As a developer in China, I am re-strengthening my English, and I hope to have the opportunity to find a job in Japan and immigrate. I want free access to information and I want my daughter to have a life of safety and choice. Before the COVID, I didn't have this idea. After the COVID is over, I can't wait to leave. I'm pessimistic about the future here. As a small, ordinary person, I can't change anything, I can only change myself.
As an entrepeneur, I left Russia last year, later than I should have, sooner than I could have. I also have a child and that was not the place I would want any child to grow up in, even if homeschooled (we tried). It's hard at first, but doable, new friends, networks, of course resentment/nostalgia, but part of being a responsible human being looking after another.
As for changing China from within, I can empathize fully [1].
I don't think you're alone, considering child births dropped in halve in China.
They can not protest, but that seems to signify a severe drop in confidence in the government.
As a reference, in the West, child births exploded in COVID.
If you want to talk sometimes, let me know. I'm interested about what's it like there at the moment ( and you can practice your English in the mean time).
Ps. Just mentioning, as everywhere, CCP could be monitoring here. It's a popular site...
"As a reference, in the West, child births exploded in COVID."
Did they really? Looks to me like they've remained static at extremely low levels. The decline since 2009 has been arrested, but that actually happened around 2018, and they haven't really recovered even to replacement rate.
As a reference, in the West, child births exploded in COVID.
Casualization != correlation. People banged a lot back then as they were stuck in home with money in their pockets and nothing to do outside, and getting cheap loans for real estate was not a problem, so having kids didn't seem like a bad decision, not because they had more confidence in their government. Though during covid and lockdowns a lot of couples also broke up.
This trend has rapidly came to a halt in 2022 to 2203, with the war in Ukraine, inflation, high mortgage rates, insane energy bills, high food prices, exploding costs of rents and buying real estate, unavailable housing, longer waiting times in the healthcare system and a shortage of staff, layoffs, hiring freezes or stagnating wages in the private sector, etc.
With the way things happened last in the last 12 months, average people really lost hope in the government, the economy and in the future and aren't rushing to have kids at all.
Though I'm only talking about Europe, not "the west". Maybe things might be different elsewhere like US, Canada or Australia.
Most people didn't bang with strangers in COVID because of restrictions, i remember just after COVID very well what the consequence was :p
Couples decided in COVID to go for the first kid ( or subsequent). The ones that banged for boredom still use protection... Having a kid is a choice here, not something that just happens. People have protection ;)
You're just affirming my statement.
Since the war in Ukraine ( after COVID) it dropped, it comes from insecurity.
So, those in China are insecure too, for the reason I stated.
Note : i didn't verify numbers, just explained the sentiment.
China's birth rate has experienced a serious decline, but as the economy recovers, people may become more confident in a few years. The government is also encouraging childbearing, but I think the main problem is that the cost of getting married (house, car) and raising children is too high. As a 1980-1990 generation, the general idea is to have multiple children, especially in countryside and small towns. Most of my elementary school and high school classmates in my hometown have 2 children, and a few have 3 children. But personally, my wife and I have absolutely no intention of having a second child.
There will be a lot less during the pandemic, and there is only one example next to me. But I estimate that it will increase later. As for how many children a family has, it is not too related to economic conditions, but more to the perception of both husband and wife, pressure from parents, or the influence of people around you (if your friends and colleagues around you have two children, and everyone advises you to have another one, you are likely to change your mind, especially in villages and small towns). In big cities, relationships are a little simpler. ）
Fertility rate dropped because its long trend, at least in EU. Ukraine is not a problem (if you dont read news), inflation cause worries for families much more.
Some years ago, Chinese immigrants came to Japan and were looked down upon as cheap labour. Nowadays, Chinese investors are buying the best real estate in Japan, and Chinese tourists are the main customers of the luxury brand shops in Omotesando.
Japan is a country where each generation is poorer than the generation before. In China, you can give your kids a better life than the one you had.
This kind of argument is very common in China's Internet comment areas, but it is also easy to refute. China's GDP is higher than that of Japan. It has experienced rapid growth in the past few decades, while Japan has lost 30 years. However, as an ordinary individual, what I want to say is who care? I did not share the dividends of the so-called high-speed GDP growth, but only suffered the inflation of housing prices and prices. May I ask the Chinese who can go overseas to consume the luxury goods you mentioned, what class do they or their parents belong to? I have nothing to do. I never thought Japan would be a perfect country, but I also don't think Japan will become poorer from generation to generation. As an individual, I don't care about the grand narrative, I don't care about the international economy, I just want to live in a free Internet, clean food and air, my children can choose not to compete so hard Just live a normal life.
The title is so mundane, and the first dozen paragraphs weren't very interesting, but I'm very glad to have persevered through it. His first-hand account of COVID in China was one of the most interesting I've read in a very long time. It was great! If he could create a separate, edited version focusing on just COVID in China, it would be newspaper/magazine worthy!
I have a rare reaction in this HN crowd. I found the first half completely fascinating. I was born in Yunnan and familiar with some of the region, but left at an early age with little memory of it now. It’s surreal to see this remote region of China written about in English this way. Reading it makes me yearn to visit and see everything for myself!
Dali is maybe my favorite town in China. Not popular enough to be overwhelmed by tourists, but still possessing a lot of bars and restaurants that you could ostensibly just spend a few weeks there having fun. There's the lake, the mountains, the hot springs, the night life.
I've been to Lijiang a few times now (not on purpose, but we had a few company retreats there), and it works really well even if its a hot place on the tourist map these days. But the first time, we did an overland from Chengdu to Lijiang, and I just remember Zhongdian (sometimes called Shang-ri-la for publicity) as an absolutely magical big city in the Tibetan plateau (likewise Litang in Sichuan).
Lijiang is absolute garbage, it's all night clubs and totally ruins the old town's feeling. I tried to get a beer for 120 RMB, but they said they were out and offered the 150 RMB beer, so I noped out. I got a cocktail for like 100 RMB, but they didn't even shake it with ice for me. WTF
150 RMB is $21.71 now, but it used to be almost $25 at that time's exchange rate
In comparison, I got some of the best cocktails I've ever had at a bar in Dali for 65 RMB
> it's all night clubs and totally ruins the old town's feeling.
Ya, totally agree. But there are nice things to do around Lijiang, at least (mountains, gorges). And I have fond memories drinking with Chinese friends there. You aren't going to get great drinks in tourist towns anyways, not like the fancy bars in Beijing/Shanghai.
Beijing bars are too expensive or the drinks are too weak. I haven't found a bar that is actually a good value for cocktails, so I usually go out for beers which are surprisingly good
Heh im French, and when time came to emigrate because I had become fluent in English and tired of France, the choice between the US and China was trivial: I chose China. It's more atheist, safer, more optimistic generally.
I think we ignore it right now, but there s a little migration wave towards China that goes beyond "rich executive parachuted in Shanghai branch", and while we re far from democracy or any kind of "Chinese dream", well, I think I ended up much much better in China than I would have in the US...
China is frigging great, the people are amazing, and we all will build this country despite the communists and the americans doing all they can to fuck it up :D Come back!
You seem surprisingly certain that you’d have been worse in the US even though you never moved there in the first place.
