Lots of people used to go to China for work and could do pretty much anything they want, but since Jinping took over it went downhill fast.
Most people in the expat community I know went to Hong Kong and Singapore instead for the following reasons:
1) Easy to do business
2) Easy to get your money in and out.
3) Low taxes
4) Central travel hubs in Asia
5) Less backwards mindset as these cities feel more cosmopolitan and are interconnected with the outside world
With HK having less and less freedom, Singapore is really the only choice for foreigners to have a decent life quality in Asia. Tokyo could potentially be an option too, but it's really hard to live there due the very different structures in Japanese society and taxes are pretty high.
HK, it seems, doesn’t have the death penalty or corporal punishment. Let’s see how long that lasts, but for the time being that’s a huge positive over Singapore.
Expat life is still pretty nice. Soho is bustling. Restaurants are reopening, clubs open to 6am.
Stuff like SVB, CS, and flow on effect to legal is probably just a big an impact.
You are not going to get the death penalty or caning in Singapore if you keep your nose clean (literally and figuratively). Both are only applied for serious crimes, and the few deltas to Western standards on what counts as "serious" (drugs, vandalism) are easily avoided.
On the other hand, HK now has years of imprisonment if you speak the wrong thing. Expats probably less directly affected, but freedom of speech is essential to financial success and the local economy will never recover.
IMO, Hong Kong's number 1 problem is that its unique position as the gateway to China has faded away, both the role as an intermediary and as a key shipping port.
Clean air, clean environment, safety, access to nature, food safety, (mostly) free/uncensored internet, easy to do business, easy to do daily things, good public transportation, safety, good medical system, not a lot of corruption.
There's other things as well, but the above things are quite important to me. Your mile may vary though :-)
I've got some years in China. I speak Chinese, I'm eating a jianbing[1] as I write this. Didn't leave during the three years of zero covid. Reopening has changed everything about daily life in the best way.
But I'm also looking for a way out. For the reasons outlined in the article, yes, and others. General sentiment toward foreigners has rebounded a bit since the early days of the pandemic, but it's pretty clear that the government would like all the Americans, Canadians and Brits to kindly GTFO. And everyone else seems to be leaving: I lost about half my friends in the last two years.
My (privileged) problem is that I can't stomach the idea of moving back to the US. I moved here because I wanted to do something different with my life; the idea of living in the US again makes me feel like life would be over. Friends are moving to Singapore, Bangkok, Bali, Berlin, so I'll likely end up following them. Five years ago HK or Taipei might've been good options, but not these days.
When I left China I spent a year or two traveling and then returned to work in Taiwan. If you already speak Chinese, it's a very soft landing. Imo the food isn't nearly as good as in China, and (depending where you were before) the weather in Taipei is much worse, but the general pace of life is way more relaxed. You don't need to go through security to get on the subway or show your ID to buy a train ticket. You hardly ever see cops pushing people around. The bureaucracy is just regular plain old bureaucracy instead of the latest creepy layer of techno-fascist privacy invasion. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and then I realize it won't, because that sense of constantly fearing the next policy shift, or wondering when something you like is about to be arbitrarily taken away, that anxiety and pessimism really is something unique to authoritarian countries.
To be sure, Taiwan is going to face increasing pressure from China in the coming years, and there is some chance that it might escalate into a hot war. But the sense of existential dread is much less for me than it was in China. Despite their best efforts, the party is much more capable of ruining the lives of people inside China than outside of it. Aside from Berlin, I've never lived in the other cities on your list, so I can't really compare, but if you enjoy the lifestyle of a tier two city in China and would like somewhere similar with a much less oppressive government, Taipei is a pretty good option.
I think it’s not just foreigers with unfavorable origins, in their speaking of ideology/regime/path confidence, anyone not subscribing and contributing to the greater good, foreigners or not, are not welcomed and supposed to stay and share the pie.
Culturally it has a lot of offer, vibrant scenes for any art or music taste and museums stuffed artifacts stolen from all around the globe[0] that might almost rival the British Museum. Also many musicians and artists have called it their temporary home, from Josephine Baker to David Bowie and his flat mate Iggy Pop[1]. Call it a litmus-test for how open a society is, even if you prefer complaining about the noise and waste the Love Parade (or rather Rave the Planet since last year) produces. On the wider geography, Germany itself is quite diverse, with a 90 minute train ride to Hamburg you will notice a difference in culture and into the south your just-acquired German skill will face challenges from many dialects. The city is also a great starting point to across the borders into the nine neighbouring countries we Germans have fought against and alongside at various points of history. Oh, and we Germans thing we have humour...
Just spent a weekend there: I heard more English spoken in public than German, and even found myself having to backtrack and switch to English (my first language) after instinctively starting conversations in German (my second language). It didn't quite feel like I was still in Germany; only the street signs and some business names brought me back.
A few of the people I met at the tech events I visited have lived in Germany long enough to get citizenship, but haven't applied because they aren't sure they could pass the language exams, and would have to take a lot of effort to get enough practice speaking - they work in English all day, and speak English to all of their friends.
Berlin is a different world from even the larger cities in southern Germany, like Munich or Nuremberg - reachable by high speed train in 3-5 hours.
For Americans, think NYC (Berlin) vs. Dallas (Munich).
It is SO hard to not switch to English when you start talking with someone who doesn't speak fluent German. It's some stupid automatism we Germans have and it took me years to break this habit. Maybe you can do the same and stick to your bad German even if the Germans switch to English? Conversations in two languages sound funny :-)
We have plenty of literature and media in German, and few languages get treated with the same effort by Hollywood distributors like German does.
If you already are a EU citizen, you simply won't bother with German citizenship. It will become an interesting problem for democracy to solve with Luxemburg have some 47% foreigners, not sure how many are EU-citizens [1].
I think I would love Berlin. It is just very different than all the other options presented, so I was curious why it was listed. It is like someone saying they are trying to decide between several types of dark roasted coffee but also having ginger kombucha in the list. Put more succinctly, I did see a common trait between Berlin and the other locations, so I wondered what it was.
TomK32's provided some great insight as a German. For me, the common traits are 1) local language is not explicitly English, 2) has a vibrant social scene, and 3) I know people there already. I'm a techie so cost of living isn't an overriding concern.
I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics.
I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit darker. It almost felt like another Chinese city. I had even been to HK several times when I was in middle school in Taiwan (I was born in America, but was a “reverse import” to Taiwan) as well as a mandarin language tutor during university, and was always amazed by the richness of HK culture from fishing villages in Saikung to bustling life in Tsim Tsa Tsui and in Central with relics of British colonialism. Now many unique elements of HK life had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution. It has its own identity from the aboriginal population, the settlers from the dynastic period, Japanese colonization, and influences from the Republic of China refugees (or occupiers, depending on your POV, post 1949 Chinese settlers) and American forces. And since 2018, I’ve seen the Taiwanese double down on their Taiwanese identity and pride, and in many ways Taiwan is the envy of China (also literally).
If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history. Now I would probably live in Taiwan and Japan.
Edit: Taiwan hasn’t always been a democracy, and the path to democracy hasn’t been easy (just ask America). It’s not perfect like any other well-running democracy, but it’s the closest paragon we have in the Chinese diaspora. The presidency has transitioned peacefully to different parties since the 1990s.
I had no idea how wide it is until a family member married someone from Asia and he explained ot me that his family thinks of themselves as ethnically Chinese, although they're totally disconnected from China.
It's actually pretty fascinating if you spend time in SE Asia. Chinese have been immigrating to all the countries for centuries. There are super old communities of Chinese in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, everywhere in fact.
And they are often a distinct community, with their own language (a dialect from where they came from in China). They were often economic migrants, so tend to be seen as a "merchant class" in these countries and hold quite a lot of political power.
The Peranakan in Malaysia are a good example. And there is continued strife in those countries as these Chinese-Malaysian often have much more political power than their numbers alone would suggest.
Thailand is weird[0], in that there's no love lost at all for mainland Chinese or Chinese tourists, but it's very socially important to have a Chinese grandparent or two.
[0]: Actually I think this is true of most of South East Asia where the Chinese community doesn't have as distinct a separation as Malaysia and Singapore
My understanding [0] from speaking with locals throughout SE Asia is a general resentment towards mainland Chinese tourists which boils down to - what else - money.
It turns out most Chinese tour operators throughout SE Asia run a completely vertical business, wherein they own all touchpoints their guests interact with (e.g. the restaurants, the bus company, the gift shops, etc.). Further, these are all staffed by immigrant Chinese. This results in all tourism profits being captured by Chinese nationals and businesses (and being exported back home as remittances) while burdening local infrastructure. Locals hate this.
For what its worth, I never heard / witnessed any hostility towards local ethnic Chinese (Peranakans), whose status, as the parent comment notes, is locally prominent. (Though there have been some bloody clashes in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_Chinese...
[0] Living in SE Asia, lots of extended chats with locals throughout the region.
> It turns out most Chinese tour operators throughout SE Asia run a completely vertical business, wherein they own all touchpoints their guests interact with (e.g. the restaurants, the bus company, the gift shops, etc.). Further, these are all staffed by immigrant Chinese. This results in all tourism profits being captured by Chinese nationals and businesses (and being exported back home as remittances) while burdening local infrastructure. Locals hate this.
I heard the exact same complaint in Italy. Chinese tourist groups come to Venice, annoy all the locals by dropping trash on the floor, but only buy their souvenirs at Chinese-owned gift shops. And they sleep on the Chinese-owned cruise ship.
Last time I was on koh phi phi someone greeted my Chinese wife in Chinese, which was a new development (english is fairly common, mandarin is also becoming more common). It seems like a lot of the tourists are now mainland Chinese, and the Thai tourist economy at least likes their money.
Bangkok is ethnically a mostly Chinese city, and is also Thailand’s richest region by far.
Just before Covid, DMK had a dedicated immigration line for Chinese passports; Chinese visitor numbers were huge already and growing until Covid, when they dropped off a cliff, and they haven't yet recovered in the same way that most other tourism has
> and the Thai tourist economy at least likes their money
Yeeees, but the government (regardless of which) has been talking about trying to move to richer tourists since forever, and discouraging large numbers of Russian and Chinese tourists who they think spend less. So yes, lots of Chinese tourists, but if they could wave a magic wand to replace those with Japanese, Korean, and American tourists, they'd do it in a heartbeat
> Bangkok is ethnically a mostly Chinese city
This is untrue, although I've heard (and would believe) that the majority of middle-class Bangkok has some Chinese heritage
> and is also Thailand’s richest region by far
Actually, until Covid's effect on tourism, that crown was held by Phuket, although Phuket also has a high Chinese influence.
Average Chinese tourists often spend a lot more than Norwegian backpackers. And it is a relatively recent phenomena for Thailand to fill up with Chinese tourists over CNY. Why limit your tourist peaks to just thanksgiving and Christmas?
Ya but it isn’t peak season. Things are much affordable in Thailand in February than they are in December. Heck, a week after new years it’s already sane again.
Places like koh chang (my personal favorite) become really deserted, not devoid of people, but you might be the only person at some lazy restaurant or bar that was full and bustling just a few weeks ago.
> As of the 2000 census, there were 6,355,144 registered residents in the city. However, this figure does not take account of the many unregistered residents and daytime visitors from the surrounding metropolitan area. More than 50% of Bangkokians have some Chinese ancestry.
They are still Thai, they often don’t even speak Chinese, just ethnically Chinese (and then I guess it depends on how you count mixed ancestry).
England has a long and proud history of being invaded, colonised and overbred by the French. Anglo-Saxon isn't exactly an English pedigree. It isn't French either, but "French" doesn't have an etymology that originated in France.
So it is quite possible that the argument of Thai people being Chinese would parallel more strongly; English people don't just speak a bit of French, they have the same ancestors and may as well be French. Hopefully the ethnic Chinese entered Thailand under more rosy circumstances!
> has a long and proud history of being invaded, colonised and overbred by the French
That’s not really true though unless you take an excessively liberal interpretation of what it means to be French. The Celts weren’t French, the Danes weren’t French, the Romans weren’t French, the Saxons weren’t French, and even the Normans had only been in France for a century before invading, although they picked up the local language pdq. The only people to successfully invade after 1066 were the Dutch, and they would assure you they weren’t French.
50% is still close to a majority. Perhaps mostly is the wrong word exactly, but it isn’t far off. And I didn’t claim Chinese language was common in either way, just that Chinese ancestry was common, which has huge ramifications to culture. Like Toledo and poles.
When I worked in Beijing, one of my friends was from Fujian. His parents lived on and off in Malaysia, which isn’t very uncommon for people in Fujian. It is alot southern Chinese, mainly Guangdong and Fujian (and maybe Wenzhou) that go abroad. It is much less common in northern China.
It's mostly because societies, where they're minorities, actively work against their assimilation. Just look at the US alone where they're always the outsiders.
I had no idea how sprawling Chinese diaspora was until I was in Ecuador and a sailor on the boat with me took me to a Chinese restaurant. In Ecuador. Of course there would be a Chinese restaurant in Ecuador, but of course there's also a sailor on my US-flagged ship who's ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin. And so we ordered Chinese in Chinese, in a Spanish-speaking country. In 1999.
The dominican republic is covered in "Pica Pollo" restaurants and they are often run by chinese people. The main food at pica pollo is fried chicken and sometimes they also serve dominican beans and rice. The only asian dish is fried rice called "cho fan" in spanish. It wasn't until years later that I learned cho fan is just "chǎofàn" spoken with a spanish accent.
I saw lots of chinese people at Pica Pollos across the country, but never saw them outside the restaurants and don't know much about where they live or what life is like for them in the DR. I'm not sure if each pica pollo is run by a chinese family that lives on site at the restaurant.
Amsterdam, Vancouver and lots of other big cities have a large enough Chinese population that there can be whole districts that are mostly Chinese. To the point where the street signs are in Chinese.
I always like to reference the moment I saw on tv in Vancouver interviewing an old lady who was so immersed in her enclave she referred to white people as foreigners.
Someone married an Asian whose family happened to be ethnic Chinese, which made you think "huh these people are everywhere". (With regards to the diaspora comment)
Then the comment, paraphrasing, "they think they're Chinese when they're not Chinese nationals at all". If their ancestors were from China, they don't "think" they're ethnic Chinese, they are ethnic Chinese. Unless you get into the nitty gritty clans and groups of the gigantic landmass. The use of "think ... although" indicates you disagree with how they identify their ethnicity. Thus I assumed you felt it was a problem.
Apologies if I read intentions that weren't there.
Calling it a strong enough link is giving it too much credit. It's more of an acknowledgement of lineage. Not difficult when names, festivals, languages are retained. In fact, if you're within 3 generations of emigration, you would even know the province and town your great grandparents came from.
Just as an example of something with a flimsier premise. Say a German American who doesn't speak the language, don't have known family there, have no loyalty to Germany, celebrate none of the German festivals, and the only indication left is a last name Schmidt. We don't say, "huh the German diaspora is everywhere" when these people say their ancestors are from Germany.
> It’s a problem in that not a common way to perceive one’s identity
This is super common in Europe. We have people who think of themselves as X and speak Xian as their mother tongue even though the region has been part of Y country for centuries.
Slovenians, for example, managed to survive under foreign rule for about 1100 years before re-gaining independence.
Nationality and ethnicity are very different concepts.
for a more American example: Ask any of the indigenous peoples how they feel about their American, Canadian, Mexican, etc. nationality.
It may not be common in your part of the world, it is extremely common in the former USSR (maybe because it was called "the prison of nations" or something to that effect). I am honestly surprised that anyone would have trouble understanding the difference between ethnicity and nationality as it seems very obvious to me and everyone I've ever met.
> Consider the way Russians-in-exile perceive themselves in the current geopolitical context.
Those who I've spoken to identify themselves as Russian citizens temporarily in exile, whilst I am ethnically Russian who has no connection to the country at all. I don't think these are the same.
That's a bad example because France isn't really an ethnicity. It's a group of regions that used to speak different languages even after World War II.
You have Bretons that are ethnically close to Irish/Scotish, Alsaciens who are ethnically Germans, Basque who are similar to the Spanish Basque, Corse who want to be independent...
A better example of a country that more or less encompass an ethnicity would be Germany, or Japan. But even there you'll find exceptions (Ainu in Hokkaido, Okinawa being also ethnically different as Ryukyu vs Yamato...)
I suspect many powerful people in Thailand feel the same (as many powerful families in Thailand are of Chinese decent).
