I get the feeling from traveling there fairly frequently and talking to some of the yuppies there that, unlike 5 or 10 years ago, all is not lost if you don't attend college and follow the hierarchy. There is a growing creative class who were not mechanical enough to get into college, but are smart enough to channel their efforts to the arts, entertainment, literature and entrepreneurship. I think this is only true in big cities though, as I have a hard time imagining country folk being very hip at all. But who knows.

I'll give an example: my cousin is 17 and lives in Beijing. He's exceedingly intelligent but hates schoolwork. He knows more rappers (in the US) than I do and knows NBA scores before I do (I live in the US, I should clarify). He wants to attend college, but knows it's very difficult, but has backup plans as he's already making decent money as a web developer by day and a DJ by night.

Sure, "they instill in you ..." blah blah blah, but I get the sense that there's a strong undercurrent creative subculture emerging and we're going to see a lot of results come from that in the future in the form of movies, arts, music and, of course, startups.