CHINA ESQUIRE

Review time again. There were a lot of good articles this week such as Andrew Hupert’s talking about WFOE’s, but since I already shifted gears all week to cover the Sichuan Wenchuan Earthquake, I figured that I would do so in weekend review. (Yes, China Esquire focuses on society as well)

Going Global did a very interesting post on what American high school students are learning about international relations. Remember, these sort of kids are going to be the future of the global economy… that can be a scary thought. But in America, it is true that students need to learn more and more about international relations if they are going to compete in the modern world’s markets. Craig talked about some problems he noticed:

Among the concerns with secondary education today is that in teaching to the lowest common denominator dictated by standardized tests, the average American high school student is woefully undereducated in subjects critical to the world of the future (and today of course), particularly math and science. Add international trade to the list of subjects in which a good education is lacking.

I have the pleasure of serving as a mentor in a program for students attending one of our local large urban public high schools. When I asked what they were working on, I was momentarily pleased to hear that they were studying international trade. My pleasure turned sour when I asked what he was learning about global trade. His answer:

Basically we’re learning how international trade is good for rich countries like the United States, but that it’s really hurting the poor countries in the world.

My mentee’s teacher is not alone of course in substituting a belief in a political ideology for a grounded understanding of international economics and business. An example of this school of thought is found in Antonia Juhasz’s book “The Bush Agenda, Invading the World One Economy at a Time” in which the author argues that the only country benefiting from globalization is America to the point that she believes that globalization itself is a conspiracy between the U.S. government and its large corporations to use global economics as an express arm of foreign policy enabling the U.S. to assert its hegemony on the world without having to resort to strictly military means.

I also wonder how my mentee’s geography teacher addresses the real world juxtaposition of the experience of countries such as China and India when contrasted with countries such as North Korea or Myanmar. Not too long ago, both China and India had nationalistic policies that isolated them from world markets. They were also among the world’s poorest countries. Since fully embracing international trade, of course, they have become shining examples of the ability of expanding markets to produce widespread economic opportunity to a previously destitute population. Meanwhile countries such as North Korea which have regimes that continue to isolate their people from world markets in order to keep the citadel walls around their autocracies remain countries with the most abject poverty.

My student told me that his teacher particularly focused on poor countries in Africa as examples of how international trade keeps poor countries under the boot heels of wealthy nations. As discussed elsewhere in this blog, interestingly the problem many countries such as those in Africa have with making headway in a global marketplace isn’t international trade, but the lack of free trade. The principal products that many of these countries could naturally export in order to gain the currency necessary to participate in international trade are agricultural. But it is in agriculture that the wealthy nations are most protectionist both in terms of subsidies to their domestic agri-businesses and tariffs on the import of agricultural goods from elsewhere. This is exactly the problem that the Doha round of trade talks is trying to address — talks repeatedly scuttled by the wealthy nations’ insistence on protectionism, not the existence of free trade.

We need to adequately train our youth to understand the global economy, and I think the bottom line is that we need to teach them facts and examples, not ideological/theoretical perspectives. The young will learn plenty of those in college. Ultimately, it is facts–case studies–that are going to be of the utmost importance because theories are nearly always adjustable. Being grounded in reality is the only way to learn IR… and a lot of other things in life as well. I think Craig catches these quite well in his post.