Another interesting tidbit is that after a civil war in China, part of the Chinese army that lost the war fled to northern Thailand. And there they settled in the mountains [0].
From my understanding (from a Dutch man that lives nearby who used to be a travel guide in Thailand) many (Thai-)Chinese people here in northern Thailand still maintain very close ties with their families in Taiwan. Also, several villages here also have their own little "China-towns", which can be interesting places to visit.
> The soldiers' war did not end after their own "long march" from Yunnan to Möng Hsat in Burma's Shan State. The Burmese soon discovered that a foreign army was camped on their soil, and launched an offensive. The fighting continued for 12 years, and several thousand KMT soldiers were eventually evacuated to Taiwan. When China entered the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a desperate need for intelligence on China. The agency turned to the two KMT generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China for intelligence-gathering missions. In return, the agency offered arms to equip the generals to retake China from their bases in the Shan State. The KMT army tried on no fewer than seven times between 1950 and 1952 to invade Yunnan, but was repeatedly driven back into the Shan State. The ending of the Korean War in 1953 was not the end of the KMT's fight against the communist Chinese and Burmese armies, which continued on for many years, supported by Washington and Taiwan and subsequently funded by the KMT's involvement in the Golden Triangle's drug trade.
>In 1961, Tuan led some 4,000 battle-weary KMT troops out of Burma to a mountainous sanctuary in Mae Salong in Thailand. In exchange for asylum, the Thai government allowed them to stay on the understanding that they would assist in policing the area against communist infiltration. As a result, most of the village's inhabitants today are ethnic Chinese and direct descendants of those KMT soldiers. At the same time, General Lee of the 3rd Regiment established his headquarters at Tham Ngob, north-west of Chiang Mai. The KMT army was renamed "Chinese Irregular Forces" (CIF) and was placed directly under the control of a special task force, code-named "04", commanded by Bangkok.
> After the soldiers reached Mae Salong, China and Thailand struck an agreement to transfer the administration of the group to the Thai government. The provincial governor of southern Thailand, Pryath Samanmit, was reassigned as the governor of Chiang Rai, to oversee the KMT division, but upon taking up his position, Samanmit was killed by communist insurgents. Soon afterwards, the KMT division was ordered to assist the Thai government in countering the advancing armies on Thailand's northern borders and the internal threat from the Communist Party of Thailand. Fierce battles were fought in the mountains of Doi Laung, Doi Yaw, Doi Phamon, and Mae Aabb, and the communist uprising was successfully countered. The bloodiest operation was launched on 10 December 1970, a five-year-long campaign that claimed over 1,000 lives, many from landmines. It was not until 1982 that the soldiers were able to give up their arms and were discharged to settle down to a normal life at Mae Salong. As a reward for their service, the Thai government gave citizenship to most of the KMT soldiers and their families.
That's interesting. I learned that historically, China has been many 'nations', with related but different languages - more like Europe than like the US. And I learned that every Chinese government has struggled to hold together these regional peoples under one central government.
The current map of China is one variation of many, many historical maps, which vary considerably. (Ask the Tibetans, in particular.) It might look like a cohesive government today, but so did the USSR - the Communists suppressed the ethnic differences, but the USSR exploded into many different countries when the Communists lost power - including Ukraine, Belarus, Modova (afaik), the Baltic states, Central Asian countries, and more.
I wonder what the truth is of China now; it's a question nobody asks.
It's not that unique, really. It's quite the same as India. I guess it's harder for us westerners to appreciate Chinese diversity because they don't broadcast so much English content about themselves.
If the European Union had been more successful and had a couple more generations totally immersed speaking English, you could imagine some Chinese people in the year 2123 saying 'wow, Europe is actually a whole Civilization politically unified as a nation. Who would have thought".
That'd be true today in a timeline where Napoleon won.
I don't know about Japan, but this is certainly not the case for Italy and Germany. Even though they might have started existing as political entities in the late 19th century, the idea of "Germany" or "Italy" existed long before that. To give you an example, both Dante and Machiavelli mention an idea of a unified state for Italians. Not to mention the Roman home province of "Italia" which corresponds more or less with today's Italy.
Although off topic from the original post, would you entertain this question? What's Taiwan's position on integration with China? What does Taiwan want for itself? I'd like to hear more about that minus American and Chinese input.
This is an extremely interesting question because I’ve heard various viewpoints. The vast majority want to keep the “technical debt” (legacy code being “Republic of China”) of this uneasy bridge to China—that is trade and movement of people between the strait, and maintaining the status quo of the “Republic of China” government (controlling Taiwan) and PRC (controlling China or “mainland”).
Many Taiwanese don’t want war, but they already are functionally independent. The PRC has never governed in Taiwan. The ROC, which governed China from 1912 to 1949, governs Taiwan and its child islands.
Many young Taiwanese just want to be Taiwanese and left alone, but the vast majority want to keep the status quo as long as it’s tenable (it’s not, Xi Jinping has indicated a timeline). The big question is how this might be possible without poking the bear that resembles Pooh… It’s obvious to most Taiwanese that China won’t keep its promises, since it made clear violations of promises made to the HK people and UK.
Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.
> Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.
Maybe data suggest otherwise?
The number of Taiwaneses that support Taiwan to "Maintain status quo, move towards unification" and "Unification as soon as possible" has been dropped from 12.8% and 5.0% in 2018 to 7.5% and 1.4% in 2019. Meanwhile the number of Taiwaneses that support "Maintain status quo, move towards independence" has been rised from 12.8% in 2018 to 25.8% in 2020.
Note: I am a one of the HongKongers fled to Taiwan after the Anti-Extradition protest in 2019.
Well, if China invades it'll have even less incentive to maintain anything remotely like pre-invasion. You gave HK as the example. That was only paperwork to get in the front door.
A HKer murdered a HKer. said murderer moved back to HK. HK government said "nope can't deal with that sorry"
Taiwan: fine, we can negotiate the extradition if you insist on us taking the case.
HK gov: actually we are gonna make an all encompassing law that deals with extradition. It also makes extraditing criminals/political refugees/booksellers/whoever the ccp request quick and easy but please ignore it.
Having lived in Taiwan both before and after China's crackdown in Hong Kong, I can say that post crackdown, I haven't encountered a single Taiwanese that wants any integration with China. They just want to be Taiwanese, which after nearly a century of being an independently governed country, is very different from the life on mainland China.
And yet most of the young people I encounter are somewhat resigned to the inevitability of invasion.
Prior to the HK affair, some older Taiwanese I met would suggest that closer integration could bring economic benefits, but I don't hear that these days.
With a number of HK journalists that I respect now in prison or having fled, I can only agree. The HK spirit and culture that once thrived in the city has all but disappeared, as the Chinese government applies their embrace and extinguish approach to cultural assimilation. When you can be imprisoned for life for uttering the wrong words, it tends to silence any dissent.
Economical benefits has always been a hit and miss and lots of the older generation have learnt their lesson (even before the HK affair).
Lots of producers of different kinds have had their technologies copied, skills learnt and then abandoned for and only to hire them on a consultancy basis for when things break.
In hindsight it has likely hurt Taiwan's economy more than it has helped.
My wife is Taiwanese. She's seriously planning on fighting for her country should there be an invasion. She doesn't want anything to do with China and my understanding is that most younger taiwanese share that opinion. But some consider that a reunion could bring them better economical prospects and would be willing to sacrifice their freedom.
One surprising aspect of that is Taiwan's very limited compulsery military service - I think it was a month, recently lengthened to 6 months? What I read says that such service is very unpopular.
I don't understand a lot about it, but wouldn't people expecting an invasion from a much larger country want universal compulsary service and as much training as they can get? Even for those less motivated about winning, it would help them survive a war.
A strong majority want to maintain the status quo or gradually move toward independence. Very few want unification. It's important to understand that China promises to invade if Taiwan declares independence (the Anti-Secession Law requires that response), which means many people would ideally prefer independence but in practice support the status quo because de facto independence (the status quo) is better than being invaded. Both sides of Taiwanese politics formally support the status quo, although the DPP has stronger pro-independence leanings.
Taiwanese identity (as opposed identifying as Chinese) has also trended up in recent decades and now most people only consider themselves to be Taiwanese and not Chinese. https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7800&id=6961
Since Taiwan became a democracy, Taiwan's stance has always been against "one country, two systems". It was like that wayyyyy before the Hong Kong protest.
Mention of the chip industry makes it hard to take the source as unbiased from US side. Other comments were more insightful on the perspective of Taiwanese and on the cultural and historical aspects.
> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been.
I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland.
Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR. India plans on doing the same wrt to China, but that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO.
People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream.
Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth (regardless of what 'expats', who often both fetish-ize and dehumanize Asians, think).
> that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO.
> Since the 2000s, India has made remarkable progress in reducing absolute poverty. Between FY2011/12 and 2015, poverty declined from 21.6 to an estimated 13.4 percent at the international poverty line (2011 PPP $1.90 per person per day), continuing the historical trend of robust reduction in poverty. Aided by robust economic growth, more than 90 million people escaped extreme poverty and improved their living standards during this period.
And, as another reply noted, China grew rich after the USSR collapsed. So your facts are wrong.
But even apart from the facts, your thesis doesn't make much sense to me. "Western powers helped Taiwan and China grow rich because politics, and this is bad because ..."?
Can you provide any good sources for these claims?
> China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR.
China's split from the USSR began in the early 1970s under Mao. The first seeds of economic growth didn't sprout until the late 1970s under Deng Xiaopeng. Most of China's economic growth didn't happen until after the USSR was gone.
i can't speak for the Taiwanese link, but my recollection was that China's rise in wealth (and investment and support from the US) only really took off in the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
hard no. usa helped but taiwan themselves made TSMC's due to their work and family culture and studying and working hard their entire lives. To say Nvidia and AMD and Gigabyte and the numerous brands from Taiwan are due to USA is farfetched. It's actually more reasonable to say it's due to China or Malaysia/Thailand etc where the manufacturing is then USA.
They got all the know how from the US as a jump start. Plus loads of financial aid especially during the 90s.
Sure, during the 2000s they moved ahead as they weren't stupid and didn't blow that chance, they're smart and hard working, but their rise is ultimately due to the US great interest in that island for military/strategic reasons.
Still really off the mark. Things like TSMC were started in a lonely garage in a warehouse district in Taipei. No USA help in sight. USA have given a few planes here and there but that's not even close to 1% of the support to have given Taiwan's rise. USA got all the know how from ancient China too. Financial aid is correlative not causative as a majority of countries receive it and don't rise like Taiwan has so it's A/B tested as not the reason. As an American it's egocentric of american's to think another place's rise is due to some abstract american propogandist support that really has no effect on Taiwan's rise.
> Things like TSMC were started in a lonely garage in a warehouse district in Taipei.
What a romantic reinterpretation of reality. TSMC was founded by a guy who studied at MIT and then worked in semiconductors at Texas Instruments for over twenty years, after which he was tasked by Taiwans government to develop the country's technological sector.
> USA have given a few planes here and there but that's not even close to 1% of the support to have given Taiwan's rise.
Maybe if you total it over the last 6 decades or so. It's hardly surprising they don't need financial support for their economy today. In the 50s, their GDP didn't even hit one billion yet, and over that decade and the early 60s, the US provided more than 2 billion dollars in financial aid, in the early years over 10% of their GDP. No other Asian country ever received that much financial aid (in relative terms). This was absolutely a relevant factor that jump started their economy.
> I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland.
Taiwan didn't get rich because of the US. Taiwan got rich because of mainland china. The rise of Hong kong, taiwan, singapore and even to some degree south korea all resulted from the opening of china in the late 60s and 70s. The chinese elites' decision to open up trade with the world is what resulted in the rise of the asian tigers.
> Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR.
Had nothing to do with the USSR. China was never a pawn for or against the USSR or US or anyone else. China got rich for the same reason saudi arabia got rich or any other nation got rich. China decided to utilize their greatest resource ( a billion relatively cheap labor ) after the USSR fell.
> People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream.
Who underestimates it? The entire world order is understood to be an american world order by everyone on earth.
> Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth
Barring ww3, I doubt china's growth can be slowed. We shall have to wait and see.
Hong Kong was promised to have democracy, human rights and access to China. If they had kept those promises, then I believe many Taiwanese would have welcomed reunification.
We all knew (hopefully) that would never happen (keep their promise). It's nothing China specific. Even lots of elected politicians fail on it in any country.
I think hindsight might've clouded your assessment of the attitude during the time pre-HK crackdown.
It was originally a time of optimistic hope that China would become more and more democratic, and the integration of HK back to the mainland will not have been hard (at least, china would meet somewhere in the middle).
There was already a wave of people considering, planning and did actually leave pre-1997 and around that time. A few did go back to HK afterwards when things looked better but left again due to the current issues.
I don't know who was optimistic. The West? Definitely not those in HK. It was a time when anti-China sentiment was high and supported by the media, artists, etc as the trend (vs the crackdown now). There were songs and campaigns supporting those that wanted freedom. Learnt from history many of the older generation that have witnessed the war and after knew of how CCP and army worked.
No 1 wanted a death sentence either. Those have worked in the mainland know the "law" doesn't exist as it does in the West (including HK at the time). Gang activity vastly dropped post-1997 because of a fear of the death sentence. A lot of them and their money left for other countries.
British HK was an act of aggression and a national humiliation for China.
The ROC/Taiwan was also happy to see the British go and their regret was that the communists succeeded where they had failed (and in fact did nothing at all as all foreign settlements were kicked out by the PRC).
Why would ROC/Taiwan be happy about it? It helps distract the PRC from ROC/Taiwan. The focus has shifted to Taiwan recently because HK has been "dealt with".
British HK was an humiliation for China. That does not mean for the PRC, that does mean China as a whole and a whole people. Both sides for the straight were glad to see the British go.
It's a lack of cultural and historical understanding not to realise that.
Likewise the focus since 1949 has always been Taiwan. It's HK that has been used as a distraction and 'tool' by the West.
Your statement does not falsify the quoted statement; both can be true that the ROC would not surrender and that China might inevitably absorb Taiwan. If we want to get really pedantic, no timeline was also stated, so this could also be 50 to 500 years from now.
Your comment is indeed pedantic and misses the point.
Obviously, the context the meaning was that there was a cause to effect link between how things were going in China and, especially HK, and the likelihood of a reunification with Taiwan.
So I pointed out that the situation in HK is not really relevant because, even if it had gone perfectly 'well' the ROC would still never had surrendered to the communists. The bottom line is that regime change on the mainland is a necessary condition.
> it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution.
How would you wrap Singapore into your comment? I was recently there and took note of what looked like significant Chinese cultural influence almost everywhere.
Unlike Taiwan, Singapore is a multi-ethnic state where English is the lingua franca, and the government has a very heavy focus on racial harmony etc.
Also, Singaporean of Chinese descent are generally not huge fans of China. While some older folks have drunk the CCP Kool-Aid, among the young there is a lot of straight up racism/prejudice against "PRCs" (mainlanders), especially around ten years ago when there was a huge wave of immigrants, many of whom didn't even try to assimilate (learning English etc). Taiwan, by contrast, is viewed very favorably.
Singapore is a republic with a large population of the Chinese diaspora. However, the control of government under its system has not changed parties since its independence from the UK (whether you agree or not, some have called it de facto single party state). Chinese culture is weaved extensively into its culture, including Chinese character names in identification cards for those that identify as Chinese ethnicity.
I have many Singaporean friends of Chinese ethnicity, and most would see themselves distinct from China—not Chinese but of Chinese heritage.
Singapore is a complex beast. On the one hand, all the political tools to kick the PAP out exist. Elections are free albeit not entirely fair.
That said the PAP has used the legal system to exclude opposition candidates and the election districts are gerrymandered [0].
But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections [1]. They've steered the economy well. The PAP regularly receive praise here on HN because of their effective technocracy.
> But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections
It only takes one person going "rogue" to topple this system of trust. Is it so hard to imagine that not all authoritarian systems could be continuously benevolent?
You’re right of course but I think the more likely cause will be typical. A policy misstep, political scandal, protests, external factors etc. The PAP will be booted out democratically if it happens at all.
But having a party that can, during the "good times" manipulate the situation, such that during a bad time, they can still stay in power. Aka, they only "pull the trigger" after they know they'd be kicked out, thus preventing themselves from getting kicked out.