On one hand, being convinced you made all the right decisions is great for your happiness.
On the other hand, as a fellow European who emigrated, and who has faced no issues due “religiosity, lack of safety or pessimism” in the US, I still have no clue if I would have “ended up better” in China or the US.
I see the opposite: European friends who moved to China in the last 15 years leaving, because they can no longer implicitly support an increasingly authoritarian regime so close to Russia.
Covid, China's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the way Hong Kong's separate systems were overridden were all factors, plus propaganda-supported anti-European racism for two people I know who lived in "smaller" cities.
>we all will build this country despite the communists
Yeaah, Russians were doing a good job building the country despite their government, but oppressive dictatorships have a way of manifesting themselves in your life, even if you don't manifest in theirs.
Can you give any comment on the experience living and working in China as a foreign national? How open is the country to permanent immigration/what is the process like? What levels of fluency and literacy are required?
Looking around his site, he did write about Covid in China in magazines, one article in April 2020[1], curiously entitled "Life After COVID-19", and one in April 2022, during/after the Shanghai lockdowns.
What an interesting piece of writing! Even after you think it's ended, he starts writing about the food he had. It's inspiring me to pay more attention to the little things in life (like having interesting meals so I can write/talk about it later...).
I did a similar journey in Yunnan region in 2008, including a longer stay in Dali and I’ve found the first part absolutely fascinating since I can relate to all the places he talks about.
Reading through the 2021 note, it's quite a change of tone.
> Whereas Beijing is hit hard by every domestic outbreak, Shanghai hasn’t had many cases while being the least restrictive city in the country. It’s hard for us fresh arrivals not to smirk at our friends in the north each time we read about new restrictions in Beijing.
I can't help but feel a sense of betrayal in his words. He's very clear in these notes that he feels China is creatively stunted, top-heavy, repressive, yet is still capable of great things. The end of zero-covid was an abrupt end to such a prokect.
Friends spoke about three types of shock. First, the raw novelty of extended physical confinement. Second, the wonder of feeling food insecure in this age and in this city. Third, a disenchantment with government pronouncements.
This was a wild read. It started out as (more or less) an essay on how geography can and does influence how likely it is that you get dissidents living in your political environment, transitioned to how the Chinese State handled the lock downs, connected that with commentary on the likelihood Xi maintains or expands his power and influence, and then called back to the first part to tie everything in a neat little bow.
China is in a state of terminal decline and closing off to the world, barring any huge macro trend reversal (CCP loses power)
- Factories are quickly moving out of China. Judging by the recent -40% export collapse from Hong Kong https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade/Hong-Kong-exports-post..., where Hong Kong serves as the main hub to transport stuff out of China, at least 40% of factory outputs have moved out of China. A few apple suppliers have confirmed the fact https://fortune.com/2023/02/28/airpods-maker-goertek-apple-s.... Unlike the majority consensus on hacker news that "it's too hard to move out of China", almost half the factories that were in China in 2022 had already left. The factories that left and went to Southeast Asia are mainly from the Guangdong and Shenzhen regions.
- Apple, a China laggard, has finally decided to pull the string and move itself and all its related supply chain out of China. Tesla is building its next big factory in Mexico. Samsung has completely left China. Dell is asking all of its suppliers to move out of China. The list of technology multinationals leaving is increasing day by day. The age of China's hold on technological supply chain is over.
- There's about 80% reduction in retail activities in China, 50% reduction in home prices, and 80% reduction in labor demands. Judging from on the ground testimonials from social media in China, such as https://www.youtube.com/@realchina, https://www.youtube.com/@baixingzhengxiang, https://www.youtube.com/@XMKZG666, https://www.youtube.com/@ZGQSL (need to understand mandarin to view). There are millions of unemployed young men walking the city streets, and millions that have gave up and returned to the country side to farm. There are people with entire savings lost in real estate and small business. It's a very volatile situation.
- China's unwavering decision to be friends with Russia with "no limit" is slow changing into "directly giving military aids". US and EU is threatening sanctions on China for this, something that most on this board would consider impossible a year ago.
China's factory activity stuns with fastest growth in a decade
BEIJING, March 1 (Reuters) - China's manufacturing activity expanded at the fastest pace in more than a decade in February, an official index showed on Wednesday, smashing expectations as production zoomed after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions late last year.
The manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI) shot up to 52.6 from 50.1 in January, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics, above the 50-point mark that separates expansion and contraction in activity. The PMI far exceeded an analyst forecast of 50.5 and was the highest reading since April 2012.
This is a government that just raised the retirement age from 60 to 65, proclaimed that one can take on a mortgage at age 70 and let the heirs inherit the mortgage, and do not issue passports freely. Where its banks has delayed its customers from paying off mortgage in full, and from withdrawing large amount of cash. Does that sound like a healthy economy?
HK (and China) export always plunges in the month with the Lunar New Year Holiday. In 2022, that would be February, but in 2023, it's January, hence the large decrease. In fact, HK export this Lunar New Year is the third highest ever, only standing behind 2021 and 2022.
Hk isn’t the main way goods leave China. Guangdong, Shanghai and Tianjin all have massive ports and are still not the only ones. I don’t know why this is being used as a yard stick for anything other than HK is going through a pretty intense change since the failed protest movement.
Which is always hilarious to me that people complain about USD as a global reserve currency and then propose CNY take over.
Whatever the US is doing with sanctions is still much looser than China's controls on capital, and they've made it an explicit point that they would rather keep capital controls and the ability to suddenly put in even more draconian ones, than to become a global reserve currency.
There are certain things that China appears to be the leader in, in particular LFP / Sodium Ion batteries (CATL / Gotion).
It will be interesting to see if the US decides to do to China for those that CHina did to the US for practically ... everything. Essentially take the technology from them with "partnerships" (you see CATL proposing and building factories in EU and US now) that will effectively onshore whatever advantages they have there.
A lot of that GDP growth is in real estate, construction, tearing things down (GDP!), building new things (GDP!), tearing them down again (also GDP…), repeat. Youth employment numbers will give you a better idea of how the economy is really doing, I’ve been through plenty of non-recessions in China where growth is still amazing yet kids are having trouble finding jobs.
China's youth unemployment is at 20% end of 2022. https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20221021-i-feel-lik..., a Great Depression type of number. With the recent estimated 80% reduction in factory jobs in 2023, One can assume the unemployment is a lot worse than 20%. If you look at some of the online videos, you will see factories that are now requiring only female workers, workers under 23, etc. You will see 100 people in line for 3-4 positions.
> If you look at some of the online videos, you will see factories that are now requiring only female workers, workers under 23, etc.
For perspective, this is rather common outside China too. Working in a factory is hard work and factories often have severe age limits. China's demographic problems mean that its time as a factory hub was always going to be limited.
The thing about Chinas GDP is we don’t know their real GDP. We only know what we have been told.
Just like COVID. We are told there’s very few COVID deaths, but we don’t know how many deaths there are and no one talks about the days long queues for cremation.
People have been saying for 30+ years that all numbers out of China are lies. If that's true then China is as poor as Africa. When it's so weak, why worry about China all the time? Just let them die in their misery, there is no China Threat.
