As a Chinese I would say that the points in this article, though true, are not among the driving reasons.
If you ask me, I would present this list:
1. Practically, there are only 4-5 cities suitable for 'tech talents' in China. The properties prices in these cities are comparable to the ones in NY and SF while the salary isn't. BTW: you have very little chance to be able to get married without a property under your name in China. This isn't a 'tech talents' specific issue but 'tech talents' have more chances to emigrate.
2. There is no union nor labour law in China (well technically they both exist but..). So labour abusing is normal. Many tech workers are 'voluntarily' working 996 (which mean 9am-9pm, 6 days a week) on a 955 pay slip.
3. Chinese society is relation-oriented. Tech workers hate that. For example often the promotion goes to the guy who has the closest relationship to the manager.
4. Primary/secondary education in China is very, very cruel. Many people don't want their children go through it if possible.
Thanks for saying these! As a Chinese as well, I agrees with you with these facts, they makes China less favorable to many of us. For some of your points, I'd share some different interpretations.
1. Yes - Housing is a problem. I think it is a salary problem. As tech corps in US earns money from the whole world, most Chinese tech corps can only attract Chinese customers. So the value generated from a same piece of code, is better in US. This makes US engineers' salary and status relatively higher in the society than those in China.
2. Yes - people are working 996. But I won't blame the law. I'd blame the culture, or the competitive nature of Chinese tech industry. Union doesn't do anything in China, but labour law does. It is written in favor of workers and executed properly, ask any entrepreneur in China. The problem is, I never seen anyone sued their employer. And there are a damn lot of people that actually working 996 voluntarily without asking by their boss, making the normal ones less competitive if they don't do this.
3. No, I don't agree here. - In tech companies of both countries, I found no difference, relationship does not matter that much even Chinese employees do have a closer personal relationship than US employees. And in other industries like finance, there are no difference either, b/c both countries are 'relation-oriented' in these industries.
4. Yes - I would not say its cruel tho. India, Korea, Singapore are all like this. Its just very competitive due to the limited educational resource and the amount of people who wants to use it. But yea I wouldn't send my child there (If I have one).
5. Pollutions - Sad, Beijing is not a human-habitable place anymore... Shanghai is still okay.
Again, I think the facts you provided are main reasons that stop people going back. Those in the article are slightly wrong(Github, VPN .etc) or not important(foreign business entry barrier) for individuals like me.
As a foreigner who lives in Shanghai for almost 8 years, the list would be a bit different:
1) pollution - Since the Disneyland has opened, things are improved. But above the regular days, it is depressing when finally the weekend came and you can't leave the 4 walls.
2) overpopulation - I don't mean the large population, but the overpopulation. There is no space for cars, yet everybody is buying, sometimes a two lane road becomes barely one, because one lane is completely blocked by parking cars and bikes going randomly. Parks are small and spare in the city. There is barely playground for children only expensive indoor ones.
3) People.. I know I know, but it drives me mad, you can only queue up like once in a year when nobody will come to the front to you. I can't count how many times I've seen that cars just blocking the ambulance in rush for no reason.
When you stop with your car because the road is blocked, it's guaranteed sby from the back will try to overtake you either from left or right. My friend had a light accident with a motorcyclist (50%-50%), he brought him the hospital and paid everything. Few months later he was dragged to the court and was charged for 28K RMB (~$4K) (including the bills he paid in the hospital, fortunately he kept the cc receipts, the repair of the bike cost like a new one etc. even if it is mostly paid by the insurance, very depressing to see this amount of fraud). And so on..
Of course you can meet nice and good people, but still the daily routine will be different (also gave up counting how many times i was almost hit by a car or motor).
4) The first green is like 4 hours driving. And not easy drive but bloody fight. Have to be fully alert, people even overtake you on the shoulder of the road + I can't recall I ever could drive without seeing accidents, see barrels or other things on the road.
5) internet - after 7-8pm it is basically cut, so overloaded, no website loads that is not hosted in the country. You have to use some kind of vpn for everything! ... your gray hair is granted. No form of video-chat works beside wechat. Skype though exists, in the current year, was really painful communicating with my parents.. as my experience goes only works during working hours or on mobile net. In this year when i go home, I started to consider it as an offline zone.
.. sorry to be honest, no pun intended. It is how it is (My wife is Chinese so Im halfway there also :)... and things are improving with time, just way too slowly, Except 2. and 4. that can't be really fixed. (can't imagine anytime soon that it will be a dream destination..)
3. I disagree. I've been working in the tech industry (in the U.S) for over 8 years now. Relationship with the manager absolutely matters as far as being paid more and promotion. That's my experience in all 4 tech companies I've worked at. Though there are props for merit, but at the end of the day, and especially at the bigger firms, it's your relationship with higher ups that gets you there.
> 4. ... limited educational resource and the amount of people who wants to use it
Is this really the case? I can't imagine a country having to limit educating students because of lack of resources. I hope they're not doing it artificially just to have a gradient.
Maybe my word choice is wrong. 'Limited' here does not mean someone is limiting the resource. It means the scarcity. In another way, it is limited by nature. Like how it is used the definition of Economic Problem: "How do we satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_problem)
Back to your question, China is not limiting education. But the education is limited by the nature of a lack of resources problem.
Lets say we are in a university called US. We have 10 students and 10 Profs in US. Then every student could easily get into the course they want. An entry test might be placed only to make sure the student has knowledge required for this course. But in another university called China, they have 20 students but only 5 Profs. So a entry test is placed on those 20 to select the best 5 students for classes. So these 20 students need to study damn hard for the chance to get into the course they want. For here, prof is a 'limited resource.'
It's not really much different from the US. There are a few elite universities that have very competitive admissions and then a bunch of second-rate local universities (although the elite universities in China are about the same level as second-rate universities in the US). The problem is that university admissions in China is decided entirely based on a single test. You basically get one shot. If you don't do well, that's it for you (unless you have rich parents that can send you to the US to study).
> I can't imagine a country having to limit educating students because of lack of resources. I hope they're not doing it artificially just to have a gradient
What I've heard about India is that there are a few (15, IIRC) prestigious Engineering colleges and everyone wants to go there. So high school students have to outdo each other to get a place, meaning a lot of study & completion. The gradient is not intentional
How much is race or religion factor as well? I'd read somewhere that it is nearly impossible to immigrate to East Asian country if at least one of your parent wasn't native born of that country. The laws around citizenship simply doesn't allow that. In some East Asian countries (perhaps Japan?), someone outsider can't get citizenship even if married to citizen of that country. Wouldn't lack of long term future prevent talents from other countries migrate in first place?
I tend to think that US is able to suck up of large portion of talent from all around the world like vacuum cleaner because laws are race and culture blind. When I look at winners of Nobel prize or Field medalists or Pulitzer price winners or popular movie directors or music performers or entrepreneurs, it doesn't escape to me that immigrants or their children make up disproportionate number of these people while all other countries bloodlet their talent.
China, or PRC, has issued fewer than 2000 green cards to foreigners every since its foundation, and most of them are issued to people who have Chinese ancestry.
Race. Chinese people are pretty...racist to TBH. But if you are White, it is probably going to benefit you. Good luck if you are people of colors. People hate PC here, but you will hate China for zero PC as well. A part that I really don't like about China, is a lot of people seem to judge others like it is their own damn rights, unacceptable.
Religion. Not really a lot people care, not even the government does, if you just practice yourself. But you are openly advocating about that, people will frown upon you, and will keep you distance.
>But you are openly advocating about that, people will frown upon you, and will keep you distance.
Having lived in an oppressively religious area (in the American South) this is one of the things I like best about China. It's a relief, compared to how it is in super religious areas.
If I felt like talking to someone about religion I'd have to go out of my way to do it. The urban areas in the South are no more or less religious than the North unless you are in a few cities (portland).
The PRC on the other hand has actively persecuted religions/cults (the Falun Gong are a prime example).
No. PRC doesn't persecute any religions now as long as they obey laws and don't trouble anyone. There are lot of Buddhists and Muslims in China. People and the government pretty much doesn't care about religion.
But Falun Gong is 'persecuted'. It is different from other religions. Now, it seems to be an peaceful religion, but Back when it was operating in China, it is not. It seeks political status, motivate its people for illegal activities, and people lost they lives because of it.
I understand you cannot believe me. But ask other Chinese from mainland china, shouldn't be hard to find some if you are in tech industry.
(They might refuse to share their opinion because they know the answer might offend you.)
> The urban areas in the South are no more or less religious than the North
Yeah... that definitely has not been my experience of urban areas in the South (mostly Atlanta, Dallas, and Galveston, assuming the latter two are considered "South").
It's subtle enough that I don't doubt that it isn't particularly noticeable from the inside, but as an outsider it was obvious to me.
Along with the general religiosity, there is also this pervasive assumption that everyone is a Christian that feels rather oppressive. I've only found Utah worse in that respect (the only state where I'm a gentile).
That said, Data is not the plural of Anecdote, and my personal experiences could certainly be far from representative.
Red China has only 1,488 naturalized foreign-born citizens.[0] But there are a lot more permanent residents than that. Those that marry Chinese will have children with citizenship.
In the Republic of China/Taiwan you can become a citizen with no parent being born there. You have to give up your foreign citizenship and may be subject to potential military conscription depending on your age and gender.
If you have the marriage visa you can do this after 3 years residence - it's 5 years residence with a work visa
2. There is no union nor labour law in China (well technically they both exist but..). So labour abusing is normal. Many tech workers are 'voluntarily' working 996 (which mean 9am-9pm, 6 days a week) on a 955 pay slip.
The US is headed that way. Uber, etc. Trump's new Secretary of Labor is a CEO from the fast-food industry and wants to abolish the minimum wage.
5. Pollutions etc.
Yes, China's big cities look like US big cities circa 1970. It took the US about ten years after the Clean Air Act to clean that up. Li Keqiang claims that fixing this is one of his top priorities. He has the authority, and the technology is known.
On point 2, a lot of startups run that way to their own detriment.
The other cultural and pay issues seem a bigger deal to me, if true. So many of the best people I've met over the 10+ years in the valley care about things other than owning a home, for example.
Owning a home is nice but it can't be emphasized enough that their heart was in the work, and everything else followed.
