Welcome back, team! In this episode of Dave Talks Politics, hi, I’m Dave, and I’ll be talking politics. Today, team, let’s talk about China’s smart system for finding and training super-talented kids in science and tech—so they can win the AI race.
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**1. CHINA’S GENIUS CLASS SYSTEM**
1. Every year China picks about 100,000 very smart 15–16-year-old kids for special “genius classes” in the best high schools.
2. These classes train them hard in maths, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science so they can win big international science competitions (Olympiads).
3. The top performers skip the normal scary university entrance exam (gaokao) and go straight into the very best universities like Tsinghua or Peking.
4. The whole thing is huge and run by the government—China produces roughly 3.57 million to 5 million science, tech, engineering and maths (STEM) graduates every year.
5. For comparison on scale:
- USA: about 500,000–800,000 STEM graduates a year (roughly 0.23–0.24% of population).
- European Union: about 1–1.2 million (~0.27%).
- UK: ~250,000 (~0.37%).
- Japan: ~175,000–550,000 (~0.14–0.4%).
- Australia + New Zealand: ~110,000 (~0.34%).
China’s total is roughly 4–5 times bigger than the US in raw numbers (even though per capita rates are similar—China ~0.25–0.35% of population).
6. Their elite stream pushes the very best kids extremely hard from a young age—so they get more top-level talent faster.
7. This is about intense work ethic and focus, not just picking “genius” kids genetically—these students grind much harder and more single-mindedly than most non-Chinese students, often giving up hobbies, sleep, and normal teen life to compete and win.
8. It started decades ago because China decided science talent was the key to becoming a superpower.
9. It works: Chinese teams now win almost all the gold medals at the international science Olympiads.
**2. IMPACT ON TECH AND AI LEADERS**
1. Many of the biggest Chinese tech companies were started or are run by people who came through these genius classes.
- ByteDance (the company that owns TikTok) — its founder came from this system.
- Taobao (Alibaba’s huge shopping site) — key leaders from genius classes.
- PDD (the company behind Pinduoduo and Temu) — founder from genius classes.
- Meituan (food delivery super-app) — its billionaire founder came from this path.
2. Same story in AI and chips: brothers who started chip company Cambricon, main engineers building DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, even Tencent’s new chief scientist who was taken from OpenAI—all have genius-class backgrounds.
3. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang said: “You walk up and down the aisles of Anthropic or OpenAI or Google DeepMind… there’s a whole bunch of AI researchers there, and they are from China… They are extraordinary.”
4. DeepSeek’s founder said: “We want to grow our own top talents, otherwise China will always be a follower.”
5. One DeepSeek engineer explained: “No KPI, no hierarchy… endless resources for you to experiment new ideas.”
6. Another graduate said: “The education I had growing up was extremely hard… You feel like, after that, there’s no challenge in the world I can’t take on.”
**3. HOW IT FUELS AI EDGE**
1. DeepSeek released a very strong AI model called R1—it works as well as top American ones but costs much less to build and they made it free for anyone to use.
2. Almost everyone on that team grew up in China and came from genius classes or the top universities.
3. After China made AI a national priority in 2017, lots of new high-school and university classes focused only on AI and computer science popped up.
4. Tsinghua University has a famous “Yao Class” (named after a famous Chinese computer scientist who won the Turing Award—the “Nobel of computing”). It trains the absolute best coders.
5. That scientist left a top job at Princeton in the US to start the class in China. Later he said Chinese students are now “actually better” than those at the top American schools.
6. Because of the huge numbers, China already has over 1,000 different generative AI models registered—way more than anywhere else.
**4. BROADER IMPLICATIONS**
1. China uses population size, careful planning, and government support to keep getting better at tech and manufacturing.
2. They bring in talent from abroad when needed and use AI in everything.
3. The US is still ahead in some creative design work, but China keeps catching up even with American export controls on chips.
4. When the US wins an Olympiad (like recent maths or physics wins beating China), the US team is often full of students of Chinese origin—Chinese-American kids or immigrants who got into US high schools and universities, showing how talent flows and the US attracts it.
5. America has a small window left to fight back—history shows the US can invent its way out of trouble (AI, robotics, biotech).
6. To win, big changes are needed—bring factories and supply chains back home, invest in home-grown tech.
7. The biggest unlock is **deregulation**—cut government rules, keep interest rates low, let the free market move fast.
**5. THE PATH FORWARD**
1. Give more power to the states—let each one compete on rules, incentives and education.
2. Some states will attract chip factories and smart people; others won’t—that’s okay and allowed by the Constitution.
3. Think of it like 50 fast, flexible destroyers instead of one giant aircraft carrier—harder to beat, more adaptable.
4. When some states win big, the whole country learns and copies the good ideas.
5. Don’t waste energy on stupid ideological fights—Russia has views closer to the West than people admit; fighting them is dumb.
6. Focus on the real game: who controls global trade wins—pure mercantilism.
**BOTTOM LINE**
China’s genius-class system picks and intensely trains tens of thousands of the smartest teens every year. Those graduates are now starting and running the companies that power China’s fast AI advances—like DeepSeek’s strong, cheap R1 model—putting China in position to lead the world in tech.
