China Cannot Innovate Without Empathy

Jiang introduces himself as a China-born, Toronto-raised Yale graduate who has worked across teaching, journalism, filmmaking, and study-abroad education. Source trail 0:07 My name is Jiang Xueqian. I am the deputy principal of a high school in Beijing called Peking University High School. We're affiliated with the University of Peking University. I was born in China, but I grew up in Toro... That biographical split matters because the interview is already about translation between worlds. He is not simply defending a school. He is trying to explain why one school in Beijing might matter to the future shape of China.

When he describes Peking University High School, he does not lead with prestige even though the school has plenty of that. He leads with community. Yes, it is a famous lab school with elite alumni, but the thing he keeps returning to is the nurturing relation between teachers and students. That is already a clue about what kind of reform he thinks matters. The International Division, launched in 2010, is then described not merely as a response to rising demand for U.S. study abroad but as a second-order experiment, a lab within a lab school for testing what education reform in China might actually look like. Source trail 0:541:542:41 So, Peking University High School. So, the high school itself was founded in 1960 as a lab school for Peking University. So, a lot of the professors got their training here in the high school. And a lot of the children...makes this high school very interesting is the sort of community, the sort of interactions between the teachers and the students. It's a very much, it's very much a very nurturing, encouraging environment. So, in 2010,...

The Ashoka prompt lets Jiang state the hinge claim immediately. China already knows its education system is failing at something, but he says the debate is asking the wrong question. The issue is not just how to produce more Nobel winners or more Steve Jobs figures. The issue is that empathy is the missing ingredient in the chain that runs from communication to collaboration to creativity. If that link is missing, a society can become efficient and literate without becoming inventive. Source trail 3:143:484:40 Okay. Yeah. So if I could just interrupt here is the way we connected is that you've created a proposal for the competition, the Ashoka competition for activating empathy, how to promote empathy in the schools. And sinc...Empathy itself is not a very well -known concept. In fact, there's actually no Chinese word for empathy. We've been trying for the past two years, trying to translate the word and it's very hard to translate. I mean, th...

Jiang does not treat the existing exam regime as random stupidity. He gives it a historical function. For twenty or thirty years, he says, China could grow rich by becoming the world's manufacturing platform. A society organized around labor-intensive production needs disciplined, literate workers who can execute tasks. The old school system delivered exactly that. The problem is that the same success now becomes a trap, because a knowledge economy needs self-directed learners rather than exam-conditioned performers. Source trail 5:486:52 I mean, right now in China, there's a fundamental shift in the society. For the past 20, 30 years, China was very much a manufacturing -based economy. So I mean, a very blunt way of saying this is that China was a sweat...And that's what the Chinese system is very good at doing. It's very good at producing discipline -focused individuals who can read and write. And the way it does that is by using standardized examinations to sort of fil...

This is where empathy stops sounding soft and starts sounding structural. Source trail 6:527:568:54 And that's what the Chinese system is very good at doing. It's very good at producing discipline -focused individuals who can read and write. And the way it does that is by using standardized examinations to sort of fil...And that's very much what China lacks right now. And because of that, China cannot progress as a society and as an economy. And so there's this fundamental debate about how China can best transition from a manufacturing... Jiang says the present system trains students to succeed inside the school system, not to learn for their own growth. That blocks the intrinsic motivation, the 'motivation 3.0,' that a creative society requires. So when he says empathy must become fundamental, he means more than interpersonal niceness. He means the entire transition out of standardized-exam consciousness into a more progressive education system depends on learning to understand other people, yourself, and the demands of the larger world at once.

He then universalizes the point. Human beings are wired for empathy; without it families, friendships, and workplaces would not function at all. The real question is what sort of social order reduces that capacity. Jiang's answer is blunt: money, tests, and materialistic goals shrink empathy, and the school's job is to remove that culture and tell students they are here to become thinkers and individuals instead. Source trail 10:0610:26 Yes. That's a great question. And my answer is that humans through evolution have been sort of programmed, designed to be individuals with empathy. A culture of empathy is a natural state of self -care. We're wired for...We're wired for empathy just through mere neurons and biologically. I mean think about this. I mean like we have families, right? We have friends. We have colleagues. In order to communicate with them, in order to be ef...

Jiang says the motive problem is almost binary. A school can tell students that education is for becoming a better individual, or it can tell them education is for optimizing the next credential. It cannot honestly do both at once, because the short-term utilitarian center overrides the altruistic, moral, and creative center. This is why he keeps insisting that students cannot enter the program with the same SAT-and-TOEFL mentality they would bring to the ordinary Chinese system. Reform begins by negating that desire. Source trail 11:3512:26 And we don't want short -term goals. Learning is a lifelong process. This is a message that we communicate to them all the time. And they come in and they think, oh, my job. Oh, my job. My job is to do well on the SAT....So another way of saying this is that, you know, these two centers are mutually exclusive. You can choose to tell students, okay, you're in school to be a better individual. Or you can choose to tell the student, you're...

Botswana becomes the proof point because the school refuses to let the trip be sold as resume decoration. Source trail 13:2214:4315:42 and telling the kids that, you know, just because you do well on tests does not mean that you're smart. Being smart means the ability to work with different people and to recognize the strengths of other people and how...I mean, we sent our students to Botswana and they came back to transform. But I think that that's 9 % of it. How much? There's one... 90? That's about 90%. Okay. 90 % of it. But there's also another fundamental part her... Jiang says ninety percent of the transformation lies not simply in going somewhere different, but in why the students go. If the motive is college branding, the encounter stays shallow. If the motive is horizon expansion and genuine service, students return changed. In that sense the trip is not extracurricular. It is a test of whether motive structure can be re-engineered.