I understand that that attitude may be one of privilege but it is what it is.
What is tech culture — at least the bits that other people want to replicate? It's about being at the edges, pushing what's possible. Or the value-add, if you're an economist. :P It's worth noting that even in the Bay Area, it's just a minority of the scene that truly aspires to this ideal. There's a lot of hanger-ons, even here. What's different about the Bay Area is that non-conformism allowed those weirdos to actually lead.
Personally I would put pollutions as #1. IMO there's nothing that makes it worth exposing my family and me for any prolonged time to the often dangerous levels of pollution in major Chinese cities.
Another thing is that it's practically impossible for a non-chinese person to get citizenship or even permanent residency - even if you marry a chinese citizen. At the end of the day the Chinese government (and maybe its people as well) does not want foreigners living their long-term.
There has even been a recent circular to not issue indefinite contracts to foreigners works. They are only allowed to employ the person for a maximum of 5 years (although extension of contract is possible). Not so sure what the deal with this is.
1. Part, When compared with average salary. Some of my friends spend 3 hours on the way between home and office everyday...even they worked in big tech companies like Baidu.
For marriage, most of my classmates without house get married, this is a problem but not "little chance".
2. Yes.
3. Part.
4. Don't know, it's OK in my opinion.
5. Yes, it terrible..air/water/land
Some more:
1. food security, this is also terrible
2. lots of people don't follow rules like run the red light and cutting into the line
3. Health care, it's cheap, but the quality is poor, especially in small cities.There's more than 10 medical accident among my relatives
> Primary/secondary education in China is very, very cruel
Could you elaborate? Based upon what I see here in Canada, chinese immigrants maniacally push their children to all functions that can be found around. And it's considered good when there're many chinese children in your kid's class.
It would be a book. There are of course extreme workloads from both the schools and the parents. But to me there is something worse - the public shaming culture.
I live in the UK now. Something very odd to me at the beginning is that I can never know how good my kids are doing compare to their classmates. The teachers would politely refuse to answer such questions. And the 'parents meeting' is private to one pupil's parent(s) and the teacher.
In China things do not work this way. Every test - and there are a lot of them - is publicly ranked. There will be a very large poster at the back of the classroom with the ranking on it. The parents' meeting is a meeting for all parents of that class together. A teacher will read the ranking aloud on the stage to all parents. The top pupils will be invited onto the stage and receive praise, which is alright. But the bottom pupils will also be invited onto the stage and receive criticism - in front of all peers and their parents. The idea here is to motivate them work harder to avoid the shaming - or to motivate their parents to push them harder to avoid the shaming. It may work for some. But I see more harm done than good here.
Yes. One can draw a direct line between shame-based cultures and an unwillingness to take risks for fear of failure. The most harmful outcome of this is lack of innovation.
Japan and Korea pretty much did the same thing, and they are not accused of lack innovation. And China is not actually lack of innovation nowadays, catch-up maybe but a strong player already.
There is nothing inherently in Chinese culture that prevents innovation. Innovated people gonna innovate, when they got the resources they need.
Poor country usually aren't very innovative, and China has become much richer at national level. To bet, there will be more innovations from China than not for the next several decades.
> The most harmful outcome of this is lack of innovation.
Maybe not Silicon-Valley-type innovation, but there have been plenty of innovations out of China's very long history.
Even in more recent times, I remember reading an article about Chinese research into floor tiles that can identify people as they walk via weight and shear. This was 6-10 years ago, I don't know whatever happened to that project.
Edit: I will posit that the people who take risks in the Valley do so not because of 'culture', but because they are well-off and/or well-connected and can afford to fail in terms of time and money.
"The idea here is to motivate them work harder to avoid the shaming - or to motivate their parents to push them harder to avoid the shaming. It may work for some. But I see more harm done than good here."
Yes, I think that this is very counterproductive.
Finnish kids don't even go to school until age of 7 - and they do as well as the top chinese students.
Are test scores calculated relative to the top performer - so that there will always be bottom performers - or is there a bar that everyone could clear so no student would be shamed?
That's the teacher's call. If consistently underperform pupil once underperformed less he/she may even get praised. On the other hand. If a top 3 pupil ranked 10 once, he/she may receive some shaming. Different teachers have different styles
And of course. Some teachers won't shame pupils at all. But the rankings are always public. No one can change that.
Doesn't matter which way they are calculated. Names are listed in order of performance. Additionally, at least some schools place students into classes based on previous years rank.
def: willfully causing pain or suffering to others, feeling no concern about it.
Shaming is undesirable, but I wouldn't say publicly knowing how you rank compared to others would constitute "cruel". Its really how the world works - in sports you see exact stats of how your do, publicly traded companies/CEOs are meticulously analysed publicly on how they perform etc. etc.
There does need to be a balance btwn hypercompetiton, and "everyone gets a trophy" mentality. I feel like the US has swung far to one side and china the other. Best would be some where in the middle. Maybe have a live list of the top 10-15% of student scores.
I am a parent, and don't want to hurt my daughter, but at the same time a little pain and suffering makes you stronger.
> There does need to be a balance btwn hypercompetiton, and "everyone gets a trophy" mentality.
Yes. Praise can be more damaging than criticism in many cases.[1][2] Certain types of praise in the form of encouragement can be very good things. Certain types of constructive criticism can be empowering.
> a little pain and suffering makes you stronger
What is "stronger"? More emotionally resilient? In my opinion, suffering just results in risk aversion. There is not a lot of positive that emerges from it. Note that I'm not referring to establishing boundaries, which may be what you're referring to with your daughter.
I agree with the thrust of what you're saying, but tech jobs are absolutely allocated on the basis of an extremely contrived test (the whiteboard interview).
Executive jobs wherein you can get fired for losing to your competitors compensate you for this risk by paying fuck-you money on a yearly, sometimes even daily basis. If the CEO of Exxon is fired for failing to overtake BP, he could never work again and still die with more in the bank than I will ever earn.
Ranking in academia does not reflect real-world conditions.
> def: willfully causing pain or suffering to others, feeling no concern about it.
willfully: check; suffering: check (the shaming); no concern: check.
Actor: state/school as a whole. So I think it applies.
I think this is sum of the parts different than the whole.
I was just pointing out that cruel has a very negative connotation ie - inhuman, barbaric, sadistic, evil, abominable etc. Applying it in the previous use case seemed excessive and implied a more radical tone than I believe the author (as he mentioned) wanted.
In the US, it is the same. I had no idea how my son was doing other than his teacher was lying to me. At the beginning of the year, it is impossible to do better than the middle. Not sure if the reasoning was so the children can show improvement? I knew he was doing better than the middle but how well he was doing was a mystery.
Unfortunately you may be seeing the side effects of the recent rush to quantify teacher performance- in most states a teacher now must show a year's improvement for all of their students, no matter how high or low they are when they start the year. And since children tend to develop in fits and starts instead of a nice linear progression, you can imagine that the system may tend to be gamed.
As a Chinese, Chinese culture think taking the education is the best way to be success. Honestly, most think that's the only way to do it, no matter they are poor/rich, or even under educated. if they(including me) want their kids to live better in the future, the fundamental thing is education.
I attended a very competitive high school in China, and under pretty high peer pressure, books were stacking up on my desk. The final goal is getting high score in "SAT" like test(also much harder) and attending good university. Some of my classmates get medal from International Olympiad and have higher chance to get in to good universities.
That's a common situation in Chinese high school. I'd say most Chinese high school are equally competitive. I am in a not so high-ranked school in Shanxi. And I literally have less than 1 day of rest each week. Each day it's from 6am to 9pm. Early self-study, day lecture, and night self-study, all in classroom...
How much are you learning and more importantly, are you retaining this information?
What subjects / topics are you studying?
The reason that I ask, is that I work in IT. If you spent this amount of time devoted to learning a programming language, web design, etc... you would be in an excellent position to work remotely for a company like mine. If you spend 6-9 learning everything under the sun, I think it is kind of a waste.
Whatever it is they learn/how they learn/etc it seems to be grossly inefficient.
I noticed literally no difference between my Canadian students and Chinese/Korean students as a TA at a top university here, other than the international students being more likely to plagiarize/copy work. Also, the international students were way more likely to be smokers - not sure if that's a cultural thing, or if it's caused by being stressed the fuck out because of the ridiculous education system there.
While I agree with your observations, there is also some element of selection bias. Most Chinese students that are able to make it to the US come from rich families since most internationals don't get financial aid (so maybe they're more likely to be spoiled/entitled).
Also, depending on how "top" your university, it may have been easier for these students to get into your university than the top universities in China (e.g. they have lower test scores than their peers at the top unis in China).
It was "cruel" retrospectively and perhaps from the point of American society. Yet it was not really "cruel" when I was "in it". It was not a burden entirely carried by individual students. The entire class was working hard. Everyone was more-or-less tired after class. Teachers and parents accommodated my needs and gave encouragement as long as I was striving to do well in school. Thus it might be ignoring the context to simply push one child in the US to Chinese level of school-work without considering the society around.
I can't speak about your particular experience, of course, but generally children tend to accept their experiences as the norm. They don't have other experiences, are naturally in a very subordinate position, and are powerless. They can't really deny or hate their parents: the child's actual survival, as well as their welfare and happiness, depends on their relationship with their parents. Consider how many adults won't challenge their bosses (the great majority); now imagine a child's powerlessness, lack of confidence, and even lack of understanding of their own situation matched up against the authority, capability, and power their parents. Even adults in such situations tend to accept their fate and deny the possibility of anything better.
I also disagree that cruelty is just a relative term. It is to some degree, but pain and suffering have absolute values. When you break your arm or your loved one dies, the suffering is essentially the same whether you are in New York or Shanghai.
I doubt you mean it this way, but claims that other cultures don't value life or suffering have been used as a justification of brutal treatment.
I'm a Chinese and I moved to US 5 years ago. Some of these are not true at least when I left China (I still go back every year and don't feel these at all).
>BTW: you have very little chance to be able to get married without a property under your name in China.
This is exaggerated. I've only seen such thing on news or from rumors. But in real life, a lot of my friends, classmates and colleges (both male and female) got married without owning a property.
