"... humanities, pure science, pure math, all these are not as clearly as useful as engineering."

To make your picture worse, Arthur, "useful" as engineering might be, the main stream career choice of our brightest young minds is far more disheartening. Data of the last decade, including year 2011, showed that 25 percent of employed Ivy League graduates, lured by the promise of fast and magical return on investment,  entered the consulting or finance industry, not engineering, not entrepreneurship, not even corporations, in short, not the productive part of the economy.

Don't you think that 25% is too big and too scary a number? How sad!

Watching kids heading for Wall St, Harold Bloom groaned: “Alas, this is the death of the mind. That is not my vision of Yale University.”

As for China, well, an economist friend, who is also an extremely popular public intellectual with 6 million Weibo(Chinese version of Tweeter) fans and truly a celebrity in China, is lecturing widely,  frequently seen on national TV and even created picture books to educate small children about how the stock market works; while I just learned from another friend, a renowned writer/novelist, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Jie_%28writer%29, whose work has inspired and nourished many in my generation (one of her earlier novels, "Love Must Not Be Forgotten", for example, was sold 600k copies in the 1st run, a record that's hard to repeat in book publishing ever!) that she isn't motivated to write nowadays because she could see that people don't read literature anymore. The difference in these two people's popularity says a lot about what kind of issues matter to the majority of Chinese today.

The Chinese Generation X (Consumerist generation) and Generation Y (Net generation) are raised to worship money as the God, I only wish that Generation Y would somehow miraculously evolve to become Generation Why, the kind of "Why" that one sees here frequently on Thinqon,  then China will be hopeful again...