In the mean time, you could also visit China, talk to people, and ask them whether they prefer the China today or the China from 30 years ago.
That's such a weird argument. Do people only leave their home country if their home country is bad? Do people who live abroad have no right to defend their home country from slander? The answer is generally "no" to both, but when it comes to China people can't comprehend anything other than "yes".
Just think about how weird that is. I increasingly believe that such hypocrisy simply indicates bad faith.
Every argument you make on China is defending it from any form of criticism. Half the time your defence is whataboutism. Obviously there’s no debate to be had with you when any sort of criticism causes you to go into straight up denial.
You feel like it’s your right to defend your country but it’s strange you want to defend your country and not your people. Majority of people here opening admit the faults in their own countries yet when it comes to China you pop out your red scarf and make sure your family back home don’t get a call. But you call that weird and hypocrisy.
shrug
Edit: as a side note my original message was criticism of the CCP, not China.
How interesting that you are accusing me of whataboutism when you are literally steering the conversation into another direction, dodging my criticism of you. In my first reply to you I stayed on topic (alleged fudging of statistics). In the 2nd reply I did too (living abroad). It is you who is dropping a "dead cat" on the table and yelling "but what about everything else??"
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No I am not defending China from "any form of criticism". I am defending China from your criticism because I think yours is unjust and/or wrong. Big difference.
There are legit points of criticisms. But you are not raising them. Instead, what you are raising is the sort of stereotypical hysterical character assassination that's propagated by mainstream Anglo media. That I will gladly oppose.
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I have had many many conversations with people about China, and by now it's clear that the mantra "I am only against the CCP, not the people" is blatantly disingenuous. We are in a Cold War with the Anglo MSM spouting anti-China hysteria day by day, creating an atmosphere which implicates common Chinese people and other common Asian people as potential CCP spies. This hysteria also contributes to popular support for a war against China. But as anti-Asian attacks in many countries reach a high, I don't see many of these supposed "loving the people and only hating the CCP" figures speak up about that. It's abubdantly clear that we common people are, in such figures' eyes, merely good enough as cannon fodder in a holy war against the CCP. It doesn't matter that the common people are implicated and yet the mantra "loving the people" goes on.
Your comments are the very manifestation of this disingenuity. Apparently your "love" for the people only covers those who agree with you.
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The Chinese people are not China the country? This sort of rethoric is just like "love people hate CCP" mantra: sounds nice in theory, but rings hollow in practice and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. US sanctions against China hurt common Chinese people. US escalating military tensions in SCS and developing consent for war, hurts people. Who stands up for that? Not the HN crowd that's for sure.
Meanwhile,the CCP has 95M members, or 5% of the population. Pretty much everybody has a releative that's a party member. But the Anglo media and govt coalitions are pushing the idea that anybody who has the slightest "links to the CCP" is a threat. This has ruined the lives of a great many American Chinese engineers and scientists. Who stands up for that?
I'll give you the answer in case you didn't get the hint. For all its faults, the Chinese state is the only entity that actually protects Chinese people. They are flawed, but they are all we have.
When a war occurs with China because of this hysteric environment, Chinese people become cannon fodder. So, no sir: defending China and criticizing this anti-China hysteria is defending the people.
Hysteria as you call it is just words and punitive policies. When the CCP starts arming Russia or invades Taiwan as it has signaled it will do with increasing volume over the last five years—reunification is a must—those are violent acts that will lay at the feet of China, not the hysteria of the West.
They've already taken a side with a country determined to wipe the identity of tens of millions of people from the earth and do so with tanks, shells and hundreds of thousands of armed men. What is there to defend there? How many tens of thousands of people must be murdered for their soil for China to disavow it's unlimited friendship?
No it's not just "words and punitive policies"! Very real people, common and innocent people, are getting attacked on the streets or having their lives ruined by baseless accusations of being "CCP spies" or even "virus spreaders"!
Nearly 90% of the defendants charged with spying are of Chinese heritage. This includes citizens with connections to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and long-standing Chinese diaspora communities in Southeast Asia https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/02/1040656/china-in...
The environment is pushing the idea that there's a commie under every bed, so they're massively charging many innocent people, and you deny this is hysteria and even look the other way?!
Now you are even engaging in whataboutism for the 2nd time, right after having accused me of doing it.
For all your talk about being only against the CCP, you sure show that you don't care about the people. You're blatantly denying anti-Asian racism that's flared up as a result of all this hysteria.
And in any case you completely side-stepped addressing my point that any violence that results from Western hysteria (as you put it) lies squarely at the feet of China. China alone will be responsible for the deaths that result from a forcible invasion of Taiwan. China will share bloodied hands with Russia if they sell arms to Russia to advance its crusade of terror.
> So you're essentially saying that it's okay to attack Asians in the west
You seem to care alot more about how Chinese people are perceived abroad than you are at home. While covid coming from China caused increased racism against Asian people in the west, it pales in comparison to the human rights violations that occur on a daily basis in China.
Tho I guess welding people into their homes, separating children, killing animals, genocide against an entire ethnic population, social credit system, millions of homes forclosed, banks stealing money and destorying peoples lives, etc. It's all fake western news.
We know this is all fake because harvard released a paper detailing the results of a survey done by a chinese company in a country where all research and surveys must be reviewed by the CCP before being released told us that 98% of the country loves the CCP.
What's the point of raising all these things? I can dispute those claims but at this point it doesn't matter one bit whether those claims are actually true or not.
How does flooding the media with such claims improve human rights in China? They achieve no positive effects for anyone in China: sanctions and war only hurt people. They are also spectacularly effective at making the lives of Asians in the west miserable.
Yet you keep myopically focusing on these claims, heedless of the actual harm they do to innocent people, just so that you can feel like you're being virtuous for raising these claims. You are not actually supporting human rights, you are abusing the very concept to feel good about yourself.
See what I mean, you care more about saving face than the people suffering. "none of its true, I can dispute it, its you who is wrong"
Look, I don't know why you keep replying to me. No one buys your propaganda and conspiracy theories and whataboutism. You can keep getting upset all you want but it doesn't change the fact you're doing nothing more than attempting to protect the CCP.
You've broken the site guidelines so badly in this thread that I've banned your account. This is a longstanding pattern and it's seriously not cool on this site.
I hate to ban you, because you've been here a long time and you've posted good things. But this kind of abuse is simply not ok, and if we don't ban accounts that break the rules this badly—not to mention ignore this many warnings—we might as well ban nobody.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You've also broken the site guidelines in this thread and continued to do exactly what we asked you not do to in the past. I'm not going to ban your account right now because (a) I don't think you broke the guidelines quite as badly as the other account did in this thread (though I haven't read it closely), (b) I understand what it's like to be representing a minority view, and (c) we haven't given you nearly as many past warnings. But you're seriously breaking the HN guidelines here and we've warned you before. If you keep this up, we're going to end up having to ban you as well.
Also, when I look through your comments, it seems that you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's another line at which we ban accounts, because that's absolutely not the intended use of this site. If your primary interest is to argue about politics and national/ethnic/ideological struggles, HN is not the site you're looking for. Please don't keep doing this.
