My observation from hiring both Chinese and Western graduates is that with Chinese graduates, you get a much better guarantee of someone who will actually work hard at their task for 8 hours a day, but, you will need to supervise them and give them a great deal of guidance. With Western graduates, about 75 percent of them are completely useless because they are so undisciplined and lacking in basic knowledge. The remaining 25 percent, however, and pure gold. They attack problems creatively, are eager to show you their best and rapidly take to new tasks and challenges.

There’s a frustrating paradox in Chinese education. On the one hand, millions of college graduates cannot find a job — at least a desirable job that pays substantially more than what a migrant worker makes. On the other hand, businesses that want to pay a lot more can’t seem to find qualified employees.

Multinational companies in China are having a difficult time finding qualified candidates for their positions. According to a recent survey of U.S.-owned enterprises conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, 37 percent of the companies that responded said that finding talent was their biggest operational problem. A separate study by McKinsey Quarterly found that 44 percent of the executives in Chinese companies reported that insufficient talent was the biggest barrier to their global ambitions.

The explanation: a test-oriented educational environment…

[The Confucian civil service exam] Keju is dead now but its spirit is very alive in China today, in the form of gaokao, or the College Entrance Exam. It’s the only exam that matters since it determines whether students can attend college and what kind of colleges they can attend. Because of its life-determining nature, gaokao has become the “baton” that conducts the whole education orchestra. Students, parents, teachers, school leaders and even local government officials all work together to get good scores. From a very young age, children are relieved of any other burden or deprived of opportunity to do anything else so they can focus on getting good scores.

The result is that Chinese college graduates often have high scores but low ability. Those who are good at taking tests go to college, which also emphasizes book knowledge. But when they graduate, they find out that employers actually want much more than test scores…

Chinese educators are well aware of the problems with the gaokao system and have been trying to move away from the excessive focus on testing…

I had an interesting conversation with a Chinese education scholar on a long airport shuttle ride this past October, and he shared with me an observation that I found to be [let us say] enlightening. I asked him about recent efforts in China to move away from a test-based education system in light of our hell-bent determination to create our own on this side of the Pacific. His response was: “China is becoming the US, and the US is becoming China.” That just about sums it up…

The U.S. political system makes coalitions virtually impossible, and the polarization of right and left is a further barrier to reform. Canada, by contrast, doesn’t go in for polarization. We prefer the mushy, pragmatic middle. All our federal governments rule from the centre, give or take a centimetre or two, which is why we’re witnessing the curious sight of Michael Ignatieff trying to attack the Conservatives for waste and reckless spending. Despite the petty bickering of Question Period, our political consensus runs deep, and the two main parties basically agree on every major economic matter.

But America’s problems go far deeper than its ideological divides. The question is not whether Democrats or Republicans will ultimately prevail, but whether the political culture can evolve enough to tackle fundamental institutional reforms. These reforms are essential if the U.S. is to fight its way back to prosperity amidst the global economic upheaval. It won’t be easy. As the astute thinker Walter Russell Mead argues, the U.S. will have to dramatically reduce the size and cost of its government and legal, health and education systems, while finding ways to make them more productive. It will have to do these things while people worry they’ll never again be as well off as they were before.

Ah Wei has an explanation for Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou as to why some of his workers are committing suicide at the company’s factory near the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

“Life is meaningless,” said Ah Wei, his fingernails stained black with the dust from the hundreds of mobile phones he has burnished over the course of a 12-hour overnight shift. “Everyday, I repeat the same thing I did yesterday. We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here.”

Conversation on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to 10 minutes every two hours and constant noise from the factory washes past his ear plugs, damaging his hearing, Ah Wei said. The company has rejected three requests for a transfer and his monthly salary of 900 yuan ($132) is too meager to send home to his family, said the 21-year-old, who asked that his real name not be used because he is afraid of his managers…

Foxconn’s Longhua complex outside Shenzhen spans three square kilometers (1.16 square miles) and is criss-crossed by tree-lined streets with a water fountain at the center of the facility. Workers wearing polo shirts emblazoned with “Foxconn” in Chinese characters over their hearts walk along the streets. Men wear blue, women wear red. Security personnel wear white. The complex boasts its own hospital, a collection of restaurants and a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees.

