WCA July 2013

Statue of Liberty Image from BigStockPhoto.com Photographer: Marty

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. As reported on 14 th 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. China is overtaking the US in semiconductor manufacturing

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 15 th 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 As reported on 27 th 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 grown exponentially in recent years. A costly investment in education

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Wire & Cable ASIA – July/August 2013