My Take | Chinese parents not foolish enough to pay millions for children to pursue useless US degrees
- Contrary to senior diplomat Kurt Campbell’s wish, if mainland Chinese students can’t study advanced science and tech in America, they will just do it back home
Kurt Campbell makes me think of George Clooney. No, I don’t mean their looks, of course, but what the US State Department’s No 2 said this week.
In the 1997 action movie The Peacemaker starring Nicole Kidman and Clooney, the world’s handsomest man plays a special forces commando whose team has just captured a terrorist – with brown skin, what else? – who earned a PhD in nuclear science from the United States.
“Yeah, we trained half the world’s terrorists,” Clooney tells Kidman in a knowing, sarcastic tone.
It wasn’t a very good movie but I enjoyed watching two very sexy people running around and talking very fast like they were under intense stress to save New York from being levelled in a nuclear terrorist plot.
To paraphrase Clooney, what Campbell obviously meant this week was that the US trained half of China’s most advanced science and tech students who are now helping the communist regime to take on America.
“I would like to see more Chinese students coming to the United States to study humanities and social sciences, not particle physics,” Campbell told the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank which also publishes the influential Foreign Affairs journal.
“I believe that the largest increase that we need to see going forward would be much larger numbers of Indian students that come to study in American universities on a range of technology and other fields.”