I've met several chinese classical music students who never heard of Bach. I don't think I can find an American classical music student or musician with this bizarre defect.
But, this is just an example out the glaring obvious: that the chinese simply don't understand the point of education. For us, it is about growth and development of the individual. For them it's... mindless performance on tests and in talent shows? Who knows...
Our education system is becoming like theirs. It's inevitable. You can't academically compete against people who have absolutely no life except for mindlessly memorizing test answers 12 hours per day. And the new trend is to use steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Unless the academic system changes, western kids will be forced into the same patterns if they want spots in their own universities. If academic admissions criteria were based on other factors besides test scores, the chinese would be in bottom place.
I went to the WWII museum in New Orleans with a Chinese woman. I'm no historian (hate history, actually), but I ended up explaining a whole lot of WWII history to her. She had no idea, for example, of why we had to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, of the Japanese culture that dictates that suicide is preferable to defeat.