Innovation is the soul of a nation and the driving force for the prosperity of a country. A scientific innovation by Thomas Edison brought light to darkness. A technological innovation by Steve Jobs pushed people closer to one another. Innovation changes the world and science promises a new future.
Dongsheng Chen: Dear students and teachers, now let’s begin our discussion. We have just heard talks from celebrities on grand topics. But we do have some small questions besides those big ones. As we all know, Mr. Shen, who gave his talk just now, is a renowned professor of physics. Mr. Qian, with whom you must be more familiar, is your teacher and a famous economist. We have been friends for years. Ying Wu is the one who created PHS in China. You may not know much about it, but my generation knows it really well. It was what preceded the cell phones today. Wu is a well-known entrepreneur and investor. Mr. Zhenhua Mao was my partner when I started my own business in 1992. We call ourselves the 1992 party. Mao is the founder of China Chengxin Credit Management. You see, here are scientist, economist, company founder, and entrepreneur.
Today, let’s focus mainly on young people, and on innovation and education. First, each of us will give a brief introduction to our own area of specialty and provide our opinions on today’s science and technology and their future. Mr. Shen, please.
Innovation and Cognition
Zhi-Xun Shen: So, I will elaborate on what I talked about this morning. It is about basic science, basic research and innovation; or to put it in another way, it is about the relationship between cognition and innovation. First, I’ll tell the stories of two companies. The first company was started from one simple thing: men raise cattle and cattle produce beef. The founder of this company was curious about if the color of beef is relevant to how it tastes. So hestarted some research and learned the whole process. Then he turned to think about whether it was possible to omit the cattle raising part of the process. For this, he started this company. It does not raise any cattle but produces beef directly from forage. This is what his company aims for. This is for sure nothing simple or ordinary. It contains many challenges but the company secured a lot of support. This is the story of the first company.
The next story, I believe, will illustrate the close relationship between cognition and innovation, especially in China today. Not long ago, two very small companies said they would solve the problem of short battery life for drones. There are some measurements in the industry. The current battery life of drones lasts no more than 20 minutes and this is not enough. If the battery life can be extended to one and a half hours, things will be completely different. This is what the two small companies are trying to do. One of them is started by two of my students in the Silicon Valley, and the other is in Seattle. How do the two students of mine do this? Quite by chance, a US oil company found some tiny diamonds in oil and it asked about whether these tiny pieces can be put into some kind of use. Diamond is well-known and profoundly loved by a lot of people for its beauty and brilliance. But can we make it into a new type of conductor? This turned out impossible but the tiny diamonds were found to be an excellent material for electric radiation. This reminded us of the Cold War years. Deep in the space, it is impossible for satellites to use solar energy, so how can we keep them powered? Based on these, we created a method of high-temperature electron radiation and the two students later applied this technology to drones.
Therefore, an innovative atmosphere is indeed important. But what is equally important is how much you know and understand this world. You’ve got to think it through for yourself when choosing your specialty. In the United States, cognition and innovation, or basic research and applied research, are to some extent an issue of politics. Democrats generally value innovation more because they aim at solving pressing problems in society. For Republicans, federal investment should be precisely targeted at and favor long-term research programs because this will lend lasting driving forces to development. They believe short-term problems can be solved by companies while efforts on the national level should focus on solving long-term problems.
Dongsheng Chen: Thank you for talking with us about the paths to innovation and the relationship between cognition and innovation, which has far-reaching influence. Now, Mr. Qian, what do you have to share?
Innovation Starts from Education
Yingyi Qian: Thank you for inviting me, Dongsheng. I feel more nervous here than on other occasions. Why is that? I majored in mathematics when I was a student at Tsinghua University. Mathematics actually has much to do with science and the Dean of the mathematics department is here in the audience now. But when I went to Harvard University, I majored in economics. Mr. Eric Maskin, the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation, is also present here today. Therefore, I will talk about something else, not mathematics or economics. By this I mean education, a field I entered quite by chance working as Dean of the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, over the past ten years. Education is highly relevant to innovation and this relevance is what I intend to talk about.
