@Dazzer: When the OP said Chinese websites recommended going to the "main HQ", I think that refers to the city office responsible for the taxi industry, not individual taxi company offices.

Have you tried just hailing a taxi and asking them to take you to the main HQ? Chinese bureaucrats can often be surprisingly helpful if a foreigner shows up in their office in need of assistance. Politeness and smiles go a long way in these situations -- if you appear upset, then they may worry that they're going to be blamed for something and their attitude can become less accommodating.

As far as closing the barn door after the horse has gone, it can help to set your lock screen text to something like "Please email name@domain.com if found, $## reward for safe return."

@JanJal: You wrote "If there was sudden influx of money and equipment to upgrade education across China tenfold or whatever, the kids would still graduate to work in factories, construction, food delivery, and KTV hosting."

1. There are serious problems in the school system apart from educational outcomes. For example, many students at rural boarding schools suffer from preventable health problems such as stunted growth, anemia, and intestinal worms, per this article in The Economist: www.economist.com/[...] More funding (combined with political will) would undoubtedly improve health conditions.

2. I think you are over-simplifying the labor market. In between the doctors & scientists and the construction workers & KTV hosts (and also above technical/vocational certificates for building trades and such), there is a whole layer of mid-skilled jobs that require something like a two-year college degree: dental assistants, electrical engineering technicians, paralegals and so forth. These are realistic outlets for many bright rural kids if they can access financial aid for their studies, but most won't get there under the policy you seem to be arguing for.

@JanJal, regarding your earlier reply to my post: It sounds like you're talking about curriculum (notably as regards job market preparation), whereas I was talking about resources (money) in the paragraph you quoted. Apples and oranges.

And I don't disagree with anything you said about curriculum.

Having done a fair amount of education-related work in the US, I think some of the criticism of the American system is overblown.

It should be acknowledged that the state of public education in many American inner cities is a national disgrace, and also that underfunding and other pathologies are gnawing around the edges of the system as a whole.

Having said that, there by and large remains a functional system that provides a decent education to most students. US students tend to score around the OECD average on international test rankings, which is not too bad when you consider the size and diversity of the country.

Contra tigertiger on the last page, I see nothing in cloudtrapezer's description of Chinese educational problems that applies to the US, apart from the pressure to buy homes in expensive areas to get kids into quality public schools. And while instances of political correctness and incompetent teaching are prone to show up in Youtube videos, they are not characteristic of the overall system based on my experience.

I agree with many of the critiques of the Chinese education system voiced above, but at the same time, some of those problems are mainly attributable to limited resources given that their GDP per capita is roughly 15% to 25% of the US figure (depending how one measures).