The three reasons for China’s success: education, education and education

Education as a long-term strategy explains China’s success in overcoming the challenges of its three Ds: demographics, debt and deflation, allowing it to become the new global leader.

Every time I have traveled there to teach at Fudan University over the years, I have been struck by the quality of China’s education infrastructure, as well as by the participative teaching methods of its faculty, initially educated in foreign universities, but who now come from the Chinese universities themselves, which are gaining ground in international rankings.

The sea turtle strategy, based on sending bright young people to study and train abroad, sometimes to get a doctorate, sometimes to work in interesting companies or to start a business, and who returned to China, sometimes after decades, has worked miracles: between 2000 and 2020, the number of engineers in the country grew from 5.2 million to 17.7 million. Investment in education has created a huge engineering dividend that now makes possible feats such as that of Deepseek, Manus AI, Unitree Robotics and many other companies, which benefit precisely from a vast pool of brilliant engineers.

All of the founders of China’s most recently successful companies are graduates of Chinese universities, who had no need to go abroad to pursue higher education, people like Liang Wenfeng, creator of DeepSeek, or Xiao Hong, founder of Manus AI, or Wang Xingxing, the man behind Unitree Robotics’ well known and viral kung fu robots.

From my own experience, it has become clear to me that these universities would soon be attracting brilliant students from around the world not just on the basis of receiving a first-class education, but also an immersion in the culture of the country that will soon be leading the world.

But Beijing’s policy is not so much to attract foreign students, and instead to educate as many Chinese students as possible to the highest standards. And they have clearly succeeded: this commitment to education is one of the fundamental elements that have made China the new world leader in every sense. Now, the country offers its brightest students enough incentives that they don’t have to go abroad, and can instead build innovative companies in a heavily…