Which is why the preparations should be prevented, even against someone who seems benevolent at the time.
and it's not just one of those fake democracy - it's as free as a true democratic country can be, as experienced anecdotally and demonstrated in their constant top 3 finish in Freedom Index.
I watched a Taiwanese election in Taiwan. I observed their polling stations. A Taiwanese citizen started a conversation and educated me, an American, on democracy and elections.
This Taiwanese person told me that elections are for the loser. If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election. Electronic voting machines exchange trust for a more efficient election. That is why Taiwan does not use electronic voting machines.
That is a pretty impressive insight that was absent from my American civic education. I was very impressed with the civic education in Taiwan, and I was impressed with the average level of education in Taipei.
My subjective experience as an American was that Democracy is more healthy in Taiwan than it is in America.
Have to agree, from study in Taiwan, life in the PRC, Hong Kong, and South Korea over decades: democracy in Taiwan is healthier than that in the U.S.
For the skeptical, check out videos of how ballots are counted in Taiwan. Individual ballots are lifted out on the ballot box, one-by-one, and held up for any and all observers to verify. Compare this to how the matter is typically conducted in the U.S., in near-secrecy behind closed doors, involving convoluted use of a congeries of machines, having closed-source software.
every single election in the US is subject to a complete audit after the fact. counting quickly and verifying accurately after the fact are not mutually exclusive.
If you're an American, you'll be all too aware of what a mess the US electoral system is, subject to varying rules across thousands of jurisdictions, large and small, and involving now prolonged "early voting", "absentee voting" for a wide variety of reasons, mail in ballots only for some states, little or no ID verification for some states, outdated voter rolls, legal "ballot harvesting" etc.
Growing up we used to politely nod at the common belief that the 1960 presidential race (Kennedy vs. Nixon) was decided by Mayor Daley's corrupt intervention in Chicago. And, of course, the wild 2000 Gore vs. Bush race decided in Florida further eroded hugely trust in the electoral system. And etc. etc.
Considering how close you came to a coup and how the elected president could spend months trying to destroy democracy while also personally using his power and influence to try to sway local officials, it doesn’t seem like the complete audit isn’t really helping. Especially when 40%+ of the population thinks those audits are manufactured lies from main stream media.
How is the coup narrative so pervasive? There was no institutional support, nobody got killed except for a rioter, they all cleared out promptly by curfew. By all indications it was a riot and a pretty mild one at that given the previous summer. How is that a coup?
We know what rioters are capable of when they actually want to overthrow govt: look at the autonomous zones and capitals that got ransacked in the upper north west (Seattle, Portland, etc). Those were over weeks where cops weren't allowed into entire city blogs, they declared themselves autonomous, and people were killed to that ends. They also received tons of institutional support from media, politicians, and wealthy people.
I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup. At LEAST the other riots were coups too, or more truly, only the leftist partisan riots can be considered attempted local coups given their stated goals and actions.
If you remember how the narrative evolved in real-time: in the preceding months the talking point was "only leftists riot", then on the capital riot and following days, the dominant narrative was "SEE! right wing people ALSO riot". Only days after that did the language start to coalesce around "actually this was was a COUP", and even then it was seen as hyperbolic even on reddit. Now it's been repeated so many times it's just taken as fact.
Even a successful coup is possible with no one getting killed;
> they all cleared out promptly by curfew
Because the coup attempt had already failed.
> By all indications it was a riot and a pretty mild one at that given the previous summer. How is that a coup?
“Coup” is not defined by intensity but by objective. The overtly intent was to use intimidation and/or violence against government officials to coerce a rejection of the electoral votes from sufficient states to allow the sitting President to extend his term nothwithstanding having been defeated in the election, at the instigation of the sitting President. It is a textbook autocoup attempt by its goals and ultimate instigation, which failed because the rioters were held back long enough for members of Congress to escape, but not by a wide margin.
Was it a hastily conceived, poorly coordinated, amateurish autocoup attempt? Yes, absolutely. Does that reduce its severity as a crime? No, no it doesn’t.
> I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup.
It was a coup attempt, specifically an attempted autocoup. It wasn't a coup, because it failed.
> At LEAST the other riots were coups
No, none of those were coups, or even coup attempts. (The “Autonomous Zone” might be viewed as a hyperlocalized secession attempt, but that’s a distinct thing from a coup, seeking to separate territory from the control of an established government, not unlawfully take or extend control of said government.)
Why did the "coup" fail? We've all seen the videos, police never really showed up in force, army never showed up, national guard never showed up. It ended because...people went home. If it were actually an attempted coup, why didn't they dig in? Why didn't a single politician back them?
You just seem convinced of a coup and nothing will shake you. What did they do that was wholly different from a regular riot? Even on the inside they're just taking photos and walking around.
I think you are oriented for defending the American election. I think a better way to orient is to compare how Taiwanese elections are run to how American elections are run.
My assertion is that Taiwanese elections are much more simple and therefore much more understandable and much more trustable. American elections might be cheaper per capita.
If we are choosing a method of elections that is more complex and results in less trust, why are we doing it that way?
In many places in the US you cannot bring your children with you to vote. So many people rely on public schools as day care so that they can vote. In places that cancelled school on election day recently (people vote at schools often, and there were security concerns after recent shootings), the voter turnout was lower in segments of the population that statistically are less likely to have family/partner available to watch children, or the means to pay for childcare.
I think it is fair to restate that your argument is: "Because there are classes of people who cannot vote because children are restricted in voting areas, election day should not be a federal holiday."
I am having a little trouble taking that in good faith. For one, the evidence presented is not of a holiday shared by everyone (friends who could watch kids, partners who also have jobs, etc).
That's before asking if it's right that children cannot be with you to vote or if that could be done better. That's before asking if there was higher turnout in other groups, like underpaid teachers.
That really wasn't my argument at all. In so far as I had one. The US system has so many more severe issues that a holiday seems minor and it is somewhat complex as an issue. Letting a parent bring in five children probably does create concerns as well.
Other than bankers and people who work for the government (like teachers) few people get government holidays in my experience. There is a surge of temporary daycare workers for those days so parents can still go to work. Poorer parents dread those days. Public school, especially post pandemic has turned into free childcare and little more due to teacher shortages.
Early voting seems like a good thing to continue to me.
Fixing the issues that make your vote irrelevant at the national level unless you live anywhere but a very short list of places would be much higher on my list than a holiday. The gerrymandering is painfully obvious on the voting maps.
How hard an election is to rig is not the issue,itshow obviously unriggable it appears to the losing voters. That's the (well, an) important thing the American system is missing.
I disagree. There was no evidence of fraud in 2020, yet the losing party at 80-90% rate still believes it was stolen. At that point, there's nothing that can be done to dissuade.
I thought there was evidence of fraud in 2020, but the problem was that the "evidence" was bogus. One of the complaints I remember was that the results swung sharply from one side to the other at some point in the reporting process, but that of course was because the initial results were from in-person voting, and the mail-in/drop-in votes were counted last, so when those results were added, then suddenly the "blue" candidates were winning, because the red voters tended to vote in-person far more than their blue counterparts. The red voters somehow refuse to believe this however and think the election was rigged.
> If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
The idea seems correct, however, unsure how electronic voting machine comes into the picture, perhaps only in a mental sense, but people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
there's that, but an electronic voting machine is more complex. Election fraud for paper ballots is "easily" detected, but not really so for electronic voting machines.
This might sound snide, but I assure you I am asking in good faith to prove a point. What does it mean to audit the election, without skipping the complexity?
A few questions I would expect to be answered:
How do we know all votes cast were legitimate?
How do we know that the voting machines recorded votes correctly?
How do we know the auditors are good faith actors?
How do we know ballots weren't lost/delayed (mail in)?
How do we know legitimate looking votes were cast by the right person?
My overall assertion is not that we can't know. It's that voting is so complex that this can't be easily explained in a satisfying way to (or by) a layman. It's so complex that "trust" is a core part of the election process.
Should I have to take a quarter long class in election mechanics to be satisfied that our voting system is legitimate? That's a bit of hyperbole, but I truly don't know how our elections work and I don't think I could understand them in an afternoon and it doesn't have to be that way.
Taiwan's elections are simple and self-evident. American elections are extremely complex and require trust in institutions.
Taiwan's elections optimize for trust. America's elections optimize for cost. Trust is priceless.
I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
> I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
Every electronic vote has a physical record, and is checked against each other. Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election.
Ok, a global wikipedia article. Is there any example in the US of fraud existing at a scale that once audited could have changed the outcome on an election?
That's an hour long technical read. Do you think your average person with high school or a GED as their highest level of education or less, ~40% of the country, is going to be able to read such a meaty document and make sense of it?
8% of Americans are basically illiterate. 54% read below a 6th grade level.
I am not trying to attack you with that statement. This is a statement form one liberal to someone else I perceive as liberal leaning:
Your education privilege is off the charts.
We could have a system like Taiwan, but instead we have an electronic voting system. How do they compare and contrast? Why were electronic voting machines pushed on us? Which one has better understand-ability properties? Which one has better trust properties? What are the properties of electronic voting machines that make them desirable? Why do we have to convince people that voting machines are good (implying a lot of people don't think they are)?
Fully electronic voting cannot be inspected sufficiently to audit. Too many points of failure, too many blackboxes, no way to detect failures.
This has been thoroughly, repeatedly, exhaustively researched and debated. Which is why most jurisdictions (in the USA) have returned to paper ballots.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
This is misleading. The vast majority will have had no exposure to that evidence (there's no big stage you can do convincing presentations on that everyone will see).
Heck, I wouldn't know how to go about finding that evidence atm.
Democracy is about submission of the minority. To believe in democracy means to believe that when you are in the minority, you must submit to things you disagree with. There is grey area around human rights and bad faith legislation/corruption.
If I don't trust the election, that means I don't believe I'm actually in the minority, and if I don't believe I am in the minority, then I am being subjugated and oppressed by people who are using power to get their way rather than a mandate from the people to execute the people's will.
I am extremely liberal and Trump is the avatar of everything that I hate, but I don't believe the election is legitimate either. A sitting president called an election official to sway the election, and 2 years later it's not clear there are going to be any consequences. The mechanics of mail in ballots was messed with during an election cycle, and the person who did that is still in control of the postal system. If there are no timely consequences for attempting to cheat, how can you trust the integrity of the system? I don't. There are clearly no checks and balances for actual and obvious attempts to manipulate elections.
I think you can talk to just about anyone who works in security and they will tell you there is no reason to trust voting machines. On slashdot, the technical community nearly universally said "this is a bad idea" when Diebold voting machines were first adopted. That sentiment has been strong through technical communities for a long time. Even today, I think if you asked HN "from a technical point of view are voting machines a good idea?" there would be a resounding, absolutely not.
Because we won, it's less of an issue for us, but had we lost, we would question the results too. We would look around us and experience that no one else liked trump and ask "how can these results be legitimate" too, the same way they look at the people around them and go "everyone liked trump, how can these results be legitimate?" He called a Georgian election official, are we sure that didn't work? Did he call other state's officials and we didn't hear about it because it did work? How do we know? How do we know Biden didn't do that?
Denial is the first stage of grief.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
You are failing to have empathy for these people. Evidence cannot be presented, because the mechanics of elections are not able to produce evidence. I am a well educated US citizen, but I think our elections amount to "trust us." Of course people don't believe evidence presented, because the evidence amounts to "trust us." "Trust this extremely complex system that only a handful of people might know how it functions in depth."
You say "regardless of evidence presented," but what if the system is not actually capable of producing satisfying evidence? What if the evidence is actually not satisfying? What if there were systems that could be satisfying, bit this one isn't able to be?
In Taiwan I could go watch an election and I found the legitimacy of it to be self evident because I found the mechanics of it simple and hard to argue with. I don't think there is anything self-evident about our elections. In America, who runs the voting machines is an important question. In Taiwan, who facilitates the voting stations doesn't make much difference. "Are the voting stations being watched" is an important question in Taiwan. "Are the voting stations being watched" doesn't really make sense here since we have mail in ballots and other methods.
Taiwanese don't have to say "trust us" they can say "go watch the election happen."
A hard pill to swallow for most of liberal America is that conservatives can be right for very wrong reasons. It's easy to say "you don't think the results are legitimate because you lost," it's much harder to say "can somebody in good faith not trust the election results?" "what might we have done to decrease trust in elections?" "Can we make our election system more resistant to claims of bad faith?"
> That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election
Losers who have stopped believing in elections will complain about any mechanism, be it electronic or analog.
(In the US, they typically don't believe the hand-recounts, either. They do believe in gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement, though, so that's how the game gets played.)
I don't live in Taiwan but my impressions - people are a lot more engaged with politics, general political knowledge and awareness is higher, voter turnout is higher - all of these may be as a result of the ever-looming threat of being subsumed by the mainland, but also maybe an enthusiasm for democracy since it's relatively new to the country!
Taiwan has its issues with first past the post voting, quality of news media and control of media (eg by sketchy foreign corporations) and conga line of infotainment propaganda outlets. There's a big economic incentive in reunificiation for some actors which perverts politics and discourse to an extent.
But to be honest.. America is currently a really low bar for democracy in the first place (speaking as someone living outside USA as well)
Thanks for the feedback. For example, the US Congress really could use some of the technical bureaucratic competence I hear Taiwan has. US institutions are in post-WWII lows right now, which is like a moist, dark, sugary place for attracting larger-than-life-personalities to no ultimate good.
As one smart guy wrote, there's three kinds of power: tradition, institutions, and personality. My coralary: weak institutions attract strong personality.
See the other conversation re: China & Taiwan below. It'd be a shame to see a good thing go away.
It is difficult to get distances in time into my own mind. But for those other than me reading this and having trouble with this mentally. The first democratically elected president in Taiwan in 1996, which was arguably a high point in the democratisation process, is now in 2023 temporally equidistant to the moon landing in 1969 and us in the present.
It's also difficult for societies with populations absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history, how developments 30, 50, or even 100 and 200 years still leave all kinds of traces and influences, materialized in attitudes, political affiliations, laws, and so on.
History is not a "that was back in the day, doesn't matter anymore" affair.
> societies with populations absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history
That doesn't really describe Taiwan. I'm still not sure of the point you're trying to make, but it seems like you are really trying to push down the people who managed to break free of the dictatorship imposed on them for 50 years by the mainlanders who came to Taiwan in 1949.
I'm not sure what your beef really is, but I have yet to read any reason for dismissing the decades old democracy that now exists in Taiwan. People my age might have been born under martial law, but most Taiwanese alive today have lived their whole adult life under this democracy. That's not incompatible with having knowledge of recent history, and Taiwan also has schools.
Your response feels largely tangential to the point I was making: That the 90s feel closer in history than they really are (especially to those of us that “were there”).
It also feels like a borderline attack, implying that I and others are somehow “absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history”. Pretty odd to make a statement like that in response to someone who you know next to nothing about, no? If you want to contribute to a good debate and hope to bring me around to your point of view, I would ask that you try harder.
>Your response feels largely tangential to the point I was making: That the 90s feel closer in history than they really are (especially to those of us that “were there”).
Well, either the point you were making was even more tangential to what was in this thread - a general observation unrelated to what we were discussing, or (as I read it), aside from the literal point, there was a deeper implicit point pertinent to what was discussed.
In this case, I wrote something along the line of "as close as year X, Y was the case", so your response can be read as: "you might think this date is close and thus events from that era still matter, but we tend to overlook how close a period in living memory is, so they matter less than you think".
>Pretty odd to make a statement like that in response to someone who you know next to nothing about, no
It wasn't writing about you, it even explicitly writes "it's difficult for societies with populations (...)". I was writing about a cultural difference.
Certain cultures got it lucky and didn't have much history of the sort to concern with, and so don't have much of a historical perspective (and how history affects the present). It's easier to have that perspective when you have had huge events like wars, dictatorships, and so on in your local livable history, than when you just read about those in the media (if many even do much of that).
You are entitled to your subjective interpretation. But my own reflection was that I perceived 1996 to be closer to the present than 1969 would have been in 1996. Thus I wanted to state a bias that I had discovered in myself, along with a trick to make it more obvious to perceive it.
> It wasn't writing about you, it even explicitly writes "it's difficult for societies with populations (...)". I was writing about a cultural difference.
Your initial response (which is what I responded to) was phrased differently in terms of the first few words. I do not have access to it, but I think my interpretation was more reasonable before you (arguably) improved it.