So you are endorsing current violence against Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese citizen in the United States, before China has actually performed any invasions?!?
The Apple-focus is indicative of a wider trend - viewing China and its economy through a Western lens - even seeing what we want to see. The CCP is going nowhere, the market while having taken a recent hit, is in no way about to collapse.
> There are people with entire savings lost in real estate and small business. It's a very volatile situation.
The same could be said of NYC or Switzerland in the previous couple of years too.
Export is 20% of China's economy, real estate is another 20-30% of China's economy. That's 50% of the total economy. Based on on the ground estimate (short sale/foreclosure by the court figures), real estate price has collapsed 50%. Based on Hong Kong numbers, export has collapsed 40%. The vicious cycle of collapsing demand -> job losses -> weakening spending -> investments pulling out -> collapsing demand will see no end.
The mind-boggling side for me is that the West is obsessed with Apple leaving China, but never bothers to check where all the EV manufacturers are. Even Tesla, without the Shanghai factory, would probably be doomed.
If I had to put money on which EV company becomes the next major car company of the world, I would almost certainly bet that it's going to be a Chinese one.
So sure, while a stagnant industry that is no longer growing may leave and that sucks, but the next huge growth industry is firmly entrenched in China and dependent on Chinese companies.
> If I had to put money on which EV company becomes the next major car company of the world, I would almost certainly bet that it's going to be a Chinese one.
I know nothing about EVs so I wouldn't be able to tell whether you're right or not, but
> or BYD, whose stock has been offloaded by Warren Buffet by 1/3 since august of last year?
Arguing that a company would fail because Warren Buffet no longer holds their stock seems a bit weak. Berkshire Hathaway doesn't hold a lot of stocks, but you wouldn't say most public companies are doomed to fail. And Berkshire doesn't hold any Telsa stock either.
> Even Tesla, without the Shanghai factory, would probably be doomed.
That makes no sense whatsoever: all the Teslas (Model 3/Y) produced in the Shanghai plant are meant to be sold in China. Without the Shanghai factory, Tesla wouldn't have much of a Chinese business, BUT it wouldn't affect at all its production capacity for the rest of the world.
The only EVs made in China that are being sold in the USA ATM are the Volvo/Polestar EVs made in Luqiao. There is a huge tax on that (into the USA from China, likewise for cars coming into China from the USA), even BYD opened a factory in california to get around that for their EV bus production (and Tesla's Shanghai plant exists for preferential tax treatment in China, which is a no brainer business move).
If China is in terminal decline and closing off to the world then why is everybody hysteric about the China Threat? Why is the US throwing increasingly harsh sanctions on China, to the point of coercing allies into sanctioning China as well?
I propose that the media and HN stop reporting on China, and that the US stops sanctioning China. This frees up mind space and resources to focus on domestic problems such as climate change, income inequality, housing, improving democracy, etc. After all China is in decline anyway so no point in worrying about them, right?
The US lost a war against Afghanistan FFS. A China in terminal decline is probably still a "threat" to the US in the sense that American Imperialism still wants to believe it can enforce its values by sheer military power.
China’s involvement in atrocities against Uighurs (including putting them in “reeducation” camps, forcibly sterilizing women, forcing Uighur women to marry chinese men, trying to erase Uighur culture) is reason enough to maintain and increase sanctions. Sure economically countries often ignore things like this, but with the current US orientation against china Increasing, it makes sense to focus on this more.
> Apple, a China laggard, has finally decided to pull the string and move itself and all its related supply chain out of China.
Apple got shaken down by the Chinese government right before Covid. If they didn't finally pull the plug after that, I would have to question whether anybody was awake at the helm.
That means wages have equalized in every country, which is a good thing. I was talking with someone a few years ago who is from one of these third world countries who lamented that corporations were coming in. I asked them whether they thought the people who worked there would prefer a relatively stable factory job over backbreaking farm work, factory jobs which usually pay more than the average wage of the area anyway in order to entice people to start working there. Free trade is good.
Factory work is not going to come back to the west in a big way. Labor costs would make goods more expensive than customers would be willing to pay.
When there are no more humans willing to do the work for cheap, which will happen when the third world catches up with the first world, everyone (including third-world factories) will pivot to robotics and automation as much as possible.
Really not sure what trade relations between the US and China has to do with the very general strategic practice of placing factories in countries with low wages and limited worker rights, in order to cut costs.
China is not the cheapest place in terms of labour costs. Hasn't been for decades.
But my point is that contrary to the rhetorics and the politics, western countries hasn't stopped trading with China, actually the opposite has happened.
> China's unwavering decision to be friends with Russia with "no limit" is slow changing into "directly giving military aids". US and EU is threatening sanctions on China for this, something that most on this board would consider impossible a year ago.
This is pretty contradictory. If you're friend with no limit, military aid should be clearly on the table. There are in fact hard limits.
China is extremely hesitant to send military aid and have been his entire time. I don't think they will send anything noteworthy personally, but it's more than plausible I'm wrong here.
I'm vaguely optimistic that a Ukranian move to get Crimea within fire control will in fact make the war come to a relatively fast end. Ukraine simply needs to recreate the conditions that led to Russia's flight from Kherson in Crimea. Such a loss will be far more devastating. At that point something needs to give. Fingers crossed for the spring.
China is falling into the Dictator's Trap with Xi. I'm not saying the Communist Party was ideal, but having a system where the entire party kept itself in check worked surprisingly well, and each generation knew the next generation, including their children, would inherit the party and they worked to keep things good and all the factions in check. With Xi, there is no point in any of that. You surround yourself with sycophants and send away anyone who you deem a threat. Your concerns for the country become entirely around how the country can benefit yourself, specifically securing your position as their master until your death. Expect to see a lot more nationalism and isolationism as Xi pits China against the boogeymen countries of the world.
>>> but having a system where the entire party kept itself in check worked surprisingly well, and each generation knew the next generation, including their children, would inherit the party
The system you are talking about was Jiang's faction. Every few years one or the other faction becomes dominant. Now it's Xi's faction. Nothing has changed, it is business as usual.
That's ignoring that Xi ended presidential term limits and stacked the PSC with loyalists. The last Chinese leader with this much concentrated political power was Mao Zedong.
I don't think so. It boomed epically from Deng Xiaoping opening up to Xi closing down a bit again. But Xi won't be there forever and the place will muddle through. Maybe a temporary relative decline for a decade or so.
China backing Russia only further entrenches Western support for a side that is fundamentally winning the war.
And really, China is backing Putin to a certain degree, not Russia. If Putin's regime falls, the next power structure has a choice:
1) ally with Europe and apologize to the newly empowered Ukraine that is just a couple hundred miles from Moscow (and now has a modern, well-trained Western military of substantial capability), and where all your elites want to travel and live in
2) ally with China who are thousands of miles away, where most significant economic activity is across deserts and mountains, and none of your elites want to visit
while Mao's era was comically brutal and took a wrecking ball to economic development it also unified the country (China's foremost problem throughout thousands of years of history), life expectancy jumped by 30(!) years, and the country obtained universal literacy. Today in India a quarter of the population is still illiterate.
The evaluation of Mao's legacy seems somewhat emotional, short-sighted and ahistorical given that modern state formation, for example in Europe, was almost always preceded by catastrophic violence.
