“Why should a financial engineer be paid 4 times to 100 times more than a real engineer? A real engineer build bridges; a financial engineer build dreams. When those dreams turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.” — Andrew Sheng, chief advisor of China Banking Regulatory Commission

This is from the award-winning documentary Inside Job, a retrospect of 2008 financial crisis. This enlightening comment reveals the true motivation of many Chinese students abroad, especially those science and engineering students who wrote in their misleading personal statements that they “want to be scientist since 9 years old”. I feel obliged to add some comments on this topic because many of my Chinese friends are working for financial giants or want to be financial engineers once they get their Ph.D. without realizing many other fruitful alternative careers. This phenomenon may be natural if we were born in a manhattan banker’s family, but the truth is that many of us were born in rural areas of China and all of us by no means had any access to systematic financial education as we major in science or technology. Many Chinese students here in the States are just for the purpose of being here, no matter what kind of program and what major they are in —  they just want a job in industry, especially in those wealthy and “generous” financial giants. The degrees they are working towards are nothing but stepping stone to success — they throw away their “beloved” science once it has served their purpose. Unfortunately for the westerners, Chinese students are always hard-working and intelligent so they actually take many occupations and some westerners consequently impute their high unemployment rate to Chinese and thus dislike anything Chinese. When I am abroad and feel offended by native people, I always tell myself to calm down —  ”there is nothing to be angry with, if I were them, I may even hate Chinese, who are everywhere and annoying.” Well, everything has a reason, not only the dislike from westerners but also the annoying Chinese stereotype. The short answer is that we can always attribute some Chinese people’s annoying aspects to China’s huge population and consequent limited resource per capita.

The documentary Inside Job implies that Goldman Sachs and a couple of its powerful former employees played subtle roles in the 2008 crisis. They had an influence on politics and academia, which correlate with each other not only to protect Goldman Sachs from being punished but also to maximize its controversial interest even during the crisis. The other banks are nothing but pots calling the kettle black — they also manipulated grading institutes to give almost the highest grades to their risky derivative products, namely CDOs, shortly before the crisis when all the CDOs turned out to be rubbish. Goldman Sachs seemed extremely powerful in that the government performed in its favor: the government forced the bailed-out insurance company AIG to pay the full amount of 14 billion to Goldman Sachs just because Goldman Sachs sold huge amount of toxic CDOs to investors and at the mean time bought AIG’s insurance products called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to bet that the toxic CDOs will go bad!

Admittedly I have to say that the documentary is not objective — the interviewer is aggressive and the editors always quote conversations out of contexts, but no one can deny that the banks indeed got involved in some immoral transactions and some politicians and scholars were corrupted to some extent.

When I was in my second year of undergraduate study, I won a scholarship award called Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program, in which we each got a $3000 check and a free trip to the Goldman Sachs headquarters (the green-glass building on the coast of Manhattan) and a short stay in a super luxury hotel in Beijing’s Xidan financial street. That was an overwhelmingly wonderful experience for us poor students — we secretly checked the rate of the room we were in and the price of the breakfast we had: it was about 3000RMBs per night and 2000RMBs per meal, far beyond our imagination. We were overwhelmingly grateful to Goldman Sachs because of its generosity. But now, realizing its great power and true face, I feel that it was just playing with us, some good students who may be used by it in the future. Frankly speaking, I regard the award as a great honour in that the award recognized my efforts to be a physicist but now I feel nausea because the award issuer might not be sincere at all — it played with the poor and ignorant students, just like the Japanese army played with those poor ignorant Chinese traitors in World War II to some extent.

I remember some time ago a friend and I read about how to transit from a physics student to a “quant”, but now we both know science is just what we want and making money should not be a purpose itself. However, China is so populated that resources are so limited that people seldom say no to opportunities, let alone easy and profitable alternatives. Imagine a peasant’s son working hard in a physics department after cracking many hard exams year after year — one day, he suddenly got to know that there is an occupation called quant and physicists are the best candidates for that position. Working for a large bank for just one year can free his father from heavy burdens in dirty fields, for just 2 years he can marry a good wife and 3 years he can buy a house. What will he do? Will he still want to climb the academic ladder step by step? Absolutely no! This simple reasoning explains why some Chinese intellectuals abroad appear earthy. I believe our western friends who get to know this principle will relieve some dislike towards Chinese stereotype.

Actually, Chinese ancient Confucianists did teach us “There is no fault to pursue wealth, but a noble person would not break moral laws in making profits.” This may be enlightening for both Chinese students who want to choose the easy alternatives and those greedy bankers. The same ancient sages also told us: “If you are poor, you should try to improve yourselves (instead of being corrupted).” This should be a maxim for Chinese peasants’ sons who happen to be scientists — when you are poor but you still stick to improving yourselves, you shall finally contribute more to the human race than bankers. I personally think, once most Chinese people learn how to turn down easy alternatives, shall we finally be considered a noble and strong people again.

By the way, some economists in office during the crisis and some key figures who had something to do with the crisis might not be corrupted, they probably just stuck to their ideology of free market too hard to realize that it can be wrong sometimes. Actually what I want to tell my friends in the western world is that not only freedom can sometimes be bad, but also democracy — the democracy that you like very much may turn out to be poison for poor nations and their poor benighted people.

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