Regardless, this is greatly diverging from my minute initial observation. Thus I will “leave it here” and look forward to seeing you in another discussion in the future.
Yeah, god forbid somebody doesn't have the US viewpoint on foreign policy and other countries, especially given its excellent track record and how it has fucked up one country after another for a century!
Anybody having different opinions must be burned to the stake!
I don't believe anyone is saying that. Reasonable objection is fine.
However the reductio ad absurdum tactic you employ to dismiss pointing out actual problematic behavior is typical of trolling itself. My opinion? I don't think that's an accident.
"That was then and this is now" is not how it works in such transitions (and after such wide-ranging power and influence of the far right, and such bad blood from the murders and torture). Not any more than it worked for the blacks after 1865 (or 1964 for that matter), to give an example from US history.
Hell, it took decades even for post-WWII Germany to shake the ex-Nazi-high-ranking influence in its politics, media, finances, and so on, and the Nazi rule was just 12 years, and they had far more horribleness and more shame as a motive to stomp out those elements after 1945...
The same has been true in post-Franco Spain, and any other place with such history.
Keep in mind Germany had to deal with the Soviet threat at the same time. Sadly, the communist influence there will take a few more decades to stomp out.
Things seem to have worked out fine for Central and Eastern European post-communist countries. Also Portugal, Greece.
>If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history
OTOH this attitude is why PRC finally calibrating HK for PRC nationals/one-way permits instead of privileged foreign expats was long overdue. Mainlanders I know in HK find the new mix PRC/HK mix more preferable than UK/HK, less visible discrimination etc. Local nativism still exists but less overt than pre NSL. Applies to the mainland as well - first exodus of privileged discontent expats who thought they were indispensable in the mid 2010s - only to be replaced by qualified nationals. Think of it as PRC fixing their H1B problem. Something many in tech have comparably aligned opinions on.
E: over comment limit @charlieyu1
That's ~2 years worth of one way permits from PRC. Xi can snap his fingers and send 1M unemployed college educated mainlanders to HK tomorrow if he wants. Let's not pretend it's a big / existential loss, reality is PRC now has an abundance of talent who are much more deserving of living/running HK than most HKers who were merely privileged to be born in a city with constrained immigration requirements that puts mainland hukous system to shame. Under any reasonably fair system, HK should be treated like just ANY OTHER CHINESE CITY, like how under qualified people get squeezed out via gentrification in tier1 cities in every other country leading to local culture changes. It's not pretty, but it's how most of the world functions.
Ultimately HK "culture" is the result of undue privilege enforced by 2 systems that benefit locals and expats instead of 1B+ PRC nationals. Expats I get, because some expertise needs to be imported and you need foreigners in the country for track2 diplomacy. But unlike pre 2000s when PRC human capital was borderline North Korea, there's nothing particularly deserving about a person born and raised in HK anymore. If anything they are increasingly less deserving, with a particularly bad human capita / talent pool. HK _still_ some of the poorest tertiary education statistics by high income standards (~25% when it should be 40-50+%) to stay competitive. Meanwhile PRC is spitting out 8M+ higher-ed a year, there's no reason why HKers or expats should have priority over qualified mainlanders anymore. If HKers want to emigrate, go ahead, there's no shortage of deserving replacements in mainland with 100x more bodies to draw from. For mainlanders, continuing HK privilege simply doesn't make sense anymore.
And the result is mass exodus of Hongkongers, especially the younger generation. 110K people moved to UK alone in the last two years. That's 1.5% of population, and UK alone. People are leaving the city faster than back in East Germany before Berlin Wall.
And why people born and raised in Hong Kong have to give way to privileged mainlanders who don't share any culture with us at all?
They may have moved, but how many will ultimately stay in the UK?
I find that asians often have very rosy ideas about the UK, but once they're here they're bound to notice that it's a decaying shithole and leave. Or maybe commit suicide like that 27 year old woman in London.
UK is far from a decaying shithole and based on recent polling many of the elements of Brexit may possibly be wound back in coming years so its future is far more optimistic.
And yet for all its problems it is still a modern, vibrant, multicultural, successful democracy on the doorstep of Europe. Which is why so many people continue to emigrate there.
It might still be better than Asia with crazy working hours, bosses that call/text you outside of work non-stop, having to attend to work gatherings, working on weekends, etc.
Not like people don't commit suicide elsewhere. UK might not be the best but it's still a lot better than some places.
If you swap out the entire population of HK with those from PRC then all you have left is a name and a bunch of buildings. Because it is the people and their unique customs that defines a culture.
You seem to be way too flippant about cultural genocide.
The irony is if Hong Kong was just another Chinese city, OP wouldn't even be in Hong Kong. It is the Hong Kong people and its culture that made Hong Kong into a world class city, not mainlanders. Take that away and Hong Kong will become a second tier city. Mainlanders cannot keep Hong Kong first tier. If they could, they would have done it in China already.
So are you distinguishing "Cantonese Culture" from "Hong Kong Culture"? Guangzhou (just up the river) has a flourishing Cantonese culture... which is where most of Hong Kong culture came from originally.
So really you are talking about the cultural differences developed from 1950 to now. Which is still quite large because of the cultural revolution... but "Cultural Genocide" seems like not the correct term.
No one's swapping out the entire population. But populations change, when people move, demographics recompose, and local customs accordingly. HK nativism/localism rose after ~150/day “one way permits” from PRC to HK (for the wealthy and family reunification) led to 1/7 (15%) of the city's growth coming from mainlanders in 20 years. That's relatively fast, as is visible within a generation, but also about as subtle as the US racial composition going from 75% white to 60% in the same amount of time.
Que similar REEEs from a bunch of young, privileged HK nativist about dirty mainlander shitting on their streets, taking their jobs and leeching their benefits (all somewhat true). But in America/west they're not called freedom fighters, they're called alt right protecting white culture, and (not accusing you) tends to adopt the flippant narrative accusing immigrants mixing their own culture as "cultural genocide". In HK’s case, mainlanders get lumped together, as if there's no regional diversity from a huge country of 1.4B people. It's the familiar culture war pattern of privileged locals mad at poor mainland (Mexicans) doing menial labour while being unsightly eyesores, while skilled mainland labour is taking their jobs and rich mainland pig farmers are buying their penthouses whilst flaunting wealth and reminding locals that HK was great when PRC was poor, so lets make HK great again.
Broad point being, in-demand urban centres in PRC (and around the world) have experienced dramatic shifts in demographics due to rapid urbanization and migration patterns (both domestic and international) causing city folk to collide with country bumpkins or dominant supremacists with ethnicities they find "inferior". But most places largely integrate while life and culture moves on. Until the alt right, or those nativists/localists parallels in HK politicize en masse and rally against filthy foreigners (alien mainland "locusts") and lose their shit and burn down the city over the fact that culture is changing to accommodate/reflect these inferior outgroups.
I'm not even unsympathetic to groups including in the west who think identity / culture has changed too much too fast. But I'm also not going to shed tears after they get stomped when they operationalize their nativism. All these arguments defending that only HKers should determine HK culture forgets that PRC "immigrants" to HK are NEW HKers and get a voice too, even if the flows inevitably shifts them towards becoming "just another Chinese city" - as if Chinese cities are all homogeneous. From a mainland perspective, the alternative vision of a British HK, lashing out to forever be untouched from 99% of "one" country, is absurd.
> All these arguments defending that only HKers should determine HK culture forgets that PRC "immigrants" to HK are NEW HKers and get a voice too, even if the flows inevitably shifts them towards becoming "just another Chinese city" - as if Chinese cities are all homogeneous.
Maybe think about the "why" instead of just complain? Try to understand things instead of just saying they suck?
- Can you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc in China? No.
- Do you get a death sentence in China? Yes.
- If you say something against the current government can you get arrested? Yes.
- Do you know what happened to Jack Ma and many others?
- Can you move your hard earned money out of China?
And lots more...
No it's not the same. HK provided what China mainland couldn't. It was seen as a paradise at 1 point and PRC wanted to get rid of this superiority. It made more $$$, had better jobs, better lifestyle, etc. People wanted to go here like in the "gold rush". The hype train was setting foot on HK = getting rich. Of course this didn't happen. This created a huge divide.
It's not that the culture changed. It's not that things moved fast. It's that it's driven away the essence of what made HK great.
And it's not like Americans don't complain about Mexicans. Trump even wanted to build his own wall :)
Nativist attitude predated NSL, when HK had their obscene privileges and responded to rapid shift in culture due to mainland immigration by shitting on the outgroup like many groups in the west in the last decade. The original post touches on why - HK supremacy where taxi drivers can afford to have multiple mainland mistresses like the 90s ended as PRC caught up. Incidentally PRC tier 1/2 is where $$$ money is made now, and plenty of cities have better lifestyles. Even TW topped at 10% of workforce working in mainland when HK peaking at 8% - plenty of well compensated opportunities in PRC for the skilled english fluent HKers, but issue is again, human capita broadly sucks unskilled and mass thinks they're entitled to a lifestyle that's no longer possible when they have to compete with ~1billion others, so they understandably try not to, and hold on in a city with worse gini coefficient / inequality than mainland. At least the welfare system, paid for by being middle men to PRC wealth, affords them higher income than they deserve. Meanwhile, as their relative status declines, they shit on poor mainlanders who have the opportunity to live in HK like most of their forefathers, many simply under family reunification permits, while lash out at nouveau riche mainlanders whose black money they’re happy to launder but god forbid when said cleaned money is flaunted in polite british inspired society.
Sure it's not the same anymore, but HK status quo was not sustainable, especially on national security grounds from where they basically had carte blanche to commit treason and be spy capital of Asia/PRC by slagging on NSL implementation for 20 years. Bringing "rule-of-law" to pirate cove sucks for the pirates. Yes they had a very good setup where they can flaunt increasingly unearned superiority to the mainland, but no reason why the mainland should maintain that arrangement in perpetuity, especially when it's received so ungraciously. As for your list, post NSL HK, you can still access foreign social media, death penalty still abolished in HK, you can still talk shit about gov (granted you don't conspire with foreign powers / undermine one country security), like a handful of folks renditioned by PRC post handover is pretty mild for the shenanigans HK was up to pre revolution, and HK still hotbed of capital flight. Yes a lot of perks are justifiably constrained, because they never took the one country part of 1C2S seriously.
Again, I get why locals went nativist and think post NSL HK is reduced - and it is - but they're still dripping in special administration privileges. Meanwhile it's great for PRC nationals now, which is frankly how it ought to be. The optimism that mainland would move closer to the HK system instead of vice versa was always hubris to anyone who looked at the numbers. State side, alt right Americans got away with as much as HKer nativists, until they stormed capitol/legco. That's when the hammer drops anywhere.
> Yes a lot of perks are justifiably constrained, because they never took the one country part of 1C2S seriously.
Is that just your vision of the country? As per the other comments before Xi started the country went in a different direction. Just because you're supporting another faction does not make HK a wrong?
> Meanwhile it's great for PRC nationals now, which is frankly how it ought to be.
Your bias is clear as day... so let's leave it there as it's pointless. Like those hands are very clean.
> by PRC post handover is pretty mild for the shenanigans HK was up to pre revolution
Because you're turning a blind eye to it all? Like when they hold up your family, your business, etc hostage just to ensure you cast a vote on a PRC supported candidate and claim the election is clean?
> especially on national security grounds from where they basically had carte blanche to commit treason
The nation isn't CCP. Clearly I give up. To take the analogy you're saying that America = Trump and anything else is treason.
No, that's the OG 1C2S vision, and frankly anyone with half a brain should understand why. HK was to implement NSL on her own, with PRC having unilateral ability to implement if HK politics took too long or security situation dictates. Boils down to this:
PRC gave HK 20 YEARS. 20 YEARS where HK existed in a national security state of exception where they can operate as a spyhub into PRC and HKers can conspire with foreign influence consequence free. That patience/benevolence on the CCP part is bordering on retarded. Literally no country in the world that's not a basket case would allow such a lapse in security to exist. Including HK under british admin. Every CCP leader since handover has hounded HK to pass NSL on their own. They failed, because they never took 1C part of 2S seriously. HK is wrong because when given the opportunity to govern itself, it failed with respect to national security, which is near #1 thing on the list of sovereign priorities.
Of course the west/US looks at this absurd situation and tries to defend it because it benefits them. But it’s not complicated - national security oversight applies to all subjects and every inch of a sovereign soil is the norm. HK is not special in that way anymore, but IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSE TO BE,
>turning a blind eye to it all
It's mild because most they did was arrest and purge a bunch of compromised candidates with connections abroad, again treason. Incumbent HK political class drunk on western influence was overdue for purge post NSL, like why would anyone allow compromised candidates to run for office? Except PRC did for 20 years, leading to accumulation of rot. ~200 arrested and ~125 charged almost 3 years post NSL is kid gloves.
>Trump and anything else is treason
I'm saying storming the capitol hill / legco in HK will get your movement stomped regardless of affiliations. Heads roll when gov building starts being attacked.
Yes, you seriously can't post this abusively here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's so interesting to read this perspective since it drives home "the grass is always greener.." for me.
I've lived a pretty charmed life in the US for the past few years (like the majority of HN, I imagine) but I find myself longing to move to a country with dense cities, affordable housing in the city center, great public infrastructure and a modicum of agreement among the citizens and China fits the bill pretty great for me. I understand that it might come at the cost of some personal freedom but I'm willing to pay that price for a great society in return. But reading this makes me think this is part of "the human condition" - the more time we spend in a bubble in a place, the more we either become blind to it's shortcomings or become overly rosy about a foreign place that would solve all our problems.
As a sidenote, the author says he does not like his kids playing "war" in Chinese playgrounds - I wonder how he will feel about the active shooter drills that are now part of every kids life in the US.
Ahh yes, China, with its brutal Darwinian rush hour on the metro. The experience of needing to shove aside a 70 year old women with her grocery trolley who doesn't understand you need to wait until people get off before you get on.
That affordable downtown housing which is on par with costs in Manhattan, where you'll hear someone renovating until 9pm every night and smell the sewage gas wafting from bathroom drains because what's a u-trap and inadequate underlying infrastructure.
Agreement between citizens that if they can cheat the laowai, or any mark really, or cut someone's line then they will.
Try living there for a bit. It's nice enough if you don't mind seeing the sun a few weeks a year through the smog.
China is actually fun to live in, but it's not a good place to live if you value your health, physical or mental. At least not the cities.
The bathroom drain thing is so true. I documented that in a bunch of cities all the way from Xinjiang to Beijing. I don't get why they don't install u-traps. There were a couple of my hotels that had them, but most did not. This includes someone's home I stayed in.
When I asked a local about it they got very angry, like I was insulting them. The need to save face in China is real. But I get it, "who is this American who thinks they can tell us how to do things?"
I didn't find the smog to be bad everywhere, though. Beijing was pretty bad in the morning/early afternoon. But from what I remember Chengdu was nice smog/weather wise.
They sell fake pregnancy pillows in China to put in your belly to get people to give you a seat on the metro. Of course that doesn't really work as soon as people knew about it.
I'd encourage you to study Mandarin for a year or so and look into what the non-influencer set is saying about China. My first trip to China was in 1999 and my last in 2019. That was a time of amazing freedom and growth. Beijing went from bicycles to cars to subways and everything was growing. It's not like that now, youth unemployment is very high, foreigners are not welcome, and you really can't imagine the political and economic situation you're walking into. One simply does not publicly discuss problems there without considering the consequences.
Columbine was 1999. I think he'll be more surprised by the level of political division and general impoliteness there is in the US.
This goes way further than most to explain "Chinese characteristics" (my term usage not link's).
China is very complex and belies any simple summary. I definitely think it's a vastly smarter state than Russia... who by comparison it must now regard as a baby sitting project.
This hits home for me a lot. I've lived in Spain, Argentina and Finland, all in hoping to fill whatever gap I thought it would, whether that would be life quality, weather, culture or whatever. But after the honeymoon period, the cracks started to show at every place. I'm now back in my home country, Estonia, which I (now) think is the best for me - but that creeping feeling of something better being somewhere out there is hard to shake, and still with me, even as I try to not think about that.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm Indian and I'm on my third country I've lived in now. I'm beginning to think I should learn to be optimistic and appreciative about wherever I live than trying to find that perfect country to settle down :)
I don't agree. Yes in one sense people are all the same. But differences in each country really do matter. As do cultural differences.
I grew up in the US but I've lived in South Africa for nearly 10 years. I've also lived in Switzerland and Mexico.