And of course the rise of China in the following decades invalidates the claim that China 'declined terminally', unless we're literally inverting the meaning of the word 'terminal'.
I mean does perspective not matter if we're talking about history? The Qing conquest killed 30 million, so did the Taiping Rebellion. 40 million died during the Three Kingdom wars, in 200 AD! About half the population at the time. Dynastic historical change in China was always that violent. It's not that unlikely that people in a hundred years, if China continues to develop, look at that period as the foundation for it.
No different than our perspective on Napoleon. Incredibly brutal, brought war to Europe, but also implemented the civic code, arguably the most influential legal document in history.
Of course it's a big deal, but certainly we're more mature than descending into Godwin's law two posts into the conversation?
Mao despite his failures is the foundational figure of modern China. He's not Hitler, who brought ruin not just to the Jewish population but to Germany as well. Mao still matters in China, Hitler doesn't in Germany. It's historically impoverished to grasp for Hitler analogies and having a reflexive panic attack every time Mao is up for discussion. Same with Stalin. Both still have significant influence in Russia and China, among the people as well as leaders and understanding why that is makes some sense.
Earlier you said "The Qing conquest killed 30 million, so did the Taiping Rebellion. 40 million died during the Three Kingdom wars, in 200 AD! About half the population at the time."
I'm not sure how one could interpret that as anything other "no big deal Mao killed a lot of people, lots of people have died in other empires".
And you're somehow conflating their legacy with the death toll. Those are separate things. Mao's brutal rule can be condemned while at the same time acknowledging his influence on China today.
And I would argue that Hitler had a massive influence on what Germany is today. Look at its role in the EU and its policy towards other countries and conflicts.
not only modern Europe itself is the consequence of war, but so are its individual nation states. Bismarck explicitly engineered the three so-called unification wars because he believed that German unity was only achievable while facing an enemy, hence the symbolic founding of the nation in Versailles.
Same is true for America really. The country transformed twice, once through civil war and then into a superpower with a modern state during World War II. Military competition and war both internal and external are by far the strongest drivers of modernization.
...And they would have been right until the 1980s. "If only Taiwan were unified with the mainland in the 1950s, they also could have experienced the horrors of the cultural revolution" is not great marketing for reunification.
China was in terminal decline in the late 1800s. The period until 1980s was not decline, it was attempt to recover with various success. Mistakes were made, but success were also made. Despite the famine, life expectancy was steadily increasing during the Cultural Revolution, in no small part thanks to the "barefoot doctors" program of organizing and allocating medical personnel.
Western comments on the Cultural Revolution is one-sided and myopic. The Great Famine was a failure to recover. It was also the last famine: famines were a regularly occurring event even before PRC. And Taiwan also wasn't a great place back then.
Well, although arguably not as bad as mainland China under Mao's rule. Taiwan didn't have any democracy back then (before late 1980s). And interestingly, the US was OK with Kuomintang's dictatorship.
Oh for sure. The reason Taiwanese dislike mainlanders ruling them so much is probably more due to Chiang Kai Shek than Mao Zedong. They would just have nothing to do at all with Chinese politics, they don't want to be ROC as much as they don't want to be PRC.
The USA was actually on China's side about supporting Pol Pot, with Vietnam against. Things are definitely blurred in history.
And they were right for 35 of those years. Will they be right or wrong in the next 35?
Wealth is a headwind against bad policy. Rich nations can survive many, many bad policies simply because they are rich. The policies it takes to get rich, stay rich, and continue to grow into the future all vary, and the transition is difficult to manage.
I think the relevant question is: are China's current policies pushing the country in the right direction? I don't see how they are.
Jack Ma shows how dangerous it is to be truly successful, so the next generation will at best be more conservative in what they pursue, and at worst won't even try. Given Western money won't be investing any more - the ability to realise capital gains is growing more difficult - and the CCP steals the wealth of potential investors, not being able to pursue big bests is probably inevitable anyway.
China has AWFUL demographics that are getting worse - their population is projected to be 650M by 2100 - and worse it is aging fast, with > 50% post retirement age in the next decade to 3.
On top of that, the CCP has re-emerged as the only force in China. CCP officials see stealing the wealth of other's as their right - a twist on the old joke to "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's fortunes to steal".
Minimal foreign investment, killing internal investment by stealing the wealth of anyone rich, rising wages, awful demographics and a polity determined to remain isolationist (with few to any friends) and knock down the high achievers sounds like a recipe for imminent (in the decades sense) collapse to me. Not to levels of Sub-Saharan Africa, but even just with their population decline, China's GDP is going to fall in absolute terms, even if their GDP PPP per capita can be improved.
The scary thing is a Nuclear China in decline is likely to become increasingly erratic. Hopefully, the war in Ukraine gave China some pause, but having gone from starvation to world's largest economy in a generation, I'm not sure China is equipped for stagnation, let alone decline. I feel bad rooting for a likely vicious and brutal CCP internal crackdown over invasions of their neighbours, but that seems to me the lesser of two possible evils.
Well depends on what terminal decline means. GP added the caveat of regime change. You can't be right for X years and then wrong thereafter, that just meant you were incorrect that there was terminal decline.
> Jack Ma shows how dangerous it is to be truly successful,
There's a conceptual gap that can and should be opened up. "Successful", even "fantastically successful" doesn't mean that you get to start throwing your weight around the state and social order.
It's fundamentally about being bound by the same rules and expectations as everyone else. He shouldn't be able to use his wealth and connections to try to steer the course of the state, or buy his way out of a situation he doesn't like. That sounds pretty damn wholesome and egalitarian to me.
Personally, I have a fair bit of faith in their government, because they have the economic and political levers to rapidly pivot to where the Next Big Thing is. Look at their dominance in solar manufacturing. You can argue it's low value, not innovative, whatever, but they certainly found a way to take over a significant industry that has global impact. Could the West even supply their demand without China's current market share?
I have to wonder if being a single-party state also helps keep their political discourse sane. There's no need to pander to an extremist base to make a candidacy viable, and there's the chance to say what needs to be said without risk of electoral backlash.
> China is in a state of terminal decline and closing off to the world, barring any huge macro trend reversal (CCP loses power)
While everyone would love this to be true, I've been hearing this shit for a decade.
I'll believe it when there are Islamic dronelords rampaging through the hinterlands of Sinkiang province, neo-steppe cyberwarriors laying waste to Peking, and Elon Musk has a territorial concession over Shenzhen.
That's what a proper true-blue "China collapse" scenario looks like in the 21st century, accept no substitutes.
Please speak for yourself only. Also, not everyone want bad things for others because of some hatred guided by politicians. PRC is no worse than the US - just different.
Naive western question here. You see headlines about this type of person quietly dissapearing. But it's not clear to me how real or common that is. Is this guy likely to end up incarcerated for this kind of post?
You can say anything in China as long as you don't question the legitimacy of the Party's right to govern.
The people who get disappeared are people who organize protests or try to sue the government. Not people who just attend protests. People who distribute VPNs, not mere users of VPNs. And ethnic minorities.
