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There's no direct translation into Chinese of the phrase can-do spirit. But yong wang zhi qian probably suffices. Literally, it means "march forward courageously." China has - and has had for years now - a can-do spirit that's unmistakable. Americans know the phrase well. They invented it. It used to define them...
Critics of the authoritarian Chinese government would say it's a system more accurately called "can do - or else." And they have a point. No one in the U.S. would argue that it should adopt China's dictatorial style of government. America doesn't need to displace tens of thousands of people in order to build a massive dam, as China did in Hubei province from 1994 to 2006. (The value of checks and balances is, in fact, among the many things China could learn from the U.S.) But you don't have to be a card-carrying communist...
When the economic crisis hit China late last year, by contrast, almost half of the emergency spending Beijing approved - $585 billion spread over two years - was directed at projects that accelerated China's massive infrastructure build-out. "That money went into the real economy very quickly," says economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...just emergency spending on bridges, roads and high-speed rail networks that's helping growth in China. Patrick Tam, general partner at Tsing Capital, a venture-capital firm in Beijing, says the government is aggressively helping seed the development of new green-tech industries. An example: 13 of China's biggest cities will have all-electric bus fleets within five years. "China is eventually going to dominate the industry for electric vehicles," Tam says, "in part because the central government has both the vision and the financial wherewithal to make that happen." Tam, a graduate of MIT and the University...
...foreigners - and, indeed, a fair number of Chinese - believe that the obsession (and that's the right word) with education in China is overdone. The system stresses rote memorization. It drives kids crazy - aren't 7-year-olds supposed to have fun on Saturday afternoons? - and doesn't necessarily prepare them, economically speaking, for the job market or, emotionally speaking, for adulthood. Add to that the fact that the system, while incredibly competitive, has become corrupt...