1 China fund says US isn’t welcoming (Andrew Browne & Lingling Wei in The Wall Street Journal) The US is telling China's $500 billion sovereign-wealth fund to "go away," according to the fund's top executive, in the latest sign of strained investment ties between the world's two largest economies. During the financial crisis, "we were sort of welcome" in America, said Gao Xiqing, head of China Investment Corp., in a panel discussion on Sunday at the Boao Forum for Asia. Since then, "somehow we've become stigmatized," he said, adding that "there have been quite a few cases where the US says 'go away.'"
Mr. Gao didn't offer details. However, he later told a questioner at the panel, the mayor of the US city of Bellevue, Wash., that the mayor's own state had lately turned down an investment by CIC. "Try again," the mayor, Conrad Lee, told Mr. Gao. Mr. Lee later said he is looking for Chinese investment to fund a toll road needed to bring high-technology investment to Bellevue. US mayors "think Chinese money is good," Mr. Lee said, "but [some] politicians look at Chinese investment as suspect."
According to Rhodium Group, a New York consulting firm that tracks Chinese outward investment, companies there invested $6.3 billion into US companies and projects between January and September, the most recent statistics available. That was more than the $5.8 billion invested in all of 2010, the previous record for annual investment. U.S. officials also recently approved a deal that allowed Chinese state-run oil company Cnooc to acquire Canada's Nexen Inc., a deal that gave Cnooc significant assents in the Gulf of Mexico.
With about $500 billion in assets under management, CIC is the world's fifth-largest sovereign fund. It was founded by the Chinese government in 2007 to seek better returns for China's mammoth currency reserves, which had typically been parked in low-yielding securities such as US Treasurys. Chinese leaders have singled out better management of China's $3.3 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, the world's largest, as a priority for the financial sector.
2 The practical university (David Brooks in The New York Times) The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for? Are universities mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?
My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is like the recipes in a cookbook. It is formulas telling you roughly what is to be done. It is reducible to rules and directions. It’s the sort of knowledge that can be captured in lectures and bullet points and memorized by rote. The problem is that as online education becomes more pervasive, universities can no longer primarily be in the business of transmitting technical knowledge. Online offerings from distant, star professors will just be too efficient.
Practical knowledge is not about what you do, but how you do it. It is the wisdom a great chef possesses that cannot be found in recipe books. Practical knowledge is not the sort of knowledge that can be taught and memorized; it can only be imparted and absorbed. It is not reducible to rules; it only exists in practice. Think about Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, “Lean In.” Put aside the debate about the challenges facing women in society. Focus on the tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wants to rise in this economy: the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t.
So far, most of the talk about online education has been on technology and lectures, but the important challenge is technology and seminars. So far, the discussion is mostly about technical knowledge, but the future of the universities is in practical knowledge.
3 Acupuncture for India’s poor (Shanoor Seervai in The Wall Street Journal) Sheetal Tupare sits in the waiting room of the Barefoot Acupuncturists clinic in Mumbai’s Vijay Nagar slum. She is accompanying her uncle, who was left partially paralyzed from a stroke eight months ago, for his second session of acupuncture. Ms. Tupare has also been treated at the clinic. The 25-year-old went there last year because her menstrual cycle was irregular. “The medicines other doctors gave me only made my stomach hurt more,” she says, adding that she felt better after three months of regular acupuncture treatment.
Barefoot Acupuncturists runs five clinics — three in Mumbai and two in rural Tamil Nadu — that provide low-cost acupuncture to poor communities. The organization was founded by Walter Fischer, a Belgian businessman-turned-acupuncturist, in 2008. He had run a free clinic in Vijay Nagar with a Swiss acupuncturist called Jacques Beytrison in May 2007. Mr. Fischer remembers it as a success. The pair provided more than 500 treatments, but working in the peak of Mumbai’s summer left Mr. Fischer tired and fed up. He traveled north to Kashmir, where he met a local tailor. As soon as the tailor realized that Mr. Fischer was a “doctor who used needles,” he invited a string of villagers with health problems to his home.
Middle and upper-middle class patients pay between 800 and 1,000 rupees ($15 – $18) for a session of acupuncture. This subsidizes the cost of running the clinic for the underprivileged, who pay 20 rupees a session. Khanta Bassum, a 23-year-old who has been partially paralyzed since she was 15, says even this is too expensive. But she continues to visit Barefoot Acupuncturists’ clinic in Dharavi three times a week.
Indian acupuncturists and volunteers, mostly from abroad, staff the clinics. Mr. Fischer says he wants to develop a training manual and guide for treating patients in diverse environments. Rather than opening new clinics, which is expensive and time consuming, he hopes to use the handbook to train staff at existing non-profit organizations. Mr. Fischer describes this project as a “Mobile International Training Center,” which he hopes is up and running by 2016. If the model is effective, acupuncture can be used to treat hundreds of thousands of patients who don’t have access to healthcare, he says.
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