Men are playing soccer in the street when soldiers from the Army’s 1^st Infantry Division arrive in Shar-e-Tiefort. Vendors selling vegetables, teapots and toys shout to the troops who are here to speak with town leaders about building better roads and schools. The greetings in Pashto and Dari don’t sound like taunts – just a noisy welcome.

The place seems safe.

But chaos explodes when a roadside bomb detonates beneath a Humvee. Downed soldiers lie in the road. Survivors take cover behind the damaged vehicle – its side now stained by blood-red streaks.

A sniper shoots though a second-story window. The Americans return fire and the brat-a-tat-tat of machine guns is followed by the clinking of shell casings raining on the ground.

Then, silence. The sniper is hit. Or reloading. The troops flank the brick and concrete buildings, trying to secure their position and eliminate more threats in this small mountain town.

They’re not fast enough. A rocket-propelled grenade rips the air, striking close to the disabled Humvee and wiping out several more troops.

Overlooking from a nearby rooftop, Stanford scholars watch the action – a training session at Fort Irwin’s National Training Center, a sort of graduate school in California’s Mojave Desert for combat troops going to Afghanistan.

The bullets aren’t real. Neither are the bombs, the blood and the casualties. The soccer players, street vendors and sniper are either soldiers stationed at Fort Irwin or some of the hundreds of role players hired to populate Shar-e-Tiefort and the 10 other mock towns and villages built to replicate communities in Afghanistan.

But the tension and pressure of battle are genuine.

“You watch them train, and you become aware that the soldiers and the military supporting them are doing the best they can,” says Norman M. Naimark, a history professor and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies who had the rooftop view.

“But you know some people are going to die.”

From the ivory tower to the trenches

Karl Eikenberry knows that tension better than any civilian. Now at FSI as the Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Eikenberry was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011. Before that, he was there as a lieutenant general overseeing the American-led coalition forces.

Eikenberry has delivered several formal talks and had countless conversations with scholars about the war in Afghanistan since arriving at Stanford this past summer. He’s proud of the Army he served for more than 35 years, and he speaks often of how adept it has become at meeting the needs of modern warfare.

Organizing the February trip to the National Training Center with the help of Viet Luong and Charlie Miller – Army colonels who are currently visiting scholars at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation – gave Eikenberry the chance to show a group of about 20 historians, doctors and political scientists exactly what he’s been talking about.

CISAC visiting scholars and Army colonels Viet Luong (left) and Charlie Miller (center) organized the trip to Fort Irwin with Karl Eikenberry, a distinguished lecturer at FSI and the former ambassador to Afghanistan. Photo credit: Adam Gorlick

“I wanted them to have the opportunity to see the technology and the networked
approach to combat,” he said. “And I also wanted them to realize that – beyond all the technologies, beyond all the equipment – the most decisive force on any battlefield for the U.S. Army remains the individual soldier and the individual leader.”

Trips like this inform a scholar’s work. And the papers produced, the lectures delivered, and interactions with other academics and policymakers can help shape the way politicians, government officials and military leaders think about wars.

“It’s always very helpful to get out of the ivory tower and into the trenches,” says Amy Zegart, a CISAC affiliate and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who focuses on the effectiveness of the country’s national security organization.

“Even for someone like me who’s been studying the military for more than 15 years, I learned things I didn’t know before,” she says. “I hadn’t appreciated how hard it is to coordinate the human element when you’re going in and doing counterinsurgency operations. You can think about it abstractly, but to see it makes it more tangible.”

Before 9/11, the Army’s training program was shaped by Cold War perspective. Tanks ruled the battlefield, soldiers were easily identified by their uniforms, and nobody thought about the tactics that have come to define the war in Afghanistan.

“The Army wasn’t planning to fight counterinsurgency in a remote country in Central and South Asia,” Eikenberry says of the organization in which he rose through the ranks. “But today, if you look at the effectiveness of our forces on the ground, it’s extraordinary.”

In The Box

Roughly the size of Rhode Island, Fort Irwin is home to the largest and most expansive of the three combat training facilities designed for each branch of the military. About 4,500 soldiers and their families are permanently stationed here, and another 50,000 troops rotate through three weeks of combat training each year.