I believe perhaps not one country in the world today attaches more importance to innovation than China does, and the Chinese people are also very passionate about it. It is a major focus for corporate investment, for students’ pursuits, and in China’s national goals. But innovation is a competition of talented people, and talented people come from education. This is the chain that ultimately produces innovation. According to my experience as a dean and a teacher, I believe, due to a wide variety of reasons, education is understood in a very narrow sense in China today. Some of the reasons may be our tradition of exam-oriented education, relevant systems, culture, habits, etc. We tend to believe that education means the teaching and acquisition of knowledge and that education is about teachers teaching and students learning. Knowledge is indeed important. I’ve always been confident that Chinese students are among the best in the world in terms of the knowledge they possess. But innovation is not a function of knowledge alone. It involves many other factors. Here is a story I’ve been telling once and again. Not long after I returned to Tsinghua, the Department of Physics invited four Nobel laureates for a seminar and the students asked why they were so successful. All that the students could think of as factors contributing to success were things like solid knowledge accumulation, good command of mathematics, dexterity, diligence and conscientiousness. But the four laureates had exactly the same answer: curiosity. So I believe, other than knowledge, curiosity is a priority.
Now, I have a hypothesis here. Detailed research remains to be done for it. Your knowledge grows as you receive more education, but curiosity generally decreases in our overall environment today as one is educated. When you are young, you are very curious. But as you read and learn at school, you will become less and less curious. So here comes a key point: For us educators, it is important to protect and encourage students’ curiosity. We may have killed curiosity when we try to teach some knowledge. This is done unintentionally most of the time. When a student raises a different opinion or an idea that sounds strange out of curiosity, you criticize him/her, saying that it is stupid not to understand such a simple point or what he/she proposed is wrong. But creativity is the product of knowledge time curiosity. It will be pointless to give more knowledge if curiosity deceases as knowledge grows. This is the first reason why I have been advocating curiosity for all these years. Curiosity is not taught. It grows out of relaxation and an enabling environment.
The third factor has something to do with what Mr. Xiaodong Wang talked about just now. It is value orientation. In the story he told, his teacher (Shaobai Xue) may be testing him. The teacher pretended that he saw it when he actually did not. This is a test of honesty. A similar story that I often tell my students goes like this: It is a story of Qiaozhi Lin applying for Peking Union Medical College. She was late for the exam and did not do quite well in it. Why was she late? She met a patient on her way and saved him. For this, all teachers agreed to admit her although she wasn’t excellent in the exam. This story explains value orientation. It is a must for anyone who will do scientific research. Today, we may do our research in order to win a certain award or to grab one of the top ranks in an exam, and this is utilitarianism. What’s more important is exploration and the value of science itself.
Two of our speakers mentioned the recent survey of Peking University just now. I had read about it too. It shows that 30% of the students think it useless to study hard and 40% don’t see a point in life. This has nothing to do with their knowledge or the knowledge part of our education. It is a matter of values, the value of life.
When we think about innovation, we take a utilitarian perspective. We value it because it contributes to economic growth. Even if we aim for utilitarian purposes only, I still don’t think knowledge teaching will be enough. Curiosity is still a must and the same is true for an appropriate value orientation. This is what I have to share here based on the years working as a dean and a teacher.
Dongsheng Chen: Our educator here has made quite a good point. So Mr. Ying Wu, what’s your topic? An innovative enterprise and what you have achieved maybe?
Ying Wu: Well, let me take the perspective of an entrepreneur. I really like the title of today’s event held by Dongrun Foundation—Innovation and the Future of Education. It is highly meaningful to put innovation and future together. China is a developing country and we are trying to catch up with other countries. As far as I believe, for Chinese entrepreneurs, it will be useless if we do the same things as many of our predecessors and innovation is the only way out.
The same is true for China as a country. A developing country will never catch up with developed countries if it does not innovate. When you do the same thing other people do, you have less fund and a less famous brand and you will never outperform your competitors. So you must be innovative, do something new, and take a road that no one has ever traveled.
