This may add more insight: I'm Chinese (mainlander) myself and I'm not rich (student). All my friends are not rich either. Yet almost everyone wants to leave the country.
This is probably due to high real estate prices (around 1M RMB in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai for a decent apartment that can get you a girl to marry you, yet you don't really "own" the property even if you buy it. Technically the state still owns your apartment and you were just paying for "usage fee" because that's how communism/socialism works. In comparison, newly college graduates earns around 6k RMB/mo); broken health care system (probably worse than the U.S, since most of the Chinese family are relying on their only child to provide health care money when they grow older); harsh job market (simply too many people for not so many jobs, so the wage becomes low); and plus, a dim future for all of the lower income families or family without connections.
Yes you can argue that there's so many opportunities in China, but somehow we voted with our feet: everyone who has a means to leave left. Most of the famous Chinese actors are now foreign citizens or at least with a green card alike. For average families, they send their kids overseas for school. That's why you see so many Chinese students overseas, doing boring PhD degrees if they are poor or enroll as an undergrad if their family could afford. For their families, getting their kids to an overseas school is like taking the first step to a much more promising future.
One of my co-workers here in SZ has a foreign boyfriend, but she doesn't want others to know about it. I asked her why she wanted a foreign boyfriend. She said it was because she didn't believe in the future of this country. This is her way out.
My other co-worker hates it that Chinese girls seem to prefer foreign boyfriends (albeit a stereotype, but who knows how reflective it is of reality?). He deems it particularly difficult because there are so many more men then women in China already.
And what do you propose is the alternative? Very easy to take a moral high ground when you don't have to worry about the repercussions of over population and strained resources. As the poster said themselves - too many people in China.
I don't need to propose an alternative in order to state that the imposed one child policy is evil, along with its forced abortions and forced sterilizations.
Second, you can't prove overpopulation is as serious as the government claims, nor can you prove their "solution" fixes it.
Third, if it is as serious as is claimed, it will affect the world (anthropogenic environmental impact, immigration, etc...), so it's everyone's worry.
I know! And it's ridiculously high, beats any property tax in U.S. That's probably one of the reason why the Chinese government is so rich.
The propaganda has invented a new saying, calling this the Chinese Socialism, and it tries to credit itself for the economic boom after the 1980s. We the people think that the gov is just trying to collect massive money after they abandoned soviet communism so everyone had a chance to make a better life. The chance is getting slimmer as the gov is getting much more greedy than in the 80s.
As long as the US is somewhere a lot of people from ethnic-based nations want to immigrate to, the US can have many more financial crises and not be severely impacted.
No. The worst thing is it's going down: living costs are getting much higher because of inflation while wages are far from catching up, real estate is still in a bubble, and it feels like the gov is getting more and more corrupted, blocking ordinary people from having a decent/good life.
"China Daily reported Friday that unnatural deaths have taken the lives of 72 mainland billionaires over the past eight years. (Do the math.) Which means that if you’re one of China’s 115 current billionaires, as listed on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List, you should be more than a little nervous." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont...).
I wonder how much fear is playing into this desire for exodus.
Regardless if its billionaires in yuan or dollars, if there is a sentiment in China that the wealthy are being killed, it could fuel the desire to leave.
I'd expect a number of extremely rich Chinese oligarchs have been shot for treason, as some forms of corruption are punishable by the death penalty.
There's a lot of really nasty shit that happens in China. Babies dying from additives to their milk formula, organs being stolen, farmers being driven off communes to build illegal factories, outright theft of government funds and property ... none of it is really sanctioned.
When the officials who set themselves up as feudal lords get busted, they can go down hard. Even if their superiors were previously turning a blind eye, if it hits Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) then things can get ugly.
Right, I think most of these deaths are due to corruption charges. One of the many weird things about China is that corruption is officially illegal, punishable by death, and yet every powerful business person or government official is corrupt by the letter of the law (favors for family, accepting bribes, favoring business that give them money). It's just the way their society has been for a long time.
It's such a dangerous political climate because you can't escape the corruption, so the party can bring you down at any moment if you start being a problem for them.
edit: I should have read the article first. Only some of the deaths are from official corruption charges. The rest I can't say for sure.
A lot of it stays in China. Officials may have a large unofficial income source (or two), which they spend on wine, women, and Karaoke (none of which officially existed, just like the money they used to pay for it, so there's no explaining to do); or food (you'll never meet a Chinese who won't think a good $500 meal isn't worth it). Or they channel some to their spouse.
A few big fish will grab a staggeringly huge amount, then run. We are talking huge amounts here, though, not a Chinese millionaire looking for a house for their kids. There's a total of $120 billion missing, taken by an estimated 16,000 officials. Only the poorer ones will be buying what you would describe as a "house".
