HANGHAI

Quick, what's 6 + 8 - 7 + 6 + 5?

If you knew instantaneously that the answer is 18, without having to pause even a second, then congratulations! You're as bright as a Shanghai kindergarten student — calculating in his or her third language.

I've met the future, and it is these kids. Americans who come to China tend to be most dazzled by glittering new skyscrapers like the 1,380-foot Jin Mao Tower, but the most awesome aspect of China's modernization is the education that children are getting in the big cities. And the long-run competitive challenge we Americans face from China will have less to do with its skylines, army or industry than with its Super Kids, like Tony Xu.

Tony's real name is Xu Jun, but all the children entering the New Century Kindergarten that he attends get English names as well. Six-year-old Tony's first languages are Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese, but even in English he rattled off answers to equations faster than I could. It was embarrassing when I posed my own question to him, 10 + 5 - 1 - 4 + 5, and he answered 15 before I could tell if he was right. I want a refund on my college tuition.

Parents pay about $2,000, a huge sum here, to send a child to a year of such a private kindergarten. But since urban Chinese families now have only one child each, no expense is too great for one's "little emperor." Throughout China, first-rate private schools are popping up, as the Chinese saying goes, like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.

Of course Chinese education is still hobbled by rural mud-brick schools that are in a shambles, by peasants who pull their daughters out of school, by third-rate universities. But China's great strength is that in the cities, it increasingly is not a Communist country or a socialist country, but simply an education country.

When I lived in China I represented Harvard in interviewing high school students applying for admission, and it was a humbling experience. The SAT isn't offered in China, so instead the kids take the G.R.E. — meant for people applying to graduate school — and still score in the top percentiles. And while many of my Chinese friends worry that the system works children too hard and costs them their childhood, the brightest kids are not automatons; many are serious enthusiasts of art, music, poetry or, these days, the basketball plays of Yao Ming.

The other day I visited one of Shanghai's best high schools, the No. 2 Secondary School Attached to East China Normal University. American students who are proud to have earned a perfect score of twin 800's on the SAT should meet the 17-year-old student here who last year got a perfect score of three 800's on the G.R.E.

He Xiaowen, the principal, showed off 14 gold medals that students have earned in the international math and science Olympics. When I asked if she had any problems with students smoking or drinking, she looked so scandalized that I might have been sent to the principal's office, if I hadn't already been there.

One reason for Chinese educational success emerges from cross-cultural surveys. Americans say that good pupils do well because they're smarter. Chinese say that good students do well because they work harder.

A growing body of evidence suggests that Chinese students do well academically partly because their parents set very high benchmarks, which the children then absorb. Chinese parents demand a great deal, American parents somewhat less, and in each case the students meet expectations.

The result is apparent at No. 2 Secondary School. The students live in dormitories, going home only on weekends, and they're mostly studying from 6:30 a.m. until lights-out at 11 p.m. On Saturdays they attend tutoring classes from 9:40 to 5:10, and on Sundays they do what one girl, Gong Lan, described as six hours of "self-assigned homework."

She explained: "This is extra work to improve ourselves. I read outside books to improve my ability in any subject I feel weak in."

Chinese students may not have a lot of fun, and may lag in subjects in which some American students excel, such as sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But these kids know their calculus and are driven by a work ethic and thirst for education that make them indomitable. With them in the pipeline and little kindergartners like Tony Xu behind them, China may eventually lead the world again.