CHINA: THE GIANT AWAKENS : Culture : A Teacher Turns Student : * Long ago, China was the model for Asians. Now the Communist titan’s citizens eagerly learn from their capitalist neighbors.

In the beginning, centuries before David He was born in China and Moon Chang Won was born in South Korea, the mandarins and monks of the great Middle Kingdom brought a treasure of teachings to this East Asian peninsula.

He’s Chinese ancestors taught Moon’s forebears how to write in ideographic characters. They brought an ethical system proposed by a philosopher named Confucius.

The Chinese transmitted Buddhism from India, which not only affected religious life but also profoundly colored Korea’s architecture, sculpture, music and dance. They introduced their systems of mathematics and of governance by elite bureaucrats selected through rigorous exams.

And the teachings of He’s people spread beyond Korea, into Japan as well. For the people of East Asia looked to China as the center of world civilization, as the Great Teacher who would lift their comparatively primitive societies into more prosperous and culturally refined nations.

But now the tables are turned. As China determinedly moves to cast off its Communist legacy of stunted economic growth and intellectual stagnation, Asia’s great teacher has become its most eager student.

Thirsting for knowledge that will propel their nation toward economic superstardom, Chinese are shuttling around the region by the thousands to learn how their Asian neighbors managed to develop so far, so fast. They are studying everything from Korean steelmaking and Japanese computer systems to Hong Kong financial networks and Singaporean manufacturing. They are also flocking to foreign firms investing in their own country to soak up new technology and to master modern management systems.

Now it is Moon Chang Won of South Korea who teaches David He of China. Moon is executive director of the East Asian division at Daewoo, one of South Korea’s leading conglomerates, while He is a sales manager in Daewoo’s office in Canton. On a recent trip, He joined a group of eight Chinese employees brought to South Korea to learn about Daewoo, take tours of modern steel and auto plants and listen to lectures on capitalist management, sales promotion and business development.

“China should learn technology from the West but management from Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong,” said He, a 27-year-old native of Hubei province in central China. “Since we all belong to the East Asian system, our cultures are almost the same and our business style is very different from the West.”

Like He, many of the Chinese trainees are young, well-educated and personally convinced of capitalism’s greater power to enrich their own lives and increase their nation’s wealth. Their numbers have skyrocketed in the last decade. From 1978 to 1982, China sent 12,000 students abroad. Since 1990 it has sent more than 110,000, according to the New China News Agency.

Most students still go to the United States. But the numbers have been increasing rapidly in Japan, thanks to programs such as one sponsored by the Assn. for Overseas Technical Scholarship that offers participants technical training in everything from electronics and machinery to auto manufacturing, shipbuilding and steel. The course work is followed by a maximum two-year stint of practical work experience at a Japanese firm. (Shorter management courses are also offered.)

No Chinese were accepted into the program until 1979. Now they constitute its largest group--23.3% of the total, or 845 people in 1992. Because of the flood of applicants from China, Japanese officials have felt compelled to impose a guideline of 25% to 30%.

“If we accepted all applicants, the number could easily reach 40% to 50%,” said a program official. “We have to control the number to let other countries in.”

Computers seem to be the Chinese students’ main interest.

“They are always asking us to teach them the most up-to-date technology,” said Shiro Koike, design section chief for Sanki Engineering Co. The Tokyo-based firm, which plans air-conditioning and sanitary systems, currently has nine Chinese trainees who are learning about air-flow systems, blueprint drawings and computer-aided design techniques.

The trainees are not the least bit shy about their ambitions. “We are going around and learning technology all over the world to make China the strongest country in the world,” declared Jing Peigong, a 29-year-old architect in Sanki’s Beijing office who has spent nearly a year in Japan.

Daewoo’s He said the Japanese and Korean ideal of the company as family, providing workers with not only jobs but also housing, meals and other benefits, is one of many cultural factors making Japan and South Korea better models for China than the West.

But some lessons are not always easy to learn--or give.

Lim Cheok Sin, managing director and part owner of Beijing C. S. Timber, a Singapore-Chinese joint-venture furniture firm on the rural outskirts of Beijing, had to train his 171 Chinese workers from scratch.

He started with a time clock to teach them punctuality. He instilled strict rules of no talking and no smoking. He fires them if they don’t meet his demands--unheard-of in state-owned companies. He even fired one worker who turned out to be the niece of a high county official.

“In Chinese factories, a lot of people are doing nothing,” Lim said. “That, we do not allow. We want them to work eight hours. After one year, I think the workers are quite OK now. They are used to our methods of management.”

But Lim added that quality remains enough of a problem that he has not yet gone ahead with plans to ship finished furniture to Europe or America.

At the Beijing Matsushita Communication Equipment Co., a joint venture with a $3-million capital investment and 150 Chinese workers, the Japanese management “demands that we constantly raise our education and technical level,” said Zhang Xiaodong, 26, who works with the computerized machinery that makes circuit boards for the firm’s telephone pagers.

Unlike Chinese factories, Matsushita makes extensive use of charts posting daily production results and quality control, with programs to boost results in both areas.

“When they first started working here, some employees felt uncomfortable with these demands, or thought they were too much trouble,” Zhang said. “But they’ve gotten used to it. Now young people in China want to have jobs at a company or workplace that helps them develop.”

Noriyoshi Kubo, the pager joint venture’s general manager, said the firm tends to hire young people straight out of college or with less than five years’ working experience because they are easier to train. Matsushita is also selective, requiring a written test, oral interview and six-month probation period, and it pays higher-than-average wages to attract quality employees. As a result, Kubo said, “there is almost no noticeable difference” in quality between beepers made in China and those made in Japan.

In Hong Kong, one of Asia’s busiest financial hubs, Huang Junqiang, 38, is learning to trade at a subsidiary of China Resources (Holdings) Co., a Chinese government-backed operation with broad investments in Hong Kong and Macao valued at $400 million in 1992.

“In this front-line business, everything is simply linked with money,” said Huang, 38, a Canton native who graduated from the University of International Business in Beijing. “Whatever decisions you make, big or small, would mean a gain or loss of money. I have to be careful.”

Money, competition, the free market, self-improvement--they all appeal to He of Daewoo. At 27, he is a committed capitalist--and an omen of China’s future.

He was born in 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began. Universities closed down, professors were banished to the countryside, his four elder siblings were sent off to factories after high school with no chance of college.

But, he says, “My generation was very lucky.” In 1979, when he was 13, China began its modernization drive. Universities had already reopened. Upon graduation from high school in 1983, he succeeded in entering the University of International Business. There he was exposed to U.S. business textbooks teaching accounting, finance, statistics, the Western economy.

After graduating, He worked for a European silk-export firm, a multinational joint venture involving polyester chips and a leasing equipment firm involving French, Chinese and Japanese banks before joining Daewoo last year.

Now he is banking on all of his newly acquired foreign knowledge and skills to help him start his own business someday.

“I think you’d better visit China and see for yourself,” He said. “I think we will be the strongest country in the next century.”

David Holley in Beijing and Christine Courtney in Hong Kong contributed to this report.