So I've seen enough of a range of how people live to know there are better and worse conditions. Maybe there is no true perfect country or culture, but there are definitely tradeoffs.
You might love the culture and hate the government, or love the government but hate the culture.
Like I love how friendly South Africans are, but my God the government is so corrupt. I love how the Swiss government works, but Swiss people aren't known for being easy to make friends with. God forbid you flush the toilet after 10pm.
So depending on what you are optimizing for, some places really are better than others.
This a a strange postmodern take. All places and cultures are really equal?
Maybe Im missing your point, but to take a hyperbolic example, surely you wouldn't live in north Korea and say "There is no place, and no time, where people are better than what you see before you right now."
I have no reason to think people in North Korea aren't just as nice and just as terrible as people in Seattle or anywhere else, really. The political system in North Korea is atrocious, but the point was that people are people.
My counterpoint is that while "people are people", they are impacted and influenced by their material, cultural, and political circumstances.
People can become hardened, callous, mean, and damaged to a greater or lesser degree in durable ways that outlast political circumstance.
If you beat and abuse a child, and that child will be more likely to beat and abuse others. This is called the cycle of violence. You can absolutely have times and places where this is more or less prevalent.
"people are people" on a slave plantation as well, but their behavior is not the same as those living in Seattle. If you flipped a switch on the political system overnight, the people would not flip with it. You might expect to see trauma and damage to impact behavior for generations to come, even if you magically teleported them to Seattle.
I know families that fled the cultural revolution in China, and it still has behavioral impacts on people 60 years later, including children who have never even been to China. Many viewed their neighbors as threats, thieves, and informants and are less "nice" to strangers as a result. It changed who they are as people in durable ways that outlasted the causal circumstance, and informed how they teach their children to treat strangers living in Seattle 60 years later.
Surely you can imagine a place where conditions are not conducive to "being nice" and as a result, people are less nice overall. You might see the same absolute range, with examples of extreme kindness or terrible behavior, but the mean and typical behavior can be shifted.
I understand and agree with what you said. But I'd say what you're describing is how people are affected in a superficial level. In the façade they present to strangers. However, I interpreted the original post to mean that, in an intimate level (within a group of friends who trust each other), it won't be that different. But yes, it may be that you are in a place where for whatever reason you can't form meaningful relationships with others. Usually that happens to people who leave their countries, rather than the ones who stay. But sometimes, it can be the other way around.
Anyway, I think the original point is that you really live in the small group of friends and your interactions with strangers, while also part of life, it's less meaningful. So, you can find a culture that matches you more closely, but unless the culture you are in is completely disgusting to you, you're probably optimising the wrong thing.
Yeah I think you get my point. I was mostly objecting to the strict equivalence they were claiming. Across cultures you will find some relative constants in human behavior. For example, Most people love their children no matter where you go, but even that can mean different things depending on the norms and that culture.
I would push back a little bit on the idea that these differences are purely superficial. Humans can have real cultural differences regarding where they find meaning in life, how they relate to others in society, and if they ever find satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment in their own lives.
Just because such differences can not be summed and weighed against each other to determine which culture is "better", does not mean they are the same.
This is the post-modern sentiment that I reject. E.G the differences can not be compared so therefore they are the same.
That's very interesting, what made you leave those countries? Argentina likely has money issues, but the other two come very "highly recommended" (high quality of life, law & order, etc), especially Finland.
Argentina has big economical issues indeed, and the resulting inconveniences were what drove me away eventually, and yet out of everywhere I've been, Argentina has had by far the friendliest people I've ever met, and the easiest people to make friends with.
Spain (the government and regulations around renting places) was unfriendly to newcomers as its a very socialist country and not very welcoming to digital nomads. Everything there is built in a way to expect a local bank account, local job, etc. From the moment of trying to get a local ID card it was clear that you were not really wanted there. Processes made purposely difficult and requirements differ from police station to police station. Beautiful country, but given that I do not intend to stop working remotely as a contractor it made basic things there very difficult. Spain is quite corrupt however so if you have money you _can_ get around these issues via some lawyer agencies who get you through the door in a matter of days of what otherwise can be a half-year wait in queue, but I just found the system fighting me too much.
Finland is great though, everything runs efficiently, most of everything can be done online, just like in Estonia, but much like Estonia, very difficult to make friends and the culture in general is quite closed and people keep to themselves a lot. Most people I know here have had the same friends since highschool. So when it came down to Finland or Estonia, I just chose the one I already had friends at.
Probably both. Escaping the routine, boring familiarity and searching for that one place where I'd be perfectly content with existence, but that in itself I have come to find is probably not possible to achieve because of the very nature of being human. Being self-aware is such a curse sometimes.
You’re not just paying in your own freedoms. You’re paying in the freedoms of others, like the Muslims that the Chinese government have decided aren’t compatible with the “great society” that you seek.
There are worse places for muslims than China as far as human rights are concerned. I feel the whole muslim issue in China is just a pretext. Have we forgot about Saudi Arabia or whatever mess is left in Afghanistan?
Well, if you would keep signaling your six year old and ignore the "deeds" of his little brother I would say you are biased and have something against your six years old.
Also what made you punish the bad behaviour all of a sudden?
It's not like China was a beacon of human rights until "now".
I don't think SA is really a little brother either. They still behead people in public squares. The whole "human rights" issue in China is really just a pretext and use of U.S soft power to isolate China. But "everyone" know that at stake is really the economic and millitary rivality. The U.S couldn't really care less about the muslims in China. Just look how much it cares about women in Afghanistan. Let's stop pretending we are little children. China is starting to influence our way of life and we should push against that but I just hate the B.S pretexts. It feels like propaganda and we hate propaganda, don't we?
I'm just saying that it's a pretext.
Like China would start saying the world should stop trading with the U.S until the U.S fixes the mess it did in Iraq(i.e war reparations).
In 2014 I worked with a company in Beijing for a few weeks. The local engineers all had pretty long and packed subway commutes from various outer developments, so my first guess would be that "affordable housing in the city center" is long gone for most major cities.
The surface-level infrastructure was interesting, it felt like Los Angeles - much more than it did Manhattan or SF aboveground - just blown up 3-to-5x. Wider streets with more lanes of cars, big mega apartment complexes just all four times taller than the common 5-story ones, etc.
+1, at least anecdotally, at least in T1 cities: I spent a few months in Shanghai for work in 2018 and all of my local colleagues had messed up housing situations of one flavor or another. One guy lived alone in a shoebox but when he had a free weekend, he'd take the train ~2h out to a smaller city where his family lived in a decent house. There were also a lot of complaints about apartment quality even/especially in new construction.
The drive from central-ish Shanghai (Wujiaochang) to PVG was mindblowing because of the scale and frequency of the apartment megablocks ringing the city: identical enormous tower after identical enormous tower, lining the wide (but at the time oddly empty) thoroughfares. Felt like an alt opening scene to a Judge Dredd movie.
With the folks I was working with it wasn't "messed up" in any way, it just was hardly any more relatively affordable give local wages than most big cities in the US.
Some fun/awkward differences though. For instance, I had imagined it would be easy to find a laundromat - I didn't want to pay the hotel prices for cleaning. Ended up almost accidentally offending the people I was asking - "why would we need to go somewhere to do our laundry, we have laundry machines, we aren't poor" - while since a lot of US cities are older in the dense parts of town, laundry machines in-unit were less common even for sometimes pretty pricey places.
One of my big takeaways is that development is a lot easier and cheaper than redevelopment. Building a ton of new housing? Put in today's amenities! It might be crappy quality even in "luxury" new construction (whether here or there) but it's gonna be a lot easier than retrofitting into a bunch of units from 50 years ago. Want a QR-code/app-based payment system to take off? It's gonna be easier if you're one of the first widespread options to replace cash (like in China at the time) vs if you're competing with ubiquitous credit/debit cards in the US. Really illustrative of how things are path-dependent - and why I'm bearish on "super apps" replacing what we already have here.
I used to think that way about WeChat but I don’t anymore. The reason stores use credit payment networks in the West is because it’s better. We have cash transferring apps but we don’t use them for a reason. Meanwhile, China does not have the same type of payment networks.
> The reason stores use credit payment networks in the West is because it’s better. We have cash transferring apps but we don’t use them for a reason.
In many (most?) European countries, debit cards and cash transfering apps are more common than credit-based payments. I have a credit card but I don't use it often (mostly for some online transactions, such as buying plane tickets), and many people only have a debit card.
Sorry, too colloquial: "messed up" == unusually high rent-to-income ratios comparable to expensive Western cities, resulting in the same sorts of compromises and dissatisfaction found in those circumstances - basically what you said.
"identical enormous tower after identical enormous tower"
That's the drukkhar architecture (we'll get to hear this word more often in the future). They are only missing giant grey flat-top pyramids: jusy as cold, efficient and brutalistic.
The same thing is common in the US, it's just "a complex of ten identical four story apartment buildings" or "an HOA development of nothing but three distinct similar house plans over and over and over again all the same color."
It's efficiency (fewer variants to make) + risk-minimization (design as a way of offending as few as possible for $$$ maximization instead of a way of expressing something).
The reality is someone have pay for those beautiful infrastructure, not going to be the incumbents due to political arrangment, then it’s the vulnerable newcomers shouldering all of it. Just think about those terrifying condo prices.
There are so many great countries/cities in Europe for exactly what you are looking for! And much more. You will avoid all the negative points from China that someone listed on another comment. While improving your life beyond work. 1-3 hours to so many wide destinations from Paris to London, Amsterdam, Oslo, Jerusalem… All while beyond guns you will have same to more freedom. Less crime. On the health side unless you need the best surgeon in the field, you will find overall better healthcare across all level. Education is great to on part with the best (for kids with countries like Norway or Sweden it’s definitely the best. Others are catching up). And I can go on and on with cost of living compare to major US cities, the variety of cultures, landscapes, way of life etc… all packed in a US size continent.
I think if Americans are easy to the idea to leave the US and sacrifice some things, they will find a wide range of interesting opportunities.
Europe is definitely on my list! Some things like economic conditions in the likes of UK and Germany give me pause, but I would love to live in all these different places and experience life there. Such a short life and so many places to be (and such tedious immigration forms)!
> I understand that it might come at the cost of some personal freedom but I'm willing to pay that price for a great society in return.
Does China provide that? Honest question, I don't know much about it.
I visited Beijing once, and it ranks on the bottom of the cities I'd like to live in. Of course, it's just my personal impression and Beijing is obviously not representative of the whole China.
Serious question, if you have to sacrifice personal freedom, what does the great society look like you are willing to sacrifice it for? What freedoms are you willing to give up for what societal benefit?
I’m genuinely curious because every person defines personal freedom differently. And great society is very subjective.
I appreciate your question because I have spent a lot of time in the past thinking about this :)
> I’m genuinely curious because every person defines personal freedom differently. And great society is very subjective.
I couldn't agree more! I believe that all of us have to give up some personal freedom if we want to live in a functional society. I may want to blast music from my rooftop at 3AM but I must curb that urge out of respect for the society I live in. How much of this personal freedom we are willing to give up is different for different people. On this spectrum, I think I lie towards giving up more if it gives me a comfortable society in return.
I am willing to mask up if it means that fewer people in my vicinity may "possibly" get sick less. I am okay with video cameras and facial recognition in public places if it means less crime in my neighborhood. I am willing to pay more taxes if it means public infrastructure can be improved and schools can get better teachers. I might be wrong though, because these things can clearly be taken to an extreme.
Are you really giving up personal freedom if you’re consciously deciding not to do something out of consideration for others?
Usually it becomes a problem because you are infringing on someone else’s personal freedom. So it’s still about maximizing personal freedom in that case.
I appreciate your perspective, because it's one that I've so often found confounding.
> I think I lie towards giving up more if it gives me a comfortable society in return
It seems like you are very practical minded, which I appreciate.
I think the fundamental skepticism that those of us who tend to be more "libertarian" minded is whether you're actually getting value in return for giving up liberties.
> I am willing to mask up if it means that fewer people in my vicinity may "possibly" get sick less.
I think this was the mentality of the majority of people who supported universal masking, and I think it came from a genuinely good place. The issue that I had with it was the lack of evidence to support universal masking, and the draconian implementation without regard to potential negative consequences. It struck me at the time as being the TSA of pandemic response, more theater than effective intervention. Time and research seem to have borne this out.
> I am okay with video cameras in public places if it means less crime in my neighborhood.
Except they don't on their own [1], but they are an incredible weapon and boost in power granted to the surveillance state.
> I am willing to pay more taxes if it means public infrastructure can be improved and schools can get better teachers.
The relationship between taxes and education outcomes is complex (at best) [2], and you need only live in the North East for a short period of time, pay those exorbitant taxes and drive 95 and the Jersey Turnpike to understand that higher taxes don't necessarily translate to better infrastructure.
Drive from New Mexico, through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama to Florida sometime and compare the roads and bridges.
I've lived all over the U.S. and experienced the difference between many states. They each have unique challenges, but I can tell you one rule that's held true in all my travels: granting more power and money to the government past a certain point doesn't translate into a better quality of life for the people.
I do live in the North east so I partially understand. I would love to go around more of the US and understand these differences. Thank you for your measured response!
"As a sidenote, the author says he does not like his kids playing "war" in Chinese playgrounds - I wonder how he will feel about the active shooter drills that are now part of every kids life in the US. Note: I'm not Chinese."
Well obviously, since if you were Chinese you'd know that kids in China are doing drills to protect themselves against psychos with knives who attack schools. Like actual grownups with machetes randomly killing children. Those attacks are happening all the time by the way.
There's a wonderful skit from Portlandia about a couple who visit Spain and come back and everything is now a reflection of what they saw there. They can't help but talk about it... constantly.
I think it's hard to really "know" a place, and frankly your experience anywhere will vary.
Looks like you got a lot of replies so good comment from that point of view. Provocative.
There's a simple way to navigate what you are talking about - look at actual immigrants. People vote with their feet and there's still a ton of Chinese and everyone else trying to come to the US, hardly a trickle going the other way.
Living in the US is amazing. Most of the problems that you are aware of aren't actually impacting you or anyone you know (like, school shootings are clearly top of mind for you but have you met anyone who met anyone affected by one? Probably not.)
I've lived in China and I can tell you, you will NOT like China especially for the reasons you've stated.
China has a ton of problems that aren't readily apparent unless you are feet on the ground. The majority of the culture of china is, "dog eat dog" in that you will be scammed and taken advantage of unless you speak fluent Mandarin.
You will run into problems with excessive Chinese bureaucracy both with the government and services you need. The only way to break through is with a bribe.
Things we take for granted like food and product safety are secondary.
In the first month, I got incredibly sick for a food born parasite (this was from a good grocery store too nonetheless).
Don't ever eat from street vendors (google gutter oil).
You also run the risk of getting physically attacked when relations with America are rough. I heard stories of a guy that got jumped by a group of chinese men after Trump was elected. He didn't even vote for him and the police did not care.
China is the type of place you visit, make a bunch of money, and get out.
In all honesty, you'd be happier living in a 2nd or 3rd tier Benelux or Dach town.
Thank you for sharing your experience - I appreciate that a lot of my views around China (and even DACH where I've also considered moving to) may be too rosy. I will definitely visit any place a few times before I move there!
> but I find myself longing to move to a country with dense cities, affordable housing in the city center, great public infrastructure and a modicum of agreement among the citizens and China fits the bill pretty great for me. I understand that it might come at the cost of some personal freedom but I'm willing to pay that price for a great society in return.
Hope you are white. If so, I'm certain you'll have a great experience. You'll be shown the modernity and good side of living under the regime, and probably made to believe they are the rightful holders of the "Mandate of Heaven". Make sure to stay in Han dominated areas, and don't document of film anything that could make the regime lose face.
> Note: I'm not Chinese.
Why are you explicitly spelling it out? So we don't immediately assume this is propaganda?
Don't worry. If they like you enough, you'll even get paid for comments like these!
Here's my opinion on how China scores against your criteria:
- Dense cities: Yes. I grew up in the suburbs and love the density here and how walkable everything is.
- Affordable housing: A good place in a popular location in Beijing or Shanghai is about $2k USD a month. You can get that down to $1k if you have roommates.
- Great public infrastructure: public transit, yes, but I rarely need to take that anymore. Public parks aren't great. You can't drink the tap water.
