If can China become a hi-tech economy, WHERE Malaysia Should Start?

Earlier this morning I had twitted this BBC News article, and tagged Prime Minister DS Najib Razak and Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin (who also happen to be Minister for Education and Higher Learning 1) as I think it is an interesting article. The article is as follows:

Inside a former shoe factory in China’s southern city of Shenzhen, the noise of hammering and stitching has long gone.

In its place is something much quieter – the hum of laboratory machinery and the click of computer keyboards.

But listen extra carefully and you might just pick up another sound: the deep, seismic creaking of the world’s second-largest economy moving forward.

At least, that is what this country’s economic planners would like to hope.

BGI has grown from nothing a little more than a decade ago to become the world’s biggest genetic sequencing company.

Almost 3,000 people work at the plant in Shenzhen, decoding DNA data on behalf of global clients in healthcare and agriculture.

Gone are the low-skill, low-wage shoemakers. In their place high skill, hi-tech brainpower.

BGI has just decoded all of the varieties of the chickpea and is now attempting to determine the genetic components of human intelligence, to give just two examples of the sort of work being done here.

“You have to have more young people, crazy people, who can work day and night to figure out what the data represents,” one of the company founders, Wang Jian, said.

“We have thousands of people working in this field, so lots of countries ask us for help. We charge them a reasonable fee and we get the money to feed ourselves.”

The company, which came into being as part of the international collaboration to map the human genome, has quickly made use of one key resource: China’s abundant supply of cheap graduates.

In some ways, genome sequencing – producing the complete DNA sequence of a particular organism – is the easy bit. You need some very expensive sequencing machines and a lot of computing power.

The hard bit though is decoding or mapping the genome.

For that, you need a lot of careful analysis, looking for similar patterns and sequences in the long strings of letters, so that you can then identify the parts of the genome responsible for particular biological functions.

And that is where the cheap graduates come in.

‘More creative’

Continue reading the main story

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We need a more challenging, more creative education system – otherwise we still, for most Chinese companies, are followers – following the UK and the States to try to catch up”

Wang Jian Chinese scientist

The floors of the old shoe factory are now divided into hundreds of small cubicles, and inside each one sits a technician at a computer terminal, pouring over data out of the labs.

BGI can do this kind of work on a bigger scale than anyone else because elsewhere in the world, it would cost much more to hire all this brainpower.

So China now finds itself at the forefront of the important effort to find genetic components to things like autism and obesity, both projects that BGI is working on, for international clients.

The country currently has a glut of unemployed graduates – part of the reason, of course, that they are cheap to employ.

Could BGI therefore offer a glimpse of the next stage of China’s remarkable economic transformation, with more companies drawing on this army of educated workers to become world leaders?

Before those aforementioned economic planners get too carried away and toast the arrival of the future, BGI’s founder has a warning for them.

“Our education system has to be changed fast,” Mr Wang said.

“We need a more challenging, more creative education system. Otherwise we still, for most Chinese companies, are followers – following the UK and the States to try to catch up.”

‘Own way’

In fact, so unhappy was BGI with the quality of the Chinese education system that it set up its own college, in the hope of replacing the traditional learning methods with more creativity and innovation.

China has many low-skill, low-wage workers

But the college has not been allowed to award its own diplomas and now Mr Wang is appealing directly to the government.

“Give people more chance to build up their own schools. We don’t want to change the whole system, but give us a chance to try our own way.”

“That’s what I need to go through you to say. Please do not cut this,” he added.

Some outsiders have suggested that, rather than a break with the past, BGI is simply following a tried and tested model.

A bit like China’s giant computer assembly plants, only this time producing DNA sequences rather than gadgets.

The trick is the same; do the job just as well but cheaper than it can be done elsewhere.

Mr Wang’s concern is for the next phase, for BGI to move beyond data processing and analysis to become a real innovator and leader in biotechnology.

He is certainly not the first person to criticise China’s education system as not being fit for that purpose.

The rote learning and cramming approach has long been identified as producing students who are better at studying than they are at learning.

But as one of China’s most successful scientists, his is a powerful voice.

And in the story of his company, the country’s economic planners may find not so much a model of China’s future, but more a warning about how far off that future still is.

As you can see, I highlighted some sentences with bold words, which mainly touches their opinion on their education system.

HOWEVER, it does not mean that I totally agree if Malaysia adopting exactly what China will do (if any) to their education system or what has been highlighted above.

What I would suggest and hope that PM, DPM and the Ministry of Education and Higher Learning will review our education system and relevant matters that will prepare our workforce and amplify the positive effect of transformation plan.

As many may have understand, the push for transformation and high-income nation will need a fine base and strong structure to support. Therefore, it is not just about having millions of job opportunities, but preparing the people or rakyat to fit in and perform in the market place is equally important.

I do hope the article I shared brings some benefit or idea what or where to start.

Thank you.

Question on the street: As much as we want to move forward, stability is also equally important too… right?

SDAR Victors of Asian School Debate Championship 2013

I was duly informed that my old school – Sekolah Datuk Abdul Razak, Seremban (SDAR), was announced champion in Asian School Debate Championship 2013 which took place in Manila last night.

