How reliable is the claim that China has high average IQ?
Core argument: Stanford's REAP group reports mean measured IQs for rural Chinese children one standard deviation or more below the international norm, a result reportedly holding for toddlers, 8th graders, and rural migrant children in urban schools.
We refer to China’s purportedly high IQ levels as a “stylized fact” for three reasons. First: there have been perhaps surprisingly few serious studies attempting to measure this quantity in China’s huge population. Second: given the “Flynn effect” of secular increases in measured IQs for national populations all around the world over the postwar era, IQ in China may well be a moving target. Third: IQ testing in China appears to have been generally conducted in urban rather than rural settings—and it is possible there is an urban-rural divergence in measured cognitive abilities due to developmental differences. This third possibility is strongly suggested by some of the recent research of the REAP group at Stanford University. Their studies consistently report finding a low average for measured IQs for rural Chinese children—a mean one standard deviation or more below the international “norm”. The result also reportedly holds for a range of rural children, from toddlers to 8th graders to migrant children from rural areas currently in urban schools. Using these REAP-PIRLS data, the World Bank modeled an estimated nationwide level of student achievement with its “Harmonized Learning Outcome” (HLO) database for its Human Capital Index (HCI). By this initial reckoning, China’s HLO level would have been comparable to those of countries like Mexico or Turkey. [See his slides here.]