Crunch Time for China’s High School Seniors

Friday and Saturday will be momentous days for millions of Chinese families, but not because of the upcoming California summit meeting between President Obama and China’s new leader, Xi Jinping.

On those two days high school seniors from around China will sit for the annual college entrance examination, called the Gaokao in Chinese. Most Chinese students prepare for years under intense pressure and families spend huge amounts on tutoring and after-school study sessions. While increasing numbers of Chinese students go overseas for college â€" nearly 200,000 went to North America for the 2011-12 academic year â€" the vast majority have no option for higher education but to do well on the national exam.

Cheating is a concern; last year 1,500 people were arrested on suspicion of selling equipment including “clear-plastic earphones, wireless signal receivers, and modified pens, watches, glasses and leather belts.” This year, one province has banned anything that “makes the metal detector beep”, including bras with metal clasps.

As with just about everything in China, there are too many people competing for a scarce resource. And through the household registration (hukou) system, the college entrance process is biased in favor of urban applicants.

The Economist this week has an excellent article on urbanization that examines some of the social barriers to expanding urbanization (last week’s China Insider column looked at some of the political and financial obstacles):

The hukou perpetuates a rigid caste system. Children of holders of rural hukou inherit their parents’ second-class status, even if they are born in cities. Many urbanites want to keep this system in place, to protect their preferential access to jobs, education and health care.

Getting into college however does not guarantee a good job upon graduation, especially this year. Seven million students who succeeded at the Gaokao four years ago are now looking for work in the toughest job market ever.

While those millions of Chinese students are sweating through the two-day test, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi will be talking in the California desert, in their first meeting since Mr. Xi succeeded Hu Jintao.

The venue for the United States-China summit meeting, Sunnylands, the former estate of Walter and Lee Annenberg, is an inspired choice that will allow the two leaders to have focused discussions in an informal setting. California will be the last stop in Mr. Xi’s Americas tour that has included visits to Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico.

The agenda has not been disclosed, but it is likely the topics of discussion will include cyber issues, North Korea, maritime issues including the South China Sea and the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, Iran, Syria, and trade and the economy.

More important than any specific agenda item is that the two leaders build some sort of rapport. As Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing and previously a National Security Council official in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, told Bloomberg News:

“What these two leaders need to do is really begin to establish a working relationship… The biggest problem we have had in our interaction with China is that it has been very stilted, and very much in accordance with scripted talking points.”

The meeting should have political benefits for Mr. Xi, as it will likely show him as a down to earth, confident, global statesman, in marked contrast to the style of his predecessors. One “senior Obama administration official” told The Wall Street Journal that “there is a lot more hope… the previous government was more 20th century. The new team seems to be more 21st century.”

President Obama is under increasing pressure from Congress to show progress on cyber-security, but we should not expect any breakthroughs. The U.S. and China have agreed to hold talks on hacking but it is not clear that the Chinese government understands how serious this issue has become on Capitol Hill and the impact it may have on the relationship:

A new, bipartisan Senate measure, for example, calls for the creation of a “watch list” of foreign countries engaging in cyber espionage. For the worst offenders, the president could “block imports of certain categories of goods if they benefited from the stolen U.S. technology or proprietary information,” explained Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in a letter to Obama last week.

“I thought you could refer to this bill in your meeting with President Xi as an example that the U.S. will indeed impose real costs on China should they continue to steal our intellectual property,” added Levin, who promised he would seek action on the bill this year.

THE NEW FOREIGN POLICY MANTRA for the Chinese government is building “a new type of great power relations.” The meaning is not yet clear but it is probably safe to assume that it involves a relative diminution of American power vis a vis China. While there are many positive aspects to the U.S.-China relationship, including bilateral trade that may exceed $450 billion in 2013, managing the rise of China is going to require statesmanship and strategic thinking that, given the partisan politics in Washington, could be lacking.

I have two suggestions for the summit meeting organizers. First, Peng Liyuan and Michelle Obama will be with their husbands at Sunnylands, and it would be great if there were a global initiative on which they could cooperate.

Second, given the proposed acquisition of Smithfield Foods by Shanghui International, serve some Smithfield Ham.