Solving For Creativity.(Mathematics and education in China)

Li Junfeng, a wide-faced, moppy-haired 23-year-old earning a doctorate in mathematics at one of China's top universities, has a problem. When he sits in his cramped dorm room talking with his fellow students about their dreams for the future, he says, "we always end up discussing these famous people." He rattles off a list of great thinkers who have solved history's most complicated math mysteries. The names are American, French, German, but not Chinese. "The Chinese we don't talk about," Li says matter-of-factly. "There aren't that many famous ones."

It's a problem that vexes some of China's brightest minds: why is China so far behind the world in math? After all, this is a country with a long intellectual tradition, one that invented the abacus and may have come up with the Pythagorean theorem before it dawned on Pythagoras. Sure, Chinese high-school students consistently dazzle the world with sky-high standardized-test scores and gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. But high school seems to be where they peak. Chinese scholars have contributed virtually nothing to modern mathematics research, say academics, and even optimists acknowledge the country is at least a decade behind the cutting edge.

Only one Chinese-born mathematician has won the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of math, in its 70-year history. And that man, Yau Shingtung, is among those most worried. Now a professor at Harvard, he was stunned after recently interviewing a faculty candidate at a prominent Chinese university. "A student at that level, I wouldn't even give a master's degree," he said. "I'm not pessimistic, but the problems are there."

Many of China's leading minds believe the problem rests in the country's competitive, test-driven education system. Primary and secondary schools stress rote memorization, and they can be brutally unforgiving of creative mavericks--one bad test early in life can ruin a student's chances for college. At the doctoral level, this has resulted in low-risk, derivative research. "When students get into the university, we have to change their way of thinking," laments Bai Fengshan, deputy chairman of the math department at Qinghua, China's MIT. "The important thing is to be creative, but because they've had to focus on the exams, they spend most of their time following rules."