Open letter to Chinese American high school students

The jig should have been up when the Varsity Blues scandal broke. Oh was it delicious. Hollywood actresses, hedge fund managers, winery owners, real estate developers and other assorted muckety-mucks sneaking their low-watt spawn into elite colleges. The fraud was so absurd you couldn’t make it up.

Rich people Photoshopping their kids playing sports, paying for medical “stupid” certifications to get “special” proctoring, hiring a Harvard grad SAT ringer able to deliver any score you want. Stanford, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown and we are not going to make USC jokes because the school has gotten a lot better in recent years.

And that Chinese girl who paid US$6.5 million to get into Stanford. Did you see her hour-long “I got into Stanford” video on YouTube? Oh the burns in the comments. If you could only read Chinese. Epic!

Of course, the joke is really on us. Because four years later, elite American universities – with additional malfeasance in the interim – continue to command the same prestige, elicit the same anxiety and demand the same obeisance.

The college counseling business is as hot as ever. Some are reportedly charging over a million dollars for white-glove service starting in the 7^th grade, with a perfect record of admissions into HYPSM (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it).

And Asian Americans. Did you really think you scored a win when the Supreme Court scrapped affirmative action last year? The universities saw it coming a mile away and became test-optional well before the gavel came down. Underrepresented applicants are polishing their essays on how they’ve thrived in unsafe spaces while you are stuck with the surname Zhang.

So what can you do? You’ve already maxed out the SATs, signed up for every AP class, play the oboe, do bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like fencing. At this point, it’s just one giant crap shoot.

Will the admissions officer like your essay on teaching inner-city kids at math camp (but they really taught you)? Does Yale need another oboist? Will your history teacher write a flashy enough recommendation?  

And even if you do get into HYPSM (or its sorry near peers), you will be surrounded by a sea of people who maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like water polo. If it is true that you learn the most from your peers, then HYPSM will likely prove less educational than high school.

If you are lucky and go to a regular high school, at least you are exposed to regular people with regular aspirations and regular opinions – deplorable as they may be. In HYPSM, you will join the tiresome Westoid elite with their anxious entitlement and risible pretensions. It’s a nauseating mélange of sanctimony, condescension, virtue signaling, victim larping and look-at-me posturing.

The only people you might learn something from are the international students who mostly keep to themselves after discovering how loud, deranged and solipsistic their American classmates are.

You will discover that student cliques mostly keep to themselves – international students with international students, blacks with blacks, Asian Americans with Asian Americans, frat boys with frat boys, sorority girls with sorority girls (okay, frat boys and sorority girls do mix). 

You will while away four years, slowly socialized into Westoid elitism with its arcane rules of self-censorship and approved aspirations, until your life path is narrowed down to finance, consulting or tech. This is made tolerable by drunken debauchery and meaningless hookups (that’s what the kids tell me anyways) that passes for a social life.    

All of this is to deliver an indoctrinated end product to Wall Street and Silicon Valley which has accomplished the miracle of hijacking both progressivism and capitalism while impoverishing the rest of America. Evidently, there are progressive non-solutions to every problem which coincidentally increase FAANG share prices. 

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know it’s all a giant farce. The system broke down decades ago. Really, what are the chances you go to a “regular” high school and expect the meritocracy to pick you from the haystack? No, your parents scrimped and saved, fought tooth and nail, to buy that house in Tenafly, New Jersey or Mountain View, California.

College admissions was your religion since birth. Sunday afternoon is for test prep classes (Saturday mornings are for Chinese school; we will get back to that). And when the time comes, your anxiety-ridden parents will fork over a pretty penny for a college counselor, if not white glove S-Class level.

If you think this isn’t farcical enough, the racket has now gone international. Longtime China resident and insightful Twitter commentator Arnaud Bertrand relays a familiar story. His ultra-wealthy Chinese friend has decided to move his family to California largely to buy his children into the American elite.

The friend plans to purchase a house in the best California school district and hire top tutors for his children, confident that it will pave the way to prestigious American universities and elite status in Western society.

Mr Bertrand explains, “Why isn’t this possible in China? Because China has invested considerable efforts – and continues to do so – to ensure that wealth couldn’t ‘game’ the education system.”

China’s schools are not funded by local property taxes. The government did away with guaranteeing school placement based on property ownership. Private schools exist but enrollment is by lottery. And famously, China, in one fell swoop, scrapped the entire for-profit tutoring industry.

Of course, explains Mr Bertrand, none of these measure are perfect. An underground tutoring industry continues to operate. The ultra-wealthy can hire household “help” with PhDs. But his wealthy friend likely reached the correct conclusion – his money has a better chance of buying his children into America’s elite than China’s.

Some of Mr Bertrand’s observations deserve to be quoted in full:

This all raises the bigger question of the reproduction of elites. In the long run, which society is more sustainable and fares better: one that does little to avoid the reproduction of elites like the US (which – contrary to the “American dream” narrative – is one of the high-income economies with the lowest rates of relative upward mobility) or one that actively fights it to enforce, to the extent possible, a meritocracy?

What my friend’s story illustrates is actually even more than this: in the US you don’t even only have a reproduction of local elites but you also have elites from other countries who come to the US because it’s easier to reproduce there!

This may all be grim reading for the anxious Chinese American high school junior. But fear not! Han Feizi does not come bearing bad news but rather with an offering of devastating logic.

Remember Saturday morning Chinese school? Where you go to socialize and misbehave? Well strap yourself down and get back up to 1,500 characters!

