You are quite incorrect. I have decades of experience hiring in China, including foreign-educated Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, domestic educated Chinese, and foreigners. Mostly this was for R&D work, but also operations and other roles.

You know what I found? The value of Chinese domestic university education was a net negative. For instance, in R&D work, I found it to be a solid predictor of futility in the face of unstructured problems. Local employees who had never been to university outperformed those who had - every time.

While I wasn't hiring Tsinghua elites, I did hire from a range of universities across a range of provinces. Many of these graduates would last only days before being fired. I found no more efficient way to screen than to allocate tools, space and a task. Domestic employment law is supportive in this regard.

If I had to generalize, when performing R&D work, the university educated Chinese people were the worst performers, mostly due to no capacity to handle unstructured problems but also due to assumptions of being in a "team" and active seeking bureaucratic excuses for lack of progress. They would freeze up and have no confidence reasoning forward when questioned. The "made it without university" Chinese people were the best performers, and excellent communicators. And the foreigners were generally somewhere in the middle. Overseas educated Chinese were essentially equivalent in this regard.

Other foreign bosses in China have reported to me that they prefer to hire women who have already had children as they are stable employees willing to do what needs to get done, graduates and in particular young men are considered near to useless, with zero loyalty, commitment or motivation.

Everything you described reflects my experience with American graduates. I have only worked at "top tier" FAANG-level institutions and attended what is supposed to be a globally competitive so-called "elite" university. Very few students at my university and others I interacted with (who were supposed to be some of the best, given the programs I met them through) and very few employees at these institutions were actually good performers or genuinely knowledgable.

I was most impressed by those from 'second tier' universities and some without degrees at all who were more obsessed with quality and rigor than they were about 'GPA', prestige, or whatever it is. I don't expect this to be different anywhere in the world, due to the nature of selection systems. That is Goodhart's Law after all.

The selection systems employed by these institutions favor those who optimize for select-ability, which distorts things quite a bit. I hold very little value in a PhD from any university at this point. In fact, I'm quite weary of prestigious credentials in general, as they often translate to over-confident idiocy with power in credentialist institutions, rather than self-aware idiocy which can at least self-regulate to some degree. PG put it well when he called them "professional fakers".

That being said, research output in China is quite strong. I have also learned that average people, given enough time, resources, and a little bit of good direction, will be able to accomplish quite a bit. China has made undeniable, unprecedented progress across the board in high-tech sectors. I say this having been part of competitive analysis at two of these top tier American institutions, looking at how China is overtaking our own products.

Basically.

> Chinese domestic university education was a net negative.

Is fair but not exceptional observation to PRC tertiary education. Can be generalized to most mid to shit tier western university talent as well, i.e. if you're not hiring from elite. But really also tons of low calibre all over "top tier" western institutions with academic inflation in last couple decades.

IMO generalized tier list is follows: c9 league (or other PRC elite) -> self motivated / self educated go getters -> competent grads from good (not elite) institutes -> average to bottom barrel grads. Note here competent grads includes much of your expats, and foreign educated Chinese... both have some qualities of self motivation to do well because they decided to go (or return) to PRC to work instead of working/staying in west. Western educated Chinese who returns also largely falls under / prefiltered the bucket of basically not being good enought for elite/C9 but have smarts and enough resources to goto a semi decent western uni. Chinese educated in mid to shit tier comparable to same quality of medicore talent from mid to shit tier western uni. Plenty of such western educated PRC grads just chilling in the west being useless, many from fairly well ranked western institutions - plenty of useless non-Chinese grads in even well ranked western institutions bad at unstructured problems (maybe disproportionately so). Young men being < young women for skilled work force also pattern you see in west, except in west, young men aren't being pushed through tertiary at similar rates as in PRC.

Also worth nothing Chinese C9 has like 400,000k enrollment (500+k if you include seven sons), vs 150k US Ivys + MIT,Standford,Caltech, good UCs, and it's maybe 250k... a big portion being non S&T.