Why East and South Asian Nations are Overtaking

the West
Michael Mohamed
ENG4U0

In a rapidly globalizing world, there is a quickly closing divide in terms

of the economic development of the Asian and Pacific nations in the world,
particularly China and India, as compared to the Western world, specifically
the European and North American nations. As a stark contrast to only 20
years ago, what were formerly slums and farms in the People’s Republic of
China have become large manufacturing factories; what were formerly
empty lands and poor villages in India have rapidly become replaced by
service and computing sciences firms all across the nation. In comparison,
the West is currently facing a regress in terms of education and economics;
in the United States alone the debt to other nations has reached the highest
of any other nation in the world. The combination of a highly competitive and
effective education system, the economic and educational crises facing
North America as well as the overwhelming population and development of
China and India are all factors helping these nations to become the most
powerful in the world.

The extremely focused and resourceful education systems being put in

place in China, India and Japan are all factors in helping their economic
growth; aside from being able to develop some of the world’s most elite
classes of specialists in various fields in privatized education, India and China
have both made large investments in order to increase the overall
percentage of educated citizens. According to the book Chindia: How China
and India are Revolutionizing Global Business, the Sarva Shikva Abhiyan
(Universal Education Incentive Program) in India provides a $2.4 billion dollar
budget for the benefit of the nation’s education system and also provides
students and schools with a meal a day, free textbooks, medical care, and
specialized and remedial classes. Although the class sizes can be over 100
students per teacher in some classes, students who do excel can be placed
into extremely high level mathematics and computer/information sciences
courses; many of these courses lead into some of the most gruelling and
prestigious universities in the world. Chindia also has a lot of information on
China’s education system: in China the resources for many schools involve
brand new Lenovo PCs for most of the students, LCD monitors, basketball
courts and track fields along with various laboratory equipment and scientific
studies for the sake of encouraging curiosity and investigative skills in pupils
of the programs. As a result the literacy rate for students between the age of
12 and 40 is 96%, many of these students being literate in both English and
Chinese; these kinds of results are part of the Chinese government’s efforts
to ensure an education for every single student in China. Many of the
education systems in East and South Asian schools are centred around the
passing of ‘entrance exams’: this is a system whereby a person can enter
any school provided they can pass the entrance exam for that school, some
schools having much more difficult entrance exams than others; for some of
the hardest entrance exams, students as young as elementary and middle
school age will spend entire years studying and preparing for their exams in
an attempt to compete with their peers. What it results in is one of the most
productive and educationally proficient groups of people on the planet; in
nations where studying is not even required to graduate from high school
more often than not, students work constantly to surpass their peers and
ensure entrance into some of the most prestigious schools in not only the
nation, but the entire world. Some of these include Indian Institute of
Technology, where from 100,000 exam entrants only 2,500 are admitted into
the institute and only 2000 graduate; for their expertise in problem solving
and gruelling work ethic (most IIT students only sleep 5 hours a night at
most, working until 3AM or later) IIT graduates are sought after all over the
world in nations like the US, France, Germany, the UK among others. An
important point to note is just how much emphasis is placed on English
education in China and India; this is important because of how much
computer information documentation, business transaction, international
services and overall frequency in which English is used. Some facts from the
educational video Did You Know? 2.0: by the year 2010, China is estimated to
have the most English speaking citizens of any nation in the world; India
already has the most English documents printed and produced (along with
publications in over 20 other languages) as well as having a 100% rate of
graduates from universities and colleges able to speak English fluently. The
Guangdong province is one of the richest and also one of the best centres for
education in China according to Chindia: Shantou University for example has
begun to abandon the old method of simply forcing students to become rote
memorizers, using various US universities as models on which to base its
curriculum; this is in an effort to produce more creative and inquisitive
learners in China. Along with this, there are even more difficult universities
that can be entered in the northern regions such as Beijing; in these
universities students still spend all their time memorizing facts and data in
order to pass their exams, which again produce an extremely diligent group
of students. From these examples, it can be seen that while China and India
do have extremely large populations which are difficult places to ensure that
all or even most students are educated or graduate, they have been
extremely effective in mobilizing students to study vigorously; as a result
they have produced some of the greatest experts in various fields in the
world.