As far as I can remember, it was 13 or 14 years ago, when some state leaders visited my company, they said that China had set a goal to build itself into an innovative country by 2020. I totally agreed with this. But what is an innovative country? We have been going all out to encourage innovation and I believe this to be a very wise move taken by our state leaders.
Actually, the overwhelming changes that have taken place in China over the past years are also a kind of innovation. We have done a lot, bringing in innovations and creating our own.
So, for scientific innovations, I think I’d better take this opportunity to encourage students to study science and technology. Inspirational learning of high school students, I believe, is the basis of creativity. We say science and technology. Science comes before technology. Without sciences as the basis, there will be no technological progress. Just now, Prof. Shen mentioned some development in science. Without such development, mankind would not have made many of its achievements.
Next, I would like to talk about education in the future. Mr. Shen mentioned the presidential election in the United States just now, but he did not elaborate. I think Donald Trump’s being elected is an issue we can delve into. There is a lot to learn from it. Social elites of the US are almost totally defeated this time. These include elites in the political, economic and educational sectors, as well as many celebrities, entrepreneurs and elites of the Silicon Valley. None of them managed to see what more than half of the American people wanted. I am not going to discuss whether Trump will be able to solve the many problems of his country here. That is a totally different question. But anyway, when Trump won the election, all the American elites were defeated. They failed to understand what the majority of American people wanted.
Last October, I sent a team of Chinese entrepreneurs to MIT for a week-long exchange program. There I learned about a survey. It was interesting. Over the past 20 years, the income of the American middle class kept decreasing. This is a problem of their country. It failed to respond to the needs of over 50% of its people.
Now let’s look at China. I think it highly meaningful to have such a forum here today. Why is that? It is about the future of education. And education is exactly what caused the problems of the US today. If we don’t confront this issue squarely now and try to solve the problem, if we don’t solve the problems of TsinghuaUniversity and Peking University, China will probably face the same problem in ten, or may be just five years. This is actually already happening now. A company wants to hire senior R&D staff members with a monthly salary of RMB30,000 or 40,000, for example, for the development of blockchain, but it can’t find anyone. There are so many people in this world, but it just can’t find anyone for this. Previously, we had good technical education and a skilled worker was paid RMB3,000 or 4,000 a month. But with such a salary, it is hard to live in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenhzen. They just can’t make it. Our education system today is formed to train people to meet needs of the society after the second Industrial Revolution. It is the same almost everywhere in the world. Developed countries or developing ones, the model is the same everywhere.
Today, as science and technology advance so rapidly, the demand for talents change just as rapidly. If we don’t make any change to our education, it will be very problematic. In my opinion, changes are needed in two fronts. The first is the educators. This involves both the national level and universities. Also, students must think about what to learn to promote social progress. This is also very important.
Dongsheng Chen: About education reform… You know Google created the search engine and with it we can acquire a great deal of knowledge. I understand the Dongrun-Yau Science Award to be a supplement to our traditional education system. Several award-winning students came to share their thoughts earlier and they said there were many different ways to do what they wanted to do. The Dongrun-Yau Award takes its own approach to improving or to offering an alternative to the existing education system. The same is true for our forum today.
Zhenhua Mao: Today, we are here to talk about the future of education. This is definitely not limited to what we should learn in the future. There may still be some shortcomings in what we learn in the future. So it is more meaningful to talk about the entire education system, the approach and the philosophy of education. I was educated mainly in the 1980s and I usually tell my students about what education was like at that time. I think that was a time full of challenges, a time when science and education progressed at a speed that we had never seen before. How was science at that time? Science meant challenges, and everyone was curious. For us economics majors, it meant that we continuously posed questions about the Chinese economy and society and answered them one after another.
In terms of the teaching and research of economics, I believe a major problem is that no prominent figure appears today in the entire sector. Those well-known economists today all rose to fame 10 or 20 years ago. Those born in the 1970s have not yet contributed influential works so far. They are not yet ready. This is a big problem, a problem of our education, especially college education.
