Chinese Inventions:
I was talking to the French guy again, (Here is a link to the first post I talk to him8 things learned after living in Beijing for 13 years) and I guess he got in an argument with a Chinese person about which country historically was more important, France or China 
. Of course the Chinese guy said they were. This made the French guy home and make a 10 page list of inventions with who was given credit for them and when. I asked to look at the list and was amazed to find he spent 3 days in his apartment making it. For me the biggest astonishment was the number of inventions given to Egypt, but that is off topic. It is really an amazing list and it shows how the country that is the world power, at the time, is the one that makes all the discoveries. I mean when France was the power house it has a ton of inventions, same with England and now the US. One thing that was interesting was Japan and Russian were hardly on the list. Apparently all Russia did was changed already invented items and Japan has just done a bunch of things that really have been cool toys, but never have really affected the world. The French guy made an interesting comment to me, he said Napoleon said, “Anyone clever is France” meaning that anyone with intelligence would be excepted and urge to become French.I looked at him in amazement there and was not sure how to react. For the list though, US had so many inventions with Weaponry, makeup, cosmetics, and birth control (I am actually curios about the dates of Roe vs Wade and when the patent for birth control was issued in the US) The inventions that were listed for china consisted of Gunpowder, the Printing Press, Compass, and Paper making. These were all invented over 1000 years ago, but can easily be argue that they are the foundation for everything modern. It was shocking though to think about this.
I went home and thought about how much emphasis is placed on beauty in the states. There are always advertisements for cosmetics which would make sense if the patents were all owned by American companies. This is also true with military. I then though about the education system in China.
Here are some things to know. A person’s intelligence is really based on how well they can memorize things. If you ask any English teacher they will tell you how amazing it is. They can give a group of students 50 or 60 words and in one night memorize the words, definitions and sentence examples. The problem is creativity is not focused on. The same student if asked to make their own sentence will normally look confused and have problems.
I talk to the French gave a few days later about this and we talked about how amazing Chinese are at reverse engineering or copying things. They can memorize 100 steps but if one step is skipped they are confused. This might explain why there are no new inventions in China. The focus on education changed to test taking several hundred years ago. Just memorizing the old. Not inventing anything new.
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