Absolutely fascinating. It suggests that the party has overtly broken the compact with the people, to keep them safe and offer prosperity for a price of social conformity.
What's left works by limping along but another privilege gone each time reinforces that the future may not be better than the past. An internal struggle in the party for power has "wrecked the joint" for everyone else.
I think they've made a mistake. It may not wreak havoc now but future cohorts may be less willing to be part of a one party state that breaks its internal promise so severely.
The long term excess deaths will echo in education, economic and defence outcomes. Claiming victim status or launching out to reclaim Taiwan may well happen, but also may not work: people have a strong "fool me twice" reaction, and the diaspora talk to people at home, Great firewall or not.
There's not a lot the state can do about it.
The idea of fringe cities and hill towns in the provinces as "pressure relief valves" the central authorities accept in some sense, reminded me of Ira Levin's "this perfect day" and the hidden maps to sanctuary islands for the rebellious.
If I were in the party, I'd be very worried about "quiet quitting". They sort of caused it.
Glad Dan decided to keep writing these these letters.
>I acknowledge that my views may be too colored by the resentments of Shanghainese around me; and that I might be wrongfooted in my assessments.
And despite being one of the better writers in the expat bubble, also self aware enough to acknowledge PRC like any other country has their (regional) bubbles whose experiences he may not be privy too.
If you're curious why the monks slip a picture of the Dalai Lama behind the Panchen Lama, it's because the Chinese government kidnapped and hid the Dalai Lama's selected successor and replaced him with a stooge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gedhun_Choekyi_Nyima
Really quite extraordinary.
It is beautiful in my opinion how we in Europe and USA stan, cheer and celebrate those Chinese brave resisters of COVID regime, but when the same people see someone doing same in Europe or USA they want to put them in a camp.
And no it is not beautiful it is actually fucking disgusting.
The sentiment is understandably scary and totalitarian in nature, but the consequences of the extreme American predilection toward individual choice has indisputable negative consequences at the population level. Video games are a leading explanation for why American men are increasingly satisfied to not work (https://w.wiki/6Qck).
Video games and TikTok aren't even the worst of it. The progressive American agenda in drugs is towards decriminalization. States like Oregon are at the vanguard of this (https://w.wiki/6Qcq), and the impact years later is widely seen as contributing to an epidemic of crime, homelessness, and bad health outcomes. China is the leading source of the worst synthetic drugs like fentanyl and meth (https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...).
Of course, the correct response is to not go the totalitarian control route, but to retain the flexibility and creativity that American independence fosters, invest in positive countermeasures (CHIPs act investment in manufacturing employment, drug treatment and diversion), and heavily regulate industries prone to create negative externalities.
It is worth reflecting that the bureaucrats in China are probably of a higher quality than their colleagues in the west. The difference in the COVID response is mainly down to how much power each group had.
>The Chinese state is usually levelheaded; but every so often it succumbs to a manic episode, in which it grips the population, not relenting until it has shaken them out of their pots for backyard steel furnaces, out of their schools for class struggle, or out of their minds for dynamic zero clearing.
What happened here isn't a case of the government going insane. What happened here is the case of the government making a hypothesis and then being completely wrong about the hypothesis.
China isn't the only country that has been wrong. Parts of the US was definitely wrong about the pandemic in the initial stages and they suffered for it as a result.
If omnicron turned out to be as lethal as ebola or equivalent than China took the right action. That is really all there is too it. They took appropriate action for a coming disaster and they turned out to be wrong about the disaster.
The interesting thing here is not the fact that China was wrong. The interesting thing is that if China was right, then China is literally the only first world country with the capability to execute these drastic measures at a massive scale. From these massive lock downs to the creation of hospitals to deal with the fallout in mere weeks... illustrates the true controversies between authoritarian and democratic governments.
As a US citizen I grew up indoctrinated on freedom and democracy. But the truth is actually not so black and white. Either way I know which government I'd rather be under if a zombie outbreak broke out.
They persisted with covid 0 well into mid-late 22. It was very clear 2 and a half years into the pandemic that covid was not ebola.
Hard-line initially is defensible, rationalizable.
Later not so much.
The other conclusions seem off too. Other Asian and South Pacific countries demonstrated their willingness to lock down and turn more authoritarian in the face of an unknown threat. They pivoted though.
It was clear for 2.5/3 years that covid0 was defensible as it enabled most of PRC to operate with relatively little disruption, wasn't until after omicron that the system became unsustainable. Persisting for another few months _ when able _ to figure things out understandable. It's a luxury other hard lock down countries didn't have, and who didn't pivot, they conceded to living with covid because they simply lacked state capacity to tackle omicron. Difference is PRC did, hence wasting a few months, or buying a few more months of insight, before calculation or reality forced throwing in towel as well. Fairly responsive as far as decision making goes.
Analysis goes full stupid when it comes to PRC policies / decision making. Seemed exceedingly rational that something as infectious as omicron was all or nothing containment affair. Just like western mRNA wank despite mRNA failing to prevent spread post delta - their only distinguishing advantage that would have helped buy more time - if worked as advertised but didn't. As if PRC would spend months and billions to vax population on political unreliable western vax for what, a few % better severe case protection among high risk elderly. Or build up reserves of expensive paxlovid when to be blunt, that's luxury reserved for high income countries. The most prudent thing to do in lieu of omicron spreading to point that required massive lockdowns after dynmamic clearing couldn't contain was simply to abandon covid0 enmass - what everyone else did. I suppose people expected PRC could have done some sort of measured transitioned, which itself is recognition of PRC state capacity, but by my assessement is that's throwing good money after bad. CCP gambled a few months to see if dynamic clearing had a chance, it didn't, next best thing was just to live with omicron as fast as possible.
>They persisted with covid 0 well into mid-late 22. It was very clear 2 and a half years into the pandemic that covid was not ebola.
It was not clear what omicron was.
Anyway I don't entirely blame them for maintaining the hardline even well past the advent of conflicting evidence. This is actually normal human behavior. People cannot flip their opinions and beliefs in the exact instant they are presented with opposing evidence. Humans just don't work this way. There's no individual or government that will reverse a policy and admit a mistake instantly. Literally not one. It's not right, but I don't expect any other form of behavior from a human or humans running an organization.
>The other conclusions seem off too. Other Asian and South Pacific countries demonstrated their willingness to lock down and turn more authoritarian in the face of an unknown threat. They pivoted though.
Naw not at the scale of China. It's easy for a small island to execute lockdown. It's extremely hard for a landmass as large as china to execute the same thing.
I'd disagree with the first point there, they were very late to pivot.
The rest seems internally inconsistent with where you were initially. I think it's because you might have stretched the kernel of wisdom, "authoritarianism may have some benefit in the kind of disaster which is only mitigated by authoritarianism" a bit further than it goes on its own merits.
They screwed up by doubling down. Your main point would actually be a lot easier to defend if you separated it from the overextended Chinese implementation.
> I'd disagree with the first point there, they were very late to pivot.
Relax the US took 10 years to apologize to the Japanese people they threw into internment camps. That was a bigger fuck up than the china covid lock downs.
>The rest seems internally inconsistent with where you were initially. I think it's because you might have stretched the kernel of wisdom, "authoritarianism may have some benefit in the kind of disaster which is only mitigated by authoritarianism" a bit further than it goes on its own merits.