The base is a community unto itself, with the shopping centers, schools, gyms and restaurants you’d expect to find almost anywhere in America.

But all familiarity vanishes in “The Box”– the National Training Center’s 1,250-square-mile operations area that sprawls across an otherwise empty high desert with infinite views of mountains, dirt and sky.

Activated in 1980, the NTC was filled with tanks and troops expecting to take on the Soviets. Trainers blasted this no-man’s land with every live weapon in the defense department’s arsenal with the exception of nuclear bombs.

Just before 9/11, the Army began rethinking the command structure of war. Rather than having generals make top-down decisions for thousands of troops, military leaders figured it was wiser to have smaller units do what made the most sense given their individual combat situations.

The move toward decentralization was complete soon after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began.

“By that time, we were well-structured to be able to fight smaller guerilla and insurgent networks,” Eikenberry says. “We changed how we were going to fight, and that meant we needed to change how we trained.”

Tanks rolled out of The Box, replaced by a new land of make-believe. Apartments. Courthouses. Government buildings. Mosques. A construction boom of facades ushered in a new way of training for the next generation of warriors.

Replicating the worst

The Army’s 1st Infantry Division arrives in Shar-e-Tiefort, a mock Afghan town at the National Training Center. Photo credit: Adam Gorlick

As the 1^st Infantry Division moves through a makeshift market in Shar-e-Tiefort, crowds of men bicker and barter over vegetables while women shrouded in burqas hover in doorways.

They scuttle and take cover when the roadside bomb explodes and the gunfight begins, but they don’t break character.

While the skirmish looks and sounds like the real thing, what’s happening is essentially an elaborate game of laser tag. The vehicles, soldiers and actors posing as insurgents and civilians wear targets that detect safe lasers being fired at them from otherwise authentic weapons.

When they’re hit, they hear a beep. Game over.

The terrain of the Mojave Desert may not be similar to the high peaks and lush valleys of northern Afghanistan, but there’s enough here to disorient – and ultimately familiarize – the soldiers with what awaits them when they deploy.

Pyrotechnics create bursts of flames and leave clouds of smoke. Speakers wired through some of the town’s 480 buildings play the soundtrack of urban warfare: Shouts, shrieks and cries replace the brief quiet that comes when rounds are no longer being fired.

Even the stench of battle is copied. Hidden sensors emit the stink of burning flesh and rotting garbage.

Scripts and mock weapons used for the combat scenarios are constantly changed and updated in response to new battlefield threats. When troops in Iraq saw a surge in casualties caused by a newly developed grenade, they were able to describe the device in enough detail so artillery experts at the NTC could replicate it.

Within 96 hours of initial reports of the new explosive, soldiers at Fort Irwin were being trained how to outsmart it.

“We try to replicate the worst possible day they’ll ever see and make sure they learn from it,” Capt. Richard Floer tells the Stanford group while escorting them through The Box.

“In Afghanistan, there’s no rewind,” he says. “There’s no stop or pause or do it again.”

Bad guys and best practices

The training isn’t all about offensive and defensive tactical maneuvers. The NTC has designed dozens of scenarios meant to replicate actual missions carried out in Afghanistan. Some involve nothing but fighting. Others rely heavily on role-playing, where soldiers have face-to-face meetings with actors posing as town leaders who are eager – or sometimes resistant – to negotiate local stability for the American promise of improved infrastructure.

Occasionally there’s a combination of force and diplomacy. An operation meant to engage local officials can be derailed by insurgents bent on driving the Americans away, like the members of the 1^st Infantry Division experienced in their training.

Soldiers plan their next move after a simulated IED attack "kills" a comrade and disables their vehicle. Photo credit: Adam Gorlick

And once the insurgents are killed and the casualties are tended to, the meetings sometimes go on.

“You need to dust yourself off and continue with your mission,” says Luong, the Army colonel and visiting scholar at CISAC who fought in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 and in Iraq four years earlier.

“You have to show the bad guys that they can’t just scare you away,” he says. “You need to show them that the Army can stay on mission.”