- Modicum of agreement: political discussion is so thoroughly suppressed that we all engage in self-censorship. I guess that could be called "agreement", but when I think of agreement I think of a place like New Zealand.
Here are the great things you're maybe not seeing:
- There's a bit of friction in everything in daily life, and that somehow makes life more enjoyable for some kinds of people (including myself). I think a big reason for that is that most people here don't speak English.
- It's incredibly easy to make friends.
- Most people you meet are interesting: either they're an expat and they moved here because they didn't want to coast through life, or they're a local and they're curious about people from other cultures.
- Some jobs pay incredibly well. For example if you're a teacher (not a "teacher"), China is a big step up.
Here are the not-so-good things you're maybe not thinking about:
- Air pollution is still a thing. In some cities, half the days you'd like to go outside for a run, you shouldn't because the air is too bad.
- Things like national parks are more crowded, less natural, and less tastefully done here than in any other developed country.
- As a foreigner you can only stay at maybe half the hotels and guest houses around the country. The others will simply not allow you to stay.
- As an American you'll deal with special attention from the government.
- Going to a hospital where nobody speaks your native language is one of the most stressful experiences you will have.
>dense cities, affordable housing in the city center, great public infrastructure and a modicum of agreement among the citizens
...
>China fits the bill
All those things may exist but sheer concentration of population = QoL / "dynamism" still gets very uncomfortable and cut throat. PRC pace = good cities with livable QoL mix rapidly develop until they're not. Hence you get expat commends like Chongqing reminds me of Shanghai in 2000s. On the otherhand, plenty of big cities at varying degrees of development to bounce around, but that's a very different life style.
While there’s going to be a lot of growth a lot of the same things can be said about Vietnam. Foreigners will never win an argument against locals, some locals will die on a hill defending the 150-200 AQI for 5 months out of the year. I don’t mean this as advice to avoid Vietnam, but just that 1/2 the bad things said about China apply to most Asian countries.
I think Vietnam probably captures the atmosphere of China 20 years ago. Plus, Vietnamese people tend to be much friendlier and have better English literacy. I lived in Beijing and Shanghai during the good pre-Xi times, and I'm dying to go live in VN for a while.
In many major Chinese cities you literally cannot see the sun bc of air pollution. No major city in VN is this bad. Will it get worse? Maybe but I wouldn't necessarily expect it. VN people actually do get quite concerned about the quality of their food and, if air pollution started to become a visible problem, in places like HCMC, I doubt people (govt officials included) would be OK with that. The drive for money is hard but not quite as no-holds-barred as PRC.
It's not a great society for Uyghurs, or Christians, or Falun Gong, or anyone who want to speak their mind. It's not just accepting limitations on your personal freedom, it's being comfortable with the oppression of everyone around you.
I am an American expat who just moved from Germany to Indonesia about six months ago. One thing I see is that the comments he makes about China echo my views of the West. Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression (though in the US, we outsource this to the private sector so that we can actively argue that it doesn't exist). What is driving a lot of this in the West is the effort to sever economic ties with both Russia and China. I can imagine that this provokes a similar though opposite-facing response in countries like Russia and China, as if Newton's Third Law applies to geopolitics as well. My brother lives in Beijing, though.
What I see in Southeast Asia, though, is quite different. While there is a lot of uncertainty about the direction of global geopolitics, and while this also has a strong effort at finding a direction towards economic development on their own terms. Indonesia is becoming increasingly assertive in this regard, for example banning export of nickel ore (and ending up in a legal fight with the EU over that), and planning to do the same for bauxite soon as well. These bans are designed to ensure that those who want to exploit the nation's natural resources have to contribute directly to its economic development on Indonesian and not WTO, US, or EU terms.
Indonesian approaches to social management and rule of law are still quite foreign to me but these (even more than in the US) are very decentralized. A majority of the population still works independently or for small family businesses though the largest employer is the government. I still struggle with the disconnect between rules and laws. But the optimism here, in part born by the hope that the legacy of colonialism may finally be drawing to a close, is contagious.
I think sometimes leaving the great powers can be liberating.
Moving from Germany to Indonesia is a wild move! Did you move to Bali or somewhere else?
"the West": This term is meaningless to me. Does this include Africa, South America, AUS/NS, Middle East?
"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.
I am in Jakarta. was thinking of moving to Bali but that isn't practical.
I think you know what "The West" is when you are outside it. If you look at which countries are sanctioning Russia, it overlaps almost entirely with that list (i.e. that list of states minus Japan and Korea though some folks might argue that Japan and Korea are in fact Western -- not including quasi-states like North Korea or Taiwan in that assessment). That doesn't say
'"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.'
Certainly there is less than in the US due to the fact that free speech law binds the private sector as well as the public sector and that, in theory, discrimination on the basis of political or other opinion is forbidden.
That being said, I watched protests during the Covid years treated differently depending on political views. In essence protests for in-favor causes were given go-aheads while protests for out-of-favor causes were restricted or banned. This may be changing now in Germany at least for the better.
I don't like the far-right but when legal far-right parties are restricted in an ability to rally because political opponents to them blame the spread of Covid on them (overlooking more likely causes like cross-border commuting to a country with far higher problems), then I get nervous since usually I find myself, more often than not, fairly far left economically at least.
"I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples."
You would get fired in Sweden if you spoke against mass immigration just 15 years ago. The social democrats still ban people who have romantic relationships with an individual of the nationalist party.
Working corporate in the west is about having the correct progressive opinions, dissent means you are an evil conspiracy theorist. Just 2 years ago it was evil and racist conspiracy theorist to say that Covid came from a lab leak.
It's evil to say the the truth until the emperor becomes absolutely naked, such as the case with mass immigration in Sweden. When you suddenly have more murders than the UK (a 7x larger country) and bombings every day it's kinda hard to deny that immigration has a link to crime.
Where are you getting these facts? Sweden and the UK have the same per-capita murder rate, so Sweden being 1/7 the size of UK means 1/7 the total murders.
> I had friends woken in the night and interrogated about their political beliefs, and I had friends forced to flee for speaking out about gender rights and other social issues. Oppression in China is real and effective.
> It’s difficult for me to imagine a better place to have lived for the past two decades than China.
I cannot understand how one mind could [fail to] reconcile these two statements. Obviously a place without state terrorism would be better! The author writes about political oppression as though it were merely a color of paint!
For me the biggest issue is that the bureaucracy has a lot of free hands in legislation. Each office can push out some regulation to go around the requirement for a proper legislation, which usually takes years.
Also the mindset of deciding for the people instead of deciding by the people is pretty unpopular but people can't do much. The cultural inertia is strong. Whenever there is an issue, people automatically turn to a bigger government. The government tries to manage everything from the top, which creates a huge chain of issues.
This all looks fine when the economy is good and booming, but when not then it's a different story. Basically the people transfer all power to the government in exchange for prosperity. Chinese people are materialistic in heart so a better material life mitigates all other problems. But what if everyone has to sacrifice for the "common" goal set from the top? It's hard to tell.
Because US and EU citizens think that "immigrant" is a dirty word for people from poor countries.
To all the other people talking about intent to settle or not: read the post. The author lived in China for 20 years and built a family there. They're not an "expat" under any technical definition of the word.
> To all the other people talking about intent to settle or not: read the post. The author lived in China for 20 years and built a family there. They're not an "expat" under any technical definition of the word.
And yet he's leaving. He calls the US "home". So evidently he was an expat.
He repeatedly talks about abandoning his plans to build a life in China. Changing plans when the government decides you're the enemy doesn't invalidate decisions taken before that.
EU citizens mostly don't think in English at all... In most languages you would call someone who moves abroad an emigrant or something similar. From the point of view of the new country, they are obviously an immigrant. The word for people from poor countries is refugee or "economic migrant".
That's true in their native language, but it's common for high status Europeans to use the term expat when speaking English as well. And in my experience, most European immigrants speak English to a conversational level.
It's likely not an intentional choice, but a learned one, since other westerners around them use that term.
This is silly. I migrated to the US from a wealthy country and I am an immigrant. I've also lived temporarily in other countries, and therefore was an expat.
Well yes, going by the dictionary definitions that's true, and I commend you for adopting the immigrant term. I'm an immigrant too, and proud of it.
At the same time, it's also clear that the status of the country determines whether people call themselves immigrants or expats. In the US people are immigrants, in Japan they're expats, for example. US citizens in particular very rarely refer to themselves as immigrants in my experience.
>Emigrants (the word I think you were looking for)
Emigrants leave and immigrants come. It's two sides of the same coin. You can't emigrate without immigrating. Except if you manage to become stateless and remain on international territory.
Migrants is just the term without the direction. Which is unnecessary if you're not talking about the country they leave or move to.
An immigrant has an intent to settle, an expat doesn't. In America, one could theoretically lose work authorization should he refer or present himself as an immigrant.
Technically yes. The legal term for someone on temporary work authorization without an intent to immigrate would be something like "non-immigrant alien resident". The common term would be... expat.
The common term, yes. But the legal definition of expat is:
2) Expatriate The term “expatriate” means— (A) any United States citizen who relinquishes his citizenship, and (B) any long-term resident of the United States who ceases to be a lawful permanent resident of the United States (within the meaning of section 7701(b)(6) ).
That's what I've read, too, i.e. intent to settle, or not.
Maybe wanting to move forever (i.e. migrant) is more common, if one is from a poorer country, which could explain why some others here thought that "immigrant" implied "poor and less educated".
While there are very jaded views about cultural superiority and other things like that. I think the truth is probably less cynical.
I can move to japan and marry a Japanese wife, work for a Japanese company, pay Japanese taxes, and speak fluent Japanese, but I will never be Japanese because my skin is white.
People can move to America, and as long as you speak English without an accent, there is an assumption that you are American.
If the place you move will assimilate you, then I would call that migrancy. If the place you move will never accept you, then I would call that ex-patriotism.
People who move to civil societies migrate, people who move to ethnic societies become ex-patriots.
Not the person you are replying to, but I have experience here. It’s both. For most Japanese, nationality is intrinsically tied to ethnicity, and cannot be changed.
I don't doubt your experience. I was projecting myself onto others, probably too much...
America is a big place. If you don't have that experience in big west coast cities, I would be a bit surprised. Likewise, I would expect well educated folks to also assume that lack of accent means American, not in an intentional way, but an automatic one.
There are large swathes of the US that I doubt would see anyone who isn't a white evangelical christian as American.
My intention was not to be black and white or absolutist, though I see how what I said reads that way.
> without accent?
Yes
> are you saying "Japanese" to mean "fit in as japanese" or "japanese nationality"?
In a way, I meant both. I meant for a Japanese person to apply the word "Japanese" to me casually. To see me as part of "us" when a Japanese person says "us" to mean Japanese.
I think if you read the article I linked, what I am trying to express will be clear. It is an extremely meaty read, but I feel like it is somewhat like taking the red pill when it comes to understanding politics and the political forces that govern us. American education has poked at the ideas in that article without providing the philosophical basis. I've heard "diversity" so many times, but never a real, non hand-wavy, explanation of why diversity is important or why we apply energy to it.
I would argue that the path to Japanese citizenship is easier than being seen as Japanese. One is a pre-defined legal process, the other one depends on the complexities of what is cultural identity.
Thank you for the correction. I think I typed "expatriot" and used the closest suggestion from the right click menu without thinking about it too much. Embarrassing, but such is life.
funnily, foreigners can never acquire chinese citizenship unless some chinese ancestry and/or enough connection in high places. Legal Naturalizations are a few hundreds a year, on a foreign population of 850 thousands
Why, you can still be useful but only marginally so.
For instance the demand for ESL classes is largely driven by school curriculum, which in China is set by the government rather than organic market forces. Welding, on the other hand, is necessary for physical production of certain goods. It can be argued about second order effects from learning a language but from purely libertarian economic POV a welder creates more added value.
All those immigrant tech workers in the US are assuredly adding more to the economy than they are taking. (And yes, they are immigrants on the path to US citizenship, not expats.) Your argument makes no sense.
I spent 3 years in China before Covid. Happened to be out of the country during initial lockdown and that was that. My experiences are pre Covid so things may be different now, I don’t know.
Pros:
- very vibrant, never bored even though when I went I didn’t know anyone really
- I was paid a Silicon Valley salary so high income compared to the typical local. Can afford a very nice lifestyle
- due to demographics and being an “actual” expat, as opposed to English teacher, was respected
Cons:
- general quality of life. Traffic, pollution, food and water safety etc
- can be hard to make deep connection except with other expats. Just different cultures and values.
- lack of freedom and censorship. Vpn needed for everything, and even then doesn’t always work. Certain topics are avoided
- there is a surface level fakeness that I personally really dislike.
It’s a fun place to be for a while when you have the income and status. But for me at least not a place to be long term.
Not a Chinese employer, although you'd be surprised at the comp levels for some companies in the larger city in China. I was working for a US employer with an office in China.
EDIT: to provide more details. Total comp of 200k USD and up at some of the larger (e.g. BAT companies) isn't uncommon for the more senior folks.
It's not surprising for the reasons you stated. People from Western countries find living in China undesirable, hence they need to be paid a lot to go there and work.
That’s certainly true for people that are relocated to China from overseas. That was my case. But local Chinese citizens working at one of the BAT companies can also be very highly paid at the more senior levels (say L7 and up). My 200k USD reference was for local comp, not imported expat comp.
I am not an expat, but I was considering spending several months in China.
After Hong Kong, there was a strong message of "Americans caused this," likewise after covid there was a strong message of "this didn't start in China, this actually started in America."
It wasn't just a message of "America is our enemy," but looking at how the People in Hong Kong were robbed of due process from an impartial justice system it was clear that if there was a problem we would also not get due process.
The Canadians arrested without due process in response to Huawei leaders being arrested was another story that says "China might do bad things to you in response to things you don't have control over."
As an American I felt it was made clear that we were the enemy and we would not get due process.
I was planning to spend several months in China, but chose not to because of Hong Kong. My choice was re-inforced because of the covid response.
I am open to the idea that international media was being unfair to China, but I had experiences which made me realize this was not the case.
- I met a person who just got out of china. She was an early 20s English teacher who didn't know why she was put in prison, but spent a couple weeks in Chinese prison until the US state department said 'give her back, now.' She figured she failed some kind of political question she was asked or made a statement about Taiwan she shouldn't have. She said she probably would still be there if her boyfriend hadn't called the US state department saying he hasn't heard from her and didn't know what happened.
- Another woman I met on a plane said that the people who ran the school she taught at threatened to revoke her visa trapping her in China. She said she was leaving for "vacation" but was not going to go back. She was also visibly shaken.
- A Hong Kong person I met broke down the way China was destroying Hong Kong culture and acting like an imperial ruler.
- Hong Kong went from feeling like a lively place to feeling like a dominated place. The energy left the city.
- Seeing the video of Triads in the train station made it clear that the Chinese government was in bed with organized crime. Seeing triads be the foot soldiers of the CPC was something I had never seen before. It made it clear that if China wanted to achieve a goal, it would use any method regardless of how right or wrong it is. It was just one more element of "our legal system is pretext, we will do what we want."
- I spent some time in China with a Chinese woman and she was constantly "correcting" me about any implication that Hong Kong or Taiwan was a country. It made me realize that I can't just hide my beliefs, they will manifest in my language, and that will put me at risk.
There's a conspiracy theory propagated in China that Covid was a biological weapon spread in Wuhan by Americans visiting during an international sporting event in late 2019.
Probably the same way conservative media portrays US joblessness as starting from other countries and their immigrants, and it’s clear that people who consume that media really buy into that way of thinking. People in echo chambers are particularly vulnerable to this sort of propaganda I expect.
I get what you’re saying. I haven’t seen that example from conservative media though. Most of the narratives I see center around illegal immigration, drugs, drain on social services, etc.
Take a step back and look at how the US blames China for all its woes. Looks the same to me as a non-American non-Chinese. Ideas planted to distract from underlying issues.
> Another woman I met on a plane said that the people who ran the school she taught at threatened to revoke her visa trapping her in China. She said she was leaving for "vacation" but was not going to go back. She was also visibly shaken.
I know someone working as an architect in China and apparently his company holds onto his college degree. Hes concerned he won’t get it back if he doesn’t remain on good terms. I was told this is a common arrangement.
This reads like it was written by someone cosplaying as an adult. A college degree is not an irreplaceable piece of paper to be guarded with your life - otherwise it would live in a vault somewhere. You can trivially have the certificate reprinted.