>Primary/secondary education in China is very, very cruel
How can education be cruel? You may say it's hard or ineffective, but cruel?? What happened to you in your child life?
One way education is cruel is the one-shot at college thing. My wife's from China and her family is amazed that it is possible for her to go back to university in the USA.
Yes, presumably they meant cruel as in merciless or unforgiving (which is acceptable usage). This is a constant in everything from documentaries like the last train home or the biggest chinese resturant in the world and even a theme in major movies like aftershock.
People say that China is 10 years in the future and 10 years in the past, but in many ways it's 50 years both ways.
The article is avoiding the elephant in the room: the lack of openness and information access is merely a consequence of having an illegitimate regime where everything is ruled by coercion, corruption, and political connections.
While you're there, if some company dumps chemicals in your backyard, somebody with a badge hounds you, or your employer refuses to pay you, good luck getting your day in court. They'd be doing this knowing they have rank and/or connections and you don't. There is no real rule of law in China. That makes it hard to be an attractive destination, regardless of how "hot" the local IT sector wants to look to the rest of the world.
Especially these days, where a quiet but massive purge is under way, and the regime's current propaganda is to push a heavily racialist/manifest-destiny style narrative, as a "welcomed immigrant" not having Youtube access would be the least of your worries.
What's striking about this description is that a number of would-be Western leaders seem to be looking at the situation and saying, "Wow, that looks great. I want my own."
But can you blame them? For years China's mantra to the West was, "Look at how great our economy's doing! Look at how divided and problematic democracies can be, they are not even that much better than China on human rights! The 21st century is not for idealistic democracies but for China."
Same story about Japan in the 80s, and quite honestly I think they did a far better job at managing their investment driven growth boom. China looks like a total disaster in comparison, and I'm pretty sure they are close to the end of their boom.
I really disagree with you. We have had a couple of dozen communist states, and every one of them has turned out bad. That's because communism is basically an unworkable system. See, for instance, Hayek's argument on information and economic decision-making.
In fact, Marx claimed that capitalism in advanced economies has contradictions that would eventually lead to its being overthrown by the workers, but that has never happened. Instead communism has always been installed through violence on the part of a small group or imposed from without, and usually in states that were not economically advanced.
> I really disagree with you. We have had a couple of dozen communist states, and every one of them has turned out bad. That's because communism is basically an unworkable system.
All of those have been Leninism or its descendants, which break strongly from Marxism. Starting with the required starting conditions.
> In fact, Marx claimed that capitalism in advanced economies has contradictions that would eventually lead to its being overthrown by the workers, but that has never happened.
It's happened in basically all of the countries that were capitalist at the time, where capitalism (that is, the 19th century system that Marx was pointing to) has been overthrown (largely, through democratic means) due to opposition from the working class and replaced with the modern mixed economy which retains some of the basic structures of capitalism, but many features of socialism applied to directly to mitigate the effects of capitalism which can critics from the time the system was named have targeted. (Many of those sytems even call themselves socialist, and the rest of them are labelled that way by their capitalist critics.)
This is going to sound like concern-trolling, but I'd thought that Marx was afraid of the possibility of the Social Democrats winning (i.e., a modern mixed economy forming) -- since this would leave the current holders of property-qua-power still possessing it, while making the workers comfortable enough to no longer desire revolt. But my memory here's faulty, and I suspect it might have been Lenin who was hostile to the Social Democrats -- although Lenin has never struck me as a particularly subtle thinker, to say the least. Did the Social Democrats even exist as a faction in Marx's time...?
(As for the rest: let's hope that the term "modern mixed economy" continues to spread. Calling the postwar Western system "capitalism" has led to a lot of confusion.)
From what I understand, Marx was opposed to reforming capitalism, since he thought it could steer the working class, at least temporarily, from the total revolution he was pushing.
I have read that Social Democracy arose in part from the failure of the working class to revolt and overthrow capitalism. In the communist movement at the end of the 19th century there were two different responses. One, lead by Eduard Bernstein, decided instead to turn to electoral politics and try to move the economy to socialism in gradual steps, and so they joined the other groups that had formed the Socialist Democratic movement.
The other group, lead by Lenin, decided to change the party into an elite group that would lead the working classes to revolution, and this lead to the communism movement as we know it and all the totalitarian states it produced.
Yes, they are mixed economies, but they are a long, long way from what Marx wanted. For instance, there has not been the dissolution of the state that he predicted.
"Communism" in the sense of "stateless, classless, moneyless society" has rarely if ever been achieved in real life. "Communism" in the sense of central planning by an undemocratic bureaucracy with totalitarian power was a fucking disaster.
The article doesn't mention that but another possible factor is that life is not that great over there either. If you are not Chinese, you'll always be a foreigner there, even if you spend ten years in the same city, so that makes it difficult to integrate. You'll also have to deal with the Chinese administration for the visa, residence permit, etc. which is quite a pain. It's definitely a great place to visit or even to spend a few years, but it's not that welcoming if you want to live there more permanently.
I agree, having arrived in USA 7 years ago, I have seen that its much easier to integrate in United States, especially if you live on East Coast or SF/LA. Sure there are visa and green card hurdles, but as a society Americans are probably more accepting of immigrants than any other country, except maybe Canada. Of course my experience is as a relatively well-off indian studying in United States, other will have a different experience.
... Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Spain...
The US immigration rate (immigrants/year/1000 pop) is significantly lower than all of the above. Norway and Spain are the top two in terms of rate. Australia is 21% foreign-born (excluding Brits and Kiwis), and NZ is not far behind. The US is only 14% (with no exclusions) - not much more than the UK's 12%.
I realise that these are 'just numbers', but the experience stacks up as well. NZ in particular is famous for its very welcoming attitude to migrants - they actually have a problem in that people use the easier-to-get NZ citizenship to 'hop' to Australia, where there's a better economy and hence jobs; thus NZ spends a lot of resources training new citizens in things like English skills, only to have them 'brain drain' away.
This is my observation: If you're Indian, being "relatively well-off" is not your only advantage: (White) Americans tend to view you in more favorable terms. It's almost as if we welcome you with open arms.
I am an Indian in the US. I get the general idea of what you are saying, but I should note that it has a strong implicit assumption of a very liberal community. In such communities (say in SF or NYC), I am welcomed pretty warmly. On the other hand, in a bunch of mostly male, middle-aged, Christian tech people in Middle America, I am regarded with a mildly welcoming/neutral attitude at best and open hostility that is leaning-towards-but-not-exactly-racism at the worst.
So this "advantage" you mention is somewhat double-edged depending upon where you are.
That "mildly welcoming/neutral attitude at best and open hostility that is leaning-towards-but-not-exactly-racism" attitude proves my point. That's much better than what folks from Black Africa, many with a much lighter skin tone than you, experience.
> It's almost as if we welcome you with open arms.
Perhaps there is something being lost in cross-cultural language or sarcasm, but I don't think "We might be racist to you, but we're way worse racist to this other group, so you have it good, really" should be expressed as "..as if we welcome you with open arms" and "You have an advantage...". Both of those are traditionally very positive expressions and you are applying them to fairly negative actual events.
I agree that the wording might be a bit inaccurate, but the sentiment in the liberal cities is definitely very welcoming. Personally, having lived in Austin, a liberal city in Texas, I've rarely encountered any explicit racism.
Than an Indian is the ex-governor of Louisiana and the current governor of South Carolina is an Indian woman says a lot. And those are are some of the reddest of states.
My understanding is that even "open hostility that is leaning-towards-but-not-exactly-racism" is better than an Indian person is likely to experience living in China.
Racial discrimination is completely legal in China. Why the hell would anyone want to move to a country where they can legally be discriminated against?
An H1B doesn't have to reapply for a work visa every year, and they eventually get a green card, while green cards are extremely rare in China. Also, you don't have to re-register at the PSB in the states a few times a year, waiting in line just to get a little slip of paper.
It is easy to get a working visa in tech, that's for sure, and if you have a company that jumps through all the hoops for you, it can be relatively painless.
I'm not familiar with China's system. But let's not pretend a lottery based system, where the only thing that decides whether you can stay in the country or not, is random number generation, like H1-B is great.
China's system is basically just "No, you can't stay". As of 2010 exactly 1,448 living immigrants had managed to become citizens. In contrast, the US naturalizes 700,000 every year.
The country actually has more billionaires than non-Vietnamese refugees.
You mean how the child of an immigrant is President?
The president's father was never an immigrant. An immigrant is someone who comes to life permanently in a new country. He was a foreign student with a wife in Kenya and eventually returned to Kenya with an American third wife upon the completion of his studies.
Several presidents have been a child of an immigrant: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Chester Arthur, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover.
US immigration goes beyond just the President's personal views and desires. The present situation is pretty difficult for many would-be immigrants, even those from middle class backgrounds in stable countries. If they lack a degree or their degree isn't recognized, they can't easily get a work visa (for permanent resident status, not temporary workers). They have to get married, go for the diversity visa program, or become a student (may be their second or third degree for some if they go this route).
This is true. But compare it to other countries: even where immigration is more relaxed, the cultural acceptance of foreign culture is greater in the US than most places. The only place I might prefer to be as a foreigner would be Canada.
Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, mother to Donald, was born on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in 1912, emigrated to the US in 1930, married an American in 1936, naturalized 1942.
Yes, and it would be a less strong argument. Being a recent immigrant in the United States is not easy, and feeling integrated into the new country is a challenge. Being a recent immigrant to China is incredibly hard, and feeling integrated is impossible. All arguments could be made on all sides of every issue; that doesn't say much about practical realities.
Also the american culture is very wide spread through media. Watching Hollywood, music, sitcoms, talk shows, stand ups etc. ever since I was 10 yo and able to understand english definitely helps absorbing the culture even from eastern Europe as myself. Visited the US for 2 weeks and really felt as if I was no stranger at all.
Very true. Most places in the US are fairly welcoming if you can speak English and communicate. It's even common for xenophobes to cut out an exception for immigrants and minorities they know personally and feel friendly toward.
I believe the author should have explored another reason: English.
One of the legacies of the British Empire is that a lot of the educated people in the world use English. Even in Europe, it is the lingua franca for business and academia. (In mighty Germany, the top institutions publish in English).
I think the applications and work would have to be done in English for China to effectively attract global talent.
