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Wire & Cable ASIA – July/August 2013
The Boston Marathon bombings
The death of Lu Lingzi points up the
strong attraction held by American
academia for ambitious Chinese students
“Chinese leaders and the government are very concerned
about the tragic death of a Chinese student and the severe
injury of another in the Boston Marathon bombing case on
15th April.”
At a news briefing in Beijing two days after the bombings,
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying did not even
then release the names of the students, both enrolled in
graduate programmes at Boston University. In fact it was
hardly necessary. Via the Internet the world had learned
promptly that the third victim of the bomb explosions was
Lu Lingzi, from Shenyang in China’s Liaoning Province.
Her injured companion at the finish line of America’s oldest
and most renowned road race was Danling Zhou, from
Chengdu, in Sichuan.
Ms Lu, 23, an only child, graduated from Northeast Yucai
School in Shenyang in 2008, then studied economics and
international trade at the Beijing Institute of Technology. In
2010, she attended a three-month programme offered by
the University of California at Riverside that enables foreign
students to earn US college credit and thus improve their
chances of acceptance into graduate school.
According to a UCR spokeswoman, Ms Lu was among
several students in that programme who continued
on to Boston University. Fluent in English, she started
her graduate classes in the mathematics and statistics
department there last autumn.
Ms Danling, now recovering from her injuries, is a graduate
student in BU’s department of actuarial science.
Amid the torrent of grief and outrage in the aftermath of
the bombings, the political rancour that is a more or less
constant motif in China-US relations was muted. Also
unemphasised. But implicit, was the extraordinary attraction
that America and its colleges hold for many young Chinese.
The number of Chinese students attending US colleges has
grown exponentially in recent years.
A costly investment in education
As reported on 27th March by the Wall Street Journal on its
Chinese website, in the 2011-2012 academic year there
were 194,029 Chinese studying in the US, the largest
group of international students from a single country and
accounting for 25.4 per cent of all foreign students enrolled
in American colleges.
The Institute of International Education (IIE) said that
the total also marks a 23 per cent increase from just the
year before and a 207 per cent increase from a decade
earlier.
The Journal pointed out that attending a US institution of
higher learning is a costly matter for the students’ families
back home in China, where according to the World Bank
the per capita GDP (gross domestic product) was $5,445
in 2011. Unlike American students — who are often eligible
for in-state tuition breaks, financial aid, and scholarships —
most Chinese students (more than 60 per cent, says the IIE)
foot the full bill. The expense to a privately funded student
for tuition and associated fees could easily run to $200,000
over four years.
Information provided by China’s Ministry of Education
suggests an eventual payoff for that country. The number
of Chinese students returning home after studying abroad
has also jumped significantly in recent years — to 134,800
in 2010, up 375 per cent from 2005.
A recent survey of Chinese abroad by the recruiting agency
Zhilian Zhaopin found that 72 per cent return to China
upon graduation or after putting in a few years of work
overseas.
❖ Boston with its many colleges, and sharing in the
prestige of Harvard University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, has long exerted a particular
magnetism for ambitious and industrious Chinese
students.
Word of the death of Ms Lu and the injury to Ms Danling
drew a response from the president of the People’s
Republic of China, Xi Jinping, whose own daughter
studied at Harvard beginning in 2010. As reported by
the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, an “extremely
concerned” Mr Xi sent messages of comfort to the two
students’ families and to Ms Danling.
The Chinese government has never publicly confirmed
that Mr Xi’s daughter, also an only child, was studying
at Harvard. In April it was unclear to American media
whether she was currently enrolled there.
China is overtaking the US in
semiconductor manufacturing
As reported on 14th April by Matt McDonald of PACE, the
Australian magazine for process and control engineering,
a number of reports mentioned by the global industry
association SEMI indicate that the number and productivity
of plants for making microchips is expanding in China as it
declines in the United States.
As related by SEMI (San Jose, California), consumption of
semiconductor materials in North America has dropped by
$250 million since 2008, to a $4.74 billion business today.
In China, consumption of these materials over the same
period has increased by 42 per cent to $5.07 billion.
Japan, where production of microchips is declining rapidly,
provides another pertinent comparison. From almost
$10 billion in 2008, the Japanese industry has dropped by
eight per cent to $8.35 billion today.
Citing the same source, Mr McDonald noted that, as
microchips become harder to make, their production is
becoming consolidated into the hands of a small number
of manufacturers located in North America, Taiwan,
South Korea and China. The rise of China in this sector
reflects the nation’s increasing manufacturing strength in
general.
Statue of Liberty Image from BigStockPhoto.com
Photographer: Marty