I think this is a problem we must think about: How can we have the true spirit of education? If we want innovations in the future, we must change our education now. We must create an education system that is truly innovative. Innovation is crucial to the future development of China. After trying to learn from the West, we now need to find our own way towards innovation, and we must think deeply about this.
The Path to Success
Dongsheng Chen: We were mostly on the macro level just now. But Xiaodong also mentioned some of his personal experience. Every one of you is prominent and influential in China today. I believe you all have some personal experience to share. Xiaodong said he gained confidence for science because he saw spirochaeta and his supervisor picked him out. When I was in high school, I was deeply influenced by the biography of Karl Marx. But what about you guys? What influenced you most, a book, a teacher or an incident? Could you please tell your own stories? What has been decisive for your life? Zhenhua Mao, for example, entered college at the age of 15 and was known as a genius.
Zhenhua Mao: From my college years till now, I don’t think courses of economics are the most influential to me. Economics can be taken as part of philosophy and philosophy opens up your mind. Before reading those great works of philosophy in college, I had no idea there were so many great thoughts and insights in human history. I was always very excited when reading these works because I was eager to see these philosophical works and thoughts guide mankind into the future, including the social organization and other most important aspects. When having student interviews, I usually ask them what they read or what philosophical work they read. This is my requirement not only for philosophy majors, but also for economics majors.
I believe education is undoubtedly the most influential event in life. Here is a story I would like to share with you. When I was working on my doctoral dissertation, my supervisor was unhappy with what I wrote. What did I write about? I proposed to set capitalized enterprises as the goal of our reform of state-owned enterprises. My supervisor disagreed. He said this was wrong. But I insisted. Later, I talked with him in detail and he agreed with me. I asked him for a preface and he wrote that Mao fully justified his point in this dissertation, so I allowed him to start oral defense and I supported him in getting his work published.
Ying Wu: After I graduated from college, I worked as a college teacher for three years and did some research. I went to study in the United States in 1985 and at that time there was a very good organization, the Bell Laboratory. I went there after two years of study. I went through the routine for every new comer on my first day there—I toured the lab. It was in 1987 and the Bell Laboratory boasted seven Nobel laureates while China had not even one. As a green hand in the field, I was astonished to learn that there were seven, although later I came to know that there were other institutions that had more of them, like dozens. At that time, there were about 170 or 180 doctor’s degree holders in computer science throughout the United States, and 150 of them worked for the Bell Laboratory. My research project there was “Multimedia Research”. It was 30 years ago and one of the chiefs of the laboratory, who is also a doctor, said that communication should be multimedia instead of having only voice. He said there should also be images, video, etc. One day after that, he asked me what my dream was and I said it was to create something like the Bell Laboratory in China.
This is what influenced me greatly, especially for my entrepreneurship later.
Yingyi Qian: I’ve had many turning points in my life, and many stories. Here is one I would like to share for it may be somewhat related to you students here today.
Several of my speeches at the inauguration ceremonies of the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, have been widely spread. One of them, perhaps the most widely known, is the one I delivered in August 2012 at the inauguration ceremony for undergraduate students. The title is “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”. Many of our alumni were still talking about this yesterday when they came back. I will tell the story behind this speech today.
In August 2012, I went to visit my mentor Mr. Eric Maskin at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was about to move back to Harvard at the time. He previously taught at Harvard and then went to work at Princeton for some time, or 12 years to be precise. It was from 2000 to 2012. After that he returned to Harvard. At Princeton, he lived in a former residence of Albert Einstein. I intentionally went to visit him in this house. (I first went to the Institute in 1981 when Mr. Yau was also there. I was there to visit a college classmate of mine who was a student of Mr. Yau.) There is a famous path on the campus and I learned a lot from my mentor when we walked down the path and chatted. It was not only economics and mathematics. More importantly, it was about how to do research. Once I said that I knew a 1929 paper of Abraham Flexner, the first Dean of the Institute, titled “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”. This was exactly the title of the speech of mine. Not many people knew it in China, though. Prof. Maskin said what this paper talked about was quite right. He said that the Institute for Advanced Study was very small, with only some 20 emeritus professors, but it covered all the disciplines from natural science, to social science, to philosophy. He said that everyone there worked on different things but one thing was in common: they were all doing “useless” research. This point sent me into deep thought and I wrote my speech of the same title on my flight back home.
