A Slip of the Tongue - Jon Huntsman

Former Governor of Utah and US's last Ambassador to China, spoke about how US can catch up in its manufacturing sector in a presidential candidates debate at Wofford College of South Carolina.

As in all presidential candidates debate, bashing China is always a cheap shot to gain applause from the audience. Mitt Romney stated the US was in the middle of an undeclared war with China, therefore the US should 'stand up' to China as if in a real war. Rick Perry proclaimed China would end up in the ash heap of history. While obviously pressured by hard line comments made by peers, Huntsman threw out what he perceived as the right way to 'take down' China: reaching out to allies in China, the youth and the Internet users. After they take down China, the US will have a chance to raise up its own economics and in particular manufacturing sector.

So all the 'reaching out' shown by the former Ambassador (as well as those by the current Ambassador Gary Locke) are not meant for friendship or promoting value of democracy?

A slip of the tongue, or a moment of truth?

Transcript from CBS News, Scott Pelley is one of the two hosts of the debate:

Jon Huntsman: Well, the re-- reality's a little different as it usually is when you're on the ground. And I've tried to figure this out for 30 years of my career. First of all, I don't think, Mitt, you can take-- China to the W.T.O. on currency-related issues. Second, I-- I don't know that this country needs a trade war with China. Who does it hurt? Our small businesses in South Carolina, our exporters-- our agriculture producers.

We don't need that at a time when China is about to embark on a generational position. So what should we be doing? We should be reaching out to our allies and constituencies within China. They're called the young people. They're called the internet generation. There are 500 million internet users in China.

Scott Pelley: And Governor, we're going to have to--

Jon Huntsman: And 80 million bloggers. And they are bringing about change, the likes of which is gonna take China down.

Scott Pelley: We're gonna have to leave it there, Governor.

Jon Huntsman: While we have an opportunity to go up and win back our economic--

Scott Pelley: Governor--

Jon Huntsman: --manufacturing muscles. That's all I wanna do as president.

Chinese College Students Can Do Math

A recent study published on Science showed the disturbing lagging of students' knowledge in science in the US.

What is more disturbing are the facts that the paper does not reveal. After the central government adopted a policy to stimulate internal consume, the annual enrollment of colleges was increased near 10 times, from less than 600,000 in 1990s to more than 6 millions overnight. Also, in Chinese education system, best universities are those mega-size national universities, and by and large, the quality of the university grows monotone with the number of students it has. In other words, all Chinese students who participated in the study are those who with so poor academic performance that they won't be able to attend a college 10 years ago.

Still these Chinese student were able to beat their US counterparts by a margin of 2:1 in science knowledge. Although the reasoning part showed comparable results, the overall capability of an individual is the product of knowledge and reasoning skills. Therefore, the final result still looks doom for US students.

What's even more disturbing is the shape of the distribution curve with grades of US students, which is almost a perfect shifted normal distribution. We would have expected a budge on the right hand side, which might reflect out liners of the public school systems and those who attend private schools. Alas, there are too few of them that no such budge could be detected.

In short, US won't be able to compete with China in the years to come.