As a Wall Street executive, I had many opportunities to compare Western and East Asian job candidates. Invariably the Chinese candidate would come in with a doctorate in a quantitative field, keen entrepreneurial instincts, and an exemplary work ethic. Usually he or she would wind up crunching numbers for an American frat boy who glad-handed the customers, earning a small fraction of the frat boy's pay. There were exceptions; the government trading desk of one of Wall Street's most successful shops was run by a Chinese woman who came to America to study ballet, and who played Mozart piano concertos with orchestra as a hobby. For the most part, though, the Chinese blended into the wallpaper and never had a chance at the big money.
Now the frat boys have less to do, for "salesmanship" has become a dirty word in the financial industry. The first trillionaires well might be entrepreneurs like Wang Chuan-fu of the battery company BYD, which might just launch the first successful mass-market electric car. The smartest Western kids went to business and law school, while Wang learned science at a provincial Chinese university.
That Wall Street frat boys are in trouble is not a controversial statement. Top-of-the-market bubble behavior no longer is encouraged. Not long from now, they will be lucky to find employment getting coffee for a Chinese (or Indian) boss. The bubble accounted for so much of America's employment down the food chain, though, that many millions of American jobs may vanish.
Whole parts of the industrial world never will come back. Nothing can resuscitate the north of Britain from industrial ruin, and portions of the United States appear likely to follow.
China's thrift, industry and diligence are qualities born of long experience with hard times. The terrible suffering of the 19th and 20th centuries left every Chinese parent with the conviction that the world shows no mercy to mediocrity. They have less tolerance for fantasy than their Western counterparts. Reality has intruded on their lives for generations to the point that they are ready to meet it head on. Enough of them devote their lives to making their children excel as to produce an army of hothouse wonders so large as to swamp whatever competition the West might send against them. If Westerners think the present recession is unpleasant, they cannot begin to imagine how the recovery will look, for it may occur entirely remote to them, on the other side of the world.
