I wonder how China's Steve Jobs did on the standardized test when s/he was eighteen. Our Steve Jobs hadn't even met Wozniak by that point.
There are many types of intelligence and only one type is measured by standardized testing. Indeed is it probably all the other types that will become increasingly important as society adjusted to its complete saturation with technology. Ken Robinson's TED talk addresses this far better than I could: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_.... If you only watch a few TED talks, Ken's should certainly be one of them.
As you point out, the picture you paint of China is strangely appealing to those on HN (myself included). I think our types tend to be good at standardized testing and we enjoy highly efficient systems. However there is a massive cost to such a system because the Steve Jobs of the world are less likely to thrive. Once you look past the initial appeal of efficiency, it becomes a scary ideal indeed.
Selecting people based on standardized tests means that you have selected people who are good at standardized tests not necessarily the smartest or most creative people.
There's a growing consensus that, at least at present, while China is certainly capable of producing complicated stuff (TV's, Cars, Electronics, Plastics, etc.) and very large numbers of well educated engineers, there is very little Steve Jobs type innovation happening in the country.
So yes, they are great filters to keep creatives out ... and what they don't catch, the gatekeepers in colleges will. Leaders fear creativity only slightly less than compassion.
That was the point I was trying to make. At 18 years old Steve Jobs was only just beginning to develop that intelligence of his we see so often today.
China is not the country the kind of nerds I know would be running.
The thing is that if you are using proxies then you can get into a lot of trouble. Then you cannot claim innocence, you cannot say that you were led astray, or you were just curious, etc., because you took active and complex steps to avoid a government security measure. And if you were stupid enough to use very strong encryption, then you are in even more trouble because the police will not know what you did, so they will assume the worst.
So no, "just use Tor" is not an answer.
Regarding about how you think China is run, well I have not been to China, but in my experience with the other communist country that is not the case. That is probably the ideal a communist country strives for, and they often believe they are ran that way, but what usually happens is that there is some kind of test used as a gatekeeper, and after that the people that are just good at politics win out. It is the same as any large organisation, such as most corporations. The corporation likes to think they only promote the smartest and most able people, but really the people that are best at office politics usually climb to the top (although there usually is a minimum intelligence they must possess).
The thought of one of them controlling people's lives on any kind of scale is terrifying.
"Yet, even within the ballpark of restricted democracy, racial qualification is an incredibly crude measure. A much better result would be achieved, for instance, by psychometric qualification. If your IQ is less than 120, you have to go through life with the dunce-cap of a nonvoter. On the other hand, you get to go through life with a government elected by those whose IQ is over 120. Even better, the result of the test could be undisclosed - so you have no idea whether or not your vote matters. You feel no humiliation if it doesn't; you receive no advantage if it does."
This is essentially how China is run: you take a standardized test when you're eighteen or so, and that test determines your life. If you do well, you have power, and if you do poorly, you don't. By the same token, if you're smart enough to download and set up Tor, you can access to controversial information. If you can't set up Tor, you can't. It's an IQ test.
The thinking here is one I have met in peopel from the East, and it goes like this. A little learning is a dangerous thing. You can't have innocent fools upset with the goverment because you just can't have a revolution every thirty years. It's a mess, and you never get ahead as a country.
Not my opinion, but if you ever found the rule of the nerds appealing, (I for one am a nerd and sort of do), now you know: that's China.