Is learning tones much harder than learning all the weird vowel and consonant sounds that English has? I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds and languages like Spanish and Japanese as easy in terms of sounds.
In my experience, if you're sorta close in English, you can sort of get your point across, even if you mispronounce words, because the mispronounced word means no sense so you start thinking about a possible explanation.
In Chinese, a different tone actually is a valid word with its own meaning, so it's a bit harder for you to get your point across.
To be fair though, if you nail all the other parts of pronunciation/speaking correctly and only get the tones wrong, a Chinese speaker will be able to infer your meaning the vast majority of the time.
Half of Korean vocabulary is Chinese, with pronunciation based on ancient Chinese pronunciation, but Korean has no tones and their writing system has recently become more or less completely phonetic. Disambiguation is still not a huge problem for them.
I've met foreigners who have had TERRIBLE tones but still manage to get their point across in Mandarin because of context. Your explanation for why English works despite mispronunciation is the same reason why Chinese works: context. For example, let's assume we were talking about our families. You want to say: 我爱我妈 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my mother". But if you said 我爱我马 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my horse", I would assume you meant you love your mother because of the context.
> I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds
Glad you mention this. I don't think most native English speakers are aware how complex English phonetics are. There are subtleties that only native speakers can distinguish. That is why many not-native speakers mispronounce some sounds. It is not that we are dummy. Our brain is just unable to hear (and produce) the exact sound.
English is a strange language, but I wouldn't say especially difficult. Chinese is much harder to learn because it's so inconsistent between what you're supposed to say and the way people actually talk. In addition to using tones that are very unfamiliar and then you also need to learn the written language which is very difficult and requires a Chinese-Chinese dictionary for strange words like manticore and sometimes you can't even find them.
I'd put English at around Russian difficulty, hard, but easy to get going. English also has the advantage of having a simple character set (less letters than Russian, French, etc) and English also has a ton of cultural artefacts (songs, movies, etc) to sink your teeth into.
My problem with Russian (unlike say, French, which I've also studied) is that I can't even find music to listen to that's anywhere close in production value to English and there are a couple of good movies (Leviathan, for example) but you can only watch them so many times. I don't know of a single Russian TV show that is anywhere close to HBO or Netflix quality. I'd love a recommendation though if someone here knows of one.
English does have a great many more sounds than Chinese, and very complicated grammar relative to any Asian language. (The tones make up, to some degree, for the paucity of sounds in Chinese.)
A native English speaker, I have always been perplexed by the tendency of foreigners to use "the" incorrectly. A space ship orbits "the Earth" but not "the Mars", for example. But then I tried to find a guide to using "the"...it is one of our most mysterious words.
It has more vowels (and more frequent consonants), but tone doesn't change the word in English. It can change the meaning (denote sarcasm, sadness, or questioning) but using a higher or lower pitch doesn't change the way you'd write out the word. Remembering tones is like adding imaginary numbers to your math, it's something you never thought about that you need to now account for everywhere. Learning new individual sounds is hard (and I have to do it with Russian) but I don't think it's as hard as the tone business in Chinese.
As for filler words in English: I totally agree it's madness. The word "set" has like 20 definitions. But you can mess them up and people will still understand you. "I break into car" (the way a Russian learning English would say it) vs "I'll break into the car" are both understood the same; whereas in Chinese if I mess up a (to my ears minor) tone, the information is completely lost.
Tonality and use of filler words are not really relatable.
Mistaken tonality is more like saying "tree" instead of "three".
Tonality is another feature of a speech sound like aspiration or voicing. Although it is not easy for English speakers, there no reason in principle to single it out as especially difficult.
I can try and guide you around good Russian music, drop me an email to alamar at my.com or friend ilyak on last.fm - that's me. Note that I'm a fan of all things DIY, production value doesn't mean as much to me as actual content.
Regarding movies, you can always go for a huge layer of Soviet films. They take some using to I suppose, but then the supply is endless.
Yes, but English is still phonetic. If the speaker slows down it's much easier to understand the person, even (or especially) if they speak in monotone, and even if they don't insert breaks in their speech. Inflection in English primarily serves to assist rapid processing, but especially in business communication it can be dropped entirely. Something similar can be said for word order, and to a significant degree even grammar.
As an American I find it very difficult to under British, Irish, and Australian accents. The inflections really throw me off. But the remedy is easy--ask the speaker to slow down. When they speak slowly, I don't need to rely on inflection. (Except in Cork, Ireland. My Spanish is horrible, but I found it easier to converse with people in Guadalajara, Mexico than in Cork, Ireland. At the bus station in Cork I didn't understand a single word coming out of the clerk's mouth. I know she was speaking English--and not Irish--but beyond that I was clueless.)
Likewise, when I've traveled in Asia and South America, understanding somebody with only basic English skills is relatively easy as long as they speak slowly. As long as I can identify the stream of words, I can reconstruct meaning with high fidelity. English grants huge freedoms in terms of inflection, word order, and grammar. Lurk on any linguistics forum and you quickly learn that it's _really_ difficult to commit a bone fide, uncontestable, error in English. Most of the rules in English are basically regional preferences. I suspect that half of what is taught in ESL classes aren't rules, per se, but merely an attempt at the formalization of the contemporary American English accent (i.e. television speech). The added structure missing from the vague rules of English aids the process of instruction. Much the same can be said for English instruction in primary and secondary school in America.
By contrast, after 15 years of hearing Cantonese on a regular basis I still can't make heads or tails of it. I learned some Korean phrases while on the plane; I still have trouble saying Happy New Year in Cantonese.
It's really difficult for people who have a good ear for tones (whether or not they're musically inclined) to understand what it's like for the rest of us. Many people don't even realize they have a good ear for it, probably because they nonetheless had to work hard at it. But the objective research suggests that if you're a native English speaker who picked up a tonal language, you're not normal, no matter how hard you had to work at it.
One thing I have learned in my cross-cultural experience is that Americans, British, and to some extent Australians heavily abuse sarcasm and cultural references.[1] It's only relatively recently that I've realized how sarcastic I can be (which is less sarcastic than many Americans), and how much confusion and miscommunication it has caused with foreign borne co-workers, friends, and family. And maybe part of the reason Americans rely on sarcasm and cultural references so much is because it's difficult to reliably encode signals in English speech. Emphasizing certain syllables, for instance, often only works regionally. The manner in which a New Yorker draws out a vowel to signal emotional content might actually be the normal mode of articulation in the Deep South. And so almost all Americans, even ones who don't abuse sarcasm, have become adept at recognizing secondary meaning based purely on the word content of speech, not the manner in which it is spoken.
[1] I suspect Germany and maybe even France might be similar in that regard. I doubt the phenomenon is unique to Anglophone countries; it's probably partly a function of modern Western culture. But the nature of English probably plays a part, too. Anyone care to confirm or contest?
> One thing I have learned in my cross-cultural experience is that Americans, British, and to some extent Australians heavily abuse sarcasm and cultural references.[1]
> [1] I suspect Germany and maybe even France might be similar in that regard. I doubt the phenomenon is unique to Anglophone countries; it's probably partly a function of modern Western culture. But the nature of English probably plays a part, too. Anyone care to confirm or contest?
The British make more use of sarcasm or irony than the Germans on average, I think this is were the stereotype that Germans have no humour originates. Still sarcasm is used here quite a lot, too, the Germans just have a harder time witching contexts. I have read an interview with a British guy living in Germany once (unfortunately forgot who it was) and he noticed in Germany, humour almost always is presented by some sort of a clown, so the audience can switch easier.
The connection between language and humour is an interesting topic, and brings to mind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or more generally, linguistic relativity [1]).
It can be difficult to tell how much of a cue (or "clown" as you mention) is required/necessary for the joke to be understood. For example, even American comedians often deliver the punch-line in an overt/exaggerated way.
I've noticed (possibly broader) Chinese and Dutch humour depends much more on slapstick and stereotypes. Of course I probably wouldn't even register the more subtle humor from those cultures.
I've often wondered if there are unique (semantic & syntactic) qualities of the English language that lend themselves to more to particular kinds of (deadpan or sarcastic) humour, such as semantic ambiguity (cf. double entendres), variations in phrasing & tone), etc.
Even the German language can be abused for a similar purpose, as the following quote from [2] illustrates:
> Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text.
Maybe "hard" isn't exactly the right word, but it's certainly different. The sounds aren't hard to make, but using the wrong tone is like using the wrong vowel. You _have_ to speak each syllable with the correct tone or people won't understand you. This can be frustrating when you're learning the language because the difference is very subtle if you haven't grown up speaking a tonal language. If you say something that sounds correct to your ears, but native Chinese speakers give you blank stares, it's not that they're being obtuse or dense. They really have no idea what you're trying to say. Also there are relatively few sounds in Chinese, so if you make a mistake, you're likely to actually say something different from what you intended.
One thing that I've always wondered about tonal languages is whether they would be easier for musicians to learn (especially if they have perfect pitch) than for non-musicians.
There's a difference between register tones and contour tones. Chinese Languages (such as Mandarin) are contour toned languages - nothing at all like musical notes.
The difference is, I grew up learning English ;-) Seriously though, I tried learning Chinese, but for the life of me I couldn't tell the difference between the tones. They all sounded the same to me. I don't know if it's related, but I don't have an ear for music (Music does nothing for me so I have never listened to it by choice). Spanish on the other hand is amazing. I know an handful of languages, but Spanish by far had the fewest oddities. It is amazing how regular it is.
first is to notice the difference of the pronunciation for foreign languages, I believe same as music singer, for word "Porshe", french will read "e" as "ei", English just mute, German says in the middle, but that's hard for me to memorize it in the middle, Chinese has same sound as "ei". Brain is not getting use to the iconic differences of the sound.
second is to correct pronounce the sound, pronunciation of "th" took me one week to practice, because Chinese does not have "th", only "s", that's why lots of Chinese says "sank you" instead of "thank you", that muscle to pronounce that is simply not trained since was born.
Much to the disappointment of her mother who thought "fumb" was cute, I once taught a 3-year-old how to pronounce "th" by telling her to stick her tongue between her teeth and breathe out. Maybe a similarly position-focused (rather than sound-focused) approach would help non-native speakers as well?
