I have just returned from a trip to China. 18 months since my last visit and the changes keep on coming. Chongqing is like a scene straight from Bladerunner complete with 200m high neon festooned buildings.
Discussions with eminent academicians in the field of materials science reveal that there is a critical shortage in China of people trained in such boring yet necessary crafts as metallurgy. Its just the same in the UK but we have been convincing ourselves that we can just import those who are necessary from India and China. However, China will soon not have enough trained students for their home market.
So what is to happen? Materials science Departments are closing down worldwide or having difficulty in recruiting undergraduates. Even those that are large enough to survive are finding it hard to keep themselves viable. And what they teach may have drifted considerably from the traditional physical metallurgy core to replace it with “trendier” subjects in the nano- and bio- areas. This has apparently (I have heard) led to MIT students on exchange visits to the Universities in the UK not being able to easily do many of the undergraduate courses on offer because they lack essential prior knowledge and terminology.
So here is the problem. we need traditional materials engineers (there is an acute shortage). But those we are currently training may not have the required skills. So how do we convince people to do these subjects and get a job?
Seems odd, what with China’s rapid ecomonic development, the coming Olympics, power stations opening weekly, etc. One would predict they would be investing in this.
Lee – One of the paradoxes of China is its combination of a highly controlled political system and apparent free choice at the economic level. This means students do the courses they want to do, much as in the west. Chinese students have been seduced by the promise of nanotech and biotech (as here at home) and thus select their university education accordingly. My Chinese colleagues were commenting on this because the investment means there are many jobe but not enough students.
The situation should limit itself as salaries increase due to insufficient supply.
Chongqing is my favorite city in China. Did you walk around Jie Fang Bei, the clock tower in the central square downtown? I hope you had a chance to stop by the old city wall, where a diorama of life-sized bronze warrior statues are perpetually storming the city. Chongqing hen ba dao!
I am not sure about the salary action on market forces for student choice. Students apply for courses 3 – 5 years before they apply fo a job and this leads to a significant time delay between a market pull and response in the form of trained graduates. In the UK this was seen in Vetinarian training where there have been swings from oversupply to under supply, presumably because of the 7 year lag in training.
Didn’t get a chance to see much of Chongqing as I was in meetings. I did get the view of the Yangtze and other river, who’s name I have forgotten, at night. That view is straight out of Bladerunner.
It is indeed.
The second river is the Jialin. Across the Yangtze from their confluence, looking back at the downtown peninsula, there is an amazing nightly light show set to music played at the promenade across from downtown. The lights on many buildings are coordinated, with one building displaying a many-story-high frequency analysis of the music, like a towering graphic equalizer display. In the US you don’t see many outdoor laser light displays anymore, but that is another part of the cross-river light show. It’s a level of large-scale coordination of a spectacle that I’ve not seen outside China; one side of a huge city emitting rhythmic pulsing light.
A curious phenomenon with lights: Chongqing is certainly luminous and an amazing sight (or site). However, I noticed on nighttime descents into Chinese cities that there is much less in the way of light polution than found in Europe/USA. There are few street lights and those that there are, are of lower intensity than back home. Houses do not have external lights and thus an aerial view of Chinese suburbia at night is a much darker vista than I expected.
welcome you to china once again,
and only government’s decision can deal with all problem.