“China has already more millionaires than Japan, Germany, and Great Britain combined. Only in US politics, where the ruling elites belong to the dinosaurs, does the myth of Chinese lack of creativity hold its sway.” -T Pattberg

WASHINGTON - This didn’t go down well in politically correct America: US presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, was recorded saying that she talks from experience when assuring everyone that the Chinese may best the tests, but are “not terribly imaginative.” “That’s why,” she said, “they’re stealing our intellectual property.”

The interview quickly went viral. Ms. Fiorina’s remarks about the lack of imagination and entrepreneurship among the ethnic Chinese feed on mass anxiety in America, where we are currently witnessing what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas once coined the ‘Siegeszug’ (a victory march) of Asian students at America’s universities. East-Asian students, on average, are vastly outperforming their white, black, and Hispanic peers via SAT-scores and other IQ-related tests, not just in the US, but throughout the world.

Naturally, many conservative voters worry a rising China and would like to hear, possibly from the next US president, that what those smart East-Asians are truly lacking is Western “creativity.” And we kind of see where Ms. Fiorina is coming from. Western education remains a fetish of the colonial past. […]

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 Thorsten J. Pattberg, PhD, is a German scholar and cultural critic, and the author of “The East-West Dichotomy.”