This idea is based on the false assumption that there are no pre-existing laws for seas. There is a UN treaty and there are maritime laws and unwritten seamen laws. And the latest date way back in history.
Pretending that seas are virgin territories as regards laws is a misconception.
I don't think the idea is based on that assumption. It's okay if there are international maritime laws, as long as they don't prohibit this sort of activity (I have no idea whether they do or don't).
These sorts of laws could even conceivably offer some protection to such a venture.
The most fundamental law, and one that effectively negates all floating "new country" ventures, is that any vessel that is not "flagged" by a real country is classified as a pirate vessel and will be taken over by any country, on the high seas most likely by the US Coast Guard which is the most widespread and aggressive enforcement presence on the high seas.
If your vessel is flagged, then this isn't a problem, but you must abide by the laws of the flagging nation. And, in international water, you are still vulnerable to random searches by the Coast Guard if for any reason they get their back up.
The people are much more pragmatic than the project sounds; they are thinking about how much autonomy is even possible, realistically. Maritime laws are seemingly one of the simplest issues out there.
You know little about the Chinese education system.
All Chinese kids (I was one of them) are basically trained for these kinds of standard tests. For the most part of their school life, they are judged by the scores they get. The whole point of the system is not to educate, but to test, and based on scores, pick the few at the top for better schools to go next year, and the process repeats. This pattern starts from primary schools all up to graduate schools. That's all freaking 16 years!
It is no surprise they score high in this one. They do not need to cheat. Of course if they want they can, but my point still holds: they are battle-tested “exam machines”.
The problem, though, is that the approach kills creativity and innovation.
Threat? Hell no. As long as the States keeps recruiting the best minds with scholarship and offers visa for them to stay working there, I don't see any chance the States will fall behind in smartness.
I have to wonder about that. At least in the STEM fields, there's no particular change in US K-12 schooling I know of that you can point at for a cause in decreased US student interest, unless it's the final decay of the Sputnik inspired stuff.
US K-12 education has been horrible for nearly 3/4 of a century. The most basic, fundamental skill, the foundation for all other learning, was in such bad shape in 1955 that the whole Why Johnny Can't Read thing got started, along with a furious debate then or a little later on "Federal Aid to Education", which then was pushed through in the '60s.
(Note, however, that a large fraction of kids, almost certainly enough to keep the STEM pipeline filled, will learn to read no matter how bad Dick and Jane and Their Running Dog Spot is. The success of this "method" was "proven" in a single study of ... the kids of University of Chicago professors and the like. It's a middle set that desperately need phonics to learn how to read.)
The attractiveness of US higher education can be largely explained by these hard to dispute facts:
Our best universities are simply the best in the world, full stop.
In a lot of countries the local universities are very bad (note where Feynman developed his theory of cargo cult science) and/or are way too small to support the number of students qualified for them (e.g. India's IITs; imagine, assuming you qualify to even take the test, being one of 400,000 competing for 4,000 seats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology... )). Many good students from those countries don't have to go to top or first tier US school to get a superior, often vastly superior education in the US.