Less true than it used to be. Here's Stanford's duplicate diploma ordering portal.[1] It's a big deal, there's a lot of verification, and it costs at least US$100.
There's an easier way.[2] "But now it's easier than ever to purchase a fake copy of your diploma. At Same Day Diplomas, we provide high-quality copies of your college diploma. Our products are crafted to match the design, seals, and color of your university's diploma."
Which is why it's become much harder to get a duplicate real one.
There's online third party diploma verification, and it probably works about as badly as most other online credential services.
…so? I never even received my degree certificate. It is a meaningless piece of paper. If an employer wants to verify my credentials, they don’t ask for it. They call/email the school.
In America a degree is a piece of paper. I could go to my college and ask for a replacement and they'll give me one for $50-100.
A company could call my college and verify I earned a degree without ever seeing a piece of paper.
I know I've read something similar to what you are saying, so I don't think your comment was bad faith, but I forget the specific mechanics of the type of coercion you are talking about.
I suspect it might be China invalidating a Chinese citizens degree if they do the wrong thing or China invalidating the verification of a degree that's respected in China, leaving a person in China without credentials that are respected in China. Alternatively it might be about controlling people who earned a degree in China.
I couldn't find the type of coercion you were talking easily with google. A simple article explaining the mechanics of what you're talking about would likely clear everything up.
> This reads like it was written by someone cosplaying as an adult.
Not necessarily. From my understanding, in Asia the actual diploma is often used as a credential for obtaining employment. (The context is reading about a con man who set up a fake job listing to attract Western job candidates, obtained copies of applicants' diplomas, then used them to construct a fake diploma that he used to get a job for himself.)
I lived in China since 2008 (Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai), left Sep '22. The way the pandemic was handled in Shanghai was absolutely dehumanizing, and it became the last drop after which we just decided to GTFO and never come back.
We (myself and my wife, who is Chinese) moved to Bangkok and I can confidently say it is a much happier and healthier place in every aspect.
Many things about China are amazing:
- e-commerce speed and proximity of everything, I work in SW/FW/HW intersection (IoT) and the ability to prototype things within a week was liberating,
- public transportation and infrastructure is amazing, perfect roads, huge subway systems, CRH,
- completely cashless society.
Many things are not so amazing:
- stifling censorship of everything even slightly critical,
- food is just not good in Shanghai, quality- and taste-wise, Bangkok is much, much better,
- terrible, overcrowded, dehumanizing healthcare,
- outside of city center the city is rather gray and ugly,
- everything is gargantuan in scale and feels built for aliens,
I lived in China for several years and left during COVID. There are lots of things I miss about living there.
The food was great. You could find fresh cooked stuff everywhere and fresh vegetables at the market every day. Getting delivery was cheap, easy and fast.
As a well-paid tech worker, housing was affordable.
There is a sense you are taking part in something important. That's difficult to explain, and it's something Americans in particular probably can't understand because their country is the same but even more so. When you come from a smaller or less powerful country, there is something exciting about becoming part of a society which has great influence internationally. When stuff that's happening locally ends up being major news because your country actually matters to the rest of the world, that's a neat feeling.
The public transport and urban infrastructure was really good, even in low tier cities, although when the COVID restrictions hit all of that changed.
And that's what made me realize that despite the benefits of centralized rule, it also can turn the country into a prison state overnight.
Anyone living in China is familiar with seeing police and other uniformed and armed officials all over the place. Cameras all over the place. Party propaganda all over the place. But it doesn't seem all that sinister when it doesn't get in the way of your own personal life. When you can go to work, and go to the market, and go to the restaurant, and it's just a backdrop. It's only when those agents of oppression mobilize that it really sinks in how messed up it is. When uniformed officials in their tens storm in with clipboards and mancatchers to shut down your favorite restaurant or street vendor because someone important has decided it should no longer be open. When something the party doesn't like is said on a website you read every morning and suddenly that website is no longer available, period. When walls get erected around every neighborhood in the city and all those markets you used to visit in different districts are now behind checkpoints you cannot cross because you don't have the paperwork to visit them.
Things improved after those first few months of COVID, but for me that was the real eye-opener. A lot of local people realized it too, and there was talk of how "now we are all Uyghurs". Of course, as the holder of a foreign passport, I had the privilege to be able to leave when I was fed up with the oppression. Most Chinese do not have that privilege.
There are lots of other bad things about living in China. The blatant corruption, for one. The endless boondoggles and scams and the greedy scumbags who buy into the system and prop it up to enrich themselves.
The classism is shameful for a so-called "communist" country. The way the urban middle class looks down on anyone who comes from the countryside or works low class jobs or didn't get a good education is depressing.
Foreigners are second class citizens and always will be. Threads here ask about why people are called "expats" instead of "immigrants", and the answers are missing the point a bit. In China, as a migrant worker, you have no choice to become an immigrant. You must maintain your job or your visa will be canceled. There is no chance of getting citizenship. There is not even a hope of getting permanent residence. There is a strong undercurrent of racism that the government allows to exist, in so far as it doesn't actively stamp it out like it does other topics they prefer the people do not discuss. At every step of your life there, you will be reminded you are an outsider. When you can't sign up for the same services local people can because you don't have the same ID card, when you are told you can't stay at a hotel because management doesn't want to go to the trouble of registering you with the police daily, when yet another landlord refuses to rent to you despite you having all the money and the paperwork. However, having lived as a foreigner in other countries, I can say that these things aren't unique to China, they are often part of the migrant experience, and a lot of countries should do better.
Of course, in China the bad things are compounded by the authoritarianism, and in the end, that just outweighed everything for me.
I've been working in, and out of South China since 2009, and have called it quit 2019, when it became clear the industry was done for, and CoVID mess only reinforced my decision.
I never held any fraternal feelings with the country, even though I am ethnic Chinese, nor I had any delusions about making long term plans there.
In my years there, I kept seeing rose coloured glasses wearing American expats. I met Tim Cook during his first travels to China as CEO at some random event in Shenzhen, only to see him regurgitate the official drivel.
Since around 2016, I kept seeing more and more Western high flyers coming to official events there, seemingly trying to network with locals, and only to see them freak out at that.
My regular conversation with them:
- it's a damn communist regime, do your business and get out
- no, it's different! there is no more communisms in China! no, it's state capitalism! no, things will change! no, I have a special plan from EY China expert!
Most of them lived there for 2-3 years, and got out just as I told when the truth hit them. In the end, I outlived all of them there.
China is a communist regime, though a very well doing for some years.
I see comment chains touching on this topic in nearly every post even tangentially related to China, and it's rarely ever that the main issue is mentioned. So I'll write this for the benefit of any passing reader with similar thoughts.
In a country of 1.x billions, it shouldn't be surprising that there would be at least a few tens of millions of hardcore, actual socialists, who genuinely believe in some distant future communist utopia.
Even if the entire rest of the population were the most perfect paragons of virtue imaginable, it's still likely going to be the hardcore folks willing to fight to the death en bloc that end up with the actual power. That's just how the cookie crumbles in every country.
Whether it's ultra-Maoists in China, or ultra-Hindus in India, or ultra-muslims in Islamic countries, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, etc..
The real question is whether or not the bulk of the hardcore group can be enticed with enough potential rewards to moderate their views.
Wealth works if there's a lot to go around, like in the U.S., EU, etc., but otherwise the hardcore group needs to be paid in some form of power, geopolitical, cultural, etc.
> My view from the outside was that it's really similar to climbing the ladder in a corporation, mouth all the platitudes but only suckers believe them.
Humans are not perfect deceivers, even the average Joe can usually tell if someone's fishy within a 10 minute face-to-face conversation.
There do exist really expert and cunning deceivers, but the folks higher up in the hierarchy will also commensurately be better equipped to see through it.
So for a large enough hierarchy, the practical impossibility of duping so many means that only genuine believers end up near the top.
You don't even need to go Beijing to see this dynamic play out, there's a company in Cupertino where many folks allege this is the case (though to be fair some allege the non-believers are also moving up the ladder).
The fallacy of "reformed communism" hopers is that with development came not their hoped reform, but even stronger regime, and harder life.
Way more, many times more rich Chinese are fleeing China now, when it reached some level of wealth, and industrialisation, than back 10-15 years ago, when China was incomparably poorer, and everyday life was incomparably harder.
All of that was easily predictable. You have a terrible regime, you give it money, and power. It only becomes stronger, and more terrible, not less.
I've been in China, on and off, since 1996. Not living there full time but spending a month or two at a go. If I were to draw a graph of my own sense of optimism about where China was headed it would be a strong upward curve from the start up until a couple of years after the 2008 Olympics. By the time Xi took power in 2012 I was still thinking that he might be a positive influence.
In many ways his early life, the political downfall and persecution of his father and Xi's own persecution during the Cultural Revolution had me primed to think that he might be a reformer. Someone that could possibly carry on in the footsteps of Deng Xiaopeng and really bring China across the finish line and into the world as a powerful and positive force for the planet at large. Instead the opposite happened.
By 2013 what Xi was about was starting to come into focus. He carried out "anti-corruption" reforms but it didn't take long to see that these really just targeted his opponents (and the occasional ally that was worth making an example of... in Chinese 杀鸡给猴看 trans. kill the chicken to show the monkey). As crackdowns on China's fledgling independent media and various minorities intensified the curve on my chart dips and starts to dip hard. Now it is as low as it has ever been and heading downwards in freefall. I declined an opportunity to go back this Spring and part of me is very sad about this but China is headed to a dark place and I don't want to be there when it happens. Unfortunately when the time comes it will drag much of our world down with it, I fear.
2000 – The government is kidnapping people from their beds in the middle of the night but that's a minor inconvenience. I'll just shut up and enjoy the economic gains. China is the best!
2022 – I can't believe the government is coming for my money and lifestyle. The tyranny was only supposed to affect the other people.
Xi seems to literally copy Maos strategy. He even got his own little book. Just waiting for the new red guard and another cultural Revolution to happen at this point. It will be the Chinese people who bear the brunt of what happens next more than anyone else.
> China’s leadership has made clear that they will prioritize unification and Party integrity over the economy and the well-being of their people.
Even if China did conqure the land of Taiwan, it's difficult to support tens of millions of population to its pre-war living standards. Both mainland and taiwan had pension+aging population problems of their own. Conquest was the easy part, surviving the aftermath is difficult. Destroyed Taiwan economy, international boycott, etc.
This article got me wondering: what is the difference between an immigrant and an expat? It seems like immigrant is the term used for someone migrating westward, and expat is the term used for someone migrating from a Western country eastward. For the sake of this definition we're considering North America the western limit of the world and Asia the Eastern limit.
Imagine if the ccp had dissolved itself, by becoming just the political framework, the shanghai clique, the traditionalists, becoming parties within the party and the legal system having a say in party inner affairs.
Imagine all those who are trampled today by that caste system in china having a chance to shine. All those brilliance we will never see, cause it gets censored to dust by old bureaucrats could shine. 1 generation from now, china could have been culture wise something similar to japan or south korea.
Instead we got this. The old errors, of walling oneself off from a percieved "hostile" outside world, of thinking one could be stand alone and the lack of seeing the need to change, to get away from the "conquer nature" mindset to a more symbiotic view of things.
Its so sad. We had a glimpse, of what could be, but then it was back to the old imperial gameboard and the people turned back into figurines.
Warning: this thread is very likely to be heavily astroturfed by Chinese influence operations. This is exactly the type of question and discussion that provides a perfect opportunity to change or chip at your opinion on China.
Hence:
- “Taiwan is acqshually a dictatorship”
- “The integration of HK was managed extremely well”
- “China may have X, but whatabout Y in the US/decadent West/Europe”
- “That’s it, I’m moving to China. Any tips?”
I’m not saying any positive comments about China are manufactured. But given the amount of money and effort China spends on these type of influence operations, the context of this thread, and the type of audience HN attracts, chances are they are.
If you can't imagine some percentage of Chinese being genuinely patriotic, you probably need to expand your imagination a bit. Not that I agree with the narratives of those comments, but isn't it at least possible they are independent people with actual lives, and they genuinely believed what they wrote? (You might attribute their views to their upbringing, but the same can be said to everyone)
With your logic I can probably conclude that Warren Buffet is a CIA shill.
Before the lab leak theory became socially acceptable, there were a lot of useful idiots speaking up on HN, and they were protected by the admins. It seems to be less of an issue lately, but then again I try to disengage from any discussion about China. It gets so frustrating reading opinions from people who have never been there or have been there for a week and think they have some deep insight.
Citation needed: I'm not seeing a single comment claiming any of those. (Except noting that Taiwan was a dictatorship, but while it was, it's not one anymore.)
- An account with no comments elsewhere, bar this thread, commenting on how they want to move to China because: affordable housing, "great Chinese society", "going to let go off freedoms, but whatabout public shootings in the US", etc etc. etc. This is the identical messaging to what China is using on other SM platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tiny_ta
- A Chinese / Chinese nationalist's account. If you look through their comments you see they leave mostly political comments with the themes of "russia is winning" (China has been following russia's propaganda almost in almost a complete lockstep.), "USA has not right to intervene vis-a-vis Taiwan", "US elite", posting garbage from "resources largely excluded from the American mainstream" (as usual), 'conflict in Ukraine'. They left comments in this thread as well (a sad attempt at whitewashing Tiannamen). This is more relevant, however: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xtian&next=34628768#...
Now back to this thread. This is a curious case of an issue being relevant from both internal and external angles. The former - like I said before, the aim is to influence you. The latter - anyone within China who is contemplating to leave the country, just like the author is doing. China has been known to focus heavily on retaining people with technical skills within the country and also campaigning for skilled Chinese nationals to return back 'home'.
Chinese influence operations have been detected everywhere: from 4chan boards to youtube videos and [insert your social media platform here]. What would make HN an exception?
What I find ironic is that as businesses leave China, they move into the exact same type of culture in Vietnam and India. Vietnam is basically a mini China and India is trending towards the same authoritarian regime that most people find distasteful.
The entire western world is so addicted to cheap labor I don't know what would happen when there is no more cheap labor to be found. There will be a huge social disruption when everyone everywhere in the world demands 100k salary a year with social benefits. That or AGIs come out and we get a disruption on the same scale.
Fun fact, Vietnam is moving from 5 days work week to 6 days work week while the rest of us are demanding 4 days work week here in the US.
The world will adapt when labor becomes scarce, it will have no other choice. The more scarce labor is, the more pricing power it has.
Arguing over “what if AGI” is like arguing about nuclear war and winter. It might happen, but no plans you form for it will survive contact with reality, so there is very little value in spending cycles on optimizing for it.
Fertility rates are dropping across Africa too, and while the growth will continue for a few more decades, maybe until the end of the century, labour will increasingly be scarce where we need it. There'll be significant political and social upheaval while countries deal with figuring out how to compete for immigrants.
I have a cynical view (sorry) that labor will always be cheap somewhere. It's part of the globalization machine, there will always be a decline somewhere, and if there isn't, one will be created.
China's Belt and Road Initiative suggests that they view the under-developed Middle East and African nations to be the next in line, the same as the US viewed China as a source of cheap labour.
The party has been making deep investments into the regions and is developing significant political and social capital at the same time that the West is retreating from them, cutting foreign aid, etc.
> China's Belt and Road Initiative suggests that they view the under-developed Middle East and African nations to be the next in line, the same as the US viewed China as a
I think it’s more “want” than “see.” They might see Vietnam as next in line but outsourcing to ME and Africa suit their interests better.
I’m not sure it’s globalization. There will always be rich countries and poorer countries. Like there will always be poor people and rich people. The gap may and should shrink between the two but not vanish.
This view seems inconsistent. Artificial manipulation is not sustainable in the long term. The ability to continually create conditions that lead to cheap labor is limited and will eventually fail.
AI is not magic, neither is capital for that matter. To perform any function in the world, it needs some type of physical form or device to do so. These devices take capital to manufacture and maintain. They're also vulnerable to intentional damage. There are obvious limits.
Are you saying that you presume the inequality is the natural state of things? What are you basing that on? A world with governments and corporations that are capable of squashing the populace? Do you ever wonder what influence this has?
India perhaps, in the long term, could challenge the US directly - but the idea that Vietnam or Thailand would openly challenge the USA in a hot conflict is laughable
culture is not the reason these people are leaving China, but an open hostility towards foreigners during recent years that is creating a very difficult position for expats living there
Let say China and the US come into open conflict and everyone is forced to choose a side, which side do you think Vietnam will pick?
