China's boxed itself in

The scenario I've described occurred in different forms throughout my two years at the school. Papers were routinely copied from the Web and the Harvard Business Review. Case study debates meant to be spontaneous were jointly scripted by the opposing teams and memorized. Students frequently posited that copying is a superior business strategy to inventing and innovating. When they considered the wealth that Chinese industry had amassed in such a short time, it was hard for them to believe otherwise.

Throughout the semesters, like students everywhere but more so, they wanted to know exactly what they needed to memorize for the mid-term and final. Considering it takes me a week just to commit several Chinese phrases to memory, I had to respect their skills.

Nonetheless, I reminded them that their exams would require analysis, and often re-explained at their request the difference between analysis and summary.

My Western-trained colleagues, both foreigners and Chinese, tell similar stories. It's not that university students in the West hadn't also needed coaching in critical thinking, but they weren't so blindly locked into such a seemingly entrenched style. It doesn't help, of course, that certain important topics related to politics and business have to be avoided in my Chinese classes.

Ironically, the government that has enforced such restrictions and focused its schools so intensely on math and science seems to realize its efforts may be too effective. Highways, dams, bridges and airports have been built, every conceivable product manufactured and sold, but so few sophisticated marketing and management minds have been cultivated that it will be a long time before most people in the world can name a Chinese brand.

With this problem in mind, local partnerships with institutions such as USC, Johns Hopkins, Yale, MIT and Insead of France have been established. If not quite ready to create cadres of disaffected litterateurs and cineastes, Beijing clearly recognizes it will take different kinds of thinkers to invent new products and sell them around the world.

And then there's the "thousand-talent scheme," a new government program intended to boost technological innovation by luring top foreign-trained scientists, including those of non-Chinese origin, to the mainland with big money and perks.