As the United States draws down its military presence in Afghanistan, the NTC is preparing new training programs for future wars. Based on newly imagined conflicts, the so-called decisive action training will pull together the motivations of military forces, freewheeling criminal organizations, guerillas and insurgents to create a host of worst-case scenarios.

Tanks, bombs, weapons of mass destruction and political, religious and cultural grudges will all come into play.

“We’re looking at the world’s worst actors and using all of their best practices,” says Brig. Gen Terry Ferrell, Fort Irwin’s commanding officer. “This will serve as our new baseline training. Once we get specific orders, we will refine that skill set and respond accordingly.”

Learning from mistakes

After about an hour of simulated combat in Shar-e-Tiefort, the troops of the 1^st Infantry Division are sitting in a room watching a rerun of the mission they just carried out. Dozens of video cameras rigged around the town captured their maneuvers and create a powerful teaching tool used during what’s called an AAR – an after action review that gives the soldiers and their combat trainer a chance to critique the operation.

They’ve run through the same battle scenario twice today and will have another crack at it after the AAR. In just a few weeks, they’ll be in Afghanistan.

“What are the things that worked better this time or need to be modified or fixed?”

Maj. Peter Moon, the combat trainer, wants to know.

First, they report the good: Vehicles were positioned to provide good cover from enemy fire. The unit did a better job responding to casualties. Overall, the soldiers tell Moon, they worked better together.

Moon agrees. “You looked a lot more controlled,” he tells them. “Things went much smoother than this morning.”

Then, the problems:  Too much chatter over the radios. A lag in communications that could have been deadly – four rounds of sniper fire went off before it was reported over the radio.

Despite the errors, one soldier describes how quickly he spotted the sniper from the second-story window. And how he waited for his shot.

“Next time he poked his head out, I zeroed the .50-cal in,” the soldier says. “And that was that.”

Moon keeps at it, asking the same questions over and over again to go over every detail. What went wrong? What needs to be tweaked? What must be duplicated?

Facades of apartments, government buildings and mosques were built in the Mojave Desert to replicate Afghan villages. Photo credit: Adam Gorlick

Here, they can learn from their mistakes. In Afghanistan they won’t have that luxury.

“That’s your goal,” Moon says. “To keep getting better and better and better.”

Drawing insight and saving lives

For many in the Stanford group, the AAR provided some of the best insight into how the military trains for combat.

Beyond the technological gadgets and computerized network systems they saw, beyond the off-the-record briefings they received from Fort Irwin’s leaders, and beyond the simulated combat they watched, many say the most impressive aspect of the NTC is the student-teacher relationship where questions are asked, lessons are learned and lifesaving knowledge is the goal.

“As a teacher, that’s what really sticks out,” says Katherine Jolluck, a senior lecturer in history and FSI affiliate. “You see the leaders trying to draw real insight from the soldiers. They’re not just being told what to do. They’re being encouraged to think for themselves and come up with solutions.”

And the most important solutions often lie in what can seem like the smallest of details: Marking a building properly so everyone knows it’s clear. Stationing vehicles in just the right place. Determining how much chatter should fill the radio. Figuring out who should be carrying the radio in the first place.

“It isn’t about grand strategy,” says Stephen D. Krasner, FSI’s deputy director and the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations.

“The goal of the training is to make sure you do all the small things right,” he says. “That’s what saves lives.”

Imagine you are on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) and a naval dispute breaks out on the Korean Peninsula while you are at home celebrating Thanksgiving. You have just three hours to prepare a detailed memorandum summarizing the situation and offering recommendations for how the United States should respond.

This is a major responsibility with a large number of interrelated issues that must be taken into account—how would you proceed?

Stanford students in the winter quarter course U.S. Policy toward Northeast Asia (IPS 244) had the opportunity to step into the challenging role of the NSC senior director for Asia and consider such a security situation. They wrote and presented memoranda on this and an East Asia trade crisis scenario in class, as well as a final memorandum to the president proposing a China policy for his second term. The assignments required students to consider a wide range of global, regional, and domestic factors—many pulled directly from current global events.

Each member of the team of Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) Asia experts teaching the course drew on decades of related expertise to write the scenarios.