Noun genders and never-ending verb endings are the drawbacks to Latin-based languages, for a second language learner. Perhaps Spanish with a single gender and English style verbs would be the simplest.
I find Spanish grammar very easy but it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to understand certain accents -- for example Dominican Spanish is really hard for me to understand.
I've found certain Spanish accents, in English, very hard to understand as well. The way Cubans can drop whole consonants[0] ("Smith's" can become "hmi'") is particularly vexing.
Honestly if you just write characters over and over while listening to Chinese TV you'll be fine. That's how I studied and when I presented in my Chinese class, the two students from Chongqing (who were taking the class to learn traditional characters) were so surprised at my pronunciation their jaws were on the floor.
No I just wrote whatever characters we were studying in class that week over and over while I watched streams of Chinese TV. I watched with Chinese subtitles but I didn't actually try to understand every word. It was mostly about framing my mindset towards a Chinese style of speaking and writing.
I spent maybe an hour or two a day, a few days a week. That was my most productive study method for calligraphy and pronunciation. Grammar and other subjects had to be studied in separate ways, but keeping the Chinese tv stream on helped either way.
For me, it wasn't the tones or sounds that made Mandarin tricky - once you get used to letting your mouth/tongue make shapes/be places you've trained it not to be the vowle/consonants aren't that bad, and fi you've ever played an instrument/sung, tones are manageable. It was the stupid pictographs. You're literally just memorizing shapes that didn't correspond to anything was the absolute worst. It got better once you learned to recognize the basic forms that were getting composed into parts of other characters, but that really discouraged me/was the hardest part. I basically gave up on written Chinese and focused on pinyin, because that made sense to my head.
Source: took two years of Mandarin and lived in Taiwan for a few months
David Moser wrote an essay telling people to focus more on Pinyin and not stress about characters until much later. I totally agree with him. Maybe one day the CCP will force everyone to Pinyin and I can finally read without having to look up half a sentence.
Moving everything to pinyin probably would introduce a different set of difficulties for a foreigner: while a native Chinese speaker knows the spoken language and context well enough to disambiguate homophones, it's unlikely a Chinese learner would have the same ability.
Just curious, what are some examples of difficult/weird vowel or consonant sounds that you think English has? And why do you think Spanish is easy in terms of sounds?
IMO Mandarin is pretty difficult since it has both tones and weird vowels/consonants - I feel like in English most people struggling tend to only have significant trouble with articles and the "th" sound.
For example, the 'i' in 'bright' is a dipthong that sort of glides from 'uh - aye' very quickly.
Many languages have very few dipthongs -- e.g. Japanese and Spanish come to mind, and Mandarin has some, but they're mostly different from English. If you go from a language that has 5 pure vowel sounds like Spanish to something like 15-20 in English (depending on the dialect), it's hard to keep track of them all and pronounce them correctly [1], especially since English orthography hinders rather than helps you, whereas dipthongs in Spanish are pronounced exactly as they're rendered (e.g. cauda is like ca-u-da spoken fast).
Maybe theoretically Spanish has no diphthongs. But rapid speech definitely sees diphthongs develop as sounds merge together -- a very much Spanish thing.
Sure, but here Spanish orthography is actually representative of the sound, whereas English orthography is a mess (plus English has more than 5 base vowel sounds to begin with).
No matter how you cut it, English's vowel phonology is much more complicated than Spanish or Japanese. One misconception that native English speakers have is they think their language is simple to pronounce, when it really isn't.
In English in The South in the USA, often "can" and "can't" are pronounced the same ("can") with a minor difference in the way the "a" and "n" are held.
And just as badly, "can't" and "cunt" just vary the vowel length without changing the vowel or consonant sounds (in some English accents). Many languages don't use vowel length to signify changes in meaning, and it is obviously hard to teach.
This reminds me of Gough Whitlam, former Australian Prime Minister ~1975:
...Gough also took aim at Sir Winton Turbull when the rural MP shouted: 'I am a Country member'. Whitlam quickly responded with 'I remember', which earned an applause from both sides of the house.
I don't know Korean, but Spanish is amazingly regular. Once you learn the 27 letters of the alphabet you can read anything. I'm not saying you can comprehend anything, but you can sound out all the words. It's not like English where you can't tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at it (for instance "though"). In Spanish you always know how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.
On top of that, Spanish feels like a pragmatic language: it foregoes French's formality and resistance to borrowed words (e.g., computadora versus ordinateur). It also helps that Spanish speakers tend to be forgiving of gender errors in the rare cases where the spelling misleads (mostly just masculine words that end in -a).
hangul is probably my favorite writing system, but I wouldn't really consider it any simpler than an alphabet type system. Can't speak for abjads, though.
Also, converting spoken Korean into text can be tricky for non native speakers (e.g. 맛 is pronounced 'Mat' although the spelling would indicate 'Mas')
for the most part Korean still follows simple rules though. 맛 -> 'mat' only if it is followed by a consonant, so 맛는 -> matneun, whereas 맛있어요 -> masisseoyo.
The Korean alphabet can easily be learnt in a few hours.
It's an "artificial" alphabet, meaning that it wasn't born organically over hundreds of years but created by a group of koreans. It's very simple by design, as it was created to allow the general populace to write and read (until then they were using some kind of chinese dialect, too complicated for those in the working class).
Arabic and Korean both possess phonetic alphabets. If you define a glyph as a pictogram then you'd have to consider Arabic to be under the same umbrella.
>>Arabic [has] different start/middle/end forms [...]
As far as I'm aware, Korean doesn't have different characters (forms) for the same sound, and doesn't omit vowels in the same manner that written Arabic does sometimes.
However, in the grand scheme of things, China has invested too much culturally, traditionally and publicly to walk away from their (relatively recently) simplified writing system and language.
You are completely wrong on your first sentence. Hangul has fewer letters in the alphabet, fewer consonants, and virtually no different forms. It's also a phonetic language written as it's spoken more or less, unlike Arabic which leaves out vowels usually making it ambiguous far to often. Lets also not forget that there's many dialects of Arabic depending on region. Further, Arabic is often written in a script that makes it harder to read, especially from a distance, whereas Hangul is pretty unambiguous even with very small print.
(Reply biased a little based on my own experience reading both languages, but still should be pretty factually correct for most)
little ambiguity? I beg to differ. no one writes with vowel marks in Arabic and the same word can be interpreted in many different ways without context. even with context but lacking vowel marks the same word can mean different things.
The problem would be way way smaller if the language were more phoenetic. I've gotten into arguments with Chinese language speakers, and they insist that the language has phoetic elements, with certain ideograms giving clues on how to pronounce words.
That's all well and good, but phoentic implies the other way around too. After hearing a word, you'll have to be able to write it. For instance, "kill", "sand", and the "shark" word in the phrase "shark" all have exactly the same tonal pronunciation, but with completely different ways of writing it.
And don't get me started on traditional vs. simplified.
In this case parent is referring to the phoneme [shā] which map to the characters 殺，沙，and 鯊. (using traditional) and mean "kill", "sand", and "shark" respectively.
Note that the last one, 鯊 is composed of two components 沙 and 魚.
So the top component is the phonetic hint and the bottom is semantic, as 魚 means "fish". Many characters for types of "fish" (I use "fish" loosely as things like whales 鯨魚 are considered fish) use the fish radical, as the characters are called when used as a component of a character.
鯉魚 carp the 里 is phonetic
鮑魚 abalone 包 is phonetic
Of course, this is just a small sampling and there are plenty of things that are inconsistent. I typically just use it as a mnemonic.
And to the point of tones, I leave 傻 [sha3], which means stupid.
Thanks for your input. I think my main point is that a phonetic language goes both ways.
Without any context, or meaning, you should be able to write a word just by hearing it. Similarly, without any context or meaning, by seeing a word, you should be able to pronounce it.
Now, of course it's a sliding scale.
But I think Chinese is on one end of the scale, where if you're just given the phenome shā without context or meaning, it's literally impossible to figure out how to write the word.
In English and all romance languages, you can try to spell it somewhat, and then give it to a native reader to see what it means. This helps a lot when you're reading subtitles for television programs or listening to the radio. If you're reading subtitles, you can sorta figure out what matches up to what. If you're listening to the radio, you can make a best guess on how to spell a word and ask somebody what it means.
What. I am a native english speaker. I don't find the tonal character of various chinese dialects to be significantly more difficult to understand than other tonal languages, like spanish.
Spanish isn't tonal. It contrasts stress, but not pitch. Words with the same syllables but a different stressed syllable are different in Spanish, but in tonal languages the same syllable pronounced with a different pitch and pitch change is different.
That said, as a native-English-speaking Chinese learner I don't find the tones of standard Mandarin to be particularly hard (Hokkien, on the other hand…). Standard Mandarin phonology is also pretty easy (some parts are tricky for native English speakers like contrasting aspiration but not voice (English is the opposite), but overall it's not terribly complex).
Cyrillic is not an abjad as far as I know. I'm a native of a country that uses Cyrillic, but it's possible that I misunderstood the meaning of "abjad".
That's not the same thing. That's an inconsistent mapping of sounds (phonemes) to symbols (and one of the reasons English can be so frustrating to learn). Tones when referring to linguistics are changes in pitch to distinguish words. Given that these differences in pitch (tonemes) are created with the same system (mouth, tongue, lips, vocal chords, &c) as phonemes, you can argue that they're the same, but it's an important enough distinction that linguists find it meaningful.
Having tones does not make a language inherently easier to learn, nor does having ideographs. If China would truly be better off using a non-tonal language with an alphabetic script, it's only because the language of the British Empire was non-tonal with an alphabetic script.
Actually, the mess that is English orthography is hardly more "manageable" than Chinese script. There are loads of phonetic elements in Chinese characters.
It's unquestionable the Chinese script is more difficult to learn than alphabetic scripts. This is directly reflected in the amount of time children and language learners have to spend on it, and the resulting reading ability.
Because the talent the US attracts started learning English before they came to the US. English is the lingua franca of global communication and is taught in almost every country. The same cannot be said of Chinese.
1. You are usually effective and comfortable in the language you were educated in.
2. If you want to do business with a person in another language, you usually both default to English because it is usually second language if it is not their first.
