An honest question, are these degrees well regarded? In the main are the Chinese qualifications comparable to those from the US in terms of depth, breadth and rigor?

I'm only somewhat familiar with their primary and secondary education (based on observation, not experience). If that is any indication, then their university courses are likely harder or at least as hard at a comparable level of institution prestige. (Harder doesn't always mean better. It's a characteristics of education that may/may not help with real-world applications.)

One reason for that: It could be harder for a Chinese student to get into Tsinghua than a US student to get into MIT. The same likely holds for a range of other institutions as well. This is based on corresponding admission rates. Also, on average, Chinese students have better math background than American students.

Obviously, MIT, Stanford, etc. currently have higher prestige in the world's eyes. It doesn't mean though that the education there is always more rigorous than top-level institutions in China.

It really depends on your hukou given China’s residency system. Each province has a small quota, though some get much more than others, it isn’t has hard as a Beijinger to get into Qinghua as a person from Henan. Many richer Chinese choose abroad for better educational opportunities, even those that are obviously going to get into Qinghua or PKU (e.g. Beijing’s top gaokao scorer a few years back went to HKU).

On average, Chinese from the big cities have better math background than all Americans, not on average for the entire country. Compulsory education in china stops at 9th grade, and small city/rural schools are incredibly underfunded compared to PISA-record beating shanghai.

I'm working as a manager in Shenzhen. I have a guy on my team who's studying to do his IELTS so that he can get accepted into a foreign university to do his masters in computer science. He says that he can't get into Tsinghua (or any Chinese university at that tier) because the competition's too fierce, and all the universities a step below are not well enough respected. Hence studying for IELTS. He's targeting University of Toronto or something at that level. For what it's worth, it's only one anecdote from one Chinese guy.

The admission standards for master's degree for the same school is usually lower than that for an undergraduate degree. At least in US, Canada, Britain and China itself.

Would guess that it is at MIT/Stanford. A key thing to remember is that the top minds of the world aren't really emigrating to go to China to study or bring their family and that isn't going to change anytime soon. All roads still do not lead to China, and for good reason. Another important thing to take into consideration is having your trig identities memorized slightly better doesn't equivocate even remotely to higher intellectual output.

By harder, I meant problems more intellectually challenging to solve. Compare hard questions in Chinese Gaokao exam to the hardest questions in SAT Math:

https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-examples-of-hard-Chinese...

By the way, SAT Math questions are generally considered a piece of cake by most good students in East Asia (and they often get 800 or close without much extra preparation), which says something about the level of average American high school math education.

Wow, that is a huge leap in difficulty.

The SATs are simple math. The GREs are as simple, which is presumably four years farther along than the SATs. However, it's hard answering all those questions correctly in the given time frame (presumably). You'd need a randomly sampled set of chinese kids taking the SATs to see where they fit against our distribution of scores to draw further conclusions. Bear in mind, too, top american students are studying advanced math in high school (advanced meaning, enough to reasonably answer the questions on the quora page, with time to practice and get used to things like the proof questions)

Note: I'm not trying to justify the american education system, just providing commentary and trying to level the comparison a bit.

Check out PISA 2015 which tests Chinese students from 4 provinces (200+ million population). They are on average above Massachusetts, the top scoring American state, in math.

Note that fewer percentage of Chinese youths attend high school than American, so that might skew the comparison.

I think I've heard of that. Went ahead and looked at the charts and it looks like the only mention of China were Taipei, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore. That's kinda biased. For example, we could equivalently grab all the students from stuyvesant high school or phillips exeter academy, make sure they know some set theory and basic calculus and what not, then make them take the exam.

Anyway, don't mean to argue - it does appear on the news a lot "the chinese are out mathing us! America sucks!" with some political finger pointing, and my reaction is usually a facepalm coupled with wondering how controlled the comparison is.

> the only mention of China were Taipei, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore

0/4, none of these are really under the aegis of the Beijing regime - and while it is flattering of you to compare the entirety of the population of four countries with 40 million people to the single most selective school in the US, it is rather inaccurate to do so.

If you look closer, PISA 2015 also had China in there, where the four provinces Jiangsu, Guangdong, Beijing, and Shanghai participated. Now poor illiterate migrants' kids might not get hukous to Beijing schools, so you might be right that this might be slightly biased - but even these four richer provinces have nearly the population of the US, so even if only 200 million Chinese are "outmathing us", it still makes a massive difference.

I see now, interesting, the chart I was looking at completely omitted China for whatever reason, so that was what I was assuming he meant

No, the result I mentioned is not for those countries/territories. It is by mainland Chinese students.

See: http://ncee.org/2016/12/pisa-2015-results/

The range of schools in PISA is much broader than the top sliver of students in Phillips Exeter etc you mentioned.

The key factor is that US cloud systems are not being included in supercomputing calculations at all. The most powerful supercomputers are Amazon's AWS or Google's systems. Alibaba's cloud systems are still tiny by comparison.

Cloud compute systems are the next evolution of supercomputing. Or put a better way, the traditional supercomputers being measured, are history.

It'd be like holding up 56k modem market leadership today as a sign of technological dominance.

Indeed much scientific computing these days is "high-throughput" rather than "high-performance" computing [1], and is done on commodity hardware, including commercial clouds. However there are certain classes of problems that still need highly-connected leadership systems [2,3], but that distinction is definitely blurring.

[1] https://www.opensciencegrid.org/ [2] http://www.nersc.gov/ [3] https://www.alcf.anl.gov/

High performance computing (HPC) is a specific field. Fast communication between compute nodes is very important and you won't get that on GCP or AWS where you may get 10gbs at the max. Most of the fast simulation codes are bounded by communication time between nodes.

Although, Azure is currently doing some HPC offerings.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/big-compute/

The point of the chart is that the rise in China's tech capabilities is quite broad-based. The tagline about supercomputers is just an illustration for non-tech readers.

Quantum communications and certain NLP applications/technologies are some areas that China has likely surpassed the US. These are definitely not comparable to 56k modem.

There's zero evidence China has surpassed the US in quantum. In fact all the evidence is that the US is leading quantum by a significant margin, from IBM to Microsoft to Google. Your NLP reference is meaninglessly vague.

Traditional supercomputers, except in isolated use cases, are a thing of the past. Nearly all supercomputing work will be done in the cloud in the not very distant future, supercomputing will continue to shrink.

China's use of supercomputing is because on the whole they're still a decade behind on adopting cloud computing (which is why Alibaba, their leader in the segment, has such a small business compared to the US cloud giants).

Quantum communications, not quantum computers. https://www.insidescience.org/news/china-leader-quantum-comm...

You can search ‘quantum communications china’ for more references.

For NLP research: https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/. See the teams behind top algorithms.

For real-world NLP: Xiaoyi (Little Doctor) was the first (and currently the only) AI that passed a medical licensing exam that human doctors need to pass (and rote learning is not enough to pass): http://sites.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/12/02/congrats-x...

That probably includes CS degrees one can get at places like Hunan Tourism Univeristy (I would joke about Beijing Forestry University but their graduates are better than you’d expect). Finding good programming talent in China is still very hard, there are a lot of low quality degrees to sift out, so that everyone is chasing a very limited supply of new graduates from just a few well regarded schools.