Over the past few years I have read a fair amount of economics, but mostly classics by well-known economists rather than textbooks. Textbooks are systematic, yet many stay at the surface; they do not dig far enough. Part of this comes from how courses are scheduled and what students can reasonably absorb. If every course went deeper, there would not be enough time to get through the required material. Seen that way, a bachelor's degree is only the beginning of specialized study. University lets students see the overall structure of a field; it does not take them into serious research.
That conclusion can be hard on undergraduates. They often assume that finishing a degree will make them experts, and some begin holding forth on the field before they have even graduated. Work usually punctures that confidence. The old saying that after learning one sees one's inadequacy, and after teaching one sees one's confusion, is wise. Most people spend much of life not knowing what they do not know. This is not necessarily a criticism: learning more does not always make life happier. Much of human distress comes from unsatisfied desire, including the desire for knowledge. Simple living can be happy living.
Because I had been reading classics, I did not know foreign textbooks well. In the past year, however, I encountered two of them, and they made the difference clear: Chinese textbooks are noticeably more concise.
Last year I wanted a full picture of how economics fits together, so I bought Marshall's Principles of Economics. It was a useful mistake. I had meant to buy a comprehensive framework book, and for that purpose I should have chosen Mankiw's Principles of Economics or Samuelson's Economics. Marshall's book is deeper than an introductory textbook and was published long ago, in 1890. It is a classic, but it is not as comprehensive as current textbooks. It is clearly not suitable as a first textbook: first-year undergraduates cannot chew through it, and its knowledge is not current, even though Mankiw and Samuelson use the same broad framework.
I then looked through Mankiw's Principles of Economics, used by 600 American universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. It is a standard textbook, split into macro and micro parts; the two 16K volumes together run to about 1,000 pages. For comparison, Higher Education Press's Western Economics comes in two 16K volumes totaling about 700 pages.
This year, with COVID-19 pushing economies downward and stimulus plans following one after another, I wanted to understand monetary policy better and bought Frederic Mishkin's textbook on money and finance. It is a 16K textbook, 560 pages thick. The Money and Banking textbook published by Higher Education Press and used in many Chinese universities is 16K and 429 pages. Some universities split money and finance into separate finance and banking courses, which leaves even less content in each.
One point needs to be made: Chinese economics textbooks are largely compiled from American books, so their tables of contents look very similar. Why, then, is the Chinese version shorter? Why is the content pared down? I cannot explain it. It would be wrong to say Chinese students are less capable; they enter university able to study and are smart. Beyond differences in capacity, perhaps the only explanation is the number of courses offered. Chinese universities may offer more courses, so each one gets compressed. That is only a guess. I would be curious to hear from anyone who did an economics or finance undergraduate degree in the United States.
A related question is whether graduates of Chinese and American programs in the same major differ in ability. I still do not have an answer. But Chinese universities have been learning from Western economics since the 1980s; more than 30 years have passed, and no economist with significant international influence has emerged. That suggests something. It may be connected to the teaching and research system in economics, which makes internationally recognized masters hard to produce.
At the risk of sounding preachy, I think students should read major classic works in their field to broaden their knowledge. Textbooks are too shallow. High exam scores do not make you much stronger than others.