I mean look at your own situation. I assume that you are fairly well educated (on Hacker News, decent grammar, and asked a good question). Suppose you had to leave the US, where would you go?
Your top choices might be other English speaking countries (Ireland, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand).
Your next set of choices would be places you could do business in English (Berlin perhaps).
Globally, a lot more educated people know English than Chinese. Its not impossible but it is a far larger barrier to entry than, say, blocking youTube.
After Ireland, Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, I'd probably go for Scandinavian countries and Iceland. They have smaller native-speaking populations, a high level of exposure to English, and great foreign language training. Then I'd probably go for countries like Latvia, Romania, etc.
I'd consider Germany and France to be third-tier in that sense because they have large native-speaking populations and a greater expectation that people know their language.
I agreed with you about English vs Mandarin from education perspect and business trade perspect.
What I am saying is that China attracts talent who live in China and why don't communicate with others in Mandarin? Learn Mandarin isn't a binary choose for these talents who live in China -- they can still learn stuffs in English and do business with other people around world in English.
From my experience that learn English is not only about helping me to communicate with others, but also, help me to learn a different mindset and culture.
Because up until very recently, very few people outside of China that were not ethnic Han spoke Chinese.
The concept of "Chinese" is fairly inaccurate anyways. I'd like to flatter myself that my mandarin is ok (I won't starve and I generally can make myself understood) but I can't understand most Cantonese. Cantonese is classified as a dialect of Mandarin, but it's really not mutually intelligible.
Whether we like it or not, English is the defacto "business" language. Most (if not all) places in the world conduct business in their native languages(s) and English.
So why would I want to learn Mandarin, which I've been told is super hard to learn and is for most purposes, useless elsewhere in the world?
Following the Second World War, but even before, there was massive world-wide investment in instruction in English; and it has worked its way into the infrastructure. Air traffic control is in English -- and in feet and knots -- all over the world, for example.
Centuries ago, the same thing happened with Chinese; and that is why a Chinese can visit Tokyo and find their way around the train station without knowing any Japanese. Maybe it can happen with Chinese again. Many Asian people learn a little Chinese; and more western people learn it now, too.
I'm sure you thought it was very funny but as the person who has to deal with the messes such comments provoke in large internet communities, I read the guidelines differently.
Please err on the side of posting civilly and substantively when commenting here.
It is true. However there are valid reasons for most of us to learn mandarin, or at least for our children. You cannot ignore 1/5 of the world's population.
Outside censorship, the working culture of China is also quite different. It's quite common to do overtime in China. work-life balance is less respected. People accept it as the normal and are proud of it.
My friend worked for an accounting company. In busy season, she had to work till 5a.m. in the morning of the next day and present her report to her supervisor at 8 a.m.
she took her toothbrush, pajamas, sleep bag to the company because it doesn't make sense to go home at 5 a.m. and back at 8 a.m. as commute takes long time too.
There is another friend working for Alibaba. Once they wanted to release a messenger app to catch up wechat. The entire team was shipped to a different city during Chinese new year, they are disallowed from leaving until the product is shipped.
I also went to a talk by Xiaomi at standford, they were very proud of having official 6 day work week.
Sounds like the worst of both worlds: totalitarian government and hardcore capitalist exploitation at work. I hope every single developer leaves this hellhole.
Investment banking/PE, management consulting, and especially US startup culture all seem to tout similar hours during busy seasons or impending product launches (similar to programming death marches).
Although more extreme, is this really much different from Google, Facebook, Apple or other SV/NY firms offering "perks" designed to make your extended office existence more tolerable?
I've never heard of one of those shipping a whole team off, during the holidays, and telling them they can't leave until a stupid fucking app is done. Read that again. It was not a vital piece of infrastructure, or an important breakthrough for science. It was a stupid fucking chat app. For that, these people were held and denied the ability to celebrate a holiday.
IB/management consulting are paying you $100k+ at the entry level and $200k-$1M+ at higher ranks. PE is paying you $300k to multi millions. All three professions are extremely high status professions. Lets just say we are not comparing the same things.
Goog/Face/App/Soft are offering you completely voluntary perks. You are free to not eat dinner at Google and go home. In fact, you can just eat dinner at Google and then go home immediately. Or even grab takeout at the cafeteria on the way to your car! Lets just say we are not comparing the same things.
None of those stories are rare in the US professional world - GP did not say that's happening every day there. Also, the 40-hr work week is a relatively new development even in advanced nations. China is newer to this game so yes a six day work week will be considered an achievement.
I'm not sure what it means to be shipped to a different city and not being allowed to leave means, but even junior investment bankers on wall street don't have to do that.
"Not being allowed" means you're fired if you don't stick to your post. How is that different to any career here where you are transferred to a different branch office? Clearly if Goldman Sachs transfers you to their Salt Lake City office and you stop showing up to work you'll be terminated.
That whole "new to the game" argument never held water with me. They may be "new", but they also have had the ability to watch the rest of the world, and see how they developed. They've had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others, and they've outright rejected it.
In China, 6 day work weeks were officially sanctioned until the mid 2000s. It was quite weird that everyone would work on Saturday when I visited beijing the first time in 1999.
everyone forgets the usa has no labor laws or unions either. well there's a couple legacy unions that survived the smearing campaign over the decades trying to associate then with crime... but none in silicon valley, that's for sure.
You are only right the USA has no unions for tech. In other industries unions are still there (public sector and manufacturing mostly). The USA has labor laws, and they are enforced. And they affect Silicon Valley worker lives daily. Non-competes are near-unenforceable in California because of California labor law. There was also a thread a while back about how CA law allows you to retain IP over side-projects unrelated to your employer's business, regardless of what your contract says.
Some of them. Lots of programmers are misclassified as FLSA exempt when they don't meet the standards for such exemption, but because of lack of organization and because of the status signalling that goes with FLSA exemption, they rarely challenge this, so it's poorly enforced.
I've almost never seen a programmer in SV whose job duties and pay mean they fall under FLSA. What are you referring to? Maybe a student programmer, I guess.
Sorry, I meant the California equivalent (the salary threshold under the computer professions exemption under FLSA is stunningly low, less than $24K/yr; the state version of the exemption for computing professions has a floor close to $90K/yr.)
The bankers that I've talked won't go (back) to China because of the pollution, specifically the smog. They refuse to put their children in that environment.
Cultural, social, language, and food differences are all superficial reasons not to go to, or stay, in China. They can be dealt with an open, understanding mind. However, the salary or career benefits don't make up for it when your children and spouse are breathing that air.
Totally this. I have a friend who's running his company's Shanghai operations. They installed four air purifiers in their home just to keep the smog out - and Shanghai is a relatively clean air city! They have to check the smog report every morning to see if it's okay to take their kid outside. I would never raise a family in that environment.
There are some good points in that article, but the narrative doesn't include the Chinese view of this. China doesn't necessarily have to lure non-Chinese. They can do well welcoming back the Chinese who came to America to earn a Ph.D., only to find they don't get the respect or the better life they expected.
I'm not sure why the Bloomberg article started from quoting a Chinese person about immigration and then shift into talking as if China is going to recruit non-Chinese. Maybe it was taken out of context, maybe it doesn't fit the narrative the author wants to convey.
My family came from Taiwan, and my father and my mother earned their Ph.Ds in the 90s. My father was one of the top scorers on the Taiwanese National Exams. Yet here in America, the only people who respect that are other Taiwanese (and other Chinese if both groups remembered this used to all be one culture). My grandparents are proud of my father; they were farmers. Growing up, there was always an anxiety about having to leave the US because the student visa is up. You can't work in the US with a student visa. Things only got better when US-based company owned by Taiwanese offered to hire him and pay for getting him a permanent residency. That gave him the negotiating leverage to get help with that in his postdoc position. Even so, he stayed as a post-doc for a long time (which, I get that right now, that's the way it is for a lot of academics, immigrants or otherwise), before becoming a professor for a short time. He was never on the tenure track.
People came here because they didn't want to be back in their birth country. I can tell you, if he had been offered a position in Taiwan with a research budget, that would have very tempting.
So when the Bloomberg author was quoting the Chinese guy about being able to recruit more people, having this background, I know the Chinese guy is likely talking about being able to recruit Chinese ex-pats who earned advanced degrees in American universities, and not feeling welcomed here.
One cultural factor is the fact that developers have a low social standing in China (sometimes referred to as 马工). This leads to low pay, reduced dating pool, lack of respect from people you meet etc.
As an example....I'm an ex-Silicon valley developer, but I am currently living in the Southeast USA and developers are scarcely understood or appreciated here, either.
I must always be measured when I introduce myself, only mentioning my managerial responsibilities when I can tell the person does not understand what I actually do.
The other reply seemed to mention the same thing - "management of other people" is a key determinant of social status in some places.....I wouldn't say everywhere.
Many people in the South (USA) still havent divorced themselves from the notion that the generic, ambiguous, and overused term "IT" or "IT guy" of the 90s - which ranged from "following a recipe" computer maintenance to very high-level sysadmin work - applies to everyone in that industry and your career can be reduced to the following:
1) Fixing a computer
2) Connecting a computer to an internet or printer.
A stark difference compared to my days in SV when the average person would know the distinction between a web/software developer, or a UX engineer or a frontend developer.
Given that I responded to a comment about social status among people in the US South, it would be odd if I said that. While true, it fails to be specific enough to be relevant.[1]
The disciplines emerging around mediated control of people through UX, copywriting, transactional email, algorithmic filtering, etc. (from garden variety A/B testing on through Facebook's emotional control experiment and beyond) prompt me to wonder whether that sort of less direct control of people will accrue status as well.
You couldn't be further away from the truth. I used to live in Shanghai studying CS and also working there as a developer and I'd say it's one of the best professions to have in terms of social status.
When you tell you are a Developer/Software Engineer etc. in the minds of Chinese people that often means: educated, intelligent and rich which is pretty much the complete toolset to succeed in (Asian/)Chinese society.
In terms of dating pool I had to say I was quite surprised that when I told some local girls what did I do for living and they got more attracted. What in the west (ignorant) people see as "geek" or "nerd" in China and many other Asian countries is seen as intelligence and success.