An arbitrage opportunity of historic proportions has opened up. Forget about HYPSM. There is nothing for you to learn there. It was already done and dusted 20 years ago. The sheeple just haven’t realized it.

Remember this acronym: TPSFZUN. That’s Tsinghua, Peking, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Fudan, Zhejiang, USTC and Nanjing. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but it’s not like HYPSM was so obvious. And we are not talking study abroad. We are talking the full four-year degree shebang!

Vaclav Havel famously said that China’s development “has happened so quickly, we have not yet had time to be astonished.” This applies to higher education as well.

In 2004, Tsinghua was ranked 62 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. In 2024, Tsinghua ranked 12^th in the world and 1^st in Asia (with arch-nemesis Peking University at 14^th). Both ranked higher than the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown.

Seven of the top 10 research universities in the Nature Index are now in China – University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Nanjing University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and Fudan University.

One of the metrics weighing down the rankings of Chinese universities is their lack of international students. And that’s where you come in! This arbitrage is just asking to be exploited. As an overseas applicant, you get the full DEI treatment. You are the underrepresented minority, the diversity admit, the token international student!

Don’t get me wrong, they don’t take just anybody. You still have to be a top student with a near 4.0 GPA and SATs over 1400. The biggest hurdle will probably be Mandarin proficiency which, depending on the school, you need either HSK4 or HSK5 to matriculate.

All things considered, however, it’s a buyer’s market allowing you to short-circuit both the soul-crushing hell of the gaokao and the humiliating dog and pony show of applying to HYPSM.

Let’s first get one jaw-dropper out of the way. It is an important consideration for many families, especially if yours stretched themselves sending you to private school. Four years of tuition as an international student at Tsinghua will set mom and dad back about $17,000 (room and board are extra). You are free to do your own calculations for HYPSM.

This is, of course, about much more than arbitraging school rankings and acceptance rates (and cheaper tuition). What you are actually getting by choosing this road is a real education. Let me explain. There are important directionality and timing elements involved.

There is a lot of truth to the cliché that modern China is a closed society with an open mind while America is an open society with a closed mind. It is relatively straightforward for a Chinese national to study in the US given the open minds of China’s youth and America’s open society. The reverse is problematic. Chinese society is far more insular and the minds of American youths are generally closed to outside input.

The Chinese American, however, is a different animal and has a window of opportunity. The width of this window depends on how seriously you took Saturday morning Chinese school. Some of you are actively discussing Genshin Impact on Weibo and can sail through HSK7. Others have more work to do.

But for most of you, there is a solid enough base to build on. The best strategy may be to stretch college out to five years with the first year in language immersion (five years of undergraduate tuition is $21,000).

To be sure, this road is not for the faint of heart. You will not be comfortably surrounded by cookie-cutter versions of yourself who maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like diving.

You will be surrounded by gaokao mutants whose intellect can be so blazing it’s like staring at the sun (thankfully, there are slackers as well). You might be constantly fighting a language deficiency. And through it all, you have the additional burden of going through the many stages of culture shock.

On the positive side, the liberal arts education at elite Chinese universities may surprise you. The resentment warriors in American academia are laying siege to the Western canon, poisoning every facet of the liberal arts education.

While politics has always encroached on academia in China, the boundaries are far better defined. Chinese universities may, in fact, be a healthier environment to study the Western canon given the immolating culture wars currently being waged on American campuses (see here). Nobody at Fudan cares if Hegel is dead, white or male.  

On a side note, this letter is addressed to Chinese Americans (and the diaspora in general) to knock some sense into them. It also applies, with certain caveats, to non-ethnic Chinese. It can be done, has been done and should be done more.

Anecdotally, non-ethnic Chinese Westerners who have successfully taken this road are eccentrics. These oddballs have gotten a far superior education than HYPSM could possibly provide because they would have had to shake off Western solipsism and open their minds.

All of this, in the end, represents an opportunity for a real education – to be outside your comfort zone, to be stretched, to interact with the unfamiliar. You have a short window in your youth to gain lifelong access to the closed society that is China. It cannot be done after undergrad anymore.

Decades ago, when China was short on talent, carpet-bagging Ivy League Chinese Americans flocked to Beijing and Shanghai. Nowadays, one can run a couple hundred meters down Chang’an Avenue with arms outstretched and knock over a dozen Chinese nationals with HYPSM degrees.

Don’t worry, you will never lose access to the West. That is guaranteed by your native command of English. For many of you, especially if a decent amount of Chinese was spoken at home, you have the opportunity in your university years to claim full native command of Mandarin. If you want it, it is yours for the taking. If you don’t claim it now, it will be lost in time.

I sense skepticism and hesitation. Of course, this is normal. This is not a well-worn path. There are no how-to manuals or consulting companies guiding students on this road. The street lamps have not been installed and you even wonder if this road comes to an abrupt end just outside your view.

If you are worried about future placement chances at Goldman Sachs, you should probably forget the whole enterprise. With decades of experience in investment banks, Han Feizi can say that he was always looking for the unicorn, the luminous being, the perfectly bilingual and bicultural animal.

At some point, you have to have Confucian faith that learning is its own reward. Planning for the future is a fool’s errand. To take the road less traveled, next to having children, is the ultimate expression of hope. We leave you with perhaps Lu Xun’s most famous quote:

“Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like the roads made across the earth. For actually there were no roads to begin with, but when many people pass one way a road is made.”