The workers, 86 percent of whom are under 25 years old, live in white dormitories with eight to 10 people sleeping in a room. The living quarters have stairs running up the outside walls and the company has begun covering them with nets to prevent people from jumping…

Inside the compound, at a factory devoted to computer motherboards, rows of young men and women stand at assembly lines, their feet shod in blue slippers and white caps on their heads. The smell of solvent hangs in the air. About 80 percent of the front-line production employees work standing up, some for 12 hours a day for six days a week, according to Liu Bin, a 24-year-old employee.

“It’s hard to make friends because you aren’t allowed to chat with your colleagues during work,” Liu said at Shenzhen Kang Ning Hospital where he was seeking help for insomnia. “Most of us have little education and have no skills so we have no choice but to do this kind of job. I feel no sense of achievement and I’ve become a machine.”

The critical issue for a left politics in the early 21st century is how do you make the real costs of an iphone visible?

The suicides at the vast Foxconn plant in Shenzhen ought to shake outsiders. They ought to make them wonder about the human cost to the 420,000 workers who make those nifty iPhones and iPads which so delight savvy westerners. Workers sleep in corporate dormitories, where an ever-shifting population of migrants makes it hard to form friendships, let alone relationships. The basic pay is $130 a month and overtime is essential. Most work 12 hours a day under the eyes of a fanatical management. One man killed himself after supervisors allegedly tore into him for losing a prototype iPhone.

Liu Zhiyi, who went into the plant undercover for a Chinese newspaper, said the lives of workers were mind-numbingly tedious. “As they make the world’s finest gadgets,” he said, “it seems that while they are controlling the machines, the machines also dominating them; the parts gradually come together as they move up the assembly line; at the same time, the workers’ pure and only youth also disappears.” [...]

The employers who feature in the pages of the China Labour Bulletin do a little bit more than turn their workers into assembly line automatons. They set thugs on independent union reps. Since the start of the global recession, there have been ever more cases of employers, including “respected” European companies, cutting rates or just closing factories and running off without paying back wages.

Here we have the workshop of the world, which is also the sweatshop of the world, where even the practices of “good” employers would be unacceptable in the west. And yet the citizens of the world, particularly Europeans, do not care about the use of the one-party state to deliver a rigged market economy in which there is freedom for the rich and authoritarianism for the poor…

For all that, I cannot imagine Stephen Fry stopping his drooling over the iPad – “Just to see this is fantastic!” he burbled as crowds gathered for its launch at the Apple headquarters in London – and showing some common decency by expressing a little concern for Apple’s workers. More to the point, I am not sure that anyone would listen to him if he did. China is too big, too powerful, too impervious to criticism for Europeans to think about. The scale of the Shenzhen plant is beyond our imagination. A boycott of Foxconn’s products would not just mean boycotting Apple, but Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, HP and Dell too. Boycott China and you boycott the computer age, which, despite the crash, effectively means boycotting the 21st century, as we so far understand it…

It would be heartening if people could shake themselves and say that the iPad is just another computer, which we do not need and will not buy unless Apple persuades its suppliers to improve workers’ conditions. Until we do, the hypocrisy of the Chinese communists is our hypocrisy as well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Napping after learning something new could help you commit it to memory – as long as you dream, scientists say.

They found people who dream about a new task perform it better on waking than those who do not sleep or do not dream.

Volunteers were asked to learn the layout of a 3D computer maze so they could find their way within the virtual space several hours later.

Those allowed to take a nap and who also remembered dreaming of the task, found their way to a landmark quicker.

The researchers think the dreams are a sign that unconscious parts of the brain are working hard to process information about the task.

Dr Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School, one of the authors of the paper, said dreams may be a marker that the brain is working on the same problem at many levels.

He said: “The dreams might reflect the brain’s attempt to find associations for the memories that could make them more useful in the future.”