• Michael H. Armacost, the Center’s Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow, previously served on the NSC, in the Defense Department, as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines and Japan, and as undersecretary of state for political affairs.
• Shorenstein APARC associate director for research Daniel C. Sneider, an Asia history expert, spent over 30 years as a journalist reporting on international affairs and security issues, including working as a foreign correspondent in Japan, Korea, India, and Russia.
• David Straub, associate director of Stanford’s Korean Studies Program, is a former State Department official with long-time expertise in U.S.-Korea relations and North Korea, including participation in the Six-Party Talks on North Korea’s nuclear program.
• Thomas Fingar, FSI’s Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow, is a China expert and has previously held numerous key U.S. intelligence posts, most recently as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He also served as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

In the first assignment, students read about a proposed China-Japan-South Korea free trade agreement (FTA). Navigating through a web of regional and domestic issues, they advised on how the United States should respond to an appeal from Japan for certain trade concessions in exchange for its backing out of the FTA. The assignment described complex economic and political conditions in May 2013 after elections in the United States, South Korea, and Japan, and a leadership transition in China. The U.S.-Japan alliance was one of many key factors students took into account.

“It was my great pleasure to participate in this class—it truly broadened my views of U.S. foreign policy toward Northeast Asia. The substantive knowledge presented by both instructors and students during the class will undoubtedly contribute to a much safer, more peaceful, and unified world.”
-Heeyoung Kwon, Visiting Scholar, Korea Foundation

The next memorandum assignment described an inter-Korean naval dispute falling in the crucial weeks between the 2012 U.S. and South Korean presidential elections. It narrated the economic and political situation of each country in precise detail, and set the stage for the dispute with real-life events like the 2010 sinking of the South Korean navy ship the Cheonan. Students were asked to consider the possible role China could play in mediating with North Korea, and how U.S. tensions with Iran could limit its involvement in negotiations.

“In IPS 244…no conversation is irrelevant to current events in Northeast Asia…The memo assignments…are so detailed, so current, and so realistic, that even a seasoned diplomat would be challenged by them—I know this because there are seasoned diplomats taking the class.”
-Jeffrey Stern, MA Student, International Studies Program

Shorenstein APARC offers U.S. Policy toward Northeast Asia each winter quarter. The diverse mix of students, combined with the “in-the-field” expertise of the instructors, creates a lively and challenging class environment. IPS 244 goes beyond a traditional academic course to create assignments based on real-life events and global conditions, and place students in the position of thinking like a government official. For the many of them that will go on to pursue government careers, the course serves as an important first-step in training for “scenarios” very similar to those they address in class.

A new Shorenstein APARC event series will explore the complex ties between identity and the social, political, and economic status of Asia's Muslim minorities, with a focus on China, India, the Philippines, and Thailand.

What are the right questions the president should ask — and we as his employers should ask — when deciding whether going to war is (a) justified and (b) worth it, asks Bill Keller in the <i>New York Times</i>. Karl Eikenberry, who served in Afghanistan both as a military commander and as ambassador, put it this way: “If we do not in the future better align ends, ways and means, historians may find that in the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the United States was compelled to contract its global posture similar to the British when they announced their ‘East of Suez’ policy in the late 1960s.”

A Wake-up Call for America: We Must Connect with the World

Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, currently the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, uses an anecdote in his new book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, to illustrate his concern that Americans have become too insular as a result of the 2001 terrorist attacks. While teaching at Marquette University Law School during the Arab Spring of last year, an undergraduate penned a column lamenting that so many students not only could not find Tunisia on the map – they could spell Kardashian before Kazakhstan.

Feingold writes that he admired this student for his confession about his lack of knowledge on global affairs, then quotes the final thought of the young columnist: “We are connected to the rest of the world in ways few of us can fully fathom, from the shoes we wear and coffee we drink to the cell phones we carry and the tweets we post.”

In a recent interview, CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Feingold discuss steps to be taken to ensure that all Americans – young and old, inside the Washington beltway and out on the farm in Wisconsin – take a patriotic stand by engaging with the world to restore our national unity and regain global respect.    

Senator Feingold, what prompted you to write this book now?