To compare to this, in North America and especially the United States

an economic regress is taking place; as a result the quality of education is
also diminishing. Even in countries such as Canada, due to the decreasing
success rate of students in the nation, courses have been simplified and
removed from the curriculum and students as a result are taught less in
more time; an example of this might be the removal of Geometric and
Discrete Mathematics (which teaches many things about computational
related mathematics such as matrices, computational timing, etc.) as well as
the recreation of Calculus courses, the reform of courses such as Chemistry
and Physics to be more heavily reliant on technologies, etc. According to
Wikipedia, since early 2008, it has been predicted that the United States of
America is rapidly entering an economic recession; the consequences of this
have been predicted that the nation will not be able to support itself by the
end of 2010 according to the International Monetary Fund economic
forecasts. For what was once the world’s leading superpower, this is
devastating. This affects the government’s ability to provide quality
education for its children, and also increases the price of university tuition
dramatically; for more prestigious universities such as MIT, Caltech, Stanford,
Harvard, and Yale (among many other scientific and political science based
universities in America) what this means is that the tuition has skyrocketed
to an unaffordable price for most students. When the ability to become
educated worsens, the careers that can be pursued become either filled with
graduates who are less than stellar, or simply not filled at all due to a lack of
graduates available. Since almost all of the conveniences and progresses of
human life depend on mathematical and scientific work, this puts the United
States in a poor position as a leader of human progress and a developer of
its own technologies; instead the US relies heavily on imported goods. When
the Clinton Administration ended its term, the national budget was in surplus
of over 2 trillion dollars. After the Bush Administration ended, the nation
budget was in debt of over several trillion dollars (as of February 12th 2009, it
is estimated at 10.76 trillion); even if the Obama Administration is a much
better economizing force than the Bush Administration, this is still a
gargantuan problem to be solved. This affects other nations in the Western
region as many of them are reliant on the United States for their resources
and products; however many nations are coming to realize that the United
States is not the best economic partner and have since abandoned them to
partner with other nations in more European and Eastern regions. For these
reasons, it can be seen that the Western side of the world has a great deal of
catching up to do in terms of being able to match the Eastern; if this goal is
ever accomplished it will be a matter of many decades.

Another one of the most important factors contributing to the rising

power of the Asian nations such as India and China would be the
overwhelming ability to develop in both information technologies, services,
manufacturing and exporting goods; the economies of both nations are
heavily reliant on these, since the 1980s this has been a provider of great
economic growth. Chindia provides and explanation for this: what were once
vast rice fields and farms in China are rapidly being replaced by enormous
skyscrapers that house various corporations, or factories that produced
exports such as clothing, plastics, silicon wafers, toys, computer hardware,
LCD monitors and the like; in producing the aforementioned exports, China is
by far the leader in the world. This is because the Chinese economy is
currently designed for rapid development; billions of dollars are poured into
manufacturing which quickly produce goods, export them, and begin making
a net profit. The demands for China’s exportation market to produce are very
high; however provided the aforementioned students and graduates coming
from the best of their universities, the people are prepared to meet the
demands of the modern world. Another important detail to note is just how
high the populations of China and India are; according to Wikipedia currently
they are estimated at 1.321 billion and 1.148 billion people respectively
excluding immigrants of each nation. Worldometers.com states the Earth
population is 6.784 billion people, this means that the populations of China
and India combined comprise approximately 19.5% and 16.9% of the Earth’s
population respectively; a total of 36.4% of Earth’s population is comprised
by these two nations alone. Because there are so many people within the
nation’s borders, this provides ample room for consumers to purchase
domestic product and in turn push the economy and development of the
nations further: these two nations are the world’s largest markets for PCs,
broadband telecom services, digital TVs, automobiles, and various other
goods. In India there is not so heavy an emphasis on producing goods as
there is on producing information technologies as well as services; as
previously mentioned the technological institutes in India are some of the
most challenging in the world and unsurprisingly the graduates of these
schools have become some of the best integrated technology developers in
the world. Anyone who has dealt with technology troubleshooting has likely
had some of their trouble shooting calls forwarded to India; indeed India has
the most call centers of any nation in the world, and given that many of the
modern day integrated technologies used today originated from India, it is
not surprising that these call centers would be based at home. Some
examples of IT firms that have been based or heavily centred around Indian
firms would include Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, Wipro, HCL, and
Satyam, Texas Instruments, Intel, Microsoft, General Electric among many
others; even if these companies were not founded in India they have become
centred there simply for the quality of productivity that can be achieved with
computer and information science centres based in India. In many cases, the
skills of India and China can be seen to be working in tandem when it comes
to international exports: while a PC may be exported and purchased in
Canada, the silicon wafers and plastics all used to build it could have been
manufactured and assembled in China, however much of the firmware,
included software and information behind the functionality of the computer
itself could have been developed in India. In either case, the greater net
financial benefit goes towards India and China as opposed to the store and
even company it was sold from in Canada. For these reasons, it can be seen
that not only have China and India become powerhouses in terms of their
production and technological advances and development, but they have also
managed to make other nations around the world heavily reliant on them;
this has overall lead to a booming rate of economic development in these
sectors of both nations.

The conclusion by now should be very clear that the Western world is
not the economic, scientific and educational leader that it once was, if
anything these standards are decreasing over time. In comparison the
development of China and India have been magnificent examples of how to
best educate and then economize on the people of a nation, significantly
increasing the quality of life for citizens on the whole even if they do live in
the more rural areas. With the development of these nations apparently not
stopping and the economic regress of the United States predicted to reach a
decline not witnessed since the Great Depression, the United States will no
longer be considered a superpower and its partners in the Western world will
suffer as a result; in comparison China and India will likely gain a very
justified superpower status.