Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, Harvard University Master of Public Administration 2025 Graduation Speech
Last summer, while interning in Mongolia, I received a call from two classmates in Tanzania who wanted to ask me an urgent question: how to use their washing machine—because all the button labels were in Chinese, and Google Translate translated a large button as “Spinning Ghost Mode.” The three of us: an Indian, a Thai, and me, a Chinese in Mongolia, are working together to interpret a washing machine in Tanzania. And now we are all studying together at Harvard.
It now takes three Harvard Masters degree graduates to work out how to use a washing machine. No wonder the West can’t make anything anymore.