Feingold: For me, as for many Americans, 9/11 was a life-changing event, the wake-up call in which we all understood that we no longer could be safe just assuming the world would take care of itself. We got misdirected with things like Iraq and we developed this sort of invade-one-country-at-a-time approach. There was also exploitation of the fears from 9/11 for domestic agendas, from the Patriot Act to the way that Muslims and Arabs are treated in this country. And then, finally, with the rise of the tea party, I feel like we went back to sleep. But there are signals all over the place, of the continued presence of al-Qaida and the continued potency of al-Qaida, not to mention so many other trends from the Chinese influence in Africa to the Iranian influence in Latin America. We aren’t connecting as a government or as a people in a way that I think is commensurate with our place in the 21^st century. I’m trying to issue a warning that we’re going to get fooled or surprised again if we think we can just go back to being just sort of safely over here across the oceans. That’s just not the world anymore.

So how do you wake up Americans and make them realize we cannot, as you say, survive as a nation without being active and aware of global events and trends? 

Feingold: It’s at all levels. I happen to think we have a good president and I think he’s going to be a great president by the end of his second term. And I think he’s started the process of alerting Americans to the need to connect to all places in the world; he’s leading us toward a global vision of the kind that I think we have to have to be safe and to be competitively successful and to be well perceived by the rest of the world. The president and other leaders should call on each of us to try and become citizen diplomats. Three hundred million people should be urged as part of their patriotic duty not just to go to the moon as we once were, but go to the rest of the world. This isn’t Pollyanna; this is about being safe. I don’t think this country is geared up to make that connection and I think it’s a fatal flaw. The Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians, they’re all over the world and they have a plan for what they’re doing. We don’t.

What do you see as the most pressing global security issues today?

Cuéllar:  The United States is confronting a changing world, where countries like India, Brazil, and China are evolving and assuming greater importance. Engaging these countries to address problems like nuclear proliferation will be critical in the years ahead.  The world also faces a persistent problem involving failed or failing states. In places like Somalia, piracy is not only a regional problem in the Gulf of Aden.  The problem is an example of how threats can affect multiple countries and impact flows of commodities, disrupting the rule of law, highlighting the challenges of governing common resources such as international sea lanes. Another challenge is the enormous potential of technology to change people’s lives for the better, coupled with risks that arise which we are only in a very imperfect and incomplete way managing; risks of vulnerabilities in our infrastructure; risks of theft of intellectual property, risks of disruption of organizations.

Feingold: I like this answer because Prof. Cuéllar did not just say, “Well, it’s Russia and Iran and Colombia.” There’s this tendency to just speak of countries. We’re just trained to say, “OK what’s the hot spot and let’s just worry about that.” Like right now it’s Iran; a few months ago it was Yemen. In my book what I’m trying to point out is that you have to look at trends and overall tendencies around the world and somehow we have to have the capacity to deal with more than one thing at a time.

Senator Feingold, you called the Bush Administration’s terrorist surveillance program – the wiretapping and surveillance of emails and financial records without court approval – one of the worst assaults on the Constitution in American history. How does the government protect our constitutional rights to privacy and probable cause while monitoring criminal and terrorist networks in a digital age?

Feingold: The assault on the Constitutional by the administration was not about whether we could do those things, its whether or not the president would basically make up his own laws just because we’re in a crisis. That to me is completely unconstitutional. We understand that a president might have to take emergency action and he may have to come to Congress and say, you know I did this, it may be beyond the law, would you please pass a law to approve it, or I’ll stop doing it. That’s not what Bush did. Bush hid it. Bush hid what he was doing on torture; Bush hid what he was doing on wiretapping. That’s a very dangerous thing that completely saps our strength from within and is completely unnecessary to stop the terrorists.

Cuéllar: The challenge of living up to our constitutional values while we secure the country is always critical. It requires organizations that can learn from their mistakes to be honest with each other enough and recognize when they have overstepped their bounds, that make good use of entities like inspectors-general, that leverage the ability of Congress to do oversight. These are all elements of making our constitutional values relevant. So me the challenge has always been how to you leverage all the information technology and all our ability to make smart, thoughtful, careful decisions – including decisions that do permit appropriate degrees of surveillance and intelligence – in order to avoid superficial reactions against individuals who simply appear threatening.

