Alice Han

But it was fascinating to me doing research on this because I hadn't lived it personally, but I can see how it's having a real impact on generating talents at the top levels of education.

of China's tech companies, of China's corporates.

And it's something that I think has really floated under the radar.

And it's been around for decades.

That's the other thing.

It's not an overnight thing.

It's been around for decades, I believe since the 80s.

So this has been a concerted effort by the government to try to find talented individuals across all of the provinces in China.

And it reminds me a little bit of the imperial Chinese system, which is very much to try to find these scholar gentlemen in all the different far-flung provinces, bring them back to Beijing so that they could become basically ministers within the court of the Chinese emperor.

But in this case, you know, in the modern day scenario, these highly talented individuals then go out and proliferate and make companies and lead major tech firms.

One last thing that I will say is there apparently is a special class known as a Yao class.

Andrew Yao is the sole Chinese winner of the Turing Award, which is basically the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in CS.

and he, a couple of decades ago, moved from the States back to China, where he originally was from, and he's really become the champion intellect and professor of AI in China.

So apparently there is a class named after him at Tsinghua called the You Class, where the chief AI scientist at Tencent was one of his students, the founder of Moonshot, which has produced Kimmy, and the founder of Pony AI, as well as a range of these Chinese tech founders.

So

Again, I think the story is so fascinating because it shows both the government having a hand and plucking out these highly talented individuals, but also then these individuals going out from the bottom up and making their own companies, which are really driving China's innovation.

I would even hazard a statement, which is that I believe China may be more meritocratic today than America is, given this system, given the way in which education and scholastic intelligence are lionized.

I would say that China today is probably more meritocratic than the U.S.

And one last point about the gold call, which you rightly mentioned, James, is that it's a system that's predicated on your score during the exam.

It's unlike any other, I think, exam in the world.