That speech spread wide because there was a major problem in China’s education system—it focuses too much on quick success. The same is true for innovations in China. This problem was so serious that I later referred to it as "short-term" utilitarianism. There are short-term and long-term utilitarianism. Long-term utilitarianism aims at the long term, the future, while short-term utilitarianism concerns only the present. It is extremely near-sighted. For example, my students have been asking frequently why we don’t offer any accounting course in the freshman year. They want this because with accounting knowledge, it will be easier for them to secure internship opportunities in the second year. For sure, they feel the pressure of competition because students learn accounting in their first year at Peking University and they feel they lag behind since no such course is available for freshmen here. They want immediate benefit from everything they learn, every course they sign up for, and every research project. They want results this very moment. If we all expect learning and innovation to bring immediate gains, I believe we will be hopeless. So a key point in the speech of mine mentioned above is that the word useless carries a pair of quotation marks. What I referred to as useless knowledge will actually be of great use in the long run.
In that speech, I gave three examples. The first was quoted from the original paper of Abraham Flexner. It was about magnetism of Maxwell. It was of critical importance to the invention of radio but Maxwell never thought about radio when he created the formula of magnetism.
The second example came from Prof. Eric Maskin and it was about economics. He talked about mechanism design and spectrum auction just now. But the truth is when he did the research on this, he didn’t give a thought to whether it would be useful or not. Interestingly, the paper for which he won the prize was a paper of 1977. It had been years before it was published in a journal although it was widely believed to be groundbreaking. After 20 years, someone said this paper was so famous that he would like to publish it. This is my second example.
The third one is about Steve Jobs, about engineering and innovation. He quitted college after only one semester in which he took a course on artistic writing purely for fun. Ten years later, when he was designing the typography for the Mac, what he learned back then was proved useful. For that Jobs said, “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
These are merely anecdotes, but they carry profound meanings. We are still short-sighted and highly utilitarian when we talk about innovation and creativity. We are still thinking about immediate gains. This is something we should meditate on.
One more thing I would like to tell you with the story of my mentor is that for education, this issue is critical all the same. Education means not only what you teach in class, but also what you show your students by doing. My mentor is here today. I am his student. He taught me a lot and from talking with him, I learned even more, especially more profound thoughts which I believe are more useful than economics, mathematics or physics.
Dongsheng Chen: Have you heard him clearly? If you want the glory they have today, you need perseverance of a lifetime. This is the most important.
Zhi-Xun Shen: Following Mr. Qian, I would also like to tell a story of “Taking Your Time”. In life, sometimes, being slow for a while may bring you speed for the rest of your life. I am deeply influenced by three people in my life: my high school physics teacher, my father and my doctoral supervisor. Given the limited time, I will only tell the stories about the latter two.
I started college in 1979. Actually, I was first admitted in 1978. The first time, it was not the best of college programs, but I thought it good enough just to enter college. It was my father who persuaded me to give up and try again the next year. When I finally went to college the second year, I was better prepared mentally. Later, when I was about to get my doctor’s degree, I received job offers from two universities before graduation. They both offered me professorship and I was happy to be a professor the moment I was out of school, for conventionally in physics, one starts with postdoctoral research. My supervisor, with his experience, told me not to rush, saying that based on my potentials, I could reach farther if I took my time for the moment. Thus, I rejected the offers and went on to a postdoctoral program. It was slow, but I got the position of emeritus professor after working for three years as associate professor. Typically, it takes seven years but it took me only five to get there.
I’ve been suggesting my students to be patient too. I have a total of 80 students. Fifty of them are professors and two have been through a process similar to my own. Princeton and Cornell offered them professorship before they even got their doctor’s degrees. I told them it was Ok to accept the offer but be sure not to start working there until one year later. I assured them that if they really wanted them, they would know that the choice they made was right. Both of the students spent two years before that and both of them got professorship after around the same time it took me. Take your time, and things may turn out better for you. This is what I have to share with you.