So, today’s news that Google will be bringing this practice to an end is a real shocker… but the real dirt relates to why Google has changed course…

Google has decided to stop censoring search results in China, after discovering that someone had attempted to hack into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists. The company disclosed the move in a startling announcement posted to its blog late Tuesday.

Google said it was prepared to pull its business out of China, if issues around the surveillance and its decision to stop censoring results could not be resolved with the Chinese government.

I don’t know if this is Google playing hard-ball with the Chinese government, but this demonstrates that senior management feels extremely confident and does not fear a shareholder revolt. Whatever it may be, this is simply beautiful.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Now if we could just get our elected officials to play a little hard-ball with our mercantilist “trading partner”….

The other problem, an inability to effectively communicate an economic policy, was typified in a Dec. 4 interview with Geithner, who was asked what is the “clear, coherent economic message” of the administration.

He proceeded to talk about “high-class education” for children, affordable health care, better incentives for energy and infrastructure, public-private arrangements and the like.

There are 15.4 million unemployed Americans and another 11.5 million “underemployed,” either having given up looking and thus not counted in the jobless numbers or involuntarily relegated to part-time work. A laundry list of the Democrats’ agenda is unlikely to prove comforting.

Geithner, who wins praise from Obama and others for his substantive performance after a shaky start and some more recent cheap political shots, acknowledges that public communications isn’t his forte. It isn’t Summers’ either. And those who are more effective, including Roemer and fellow Council of Economic Advisers member Austan Goolsbee, sometimes are cut out of the action.

It’s not that Team Obama followed in GW’s foot-steps in carrying out the largest transfer of wealth in human history without addressing the central problematic of the American economy [Over-leveraging]… Of course not… Nothing to see here… We’re in Recovery!

“As the clock starts on the New Year, the likes of exotic mortgage recasts, small-biz failures and state and local tax hikes will take the field. And the realization will dawn that none of our fundamental problems — most notably excess leverage — have been solved…And just as one could argue that markets were overly aggressive in discounting the end of existence as we knew it back in March, so, too, they may be guilty of anticipating our imminent arrival at Nirvana today.”

The agent of the great awakening will be gathering pressures on the credit market, as banks are “forced to re-provision, and resurgent delinquencies find Fannie and Freddie (and everyone else) putting ill-made mortgages back to lenders.”

Credit will grow dear and do so precisely as the demand for it from borrowers looking to roll over maturing obligations swells.

The numbers, Stephanie exclaims, are unbelievably big. Uncle Sam must roll over $2.5 trillion in debt during the next two years, banks worldwide have some $7 trillion due in the same stretch and commercial real estate will weigh in with another $750 billion.

In my humble opinion, it’s time to extract ourselves from the dollar trap entangling the U.S. and China and begin the process of re-balancing the global economy. The Chinese need us way more than we need them… the barrier here is Wall Street and its century long fetish with the “Chinese Market.”

Volcker: The recovery is quite slow and I expect it to continue to be pretty slow and restrained for a variety of reasons and the possibility of a relapse can’t be entirely discounted. I’m not predicting it but I think we have to be careful.

SPIEGEL: What is the difference between this deep recession and all the other recessions we have seen since World War II?

Volcker: What complicates this situation, as compared to the ordinary garden variety recession, is that we have this financial collapse on top of an economic disequilibrium. Too much consumption and too little investment, too many imports and too few exports. We have not been on a sustainable economic track and that has to be changed. But those changes don’t come overnight, they don’t come in a quarter, they don’t come in a year. You can begin them but that is a process that takes time. If we don’t make that adjustment and if we again pump up consumption, we will just walk into another crisis…

SPIEGEL: So what do you expect in the very near future?

Volcker: As an American, I have to be an optimist. But we have got a big challenge and we have to face up to it. And as you know, there is a lot of concern about the dysfunction of the political system.

SPIEGEL: So it is becoming harder to be an optimist?

Volcker: It’s a challenge.

[UPDATE] Here is the best tally I’ve seen to date detailing the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. Dysfunction or Public Looting? Hard to tell at this point.