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[Biweekly Symposium] No.346, Population Quality
 
 Author:Unirule  
Time:2007-10-12 14:12:55   Clicks:


Topic: Population Quality 
Lecturer:Lu Xun 
Discussants:Prof. Mao Yushi, Prof. Hu Xingdou, Prof. Wang Meina, Mr. Zhong Dajun, Mr. Han Jun 
 
 
The 346th Unirule bi-weekly symposium was a round table workshop focused on population quality. We first invite Mr. Lu Xun to give a travelogue on his 10-year around China tour with focus on differences in population quality across China. Then was the discuss session. Below was the abstract of participants’ discussion.

Prof. Hu Xingdou specialized in the field of moral quality. He thought there were two main factors that affect moral quality. One was belief. Chinese people had been criticized for low moral quality. A possible explanation was that Chinese people didn’t have believe in the transcend. On the contrary, Chinese people worship power and wealth. Too much focus on the reality tends to corrupt a society and its members. Another critical factor that was crucial for a society’s moral quality was the social structure, on general; a civil society tends to have higher level of common morality.

Mr. Zhong Dajun raised one interesting fact that for the past 2,000 years, the education level of Chinese peasants was very low, most of them were illiterate. But Chinese peasants traditionally had a very high level of morality. Based on this fact, Mr. Zhong argued that knowledge was not the base of morality. Like Prof. Hu, Mr. Zhong also thought it was the recent trend of worship wealth and power to be blamed for the decline in population quality in China.

Prof. Mao first raised the question: “What was population quality?” In his eyes, there was a distinct between people’s education level and their quality. You may find some high quality people with relatively low education level. So why some people were relatively high quality while others not? Prof. Mao state that if one see other people as equal society member as herself, then she could be labeled as high quality people, otherwise not.

His illustration was as follow. Man were born self centered, a baby’s sole objective was to satisfy all her needs. As she became older and gradually got involved in the society, she learned that other social members had the same desire and need as herself. We saw those people who jump a queue as low quality people because they didn’t value others’ time as theirs. Mr. Lu just mentioned that some region lack behind not only in capital endowment but also in population quality. Prof. Mao had a lot of experience with migrant rural workers. The migrant rural workers didn’t know how to communicate with other properly. They only know what they care but didn’t take into account what other people want. So they didn’t know how to express them properly and make themselves understood. The consequence was that they couldn’t meet with the market demand, i.e. they didn’t know how to sell their product and services to others.
 




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