I'd think most of the Chinese buying houses for their kids are essentially legit businessmen. They probably use cash because Chinese just hate debt. They also see it as an investment, because houses are some of the only things Chinese trust - they see shares as giving a total stranger your money to play with, in the hopes that he gives you more back (I mean, have you seen what US CEOs get paid?).
> I'd think most of the Chinese buying houses for their kids are essentially legit businessmen.
Not the instances that I know of. They are corrupt Chinese gov officials using embezzled money on homes that typically cost 1-4 million USD (mostly in the 2's from what I've seen).
As a Vancouverite, I can confirm this. The only reason our housing bubble didn't pop with everyone else's is the continued influx of large amounts of capital from (principally) China.
It also gets laundered through Hong Kong (mostly Lantau) through gambling (a good reason to be against gambling in general - it's a very well known way to launder money)
There is a death penalty in China for trying to form a labor union (and people said American labor unions opposed "free trade" agreements with China out of pure selfishness...).
Anyway, there's a complex mix of people in China afraid of being killed.
Really? Can you point to a death penalty being applied for such a case? I'm not saying your wrong, but its the first I've heard of such thing. I have seen cases where the PRC has protected the rights of workers to form unions. Of course, these unions are through the government.
There's a de facto death penalty for being sufficiently troublesome. I'm not sure whether a do-not-try-to-start-an-independent-labor-union law is actually on the books or not.
There is too much bias from reporters these days to work out actual trend from manufactured trends with regards to china.
Silly to say "half of china's millionaires want to leave" without saying how that percentage is different from "all chinese"...
China long ago loosened restrictions on emigration, to allow Chinese to be educated overseas and then (hopefully) return to China, so that it could benefit.
I think this increase of emigration could be a natural progression of that policy (as Chinese now have a lot more ties in other countries).
The 'unaffordable housing' issue, sounds similar to Australia (Median house price is 8+X median yearly/salary), so I doubt it is a reason for leaving.
People who are saying it's "too be free", are clearly just anti-P.R.C, again, by-in-large chinese are happy/apathetic about the govt in china. Those that care about politics, join the party and have just as many rights (to vote and affect change as americans have).
Note that the claimed reason is better education opportunities for their children. There is definitely a perception here in China that connections and schooling are critical for a life of success and wealth.
That said, I have my doubts they would be able to directly ask, "Do you want to emigrate?". So perhaps that is why they tacked on the education bit for plausible deniability (i.e. I love my country but my child should go to Harvard).
Once you're rich enough, you become concerned with protecting that wealth and your own well-being. You want transparency from your government, rule of law (in a transparent, predictable manner) and political stability. Those are not strong points in China these days.
I think this is true. Additionally, as other commenters have mentioned, daily life in china is a bit of a health risk due to the crazy traffic, air pollution, poor food safety etc.
I forgot this - I have two friends who lived in Beijing for years but moved to LA when they had kids, in large part because the air pollution was so bad they said they could feel it in their throats when they woke up each morning if it was going to be a bad day. Nobody likes to feel like their they breathe is killing them each day.
There was a comment (I think on Top Gear, so take it with a grain) that if you drive a new Porsche through Beijing, the air coming out the tailpipe is cleaner then the air going in the front.
On the order of a lifetime (50-60 years)? No. Especially given that you have an incumbent political party that is (at least in name), still Communist and committed to the equitable distribution of wealth across the population.
China has a lot of internal tensions, not the least of which is that as people become more affluent, they start to want greater transparency from the government, greater fairness, and more independence. All of those desires put them in conflict with the current regime. The party may be able to keep things under control, but I don't think there's any question that it's already grappling to maintain order via censorship, suppression of dissent, etc.
I'm pretty sure Julian Assange is facing this exact problem. When you challenge authority... the results are predictable (regardless of the ideology behind the authority).
Also note: Most chinese (i'd say) don't worry about this. So the point is a little over dramatic.
Some one care to enlighten me how the censorship of wikileaks is any different to the great fire wall? (Slightly different scale, but they both illustrate censorship).
Or the suppression the of the Occupy Movement is different from the concept of "suppression of dissent". That is the forcible removal of people with views the government doesn't want to hear.
I haven't even mention the Patriot Act and how it has been exploited...
That's not the same thing as peaceful protests by students and professionals. Noam Chomsky (!) is on the record saying the US is a very free country. Politically, that is, by which he means the scope of permissible political action is wide not, that it's rate of success is high. He's right.
Tiananmen square protests (what the "Tanks" were implying) were not peaceful. They started that way, but they were not that way, when the military stepped in. There have been numerous reports that the 'trigger' moment, was a group of soldiers being isolated and threatened or attacked.
