In a changing market, many graduates with big dreams and high scores find they have few marketable skills.

"What we studied has no use in finding jobs," said Xu Ke, 23, who was at the same Beijing job fair and is soon to finish her course majoring in general marketing planning at an agricultural institute in eastern Jiangsu province. "In college, we thought companies would be queuing up to hire us. Now, I just hope I can find a job soon."

VOCATIONAL VS ACADEMIC

    The government plans to reform the national college entrance exam system by setting up a technical training exam separate to the academic exam, Education Vice Minister Lu Xin was reported by Xinhua as saying. The ministry would also turn more than 600 local universities into higher-education vocational colleges, Lu said. China has 879 public universities and colleges, according to a 2013 ministry list.

"Vocational education has a bearing on China's economic transformation and upgrading ... and on the employment of hundreds of millions in the labor force," Yu Zhengsheng, the fourth-ranked member in the elite Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party, told a meeting of the national political advisory body earlier this month.

The ministry declined to comment for this article.

In recent years, graduates from higher vocational schools, which rank below universities in the Chinese system, have consistently done better in finding jobs than standard college graduates, Lu told the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, in a separate interview.

    Apart from the economic concern, the government is keen to move graduates into suitable jobs to prevent any formation of a restive young population - which played a major role in the 1989 pro-democracy movement. For years, Beijing has encouraged students to accept more lowly positions, such as village officials, especially in the less developed western regions, and to start their own businesses.

    About 80 percent of higher vocational school graduates last year found jobs, while only around two-thirds of college graduates secured work, according to a report from the 21st Century Education Research Institute. Vocational college graduates also had a higher average starting salary - at 3,291 yuan ($530) a month versus an average 3,157 yuan among students from China's top-100 universities.

"We don’t necessarily need to sit in an office after graduating. I can start in the factories and work my way up, step by step," said Li, who hopes to pick up the practical skills that will allow him to move on to more advanced electrical work.


Quoted in full because omg.

And the right answer is.......? (Hint: it's not "87")

"L8"?

"L8"?

 

...

Of course....need to make those children competitive as early as possible...

Xi: China Must Take Technological Future Into Own Hands

Speaking at a conference held by two of China’s top research institutes, President Xi Jinping advocated for a new era of Chinese innovation. “We cannot always dress up our tomorrow in other peoples’ yesterdays,” Xi told 1,300 researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. “We cannot always rely on others’ science and technology to raise our own technological level.” The full Chinese-language speech was the featured headline on Xinhua’s website Monday.

Making sure that there would be no misunderstanding, Xi emphasized that the future of China’s science and technology industries should be “innovation, innovation, and innovation.” To nurture innovation, Xi called for a national system to encourage creativity, including more resources for science and technology development and the removal of systemic obstacles. The impetus for the push was apparent in Xi’s call for Chinese scientists to “take key technologies into our own hands.”

Early in his speech, Xi made it clear that China must become a “technologically strong country” in order to complete the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” He compared the current period to China’s historical period of suffering — a time when China’s lack of technological prowess caused great anguish for the Chinese people. Based on that experience, Xi declared that “science is the foundation for a country’s prosperity.” Science, he said, will determine the fate of all countries and all peoples...


Science as an innovation engine? What a novel idea.

ISIS are in the north. the oil fields are in the South.

I would guess that ISIS will find it a lot harder to gain ground in the South.

This situation is of course horrible, but it does present some extremely good opportunities for creating a better relationship with Iran (either by USA or China) and tacitly supporting the breaking up of Iraq to include a separate Kurdistan, which as long as it doesn't screw up Turkey would be a good thing.

I'm not at all sure that Iraq as a country is a terribly good idea anyway. I heard the other day that the last time the Sunnis and Shias successfully shared power there was about 1,100 years ago.

Not that anything's that simple of course, but what else exactly is China supposed to do?

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to read this drivel.
In accordance with relevant experiences and scientific practices, don't read it all at once.

The Internet in China
Foreword
I. Endeavors to Spur the Development and Application of the Internet
II. Promoting the Extensive Use of the Internet
III. Guaranteeing Citizens' Freedom of Speech on the Internet
IV. Basic Principles and Practices of Internet Administration
V. Protecting Internet Security
VI. Active International Exchanges and Cooperation
Concluding Remarks

Now more than ever, attaching great importance.

Also, China invented football

The Future of English in Korea

President Park Geun-hye’s confident use of English points to changing attitudes and ability for Koreans.

In the 1950s South Korea was a country devastated by war. Per capita GDP was a meager $300 a year and fewer than 50 companies had more than 200 employees. Those who spoke English had an incredibly lucrative skill. They could work for the U.S. military, for embassies, for foreign companies, or as middlemen and get paid in foreign currency, making enough money to help their extended families survive.

From this came the idea that you could be rich by speaking English in Korea. Sixty years later and South Korea is now a wealthy nation. Still, sixty years is not that long ago, and many Koreans have held onto the idea that the ability to speak English is worth its weight in gold. That was until President Park Geun-hye came to power in 2013.

Previous presidents Lee Myung-bak, Roh Moo-hyun, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam grew up in a Korea where you could become rich if you spoke English. Park saw Korea rise out of poverty as she grew up, and English is not what did it.

In The Local Constructions of a Global Language, Joseph Park wrote about how Koreans thought of the English language, which is through the concepts of necessitation, self-deprecation and externalization. It is viewed as a necessary language, you have to be humble when speaking it and keep in mind that it is the language of the out-group. That was until Park came to power....


Interesting metric. We have until the highest-ranked Chinese official gives televised speeches in English.

The Future of English in Korea

President Park Geun-hye’s confident use of English points to changing attitudes and ability for Koreans.

In the 1950s South Korea was a country devastated by war. Per capita GDP was a meager $300 a year and fewer than 50 companies had more than 200 employees. Those who spoke English had an incredibly lucrative skill. They could work for the U.S. military, for embassies, for foreign companies, or as middlemen and get paid in foreign currency, making enough money to help their extended families survive.

From this came the idea that you could be rich by speaking English in Korea. Sixty years later and South Korea is now a wealthy nation. Still, sixty years is not that long ago, and many Koreans have held onto the idea that the ability to speak English is worth its weight in gold. That was until President Park Geun-hye came to power in 2013.

Previous presidents Lee Myung-bak, Roh Moo-hyun, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam grew up in a Korea where you could become rich if you spoke English. Park saw Korea rise out of poverty as she grew up, and English is not what did it.

In The Local Constructions of a Global Language, Joseph Park wrote about how Koreans thought of the English language, which is through the concepts of necessitation, self-deprecation and externalization. It is viewed as a necessary language, you have to be humble when speaking it and keep in mind that it is the language of the out-group. That was until Park came to power....


Interesting metric. We have until the highest-ranked Chinese official gives televised speeches in English.

Do you think that the Chinese would go for that though?

They never had the thing of speaking English as a way out of poverty, they managed to maintain the integrity of their dictators

Dunno. What is the Chinese construction of the global language? People used to say, vaguely, it was for foreign trade. I don't know that people say it's for anything these days.