Isn't it the foundational concept of fizzbuzz that a lot of applicants to programming jobs are "completely unable to do anything"?
The problem is they don't know how to actually compile and run a "Hello World" program, or write and run any kind of program on a physical computer, because they never had to do it as part of their computer science education.
Real tech interviews have always been about understanding and applying data structures and algorithms, with some emphasis on problem solving with those tools.
A really long time ago, there used to be questions that were more like "do you know some very common C/hacker idioms", like write a one line strlen or reverse a linked list in place. I used to get asked stuff like that in the late 90s.
(There were also the brainteaser style things, like how many golf balls fit in a 747, but those were often for non-programming roles where people were looking for your ability to problem solve in a vacuum with little information. Those were rarely aimed at engineers, but at engineer adjacent non-technical roles.)
It was common knowledge that people who had graduated before 2004-2005 tended to be much better candidate and had received a better education. In the end, it was necessary for the country but any big systemic changes like this cause growing pains. I do not know what the current landscape in China is nowadays, I would assume that this is much less of a problem since time probably helped with those growing pains, on the other hand, as the PRC starts creating tighter and tighter restrictions, the best elements might be more likely to want to study abroad.
There are some great universities in China and there are definitely some who know their stuff but the average mid level university in China? Nope, completely useless.
To be fair, this was in 2009 to 2014. I have left China since.