I'd say that the social status of developers world wide has been getting better because of the recent tech boom but in China it never was underappreciated.
Edit: Speaking money-wise: Also the relative salary in China for SEs is really good.
You miss a point bro, that is, foreigners in China are warmly welcomed and respected. I think that compensate the social status of IT workers. BTW, by foreigners I mean white male
Developers in China fare much better than in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, or Korea, for sure. They get paid more (relatively speaking) and are pretty desirable on the dating market. If you tell someone in Beijing "I work for Microsoft", you get a much better response than if you tell someone the same thing in Seattle!
I'm hardly pro china, but the society has been pretty aggressive in courting SEs and paying them well (if they are good, of course, there is a huge low end that is quite different).
Now, there is a lot of pressure to move into management, from family and peers; this reduces the number of senior practicing SEs dramatically, and is a huge problem, but a different problem.
But that comparison about a Microsoft employee isn't about being an engineer. It's about "I work for Microsoft" == "old and crusty", "coasting" in Seattle. In Beijing it might be more impressive because it's a well-known prestigious company.
One reason why the SF Bay Area attracts so much tech talent is that techies have high status here.
Boston is the second biggest location in the U.S. for startups, but as a tech worker, it was a much worse place to be status-wise. Boston is teeming with doctors, corporate lawyers, management consultants, investment bankers, etc., who generally have much higher status (and typically earn much, much more money) than a developer there.
Programmers are literally 程序員, where 程序 means program, and 員 means worker. People also call them 程序猿, where 猿 has the exact same pronunciation as 員 but means monkey. So basically programmers are also called code monkeys in China.
Interesting, didn't know that! Can you comment a bit on the context in which 码农 is used in China? I'm curious how it differs from the usage of "code monkey" over here where it's usually in jest/tongue-in-cheek.
农=farmer, 工=worker. I don't think there's much difference between 码农 and 码工. The 2 words are interchangeable. 码农 seems more common. The usage is also same as or similar to "code monkey", in jest, or self-deprecating when used by programmers themselves.
Can you comment on why this is? Speaking broadly, software development tends to attract intelligent, hardworking, and educated people - not always obviously, but I think more so than a most other "office" jobs. What is contributing to the low social standing?
There is an alternate measure, less commonly found but certainly existing in the mainstream: Rather than how many people are below you, how few people are there above you (in a large organization).
By that measure, the senior developer on a 'special projects' team reporting directly to a CxO could be quite high status. Similarly, the US National Security Advisor only has a small staff reporting to them, but their influence on US policy is as great or greater than the Secretary of Defense and/or Secretary of State.
mattmcknight's comment addresses one of the reasons.
I think another part of it is a lack of understanding of what developers actually do - people perceive developers as manual laborers that just type stuff into a computer based on what a higher-up has designed/created. They attribute the actual creative/engineering output to the manager.
It's also a low-paying job in a materialistic society. There's a feedback loop of Low pay -> no respect -> low pay that's hard to break out of.
TLDR: Tech success is driven by openness of ideas and people, and China's control and oversight of the internet and other data stifles the ability of companies to execute quickly or with confidence (e.g., security, IP).
IP isn't enforced there, technology companies are comprimised from the start, "failure" isn't seen as a stepping stone to success, basic personal freedoms for its citizens don't exist.
Hm, wonder why smart people with plenty of options wouldn't want to live under a totalitarian government like that.
The lack of IP enforcement is going to be better for startups. Patents exist only to prevent others from doing what you do, so that tends to be painful for startups who can't cross license or even afford lawyers and legal battles. Of course once you get big then you switch sides on that issue.
no startups have actual enforceable patents in the usa too. it's not like they have a research department or a huge legal fund. they may get the occasional design or method patent that means nothing in the real world. so i don't thin the China ip thing means anything for startups, other than know you won't be the target of a troll right off the bat.
I agree with the article. I've spent a little bit of time in China, and I find it enjoyable despite its obvious detractors. In many ways, the Chinese lifestyle is refreshing to someone who has spent their life in California.
The problem is going to be with the Government being so hostile to open information. That and the salaries are not going to be as competitive. And I predict Trump will do little to shake the Californian stronghold of technology.
> In many ways, the Chinese lifestyle is refreshing to someone who has spent their life in California.
Could you expand on that? I was born in China, but grew up in the US and currently live in California. I can't think of many ways in which China is better and plenty of ways in which it's worse. My mother (who obviously has a closer connection to the country) tells me she strongly prefers life in the US.
Californian culture can be stifling at times at how "laid back" it is. There is a culture of lethargy and apathy here that can leave people wanting more, which is why so much talent that grows up here ends up moving to far more rigid cities and cultures like in New York. The rigidity of Chinese cities coupled with their liveliness makes for a fantastic escape from California.
That and infrastructure here is absolutely frustrating. Everything in California was structured around car culture. While much of China is now the same way, there is still plenty of excellent public infrastructure as well. Some might argue it's worse than the US, and I can definitely see how the large crowds in subways, the constant construction, and the some of the cheaper buildings are ugly and poorly designed... but California's ultra-expensive, 20 year major projects consistently are less effective in sheer results than China's quick-and-dirty development.
And lastly, I think it needs to be said that China as a culture, nation, and civilization is ancient! Its deep roots and environment create such a fascinating mix of old and new. Here in California, we paved over our past forcefully, and what past there is left to observe is often depressing at the core; nothing to be proud of.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the countryside. California is beautiful, but China is so entirely different geographically that just being there feels so shockingly wonderful.
Don't get me wrong. I love California at the end of the day and would find it hard to ever leave, but I'm simply explaining my statement. :)
Makes sense, and I guess I agree with quite a few of your points. I actually moved from New York City, where I did my undergrad, so I totally feel you on the horrible public transportation infrastructure. But I don't find California to be less lively. Granted, I live in Berkeley, so it's more urban than, say South Bay or the LA suburbs. I would consider moving back to NYC if the weather wasn't much worse and if there were actually jobs in my field (Electrical Engineering).
I just spent a month living there, and while I enjoy the country(food in particular is amazing), internet speed is terrible, and basic developer needs like being able to download a docker image, is like an overnight download ( because the internet will throttle down to low kb/s on such a download). Doing full time startup work from there would require working on something fairly lightweight I think.
It's likely that I wasn't on an optimal connection - but I also tried coffee shops, various different hotels, and several different vpn / proxy strategies and all were like this (once or twice a proxy configuration would get me about the speed you are saying for a day, but then would be not working the next day), so whatever the optimal connection is, it wasn't easy to find.
I don't know where you lived, normall, in China, you can use Interenet from Starbucks or any chain coffee stores, they are all have good Internet speed. And if you try to access Google or Youtube, FB etc, you can try ShadowSocks instead VPN.
For the slow speed between US and China, Jap (and other asian countries), I think that's the nature issue for oversea Internet connection. You can use this website (http://ping.chinaz.com/, you may need google translator) to test how speed looks like as you connect to other country from China.
(Shijiazhuang 3 weeks and Hainan 2 weeks) I did occasionally get good speed (I tried starbucks twice and one day it was decent, the other day was quite slow). There was a particular set of docker images that I had to repeatedly download that I found very painful to deal with, and eventually just decided to work on something else- I did in fact end up using shadowsocks, but on one day I set it up with a server in singapore it was reasonable (like 200-300 Kb/s), the next day it was 7Kb/s, so I'm not sure what happened. It might just be that I had a string of bad luck with connections. I guess if you live there it seems reasonable that you could buy a private faster internet connection / maybe find a reliable starbucks coffee shop. I am completely willing to accept that I might just have run into a set of bad connections and it was luck.
I heard rumors (just rumors) that Internet providers in China limit your connection speed to servers outside China unless you upgrade your service and pay more.
For people from Russia or other countries China could be attractive option.
Take-home money can be good, especially with low taxation.
US is not really a competition, it is relatively unfriendly to foreigners, very hard to move there.
But I think China wants to mainly increase talent retention. There are many Chinese who stay in US after finishing their studies there. China wants those educated people back.
"But I think China wants to mainly increase talent retention. There are many Chinese who stay in US after finishing their studies there. China wants those educated people back."
They should consider democracy, then. Educated people like that.
I was born in a communist country. It's not surprising to me that smart people want to leave.
Yeah, if you think of word "communist" as a name for an ideal, perhaps it's possible. But most countries that were designated communist (or socialist, which is even more misleading) were also undemocratic, and I happened to be born in one of them (Czech Republic).
The "communist" part of the system I was born in actually worked somewhat. What didn't work was absence of democracy, which means there was one hierarchy of power. This was the cause of nepotism, corruption and pollution, just as it is in China.
I guess it depends on your idea of "unfriendly to foreigners". If you're referring to countries where the US has icy relations with, getting a visa might be problematic, otherwise, I think your experience is a bit off.
As a native born American, I see a surprising amount of small business owners who are successful are not from America. Even in the small town (Nicholasville, KY population ~20,000) I'm from, most of the convenience stores and gas stations are owned by a single middle eastern family that is super friendly to everyone. I went to school with Charlie, one of their sons, who was the first to be born and raised in the US. I see so many Americans who were raised in relative ease and comfort simply being out hustled by immigrants and "foreigners" who have more drive.
You know what, that is great! The healthy mix of diversity is what makes America (already) great. If a family legally comes from Mexico and wants to hustle their way into success, I'm all for it. Immigration is not a bad thing.
No offense but I don't think you really have a grasp of the US immigration system. It's very difficult to immigrate or even get a temporary work visa. It's easier if you are the relative of a US citizen, but even then if you are mainland Chinese born or Indian you have to wait in a long queue unless you are the spouse of a US citizen.
Very difficult is an understatement. It's basically close to impossible to work in the US for a EU or russian citizen.
Source: Friends of me who want to move to the USA. I'm talking people with rare qualifications with a company ready to take them at $200k base salary and the layers to do all the paperwork for the H1B. They just can't get a fu----- VISA.
Yes, even in a situation like that, it still comes down to, literally, a lottery (one with zero transparency). Compare with the independent skilled migration systems of Australia, Canada and NZ.
If a sponsor employer would give them that salary, and they have rare qualifications, maybe they should apply for O1 rather than H1B. I helped a guy with a recommendation letter for O1, and it wasn't hard. He basically gave me a template that I customized with data specific to work we had done together. I am not even American.
