As a lifetime reader of the NYTimes, I have always admired its journalistic standards. Unfortunately, these standards do not transcend the barriers that prevent the NYT from doing quality investigative and professional reporting in China.

The NYTimes is aware of this and presents much of its 'reporting', including this excerpt, in the form of blogs in "Sinosphere".

Try to imagine an article about any European country where the NY Times made enormous generalizations about complex social issues in education and social engineering without citations from multiple credentialed academic researchers and several officials in the departments of education and health of the country.

Now, it's not the fault of the NYTImes that they do not have access to these people in China. But they still choose to feed the U.S. public's new found interest in China with material that, I know for a fact from NYT employees, violates their own journalistic standards.

I've been teaching young men in higher education in China for 10 years, but I'm would not venture to provide anecdotal evidence to deny or support the claims that this article's writer has made (Linkedin identifies him as a Harvard college grad with only one job at the NYTImes). I simply do not know how the 'Chinese government' feels or how 'young Chinese men' of this generation are statistically different from generations past.

The NYTimes doesn't know either.