102
Yea and China is definitely not the leading country in academia in basically every field
(hexbear.net)
China’s education system also suppresses innovation while rewarding imitation. Although some Chinese schools conduct innovative experimental education, they remain few and have little impact.From childhood to adulthood, Chinese students are subjected to rote learning—memorizing and obeying rather than questioning or thinking independently. Thus, while Chinese students and researchers excel at replication and refinement of existing work, they are poor at true creativity.
I was thinking about the classes I've taken with Chinese professors, and it's definitely the case that they have a teaching style that focuses more on memorizing things and understanding complex systems by breaking them down bit by bit. In practice, that means students spend some time just accepting some things as true until they see how everything fits the big picture at the end; Western education is a little more top-down where you start with the big picture, then look into the details. It's a mistake to think that the former approach doesn't teach students as much, or that it's "rote-learning." You learn things more thoroughly that way! It just requires more effort, too, and you gotta actually trust the professor to tie things together (one advantage of the top-down system is that if you have a trash professor that only sufficiently covers the big picture but leaves out the details, you can more easily read the literature on detailed information).