What key steps should the U.S. government take to improve its counter-terrorism efforts both at home and abroad?

Feingold: The first thing is to recognize the nature of the threat. One of the chapters in the book is called A Game of Risk, where we seem to think the way to counter terrorism is to invade a country and stay there forever and say we have to stay there or the terrorist are going to come back. But this isn’t the nature of al-Qaida or similar organizations. President Bush used to say there were 60 countries where al-Qaida was operating and, of course, one thing that was embarrassing about it was that Iraq wasn’t one of them. But we’re still in this place today. Al-Shabab in Somalia; al-Qaida and the Islamic Maghreb in northern Africa; a group called Boko Haram in Nigeria, which looks very much like an al-Qaida group, has pulled off some 70 attacks in the last year. So this is an international organization that communicates with each other and they’re not done just because Osama bin Laden is gone. So let’s not get caught unawares again.

Senator Feingold, what was your most memorable, defining challenge in Congress and how did that change the way you see yourself and the world around you?

It had to do with recognizing when 9/11 occurred that there really was a group of people out there who would love to kill all of us and, despite the fact that I’m progressive and I voted against most military interventions, just saying to myself: look, there are times when threats are real. And it caused me to actually seek to be on the Intelligence Committee which is something I never wanted to do; I was not sure of the importance of intelligence in the post Cold War era and it was a real change for me. I remember having an emotional response, saying, “You know what? This is real; what these folks did was real and they have intimidated an entire country if not the world.” I wanted to know everything I could about how they came to be and what they were planning next, and to be a person who could try to think ahead for other kinds of threats so we as Americans can get ahead of threats instead of being the people who are reacting.

Full text available at YaleGlobal.

Children of China's Future – Part II

Aging population and poverty require stronger investment in China’s rural youth

Karen Eggleston, Jean Oi, Scott Rozelle, Ang Sun, Xueguang Zhou

YaleGlobal, 14 March 2012

Poor education mortgaging the future? Students in a Gansu province school, where many are anemic (top); another class room in Loess Plateau. (Top Photo: Adam Gorlick)

DINGXI PREFECTURE: Wang Hongli, 8 years old, lives in a remote rural village on the Loess Plateau in one of China’s poorest and most agricultural provinces, Gansu. His prospects for living the good life are as bleak as the landscape. He is not on track to become part of China’s emerging middle class, the free-spending, computer-savvy, person-of-the-world often featured in the western media.

Hongli is a pseudonym. His parents work in a faraway industrial zone, coming home for only three weeks at Chinese New Year. His grandmother takes care of him and his siblings on the weekends, and during the week he lives in a dorm, three to a bed with 36 other students in an unheated room 4 by 4 meters.

Hongli suffers from iron-deficient anemia, but neither his family nor his teacher knows he is sick. Even if his anemia is discovered and treated by the researchers who have documented 30 percent anemia among children in poor rural areas, it likely will recur after he finishes the study, with furnished dietary supplements. Despite educational pamphlets, he’ll likely revert to a diet of staple grains and bits of pickled vegetables.

Unsurprisingly, Hongli’s grades are not good. In China’s competitive school system, he has only a slight chance of attending high school, much less college. In China’s future high-wage economy, all Hongli can hope for is a menial job in the provincial capital, Lanzhou, or as a temporary migrant elsewhere. Without urban permanent residency, hukou, he will have limited access to urban social services. He may suffer chronic unemployment, or resort to the gray economy or crime. He also may never marry – one of the millions of “forced bachelors” created by China’s large gender imbalance.

In China’s future high-wage economy,  all the rural poor can hope for is menial jobs in a provincial capital.

Hongli is not alone. In fact, he’s one of 50 million school-age youth in China’s vast poor rural hinterlands. Recent studies by Stanford and Chinese collaborators show that 39 percent of fourth-grade students in Shaanxi Province are anemic, with similarly high rates elsewhere in the northwest; up to 40 percent of rural children in the poor southwest regions, e.g., Guizhou, are infected with intestinal worms. Millions of poor rural students throughout China are nearsighted, but do not wear glasses.