I love you are saying The US is a very free country in response to the L.A riots... the irony is not missed :D
Remember the way America plans to compete with China is to wait for China to fail. So there are a lot of Americans straining their eyes for a glimmer of salvation. That is the context for pretty much every American story on China you see.
The reality is that Chinese rich are hedging like all the rich do. Putting 20% of your wealth in a safe investment outside your home country is not unusual. And they are gearing up to send their child overseas to the best schools they can find - just like all the other tiger economies did.
Later on I'll have a read and translate any interesting parts of it. Right now it's 4 AM here, I'm coming off a long and not-very-fun debugging session, and I'm going to sleep.
I blogged about that report and translated some portions of it at the time, see there for my thoughts on these things. my analysis in short: not many people taking concrete action, not many people leaving permanently. http://notlearningcantonese.posterous.com/rich-emigrants-as-...
The trend is definitely true, but it's been there since day one when there began to have "rich Chinese". This CNN post made it sounds like, suddenly the rich Chinese worry about them being killed or end up in jail, because they oppose the chinese government? This is laughable.
“We see too many worried entrepreneurs nowadays who are afraid that they would end up in prison for offending Chinese officials,” You gotta be kidding me, most of the richest Chinese ARE the Chinese officials!! If they do end up in jail, it has much more to do with them accumulating their wealth illegally by abusing their power, than say, publicly posing a middle finger to Mr. Hu.
This article looks like just another typical heavily biased manipulative CNN crap, which throws in some data at first to make it believable, and then hijacked the real reason behind the data, adding their own interpretation. Reading CNN's news on China is just like reading Fox's news on Obama.
I would recommend first hand observations from western expats (through their blogs probably?) that actually live in china or at least spend reasonable amount of time there. Their opinions may be biased too, but at least it can give you a bunch of mixed views that are closer to the truth.
As for traditional media, the Economist does tend to be relatively neutral, and not adding too much of their own "secret ingredients". But that's just my own opinion.
This seems to reinforce some points made by Paul Graham in his 'How to Make Wealth' essay. Especially regarding governments not allowing individuals to accumulate wealth. http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
It can. If you have money in China, you are much more free than in the West. Because laws only apply to you to a very little extent. You killed five people while speeding drunk? One phone call and problem solved.
The question is not freedom but legal security. Here in China you never know when the goverment will show up and take you money or company away from you.
China is quite free compared to most western countries. If you have money you are pretty much free to do as you please as long as you keep your head down. There are two types of crimes in China crimes that get you put away forever or executed and crimes that you just pay the officer for. Every regulation in China is basically a tax, you pay someone and it is solved.
It is how everything works in a Communist society, everything bends to the party, the people, the land, the environment. The results to each is usually the same.
China's had little to do with communism for decades now.
Your statement is both true and unfitting to the thread here. The truth is that the current governing policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are not doctrinaire communism, in the Marxist-Leninist sense, but rather "socialism with Chinese characteristics," as that party officially labels those policies. But the key political point, and the key motivation for many people wanting to leave China, is that the CPC is the sole ruling party and has been since 1949. Ideology bounces around, but the grip of the CPC on political power on all levels, and on all the major means of gaining economic power, is never relaxed. Mass media in China are subject to prepublication review by censors who are staff members ("cadres") of the CPC. The most crucial distinction between crimes that are punished and crimes that are left unpunished is whether or not the crimes threaten the rule of the CPC. And many activities that are perfectly legal here and in all civilized countries of the world, such as political dissent, are illegal in China solely because they threaten the CPC's grip on power.
I speak Chinese. From time to time I have had the opportunity to participate in seminars with Chinese journalists in the United States, out of earshot of Chinese censors. Even today, I cannot reveal the name of one journalist who once expressed a frank opinion in the hearing of several Americans who are familiar with the situation in China. He said that if the common people of China had full access to uncensored news, the Communist Party of China would fall within a week. The huge efforts that the CPC-controlled government in China makes to set up a "Great Firewall of China" to control Internet access is a sign that the government greatly fears uncensored access to news for the Chinese populace.
That's all true, but doesn't seem particularly "communist" in a relevant way--- that was also true of Greece under the junta, or Spain under Franco. Wouldn't it be more accurate to just call China an authoritarian or one-party state?
Heck, even "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is a bit of an anachronism these days, and the people who take the old conception of it seriously are seen as left-wingers within the government; it's closer to "one-party capitalism with Chinese characteristics"...
doesn't seem particularly "communist" in a relevant way
Perhaps in some academic sense. On the other hand, can you name a single national experiment with communism that didn't become authoritarian? There are certainly plenty of ugly examples.