There's a long queue for permanent residency for certain countries. The process of getting a temporary work visa is largely the same for a Chinese or Indian national as it is for an EU or Japanese national though.
> US is not really a competition, it is relatively unfriendly to foreigners, very hard to move there.
Which is why the immigration volume into the USA is more than 10 times greater than China?
> There are many Chinese who stay in US after finishing their studies there. China wants those educated people back.
Sure China wants those people back, but those people want to avoid the smog and are rather happy with the public education system for their (more than one) kids. China has a lot of problems to fix before it can stem the brain drain.
> But I think China wants to mainly increase talent retention. There are many Chinese who stay in US after finishing their studies there. China wants those educated people back.
Do you mean their Chinese talent? Because for everyone else it's practically impossible to make long-term decisions about staying in China. Your work visa will always be tied to a company and a marriage visa doesn't entitle you to work. The mythical "green card" visa for all intents and purposes doesn't exist.
Once you have certain categories of information on tap, you never want to be locked behind a firewall again. I'm not just talking about salacious imagery, either.
The US needs to clean up its act, as well, as it is losing many of the most desirable Chinese immigration candidates to Canada now.
This article is just typical Western nonsensical way of looking at China that let ideology fool the you and your audience.
If you look at China in a realistic way, its pro/cons are very obvious:
Pro:
1. Chinese market is huge
Cons:
1. This market is very competitive. Local giants are not far from their US counterparts, and they learn(copy) quickly.
2. Pays are high comparing to other jobs in China, but not living up to US level(but on par with Europe and Japan).
3. Long hours and no play.
4. Air pollution.
5. Language barrier for Westerners. You cannot go too far if you don't understand Chinese.
6. Foreigners, even if they want to, have nearly zero chance to be a permanent resident. (Extremely anti-immigrant policy, but the reason is actually consistent. CCP think China is too crowded, so they don't need extra people, they don't even let its own citizens to have more than 2 kids! :P)
How hard is that to figure this out? However, this article is just making everything looks like it is about their cherished liberal ideology. No, if China has money to dig, people will go. But it is not for foreigners, and probably not worthy it.
I don't think it's just information access issue that is issue. The way I see is that there are many people considering working and living in China as bit of risk considering government's decisions and policy can change fairly arbitrarily, which of course the one of prominently seen effect of that is change in government firewall blacklists.
Something ironic about an "open" culture being critical of a "closed" culture.
Reality is the American's tech cultural is at its core a very closed community. Even within America, trying to create a startup outside of the Bay Area, which is insanely expensive area to do business, will require exponentially more effort, luck, etc.
Neat, thank you! The graphs use this nebulous "signal" metric. It is hard to tell if that includes start up valuation and/or exits, which I posit are more important than some of the markers they mentioned like advisor or investor popularity. Neat data point though.
Though what that does not account for is the ratio of equity given for capital raised; my understanding is that on average per percent of equity that the amount of capital raised will be double that of anywhere else; means that really, amounts shown for the Bay Area should be double due to the value of that capital in a deal.
As an American-born Chinese, the main reason my wife and I chose to move to China and raise our kids there is to ensure their self-esteem.
Perhaps it's different for West Coast Asians, but when I grew up in in the States, I went through a period of self-loathing due to my race. With no AA role models, it took a really long time for me to come to terms with who I am.
Add to that the constantly accepted jokes about Asians, and it really caused an inferiority complex growing up. Something that I don't see in native Asians/Chinese.
So when a Chinese company started to recruit me, I jumped at the chance.
Perhaps because I'm Chinese, already married, and I speak Mandarin, the only issue for me in that list is the pollution factor. Everything else isn't that big of a deal.
I also disagree with the Chinese tech industry is any more relation-oriented than the US tech industry. Just like how Asians can beat the "bamboo ceiling" by using soft skills and mingling with the executives, foreigners can as well in China.
I would also add that for hardware tech talent, there really is no better place than China. People lament the IP issue, but for a hardware startup, this openness is a blessing.
Also, I will state without proof that the Chinese government are more knowledgeable in stimulating technical innovations than your average Bloomberg columnist.
There's documentaries and other documentations. The one I saw showed a husband and wife fishing out of the sewer near a hotel. They take the gunk, boil it and then fry their street foods. Can't go there.
Well, the US lost the top guy in machine learning, Andrew Ng. In the US, he was a professor at Stanford, not even the head of the department, with a few grad students. Now he's Chief Scientist and VP at Baidu.
He's Chief Scientist at Baidu Research, which is based in Sunnyvale. So he's not really "lost" to the US, just lost to Stanford (and, I guess, to Google, since he was working with them before).
Well, the only way for China is to create tech incubators in the West with their investment arm, and build additional facility in Shanghai to interface English outcome to Chinese lore. I think they are effectively doing that. Volvo, Opera Software are recent examples.
Is China really trying? I know they had some initiatives to get Americans with the Trump election. In general, I don't think it's an actual goal for them. They have a large pool of talent. They aren't needing to go outside yet.
I agree with many of your points, but still China is the second largest country in information technology, better than EU and Japan. How do you explain this? Any thoughts?
These are more towards team collaboration. imo China doesn't have the ecosystem for open source. Too many people just take the code, rebrand and market it as their own product...
I've seen this recently with deep-learning libraries on Github (when using the search); people (located in China, according to their profile) copying other peoples' repositories (e.g. TensorFlow), changing the title, description and readme, and then trying to pass it off as their own by rewriting the revision history.
It's actually becoming an issue when using the search functionality.
I don't think it's a joke. Wechat is a highly usable app, but more importantly it is integrated with many parts of Chinese life so you use it for many things. Perhaps most importantly of all it made headway into getting people to trust online payments in China. It's not perfect but it is ahead of Facebook in some respects
I have to say that most problem is not true. Most Chinese don't prefer youtube and even for the university student knows how to pass the block by vpn and other softwares. Also in some university Google is not blocked.
The point is that quality of life (and work) in China is still not as good as the US. You might waste 20 minutes everyday working with your VPN to push to github. That affects work efficiency but also morale. Use these services outside of China and you feel like you're flying.
That being said, US reporters write these stories all the time. This journalist doesn't quote any data on Chinese emigration and seems to go off gut... seeing as his bio doesn't mention he speaks Chinese and he only lived in Shanghai, I wouldn't trust his intuition about what Chinese outside of Shanghai think
Hey. We have a soft spot for former geodesists and forestry specialists (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9910140), but we need you to stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Even if everything you say is 100% correct, posting this way sets a terrible example for lesser users, so you're pushing this site closer to the wasteland either way. And nobody bats 100.
Except that the source article is exclusively about the problems with tech in China, largely due to government and cultural reasons that have very little to do with Taiwan, and the fiction that there is actually a single China, inclusive of Taiwan, is totally irrelevant.
Taiwan can be just as bad, and salaries are often less than first tier mainland cities (many Taiwanese go to the PRC to work for the money). But ya, the article is not about tech in Taiwan.
Please don't argue like this here. It has troll effects whether you mean to or not. Instead, please argue substantively, and get less inflammatory (not more) as a topic becomes more divisive.
This comment adds nothing to the conversation. But the media definitely seems to know that anything about Trump gets clicks. Bashing him seems to be the fotm
First, your purpose from first blush is to stifle the discussion, not enhance it.
Second, and more disturbingly, you make the implicit arguement that if you're not a minority living in the US you don't have anything to say on the matter, either because you can't possibly know what it's like, or because your (implicitly) white opinion is invalid when it comes to the case of minorities. This argument has been moving through academic and now progressive circles for the last few years, and while its initial purpose was noble - empower minority groups to tell/own their own histories as opposed to being told what/who they are by the existing power structure - I think it has been taken to an extreme that is as radical as it is intellectually hypocritical.
In making the argument - that unless you are a minority, you can't have any meaningful statements about being a minority in America - you're arguing against the idea of a universal human experience, against empathy, and against reason. If what you say is true, why should I bother reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's run of Black Panther[1], or Sylvia Plath, or any of MLK's letters? My ability to understand these figures would be curtailed to the point of meaninglessness by my whiteness, my middle-classnes, my sex. This is patently untrue. There is something uniquely human in us that is touched by these issues. I will never be targeted by police because of my skin tone, but I am still outraged by it. I will never live these problems but I can still see them, and can still work to fix them. Your argument denies that, and I defy it.
[1] It's excellent by the way. Highly recommended.
Yes. Since my wife (and all of her immediate birth family, and lots of people I know through her, as well as lots of people I'm close to not through her) fits that description. Some of them even have experience with other immigration systems for comparison.
The US immigration system is far from ideal (especially from the perspective of prospective and not categorically barred immigrants.) It's also much, much better for actual admitted immigrant and non-immigrant foreigners than systems in most of the rest of the world.
The salaries in china are getting way higher than in silicon valley as far as I can see and that's gonna make people move. Especially with more and more layoffs in SV and the european market lacking jobs.
EDIT: Looks like I'm wrong, I did the wrong conversion while on glassdoor. Salary in china are way lower than SV
My point is that people move where the money is, when the salary are gonna be higher, people are gonna move there
I don't doubt your claim, but do you have any hard data on total comp in China? This comment would a lot more informative if we knew how much more they are paying and so on.
Even if it is higher (which apparently it's not), is it high enough to make up for all of the other downsides, specifically the totalitarianism and the pollution?
If you ask me, I would present this list:
1. Practically, there are only 4-5 cities suitable for 'tech talents' in China. The properties prices in these cities are comparable to the ones in NY and SF while the salary isn't. BTW: you have very little chance to be able to get married without a property under your name in China. This isn't a 'tech talents' specific issue but 'tech talents' have more chances to emigrate.
2. There is no union nor labour law in China (well technically they both exist but..). So labour abusing is normal. Many tech workers are 'voluntarily' working 996 (which mean 9am-9pm, 6 days a week) on a 955 pay slip.
3. Chinese society is relation-oriented. Tech workers hate that. For example often the promotion goes to the guy who has the closest relationship to the manager.
4. Primary/secondary education in China is very, very cruel. Many people don't want their children go through it if possible.
5. Pollutions etc.