Free Postcards From Tomorrow Square by James Fallows Page A

contestants were divided into two teams, which then competed against each other in some real-world business task—selling life insurance, raising money for charity, improvising a solution to some other business problem. Members of the winning team got to come back for the next episode. Members of the losing team went through various other assessments that included a final PK. Based on how the pair sounded when debating, a panel of judges would send one or the other home.
    All the contestants were interesting, but we found ourselves rooting for four. Zhou Jin, one of two women among the final 12, was general manager of an advertising agency, and her project was to develop new labor-training services. She was seven months pregnant when the competition began and was granted permission for a brief absence from on-camera segments, but then fought her way back into consideration with strong performances. Ms. Zhou had a sassy air and, as best I could judge from others’ reactions, a sharp tongue. She had a lot of backing in blogs because of the way she handled her pregnancy.
    We came to think of Song Wenming as the social-conscience candidate. He was a mild-looking, baby-faced man in his early thirties from Anhui province, an impoverished area, many of whose people end up as illegal migrant workers in the big coastal cities. Song himself had earned an M.B.A. and held a job with a big international accounting firm. He resigned and, with two friends, started an employment firm to match Anhui people with jobs. His business plan was to expand these operations with new capital.
    Zhou Yu was jokingly called “Wolf” or “Wild Wolf” by his competitors, but we thought of him as “Country Boy.” He was a tall, rangy 35-year-old with a buzz cut who had worked for years in the clothing business, and his business plan was to expand factories for lingerie and other ladies’ apparel. In manner, he was much earthier than most of the other contestants—barking out remarks, grimacing, predictably losing his temper at some point in each show. Among the final 12, he was the only one not to have gone past high school, and during PKs he talked about the limits of book learning and the value of the school of hard knocks. He was a favorite in mobile-phone voting.
    Then there was Zhao Yao, who struck us as the smoothest of the candidates. He grew up in Beijing but now lives in Los Angeles, having been based in America since 1995. He’d left China to get an M.B.A. at the University of Wyoming, and then tried to set up what he later described to me as his “Wyoming-based self-service tour-planning company.” After work-permit problems, he’d moved to California, where he was a computer programmer, an accountant, and a business consultant. He dreamed of bringing the “direct-response marketing” business to China. Direct-response marketing is the polite name for the infomercial business, and Zhao planned to set up the infrastructure—call centers, payment systems, customer service—that would allow the George Foreman Grill, for example, to be sold on TV in China (except here it would be the Jackie Chan Grill).
    Week by week, our candidates survived, until the last episode before the live finale. Zhou Jin, the woman, and Zhao Yao, the Californian, were both on the team that lost that week’s competition, and they were pitted against each other in the final PK. One or the other would go down! Their debate was relatively high-road, each pointing out his or her own strengths rather than the other’s weaknesses. Ms. Zhou looked shocked when the judges’ result was announced: She would go on to the finals, and Zhao was out. This seemed shocking because Zhao had seemed, probably even to her, such a golden-boy candidate. When the series was over, I asked him, in English, how he interpreted his elimination. “If I had just spoken my mind, here is what I would have said before the verdict,” he told me. “I would have told the judges, ‘I