Because China’s urbanites have fewer children, poor rural kids like Hongli represent almost a third of China’s school-aged children, a large share of the future labor force. These young people must be healthy, educated and productive if China is to have any chance of increasing labor productivity to offset the shrinking size of its aging workforce.

Many observers presume that China’s growth will continue unabated, drawing upon a vast reservoir of rural labor to staff manufacturing plants for the world. In fact, to a considerable extent, China’s rural areas have already been emptied out, leaving many villages with only the old and the very young. The growth of wages for unskilled workers exceeds GDP growth.

Better pay should be good news for poverty alleviation. However, rising wages push up the opportunity cost of staying in school – especially since high school fees, even at rural public schools, are among the highest in the world.

It’s myopic to allow rural students to drop out of junior high and high school – mitigating the current labor shortage, but mortgaging their futures. Recent studies demonstrate that eliminating high school tuition – or reducing the financial burden on poor households – improves junior high achievement and significantly increases continuation on to high school. Yet unlike many other developing countries, China does not use incentives to keep children in school, such as conditional cash transfers. The public health and educational bureaucracies also do not proactively cooperate to remedy nutritional and medical problems – including mental health – that school-based interventions could address cost effectively.

Less than half of youth in China’s poor rural areas go to academic high school; less than 10 percent head to college.

The educational system, based on rote memory and drill, doesn’t teach children how to learn. The vocational education system is ineffective. Instead, China’s schools tend to focus resources on elite students. Tracking starts early, and test scores are often the sole criterion for success. A recent comparative study documents that China’s digital divide, with lower access to computers in poor rural areas, is among the widest in the world.

China’s government is increasing expenditures for school facilities and raising teacher salaries. However, these steps are far from adequate. During South Korea’s high growth, almost all Korean students finished high school. Today, less than half of youth in China’s poor rural areas go to academic high school, and the percent going to college remains in the single digits.

Greater investment in public health and education for the young people in China’s poor rural areas is urgent. If the government waits 10 years, it may be too late to avert risks for China’s stability and sustained economic growth.

Surely China could easily address this problem? A third of Chinese were illiterate in the early 1960s; now, fewer than 5 percent are. By 2010, about 120 million Chinese had completed a college degree. Chinese also enjoy a relatively long life expectancy compared to India and many other developing countries, and basic health insurance coverage is almost universal.

But the pace of change and citizens’ expectations are higher as well. Most Chinese assume that basic nutritional problems and intestinal worms were eradicated in the Mao era. China’s mortality halved in the 1950s; fertility halved in the 1970s. As a result, China will get old before it gets rich. Population aging, rapid urbanization and a large gender imbalance represent intertwined demographic challenges to social and economic governance. The policy options are complicated, the constraints significant, the risks of missteps real and ever-present.

China’s prosperity depends on youth mastering skills to thrive in a technology-driven world.

Timely policy response is complicated by competition for resources – pensions, long-term care, medical care for the elderly and more – as well as significant governance challenges arising from a countryside drained of young people. The well-intentioned programs for what government regards a “harmonious society” create large unfunded mandates for local authorities. Attempts to relocate rural residents to new, denser communities provoke anger at being uprooted and skepticism that local authorities simply want to expropriate land for development.

Millions of migrant workers – like Wang Hongli’s parents – return to their rural homes during economic downturns. Urbanization weakens this capacity to absorb future economic fluctuations. Government efforts at “social management” – strengthening regulatory control of informal social groups and strategies for diffusing social tensions – expand the bureaucratic state, a central target of popular discontent.

Premier Wen Jiabao’s announcement of a 7.5 percent growth target – the lowest in two decades – has been expected. Future economic growth will moderate partly because of demographics, but mostly because productivity gains slow as an economy runs out of surplus rural labor and converges on the technological frontier. Costly upgrading of industrial structure will squeeze the government’s ability to deliver on its promise of a better future for all, stoking social tensions.

China’s stability and prosperity, and that of the region and the globe, depends on how well today’s youth master the knowledge and skills that enable them to thrive in the technology-driven globalized world of the mid-21st century. Resilient public and private sector leaders of the future must be able to think creatively. Therefore, China’s government should respond to population aging by acting now to invest more in the health and education of youth, especially the rural poor.