Carly Fiorina Says the Chinese 'Don't Innovate'

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and current Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina apparently doesn’t think very highly of the Common Core education policy or of China’s ability to innovate.

How are those two things related? Well, Fiorina has criticized proponents of Common Core who think the policy will help U.S. students compete with Chinese students in subjects like math and science. The 2016 presidential hopeful told Iowa political video blog Caffeinated Thoughts earlier this year that the U.S. education system should not be modeled after China’s. Chinese students may test well, she said, but they fall short when it comes to innovation.

BuzzFeed pulled this quote from Fiorina’s video interview, in which she cited her years of business experience in China:

‘I have been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate,’ she said. ‘They are not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial, they don’t innovate, that is why they are stealing our intellectual property.’

Fiorina has broached this subject before, arguing in her book, Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey, that China’s educational model is “too homogenized and controlled to encourage imagination and risk taking.”

The former HP (HPQ) chief executive’s political experience is limited to her failed 2010 U.S. Senate bid. Fiorina’s tenure as HP CEO ended in 2005, when the company’s board forced her to resign following years of stagnant profits and a massive, ill-advised merger with Compaq.

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