Internally inconsistent? No it's not. And you didn't point out where too. Just a vague, "seems inconsistent".
It's also not really a stretch. Part of the speed and efficiency in China's response comes from central control. Part of Americas dying infrastructure comes from lack of centralized control, too many Nimbys, different motives and conflicting opinions.
>They screwed up by doubling down. Your main point would actually be a lot easier to defend if you separated it from the overextended Chinese implementation.
Yeah they screwed up. But my point still stands. Also it's not the biggest fuck up. Not by a long shot. Take a look at the US blowing up the nordstream pipelines. Holy shit a literal act of war/terrorism on an allied country. The US is no stranger to dark shit and huge fuck ups on a scale equivalent if not worse than china.
Relax the US took 10 years to apologize to the Japanese people they threw into internment camps. That was a bigger fuck up than the china covid lock downs.
I wouldn't count on China ever admitting they messed up. That's just not how it's done there. Hands will be waved, stories will be spun and they'll talk like it was a perfect strategy.
"Saving face" is very real in Asian cultures. If you can avoid ever admitting a mistake or fault, you do it. I saw it a lot while living there.
I 100% agree with this. I'm Chinese (racially) so I know. That being said, it doesn't mean other "cultures" don't have the concept of "saving face". It's an inborn thing. Genetic. I haven't met anyone asian or not who admits their mistakes with ease. Think about it, 10 years of not apologizing is not that far off from never admitting a mistake.
I will agree with you that from my own experience that this does effect the Chinese more than other people in general. But my argument here is simply that the Chinese had a superior response to other democratic countries when handling covid.
The response ended up being from certain perspectives, mistaken, and the slow reversal of the response while, wrong, is something that governments (including rival governments) also do similarly.
It took me a while to wrap my head around it, but saving face is more than just "not admitting mistakes". It's the view that your social status and honor is based on not being wrong or admitting mistakes.
A good example of the differences are apologies by Western governments for past wrongs. Doing so can actually increase social standing among the population. Admitting guilt and wrongdoing can be seen as a redeeming quality.
But I do agree that not admitting fault is a pretty universal human thing. I think "saving face" has more to do with the social pressures around it.
>A good example of the differences are apologies by Western governments for past wrongs.
Do they apologize for their own past doings or does one US faction throw another faction under the bus through a half-hearted apology?
It seems most of the US population considers an apology worthless at this point, atleast if it's not attached to financial compensation which is the case for the majority of mistakes or crimes. They are just considered political lip service.
I'm chinese. I understand what you're talking about it, More than you. But you are taking it too far. The concept is exactly the same as the the universal thing about not admitting fault. It is exactly the same.
The main difference is the concept has been crystallized into the language and is more prevalent. It is not anything more than that.
It's likely someone who was natively born in China is trying to explain the concept to you without fully understanding western culture. He likely thinks western culture is some sort of pristine culture with no concept at all of "not wanting to admit fault" and was trying to explain it to you thinking that the concept was completely absent from your background. No, this is wrong.
I'm a creature of both worlds. Deep insight into western culture by virtue of being born in the states and deep insight into east asian culture by virtue of being born of the chinese race, having family who is chinese and also having friends who are all chinese.
The duality of my origins make my insight more calibrated in this regard.
Tell me what you observed because you're dead wrong. You're a foreigner and treated as such, your interpretations are likely through a filtered lens. I'm not.
Perhaps you know you're wrong and you're trying to save face?
When you look at Chinese people "saving face", when you look at the Chinese government "saving face" keep in mind that sometimes you're looking at a mirror. We're not that different. I think you mistook a popular Chinese idiom for some Chinese cultural quirk.
As a foreigner, I read the same local news same as locals. I can observe the behavior of governments when it comes to "saving face" versus Western governments.
It's pretty obvious that in countries like China the idea that the government can "never be wrong, never show weakness" is different than the Western approach.
This is a authoritative government thing. Not a Chinese thing.
The western government does the same shit. Their reach just isn't as far as the Chinese government in its ability to completely lock down the media. Instead the US government typically does what they call "a cover up".
Both governments launch massive amounts of propaganda, both would take a loong time to admit thier mistakes if given enough pressure. The only difference is, in china no one is allowed to deliver pressure.
It's unmistakable. The US did it and everybody in Germany and Europe knows it. The US was meanwhile over-concerned with their first major F-35 kill ever: Balloon gate.
> European countries did much better than china regarding covid. US did protlly because of many internal issues which seem to be unadressable.
The US did poorly because of lack of centralized control and abundance of karens and the male counterpart. China had the superior response in terms of infrastructure adaption.
It was very clear what Omicron was by that point. China didn't really relax restrictions until December 2022. By May of 2022, most other countries had pretty much opened up and had Omnicron run rampant through their populations.
My hypothesis is that China stuck with it so long because: 1) their vaccine wasn't that good and they refused superior mRNA vaccines and 2) their ego was all wrapped up in the "glory of the Chinese way" of dealing with Covid and letting it run rampant was tantamount to admitting their policy was wrong.
Doubtful. Pfizer manufacturer 4B and Moderna almost the same. Plus Fosun-BioNTech partnership allowed manufacturing in Hong Kong. There was certainly capacity to produce enough or at least enough for a large percentage of the Chinese population.
China just decided they weren't going to use it. It literally wasn't allowed.
If China had used a mix of mRNA and other vaccines I might see the argument they had a lack of supply.
Hong Kong imported the vaccines. The city was international enough that using a foreign (non-Chinese) vaccine wasn't a political statement that the Chinese vaccine wasn't as effective. The political calculus is different for China generally.
The plan was to manufacturer the vaccine in Asia for the Chinese market.
I agree that the politically, China didn't want to use Western vaccines.
BioNTech and Fosun Pharma are setting up a 50-50 joint venture to make and sell the COVID mRNA shot in China, with manufacturing capacity to produce up to 1 billion doses a year, Fosun said in a filing (PDF) to the Hong Kong Exchange on Sunday.
Setting up… so you’re saying they don’t have access to it now… Which means they didn’t have access to it in January… Which was my point the entire time.
This just isn't true. There has never been enough global supply for China AND the rest of the world. If there was, why (as you stated) would they be setting up net-new manufacturing of it?
That, coupled with the fact that the Chinese population have resisted getting vaccinated meant that it was never a viable strategy to purchase billions of doses and open up. The only option they had was COVID-0 style strategies.
I dont know why youre so hung up on “not enough supply for China”. There is no binary option. They could have imported multiple vaccines (like Vietnam and many other countries did) and used what they imported.
They didnt.
Instead they used their home grown vaccine which had terrible efficacy.
The FDA would be asking for submission if that vaccine was from Europe. There was a huge supply side problem in the US in the initial stages of the pandemic and any additional vaccines could have alleviated this issue.
It's not about the technicalities of submission. It's about whether or not there was political desire to "bend the knee" and ask for a vaccine. The answer is obviously no. Neither side will do it.
> What happened here isn't a case of the government going insane.