Oh, that wasn't the angle I was going for; I'm not arguing that "real communism will work" or something. Just that it doesn't seem meaningfully different from "non-communist" authoritarian states, so the label "communist" appears to be a historical anachronism that doesn't add any real information in 2011, versus just calling it a "one-party" or "authoritarian" state. In the 1960s, at least, it added the additional bit of information that the government was attempting to suppress market economics, but that part isn't true anymore.
So since you know, what is that party line? I've found that anything said in a civil manner here with a minimum of snark is usually safe regardless of the opinion expressed by the content.
It's not unique to China. There's a long tradition of powerful families creating wealth from the growth of a city or economy by buying up real estate, promoting the growth of a city, then benefitting from the radical increase in real estate value that results as land transitions from agrarian to urban.
The SF peninsula is an example of this - families that made money in mining bought up land south of the city in the 1800s, then actively worked to promote policies that would lead to growth of the city in that direction.
As noted, housing bubble, the bubble was started by lack of investment opportunities when people start to amass wealth in cash, housing is pretty much the default choice. Bond and other safe investment do not yield enough to cover high inflation.
It is then further furled by a combination of speculative investment and local government/bank/construction industry collusion. This is quite similar to what happened to the States in post-2000 housing bubble, but in greater scale due to stronger government control and growing economy.
Not just houses - if you somehow managed to own the 'peoples bicycle factory' on land right next to the port that is now a Foxconn factory you are likely to have done OK out of the deal.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for China or a good thing for countries that want these millionaires. I bet after migration many of these millionaires migrate will establish companies that connect with sources inside China for outsourcing. In an economic sense, the millionaires are very much Manchurian candidates.
In Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver, you see this very clearly. Many chinese people are technically in Canada, but they never really left their home country. They create a small subcity with its own economy, and huge ties to the homeland. A great deal of them never learn English because they don't have a need for it.
That is an excellent point. I have many second and third generation friends who's grandparents, and even parents have only assimilated local culture when absolutely necessary. Their children however are as 'home grown' as you like, to the point where most laugh at their for-bearers (reverse?) xenophobic behavior. This is a phenomenon not exclusive to people from the far east either. The same can be said for many families I know from eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Totally agree, in some parts of Toronto, it's probably difficult to get by without knowing some Chinese (pacific mall anyone?). Even here in Waterloo, which is much smaller than Toronto, you see these kinds of "sub cities" and tight networks among the first generation Chinese.
One quarter of China’s top 1000 richest people obtained their wealth from property, compared to less than 10% among the world’s 1000 richest, the report says.
Are they comparing the top-1000 richest people in China to the top-1000 richest people in the world? That's not a very good comparison. It's like comparing the top-1000 students from a single college, to the top-1000 students from every college in the entire world.
I'm not sure if the actual report makes this comparison too as I cannot read Chinese.
It makes perfect sense, as many of those who made a fortune in property probably obtained that land through party connections and/or party corruption. How else would they have obtained 'property' in China?
Since this is Hacker News and all, I'll pose a question: we had that news story on how few Indian hackers and tech startups there are, what about in China? Are any of these millionaires profiting off things like Baidu is with web tech working for the government?
Is the real problem that lots of party functionaries without much money has power and little oversight? So they can press money out of the local rich, without repercussions?
Or is political uncertainty the real problem -- the political climate next month can be halfway back to the cultural revolution?
Hmmm.....I can't disagree with the contents of the post. Yet I think it is a piece written to distract from the issues facing our own nation by doing an implicit juxtaposition between China and the U.S.
I am of the opinion that we should spend less time denigrating others and more time having open and honest discussion AND reporting of the issues facing us here in the U.S. Pointing out issues and flaws in others in now way helps fix the flaws in ourselves.
CNN is just reporting on a paper published by the Hurun Research Institute and the Bank of China. That isn't "denigrating" anything, it's reporting a story, which given the source (not CNN, but Bank of China) is probably pretty factual.
This is probably due to high real estate prices (around 1M RMB in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai for a decent apartment that can get you a girl to marry you, yet you don't really "own" the property even if you buy it. Technically the state still owns your apartment and you were just paying for "usage fee" because that's how communism/socialism works. In comparison, newly college graduates earns around 6k RMB/mo); broken health care system (probably worse than the U.S, since most of the Chinese family are relying on their only child to provide health care money when they grow older); harsh job market (simply too many people for not so many jobs, so the wage becomes low); and plus, a dim future for all of the lower income families or family without connections.
Yes you can argue that there's so many opportunities in China, but somehow we voted with our feet: everyone who has a means to leave left. Most of the famous Chinese actors are now foreign citizens or at least with a green card alike. For average families, they send their kids overseas for school. That's why you see so many Chinese students overseas, doing boring PhD degrees if they are poor or enroll as an undergrad if their family could afford. For their families, getting their kids to an overseas school is like taking the first step to a much more promising future.