When the interviewer asks for a definition, Jiang reaches for theory of mind: empathy is the ability to perceive, understand, and articulate viewpoints fundamentally different from your own. He calls that one of the most intellectual things a human being can do. This matters because it rescues empathy from the sentimentality trap. In Jiang's telling, empathy is not the opposite of intelligence. It is one of intelligence's highest forms. Source trail 16:3516:5117:00 That's right. You know, I think empathy is related to a lot of things. Again, I don't know the neuroscience behind these things and, you know, no one has yet figured it out. But I think empathy, morality, altruism, crea...Well, here's the thing is, is what is your definition of empathy? How are you defining it? What's your kind of operating definition?

Once the interviewer starts asking about China as an authoritarian, hierarchical society, Jiang stops sounding merely pedagogical. He says empathy requires equality, trust, and a world in which people are not afraid to make mistakes, offend superiors, or lose face. That is why the problem is not only curriculum. Hierarchy itself trains the powerful to bully the powerless, and if China wants to progress as a twenty-first-century society it has to re-examine the political and social order that makes that pattern feel normal. Source trail 19:5620:2421:3722:26 I mean like, you know, you're really talking about the four stages of empathy, right? Yeah. And, and how they build on each other. The first stage, the second stage, the third stage, the fourth stage, you know, another,...Yeah. So it's like the, you're saying kind of an individual part, which may be overlaps with self empathy. You have to be able to be aware of who you are as a, as a individual. That's right. Perhaps. Yeah, that's right....

He sharpens the same point in everyday social terms. China, he says, is still held together more by family and clan bonds than by stranger-to-stranger respect. On the street or in traffic, the person with power behaves as if power grants exemption from reciprocity. That means empathy is not just a private virtue. It is the social glue that would make a nation out of people who otherwise remain locked inside narrower circles of loyalty. Source trail 28:1329:03 You you know, you know, it's you know, China is a very different society from America and I'll give an example where you know When I walk the street, um, you know, I'm sort of beeped by a car and you know one time I've...you're exactly right where where you know I mean when people Um, when when Americans are together, you know, there is there is a culture of empathy At at the you know at the most fundamental level, you know Even strange...

The metaphor section clarifies how total Jiang thinks the problem is. Asked for his own image of empathy, he rejects decorative metaphors and finally lands on water. If water is to the individual, empathy is to society. Without it, a society does not simply become harsher. It slowly degenerates and dehydrates. That is why he resists any model that would confine empathy to one elective class. It has to run through literature, group dynamic, evidence-based discussion, feedback, and the replacement of tests with papers, presentations, and experiments. He calls the school not a lesson about empathy but empathy in practice Source trail 35:23 I mean, like, like what we try to do here is what I call empathy in practice. So even though we don't articulate it, even though we don't try to sort of indoctrinate our students with it, it is fundamental to everything... .

The vocabulary problem returns at the end and becomes even more revealing. Source trail 39:0439:4340:1241:2041:42 And how are you going to overcome that vocabulary problem of not having the word? Is it, like, you know, the word, you know, empathy was actually a German word and it got kind of incorporated into the English. They just...So coming closer, okay, so, so Rebecca has been in our program since, since the first day. And what we're talking about right now, what we're talking about right now is, is the word empathy. And how, you know, first of... Rebecca says Chinese has smaller phrases that gesture toward thinking for other people, but nothing as broad as empathy. Jiang adds that even a newly coined Chinese term would still lack the historical images and connotations the English word already carries. In other words, the school is trying to teach a moral-intellectual capacity that its surrounding language has not yet fully naturalized.

Rebecca then supplies the strongest proof in the interview. Botswana mattered not because it let her perform compassion, but because it let her discover a lack in herself. As an only child, she says, she was not accustomed to constantly thinking about siblings or other nearby people. In Botswana she watched a girl in a homestay family care for younger siblings, and later sat for half an hour beside a nonverbal girl with Down syndrome trying to infer what she needed. The realization is stark: what she lacked was not family size as such, but the habit of being aware that other people are there at all. Source trail 43:1644:1945:1346:2647:01 Uh, so I was, I was thinking about the Botswana trip that we took, uh, a month ago in our winter vacation. We went to Botswana. It was the first time for almost all of us, um, in Africa and, um, I think we went in with...Um, we are all, us, I think most of us are this single child in, in our homes. Um, as a, I'm not accustomed to constantly thinking about someone else, like a brother or a sister, um, feeling, okay, she can, I was at a h...

Jiang immediately generalizes her story into a larger diagnosis: Chinese students often live narrow school-home lives, so their emotional range stays narrow too. That is why he wants global school networks, reciprocal visits, and incoming Thai students. It is also why he resists fixed role boundaries inside his own institution. He says he is an administrator and a teacher, Rebecca is both a teaching assistant and a student council participant, and the school tries to flatten hierarchy and get rid of boundaries in order to become a community of learners. The interview ends with no triumphalism. Empathy is still new in China. The climb is uphill. Any allies who help widen that community matter. Source trail 47:2849:2750:3251:1951:57 But, but, you know, I mean like, like I'll make a larger point, which is, you know, in my experience, um, you know, Chinese students have very limited experiences. You know, they go to school, they go home, that's about...I mean, you know, I mean, please, please make the introduction, um, you know, if, if, if possible, you know, you know, we have video facilities, um, you know, Skype, but also video conferencing. So, um, and you know, I...