You're missing Dan's references to the two notable previous cases of the Chinese state adopting batshit insane policies and persisting with them for years, namely the Great Leap Forward ("their pots for backyard steel furnaces") and the Cultural Revolution ("out of their schools for class struggle"). Both were calamitous, directly leading to millions of deaths, and accomplished nothing at all of use.
What Dan is saying is that the Chinese state has a track record of adopting policies and sticking to them for lengthy periods despite mountains of evidence that they're harmful, and their COVID response is only the latest example.
Democracies generally have a harder time doing this, because they have checks and balances that prevent going to extremes (welding people into their homes etc) and the governments responsible will eventually get voted out if public opinion turns against them.
> What Dan is saying is that the Chinese state has a track record of adopting policies and sticking to them for lengthy periods despite mountains of evidence that they're harmful, and their COVID response is only the latest example.
I know. But that's separate from my point. Dan is not wrong about China.
Additionally I would argue every government acts this way. It's human nature. When someone fucks up big time it takes them awhile to voluntary face that fuck up. Governments are no different.
I mentioned this somewhere else but the US one time threw the entire japanese population in the states into internment camps. It took them 10 years to apologize. The internment camp thing is an epic fuck up. Epic. And it took 10 years the government to admit they were wrong.
>Democracies generally have a harder time doing this, because they have checks and balances that prevent going to extremes (welding people into their homes etc) and the governments responsible will eventually get voted out if public opinion turns against them.
This is garbage. Democracies are no strangers to dark dark shit. Again as I mentioned in a sibling comment on this thread, the US recently blew up the nordstream oil pipelines. Literal act of terrorism against an allied country. Germany is clamming up because they don't want to start WW3.
Not to mention the CIA torture program or the CIA program of SELLING crack cocaine to americans to finance their foreign operations.
Literally throw a dart and it will land on some atrocity conducted by the US, there are tons and tons of shit you can dig up. It's no different for China. Just apples and oranges.
Humans aren't white knights, and operate in areas that are morally grey. This aspect of humanity is reflected in governments, independent of centralized or democratic organization.
Are you with a straight face arguing that autocracies are morally equivalent to democracies? Remind me again which democracies have let 15-50M of their own people willfully starve to death (Great Leap) or willfully destroyed nearly their entire cultural heritage while killing millions in the process (Cultural Revolution)?
It's no coincidence that the three bloodiest mass murderers of the 20th century -- Hitler, Stalin and Mao -- were all dictators, and while the US has done and continues to do a whole lot of repugnant shit, nothing comes close to any of these three.
>Remind me again which democracies have let 15-50M of their own people willfully starve to death
The US and other western countries blocked Chinese emergency imports of food that wouldve saved those people. I've never heard of China willfully allowing people to starve to death but the democratic US has done just that to it's own indigenous population, children in Iraq, and countless other countries.
>Are you with a straight face arguing that autocracies are morally equivalent to democracies?
I judge morals by actions not by labels. If a country dropped a nuclear bomb on hiroshima slaughtering millions of innocent civilians. I don't judge that country based off of a label of "democracy", I judge it based off of action.
If a country kills millions of people by letting them starve to death than that country is ALSO judged.
Not only do I not Judge a country based off of a label. But I don't hold any loyalties to ANY country. I don't join teams or take sides. I judge dispassionately with ZERO patriotism. Patriotism is bias. You should not hold it for a country or for a philosophy. If democracy has issues I judge it, it communism has issues I also judge it.
This idea of the ludicrousy of asking the question: "Are you with a straight face arguing that autocracies are morally equivalent to democracies" is raw garbage. I don't take sides. EVER. And I hold all things equal until I look at evidence and form conclusions from that ONLY.
>It's no coincidence that the three bloodiest mass murderers of the 20th century -- Hitler, Stalin and Mao -- were all dictators, and while the US has done and continues to do a whole lot of repugnant shit, nothing comes close to any of these three.
It's not a competition. The point for why I pointed out atrocities in America was to sort of tone down the bias against China. To help people see that there are negative aspects of both countries and to help eliminate this idea that a democratic country is some kind of paragon for moral goodness. It is not.
Many Americans are blinded by the current cold war rivalry that they are unable to see the things that China got right. China EXCELS and is SUPERIOR then the west in many areas. One of these areas is large scale response and organization to potential threats LIKE the pandemic.
That's an ahistoric claim. People standing up to the CIA, FBI, or othe parts of the US government that are a reasonable threat end up falsely arrested, assassinated, or tortured and killed in blacksite prisons.
From 2020 to 2021 I would have agreed with you, but after the vaccine was out Chinese citizens mostly all got it. The remaining restrictions were absolutely unnecessary and actually ineffective.
Even now, you need to wear a mask in public transit, and just to come into the country you need to take a COVID test before your flight. You get a COVID test after touching down.
But for what? That's an unnecessary expense for the traveler since nobody does free COVID tests. My girlfriend paid $140 in the US for one, I paid $50 in Korea (it would have been $80 in the airport, but I wasn't at the airport at the time)
>>> but after the vaccine was out Chinese citizens mostly all got it.
When the restrictions were lifted and the cases skyrocketed, it was because people hadn't taken Sinovac. Chinese don't trust chinese vaccines. Everyone was flocking to macau to take foreign vaccines
If there's a seemingly "free region" that everyone knows about and deflects to, you can be 100% sure that the state knows about it, knows everyone who "deflected" there, and keeps tabs on everyone.
A smart authoritarian government will have these "free" zones as a pressure release valve:
- Most active dissidents jailed
- Active dissidents allowed to flee the country
- Somewhat active ones allowed to "flee the regime to the free-thinking zones far from government control"
It's not a "free" region, just a remote, poor province where the central government is less relevant. As the Chinese say, 山高皇帝远: the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.
If there was a genuine insurgency, as in Xinjiang and Tibet, the central government does get involved and stomps down hard.
天 (and probably meaning heaven where the gods live).
A grounding would be to visit Mount Tai and see the clouds beneath you when the weather conditions are just right. You have the same picture looking out the window of a Boeing 737max8. Anyway the ruler and ruling elites used to perform ceremonies on Mount Tai, poeticly gods living in heaven.
天 looks a bit like the picture postcards of Mount Fuji from various angles.
I think people overestimate how authoritarian China is. Not in the good sense, but in the central government has limitations in what it can pay attention to (large country, lots of local governments, not a lot of police, etc...). Truth is, China can be a very free place at the same time it is restrictive (easy to break laws and not get caught, hard to hand out fliers in public criticizing the government...at least in Beijing).
Let's say you're a teacher with known dissident tendencies. Boom. Suddenly the only place you can get work is one of these remote regions with lax control. Yes there is less government there, and you can even start a book club or something to read and discuss banned literature, and no one will bother you.
But try and get out because you're tired of rural life... and no place in the "mainland" will acept you. Or will only offer you menial jobs and unskilled labor.
This was a very widely and well-used tactic in the USSR. Can't see why China (or any other authoritatian state) wouldn't do the same. Especially China with their current state of surveillance tech.
Your hukou is going to limit where you can get work. So you just can’t move to a remote region and become a teacher there, since it is a government job. But exiling is really rare, it’s much more possible that you are stuck in the backwards rural place where you were born or your parents held hukou.