By the way, I think the greatest help my teachers offered me is not that they answered one question or told me how to learn. The greatest help is that they told me how to be. This is something you learn only from conversations.
Dongsheng Chen: So you must be perseverant and follow a good teacher. Make sure you find a good teacher. I believe many of the students present here will later become doctoral candidates under your supervision.
Q&A
Student 1: Thank you all for today. I’m from Peking University Health Science Center. I have a question for Prof. Qian. You mentioned the issue of values. What I do is mainly to promote education of humanities in the healthcare sector. So, what do you think about values in the context of education?
Yingyi Qian: You are from a medical college. So I guess you must be familiar with the story of Qiaozhi Lin I told. That story is very important and meaningful. The story from Xiaodong Wang is also very good. Values involve many things but we tend to think of it as something very abstract, sometimes lofty. In doing research, we need a good attitude above everything else. Why did Xiaodong Wang’s supervisor pick him? It was because of his attitude, mind-set, values, and the like. In my school, we offer a course called “Critical Thinking and Moral Reasoning.” It discusses moral dilemmas. I believe in medical science there are many topics to discuss from a moral and ethical point of view. Values are seen in many ways, like what research topic you choose, what attitude you take towards publishing a paper, etc. I once asked Prof. Eric Maskin, “That paper of yours is so good, why didn’t you get it published?” He said that it was not so important to get your paper published, and instead, it was important to let others see the value of your work and to influence others’ research efforts with your work.
What do you think is the value of science? Seeking the truth, exploring the world, these are indeed important. For sure utilitarian purposes can also result in innovations. The medical science aims at curing diseases and saving lives. It is simply useful in the short, middle or long run.
However, I believe there are values beyond such utilitarian value. So two weeks ago, when I was awarded the China Economics Prize, I talked about the three levels of motivation for scientific exploration. It was also spread wide. One motivation is for the short term, for publishing a paper perhaps. This is good too, but the creativity therein is limited. The second is for a longer term but still utilitarian. The third is to explore the world. This third level comes from Einstein. At a meeting celebrating the 60th birthday of Max Planck, Einstein said that there were different kinds of people in science and various motivations for their exploration of the world; and Max Planck belonged to the kind that explored the world to seek the truth.
Student 2: I am a participant of this competition. I’m from Guangdong. Just now one of you mentioned that the five Nobel laureates said their success came from curiosity. I would like to ask all five of you here where your success came from?
Yingyi Qian: Let me put success aside. Each of us here has his special features. Everyone has his strengths and weaknesses. I have something that is related to curiosity: I ask a lot of questions, all kinds of questions. Just now, sitting beside my mentor, I was again asking him questions. I believe my willingness to ask questions is a major motivation of mine.
Dongsheng Chen: Be a long-distance runner in life, not a short-distance one.
Ying Wu: Perseverance.
Zhenhua Mao: Be prepared.
Zhi-Xun Shen: Perseverance.
Student 3: I am a participant of the competition. I’m very glad to have this opportunity here and thank you for your time. This is a question that has long been bothering me. Many people mentioned emptiness and pointlessness in life. I also feel that sometimes. How should I put it? Many of the students about my age feel that life is pointless but this does not mean that they do not want to live. Actually the problem is they don’t know how to live this life or what to do with this life. Mr. Lu Xun didn’t know what kind of a man he wanted to become when he was young. I think this is an issue of how to take your first step of life. This is important but we just don’t know what the purpose of our life is. Once we know that, things will straighten out. I think many young people and college students are confused about this. Though you have all told some stories of your early days, I still hope you can talk more about this: How did you take your first steps in life? How did you know what you will do for your life? What’s the best choice? Or how have you managed to fulfill your purpose of life?
