>Are you seriously saying that the children of the wealthiest families in China are "China's best minds"? Please, show me some evidence for this egregious claim.
I've been in programming and systems administration my whole working life, and I've been working in departments that are about half foreign born for most of that time. It's always a kinda weird cultural clash at first, as I look and sound, uh, a little bit midwestern; I've never left the country, and I have zero formal education and come from a family I'd call middle class (outside the bay area middle class) And then you get these very cosmopolitan foreign born people who almost always have advanced degrees working alongside me.
My impression is pretty different from yours. My impression is that, yeah, a lot of these people were raised rich and powerful by the standards of where they came from, and many have the social defects you see in Americans who had serving staff as children. But... generally speaking? they meet or exceed the same technical standards everyone else does for the job. I mean, interviewing is hard, and sometimes they get one that isn't any good, but that's true of all people of all national origins. interviewing is hard, and you make mistakes in both directions, and have to correct later.
Now, I didn't go to school; I don't know if those that aren't any good get failed out in school, or if they don't pass the interview... but I will stand by my statement that if you put in the effort to understand the accents, these foreign students aren't worse than US born candidates. And even if we're just talking about communication, foreign born people I've worked with who were educated at US schools all wrote better than the average US-born person in the same role. I assume that was something the US schools either filtered on or taught well.
I'm just saying; my experience is that these people, one way or another, got themselves some serious education and passed a fairly high intelligence bar, too. There's no way that these are China's minds with the most potential, but they might be among China's best educated minds, and that ain't nothin'
(As an aside, I certainly agree that you overlook a lot of good people if the first step in your filtering process is "has wealthy parents." both China and the US has serious problems with wasting good minds that happen to be born to parents who aren't wealthy. That this has been true for all of history doesn't excuse the truth.)