Even better, the Overall Best Speaker of Asia and the Best Finals Speaker was won by one of the SDAR debaters and another one took 8th spot of Best Speaker’s list.

Well done boys! You guys surely made your parents, teachers, fellow SDARians and Malaysians proud for your achievement. Keep up the good work and ensure the knowledge is passed on to the juniors, and develop others to be better.

Congratulations!!!

p/s: All of the sudden, cheer songs playing in my head.. hahaha

#MondayBlues: Gen Y – Selfish narcissists or selfless revolutionaries? It depends what you read

I would like to share something interesting, which may be relevant to Malaysians’ Gen Y. Please read the following:

There’s nothing like a bit of lazy stereotyping to drive a newspaper headline. Last week we read in The Age that Generation Y was a bunch of selfish narcissists.

Yet the week before, Time magazine’s cover story told us that it was Gen Y selflessly facing down the tanks and using Twitter to bring a new dawn to North Africa and the Middle East.

These stories paint two very different pictures of Gen Y (also know as the ”Faceboook”, ”Net” or ”Millennial” Generation). Does it make any sense to group the young people facing down dictators with Australian young people? Is Gen Y a useful term at all?

The claim that this generation is increasingly narcissistic came from the work of Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, on her recent visit to Melbourne. Twenge uses psychological data, mostly collected from American college students, to claim that today’s young are increasingly selfish. She attributes the rise of what she calls ”Generation Me” to the sinister influence of permissive parenting, celebrity culture and the internet.

The Life Patterns Project, which followed several thousand members of two generations of Australians through their 20s and 30s, suggests an alternative reason why today’s young people might appear narcissistic. Over the past quarter of a century, changes such as the need for more education, greater uncertainty of employment and the decreasing relevance of traditional patterns of living have created a context in which young people think of their lives as a personal project.

The study’s participants grew up being told by parents, teachers, career counsellors and many others that they must make decisions about their future and, more importantly, take responsibility for their choices, even if the circumstances and resources that make this possible are missing. For the Gen Y group in this Australian study, going on to further education straight after school was the experience of the majority, but within that group young people from low socio-economic backgrounds were about four times more likely to not finish their courses than their better-off peers. In large part, this was due to the challenge of combining work and study.

Most of the participants worked while they were studying, but those with wealthier parents were able to take time off to focus on their study, or to simply take a break, when they needed. The new opportunities available to this generation are not equally available to all.

In some ways young people do have it easy, but they must build a life without some of the security and predictability that was available to their parents. Making decisions about how to navigate post-secondary education, juggle part-time work and build bridges into an eventual full-time job that is hopefully secure, while trying to find time for friends and family, requires significant life-management skills.

The task of holding these various areas of life together may sometimes lead to young people appearing self-centred. However, to focus on narcissism risks missing the broader realities of young people’s lives today.

Although young Australians may seem on the surface to be the luckiest generation ever, they have patterns of mental health that suggest they might not have it so good after all, with a quarter of young Australians experiencing some form of mental health problem.

The idea of neatly defined generations has come to shape how we think about young people – as well as the not so young. This is both a good and a bad thing. Talking about generations is useful, for example, when it is used to recognise that the conditions that shape the thinking and actions of young people today, and will shape their adulthood and old age, are not the same as those that shaped the baby boomers. It is  counterproductive, however, to make sweeping claims, as Professor Twenge does, that feed the appetite for negative assessments of ”today’s generation”.

Young people in Australia may be focused on the task of navigating complex pathways, but this in itself does not make them a narcissistic generation.

The evidence before us is that Generation Y, if it can be said to exist, is shaped by diverse conditions across different parts of the world and, as you would expect, is responding to these conditions in equally diverse ways.

The profound events in the Middle East are being shaped by a generation of young people who want change, even at the cost of their lives.

Young people in Australia are also engaging with the circumstances of their times. The young people of Egypt, Australia and, no doubt, America, from where Twenge draws her data, are building their lives in radically different circumstances to those of their parents.

Yet while it is true to say that young people as a whole are living in changing times, this does not mean that it is the same world for all those classed as Gen Y, even within a single country such as Australia.

Dr Dan Woodman is a research fellow in the school of sociology at the Australian National University. Professor Johanna Wyn is director of the Youth Research Centre at The University of Melbourne.

Yes, the article was written few years ago and the main subject was on Aussies.

However, the points that delivered in the said article seems so relevant to us here in Malaysia – what you read shapes your mind.

Yes, we want change, we want for betterment.. but HOW?

Will street demonstration solve the issue? Is the street demonstrators are better than in many ways? How can we guarantee betterment if result is expected even before the seed is being planted and taken care accordingly?

These are the questions that we and the Gen Ys need to think. And more importantly, those having the influence on Gen Y also should be more responsible in giving hope, inspiration and direction to younger generation.

When I say those having influence, I meant for BN and PR politically, and elders and parents socially.

We have seen what has happened to those Middle East countries since the above article is written. Yes, “change” was the aim, but considering the method and patience (and passion) for change was driven by hate and anger, those countries are still in chaos.

So my dear readers, if we wish for a change, we must do it in the best possible manner and in best possible practice. Drive the change with positivity, not anger and hatred.

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.

 ~Nathaniel Branden