Dongsheng Chen: I was born in the late 1950s and I usually say I’m a good child of Chairman Mao. Education at that time emphasized patriotism. I’m a good student of Deng Xiaoping for I entered college in the early days of the Reform and Opening-up and education then was better. I am also a good soldier of Jiang Zemin. Why is that? I started my own business in Jiang’s time. When I was young, kids were encouraged either to become a professor like Chen-Ning Yang, or to be a hero like Lei Feng. My aspiration was to become a professor. I never expected myself to be an entrepreneur. Therefore, to succeed and excel in life, your specialty does not really matter much. For sure, for an economics major, his specialty may have more to do with doing business; while for an engineering major, things may be different. Your major is important but not that important. Another key point is you have to seize historic opportunities. Why did I start my own business? At that time, I was deputy chief editor at the Development Research Center of the State Council. In 1988, I was in my early 30s. I brought to China the evaluation of 500 US companies and this was something that changed my life. It made me determined to start my own business. This is because I found that a county’s economic development and national strength had a clear positive correlation to the number of large companies the country hosted. At that time, you know, one may contribute to his country by doing scientific research, developing industry, or engaging in education. If China was to become a strong country in the world, there must be a number of strong multinational companies. I selected the best entrepreneurs of China in 1988 and I have only a rough impression now about the number of world top 500 companies in each country. There were 160 in the United States, 110 in Japan, 59 in Germany, 53 or 56 in France, and 52 in Great Britain. In comparison, last year, only 110 of the 500 were in the US, 60 in Japan, 34 in Germany, 32 in France, and 33 in Great Britain. These numbers all went down because 100 Chinese enterprises entered the list and squeezed others out. So my dream was to build a company among the world top 500. Now, Taikang is very likely to make its way into the list next year.
Zhi-Xun Shen: There is one point I want to make here. Many of my students at Stanford are also confused about what to do in the future. You have many choices when you are young. You are just growing up when you are attending college or graduate school. However, you must have the ambition to change the world. We have recently established a new school at Stanford, following the example of the Rhodes Scholarship of Oxford. We analyzed Rhodes scholars, both the successful and unsuccessful ones. The scholarship picked out-going people like Kennedy who were very successful but it covered no introvert like Bill Gates. However, our analysis showed that both kinds of people, though very different, share one thing in common: They were all very ambitious when they were young. This is very important. When you believe in something, you must be brave to march all the way towards it. This will turn out to be highly meaningful for your life later.
Yingyi Qian: You raised a very good question. Why is it good? You are thinking critically. You raised your doubt to a PKU professor and your doubt is reasonable. Let me give you an example to support your point. You said you felt life was empty and pointless and it seemed to be a problem of your generation. But the truth is this problem has existed for every generation. Here is my example. When I was in college, an article was very famous all over China and it was titled “Why is the path of my life narrowing down?” I believe everyone who attended college in the late 1970s and early 1980s is familiar with this article. It was published in China Youth Daily and spread nationwide. So this is not only a problem of your generation. You may continue your thinking and continue to raise your doubts along this vein. My second point is when you think critically, you must support your point well. Since you are a second grader from the High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China, I suggest you apply for SEM Tsinghua University next year.
Ying Wu: This is indeed a very good question. It is representative. I will make a point similar to Mr. Shen’s. The question is actually “Who am I?”. Many people think about this in very simple ways and cannot find the answer until they are 30 or 40 years old. You are luckier than many to be attending one of the best high schools. You must be very clever. You may be destined to do a lot of things, but don’t rush to find out what you will do. Follow your heart. You may finally reach the point of success even if you start simply for the purpose of creating a better life for people around you, or helping your grandma be healthier and happier.
Zhenhua Mao: I feel very lucky to have been in college in the 1970s and 1980s. The experience is valuable. College changed my life and the life of my family and it also enabled me to do something for my country. My home and my country, these are the purpose of life for many of my generation. For you young people today, it may not still be necessary to change the life of your family with your own efforts because China as a whole is much better developed now. It may also be difficult for you to change anything of your country or society. I understand that. This is a philosophical issue.
Dongsheng Chen: Now we have different answers to one question. If there are more questions, you may start to fight. You contributed the best question today. But our time is up. This is the first of our forum. Let’s meet here again next year. Thank you to our guests today and thank you to all of you.