China and Vietnam share a long history and culture. They are also right next to each other and have the same government type. Vietnam has openly showed their desire to work with China at the cost of the US. They sent some top diplomats to China right after the US diplomats came to visit them. That is pretty clear to me which country they prefer more.
Investing in Vietnam is basically the same thing as investing in China in the past. It will end the same way, with a strengthened opponent in Asia.
A vast majority of Vietnamese view China in a worse light than the US, and China and Vietnam have recently had quarrels over the South China Sea. They share a lot of history...and some of that history includes China invading Vietnam several times. I wouldn't count on Vietnam siding with China in a global conflict.
>I wouldn't count on Vietnam siding with China in a global conflict.
The last global conflict had the current Vietnamese government sided with China and the USSR against the US. I think you already lost that bet.
I would like to ask you for sources on Vietnamese sentiment regarding China and the US. But that is probably irrelevant. What the majority of Vietnamese think ultimately doesn't mean anything, because it isn't a democracy. What the communist party think is more important. And I would bet two communist parties are probably chummier with each other than with the US.
> The last global conflict had the current Vietnamese government sided with China and the USSR against the US. I think you already lost that bet.
I didn't claim a bet, but anyhow I don't know how to tell you this, but that was 40+ years ago. Even then you're not quite right, they went to war with each other in the 70s. The world is much different now and China at that time was not considered a global power. Now it is, and a lot of its neighbors don't like it. That includes countries like India and Vietnam.
> I would like to ask you for sources on Vietnamese sentiment regarding China and the US.
Ok, here is one of many.
"Based on the latest ABS data, only 25 percent of Vietnamese respondents believe that China has exerted a positive impact on their country, but for United States, the number goes up to 85 percent. "
This is the kind of comment on HN that really, really annoys me. It's the kind of superficial analysis that seems reasonable only if you haven't studied any history or had any in-depth interactions with the people you're talking about. How many Vietnamese people have you spoken with, and what are their opinions of China?
>What I find ironic is that as businesses leave China, they move into the exact same type of culture in Vietnam and India
most of those are just Chinese shell companies or doing final assembly on parts made in China to get around sanctions and as a PR stunt by big companies to appease DC by claiming they are moving out of China
One could argue that there is great value on being able to operate in different countries rather than centralize operations or manufacture in a single country.
> Fun fact, Vietnam is moving from 5 days work week to 6 days work week
This is literally because they need to increase manufacturing output and efficacy if they're to have a hope of competing with China's economies of scale. (It's probably not going to work out, on the whole, and a large amount of Vietnamese "manufacturing" is tightening the screws on products that were 90% assembled in China.)
> while the rest of us are demanding 4 days work week here in the US.
This is because a huge chunk of American jobs are bullshit make-work. If the US had a better legal/regulatory system, you could move to a three-day work week and nobody would notice a thing.
I am mocked for seeking non-china made goods, and paying extra for it. Predictably from my (boomer) parents who see no problem with funding china and getting low quality goods that break... its so cheap they have no problem simply buying another one. If we were importing cheap gold jewellery from nazi germany they'd be all about it.
>I don’t believe the average western person would care at all if they could afford fewer cheap products
I don't think this is the case. The average person wants a lot of things for cheap. Also, more expensive items like computers and phones would increase in price. People like having the newest phones, but might be priced out of it if it increased.
>"The entire western world is so addicted to cheap labor "
This is the only thing that allows rich to get richer while still keeping peasants under the boiling point. Without cheap labor living standard in developed countries would drop like a rock. What comes after nobody knows.
Having traveled to Vietnam AND being a bit of a history buff, especially on US war history (and theres a “bit” of an intersection there).
Can you explain how? They are a communist government sure and to get fairly large as a private company you do have to cut the government in (ie: Vin company, Viettel, Sunworld etc) but they do appear to be much less repressive and much more open than say a china. Especially socially.
I think for Vietnam, it is more that they couldn't afford to be repressive, not that they don't want to.
They are still relatively underdeveloped. Cracking down too hard on dissidents would hurt their FDI from places like the US. Not to mention they probably don't have the money and manpower to spare on that. China was the same when they were at the stage Vietnam is in now. And it is very likely Vietnam will do what China is doing now soon enough.
I have been to Vietnam too and I think for the time I stayed there, I got to experience a pretty authentic feel for their political and cultural systems. And all it reminds me of is China, a decade or two ago.
Thats fair. I have never been to China but have worked witb folks that have. They have to take some….extra precautions traveling there.
Vietnam seems much more open. Their internet is largely open and accessible. Even easy to register sims. They have no quarantine or vaccine requirements for entry or visa etc.
All in all much more open and light. Similarly in good company they would be fairly open about the government and problems etc.
It definately isnt on the same level of freedom as America but definitely didnt seem as repressive as china and i didnt see the will there to move that way. In fact they seem like they wanted to remain open for the financial benefits of doing business in the west.
>Vietnam seems much more open. Their internet is largely open and accessible. Even easy to register sims. They have no quarantine or vaccine requirements for entry or visa etc.
This is patently false. I do not know what time period you went to Vietnam but recently their country literally went into lockdown and did not open until much later. They still require proof of vaccination to enter the country and I was told to present my ID and visa before I was allowed to get a sim card. They also blocked many social media and news sites like BBC. Any content remotely critical of the party over there is blocked and their authors arrested. It is very reminiscent of early China.
They definitely can ramp it up once they get their hands on more surveillance tech.
I was in Vietnam last month. I also work in IT and had both my personal and work laptop with me. I waited to reply because i still had friends in country at the time.
There is no proof of vaccination required and hasnt been since at least the beginning of this year.
I did not notice any blocks of internet on Viettel (and BBC is in my news feeds).
I would periodically hop on a VPN i own and use Firefox Focus if i was googling something that the government may have viewed as controversial. But I wasnt given a reason to, I am just a bit of a privacy freak and assume they are logging traffic.
And the sim card did not require any ID. When we arrived one of our friends handed them out, about 10 of them to all of us. I even went as far as to call and upgrade it to a higher plan as 1GB/day wasnt sufficient.
I also used to believe the common phrase that Vietnam was a "mini China".
Reality is different. It's no where near as repressive.
Real Christianity & Buddhism is all over the place.
Everyday people don't speak with the self-censorship I've seen in China (and I don't certainly don't censor myself the way I felt forced to in China).
The internet is no where near as censored (or softly censored) as in China! This is a night-and-day level of difference.
Ironically, in some regards, VN is more capitalist than the USA. Just go down any average street in Saigon and see how many entrepreneurs you find. And never saw 'chengguan' bossing people around in VN. Part of the reality is that communist policies failed so hard in VN after the communist takeover, many people had no choice but to stand-up-against-policy and be entrepreneurs regardless of official laws and that is baked into the culture now.
Part of the reason VN's communist party isn't as powerful as China's communist party is because it does not have as much resources. But I would argue that part of the reason is the government really doesn't have the desire to be anywhere near as heavy-handed as the CCP. At some level, Vietnam seems to me like 'one big family' with a certain level of warmth to it, whereas China is just too big with too many intra-China conflicts for Chinese people to extend trust to other Chinese people. In my experience, there is a much further sense of distance in relations with PRC Chinese people (not e.g. Taiwan Chinese) that is difficult to overcome.
People in the US/Europe forget that Vietnam had a border conflict with China following the France/VN US/VN conflicts -- the difference about the China conflict is that China truly does want to take over some of Vietnam's land for keeps -- this is understandably ingrained in everyday Vietnamese people's minds.
Everyday VN people are commonly quite welcoming to visually-obvious-foreigners, whereas everyday PRC Chinese people are often times quite wary.
Vietnam also operates within ASEAN. Singapore/Malaysia/Thailand/Indonesia/Philippines political opinions and security concerns impact Vietnam.
I would say things in VN have changed a bit since Nguyen Phu Trong's leadership and Covid (globally democracy on average has taken a step back during this timeframe), but I've come to realize that calling Vietnam a "mini China" misses many important points.
indeed. vietnam is run by the communist party of vietnam. remember, they won the war. that's why there is no south vietnam and north vietnam anymore (unlike korea). there is no free speech. there is no rule of law. there is no free market.
i wonder how long it will take before we start hearing "i hate the VCP but i love vietnamese people/culture". probably when they get powerful enough to challenge the regional US interest in anything significant.
I don't think we have an alliance with Vietnam. AFAIK, there is no US base or military agreement or anything indicating a higher relationship than trade partner.
In fact, a few times DC sent some diplomats to Vietnam, the govt over there responded by sending their diplomats to China. Basically saying they prefer China over the US. It makes sense to them since China is closer and have higher trade value than the US. But because of that I don't see how Vietnam can be a "strong ally" to the US.
I read this a few years ago, not sure how much it reflects reality. Anecdotally, immigration from Vietnam is still strong, except the more recent immigrants I've met are pro-communist (as opposed to the first and second generations of Vietnamese immediately following the war).
I'd imagine that the US and Vietnam are allies in the same way that Israel and Egypt are allies. Publicly, they have to show opposition, but privately they work together economically, militarily, and everyone knows that they aren't actually at odds with each other.
It is just an old poll. I don't think it is relevant. Public opinion doesn't mean much in authoritarian countries. It is what the Vietnamese government is doing that would reflect what they really think.
It is more likely that Vietnam is playing both sides and try to appease both China and the US. But no way they are an ally or even a potential one.
Again, that sounds like “better than China” and not a direct endorsement of the Vietnamese communist party. We are talking about global trade here - the proponents aren’t rooting for communism.
The Chinese invasion of Taiwan is inevitable. When it happens, every Western company will suddenly have to pull out, just like they did Russia. The losses for Western companies will be tremendous. For some, it will be a mortal blow.
I can hear some of you saying "...but, but, China would never... because that would be so stupid...". It doesn't have to be a good idea! Russia's invasion of Ukraine a) wasn't a good idea, b) wasn't in Russia's best interest, c) had predictable devastating consequences for Russia's economy, and d) wasn't wanted by anybody (except Putin). Yet somehow it still happened.
It happened because autocrats are all the same. They're always surrounded by enemies, because neighboring countries don't want to be subjugated. Once the autocrat gets the domestic opposition under control their attention turns to foreign enemies. The CCP has always been fixated on Taiwan. The mere existence of Taiwan refutes everything the CCP tells its people about why they can't have nice things (like democracy and individual liberty).
The invasion will come when China thinks they can pull it off. Leave China now and protect your business.
It was very worrying (albeit not surprising, of course) when Xi passed the threshold of the third term and officially is trying to make himself an indefinite ruler of China. The shift towards more one-man rule puts them on the path you outlined.
If financial forces were any use they should already now divest from China as hard as they can.
I think that what you are saying is now obvious to every western company and they are in the process of getting out or diversifying their supply chain. If China can lock down their country for years over Covid, they are capable of anything. Invading Taiwan, even if it had repercussions would be no problem at all. I think the government is likely observing the fallout from Ukraine right now and planning how best to mitigate the western playbook. If they wait till the next US administration, one likely to be inwardly focused, they might have an even easier time.
> When it happens, every Western company will suddenly have to pull out, just like they did Russia
The PR benefits of pulling out of Russia outweighed the negligible revenues these companies were earning from the country.
Saying goodbye to Taiwanese manufacturing is instead a death sentence for them, and probably for a large chunk of the western economy as a whole. China knows this, and they know how much there is to gain economically by keeping the system running.
So the end result is likely going to be – China pulls off a bloodless coup of Taiwan, and companies continue doing business there as usual.
a-d) are all wrong. Without defending Putin who deserves to burn in hell for what he's done:
a) wasn't a good idea: pretty much everyone thought Russia would win and could not fathom the incompetence of the Russian armed forces. It's possible that even with it's incompetence, if they had successfully taken Kyiv in the early days they would have won.
b) if Russia holds on to arguably outdated concept of geopolitical strategy, it's easy to see why it's in their best interest. Demographically, Russia is in decline and so they had at most 5-10 years to expand out to defensible geographies -- close up to the bessarabian gap and border to the Carpathian mountains.
c) it's not entirely clear even now that the Russian economy is going to collapse. Remember, Russia is a producer nation. It will (relatively) suck as modern shit starts breaking but Russia is barely starting to deficit now. While economic sanctions do have an effect, if the government falls I think deaths of young Russian men (esp if they are forced to meat grind muscovites and st. Petersburgians instead of just ethnic minorities from the hinterlands) is more likely to play into that sentiment than prices going up at tasty period (McDonald's).
d) a large part of the Russian polity wants this, not just Putin.
I'd have to call you on a, b, and d - Russia saw it as integral to their existence as a nation, and it had to happen pretty much exactly when it happened or they would lose their (very very small) chance ever again. As it stands Russia probably won't exist in 50 years thanks to the damage that Putin accelerated. Look into the geopolitics of it.
I recommend watching reports from RealLifeLore, Whatifalthist, CaspianReport and Peter Zeihan.
As a Chinese living outside China for the last 20 years, I was seriouly thinking about going back before the pandemic, but now that idea has gone for good, for reasons exactly like the article outlined.
As a Chinese, I believe what he said. On that day, my whole family and most friends were nervously checking their phones. They were afraid of a possible war between China and the US as there was a lot of propaganda on Chinese websites implying a war between China and the US if Pelosi come to visit Taiwan.
>But in order to live everyday life, most people living in China find it necessary to turn a blind eye until it affects them directly. That became impossible during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the force of China’s technocracy was on full display
it's amazing how people were able to delude themselves for so long, Tiananmen should have been enough to make people and governments realize things weren't going to change
It's not that amazing, it's just that American investors wanted to cut labor costs in the late 1990s and China was offering dollar-a-day workers. The claim that opening up trade with China would have a 'liberalizing influence on the country' was one of the key selling points back in 2000-2001, pushed by both Clinton and GW Bush:
> "By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy's most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say."
Of course it was all nonsense, Clinton and Bush were just listening to Wall Street interests who saw massive profits in moving US manufacturing overseas to cheap labor zones. (Importing cheap labor to do jobs that couldn't be outsourced, in agriculture, construction, etc. was the other side of that coin).
> Of course it was all nonsense, Clinton and Bush were just listening to Wall Street interests
I'm not a fan of either Clinton or Bush, but this is unfair. There was far more going on.
At the time, there was a strong sense that democracy had won, and that it was inevitable. That empowering people economically would eventually, without fail, lead to democratic reform. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" is one of the most influential books of the period.
But, Fukuyama and people like him (Reagan, necons, Bush, Clinton, etc.) turned out to be fatally wrong. They created an incredibly unequal world that has eroded democracy to the point where we can seriously discuss a US that isn't a democracy anymore in our lifetimes.
You should read the book. It's an interesting case of someone who originally set out to help people, but who created a hellscape instead.
I'm afraid my view is a bit more jaded - I think those storylines were manufactured for ulterior motives as part of an effort to sell a program to the American public that would significantly reduce the average standard of living while concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaires. They'd already seen the effects of NAFTA and with China, they were hungry for more of the same.
I don't believe the conversion of the industrial manufacturing heartland of the United States to a region now called 'The Rust Belt' was accidental or unplanned. Nor was the destruction of much of the West Coast garment and electronics manufacturing industries.
This has been a deliberately planned policy with a known outcome by its architects, and it's been going on for about four decades. See for example:
> "By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today—channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton—the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe."
Lots of relatively rich countries are in the TPP, including my country, NZ. It has significant rules protecting labour and environmental conditions. It's fine.
From your link:
> The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.
So they're saying that jobs moving from the USA to Mexico increased the flow of Mexican workers to the USA? That makes no sense at all.
The other side of the NAFTA coin was that it allowed US agribusiness to dump products like corn in Mexico at below-market prices, driving many small-scale Mexican farmers into poverty. At that point, they could either work as low-paid maquiladores (the border factories etc.) in Mexico or become Mexican expats at significantly better wages in the US agriculture, construction, restaurant, hotel & golf course etc. sectors.
The neoliberal project in a nutshell involved the outsourcing of unionized well-paid domestic manufacturing jobs overseas, on one hand, and the import of cheap expat labor to fill jobs that couldn't be moved offshore, driving down labor costs and creating hundreds of new billionaires, who used their money to buy more politicians to lock in the programs and prevent any change.
> They created an incredibly unequal world that has eroded democracy to the point where we can seriously discuss a US that isn't a democracy anymore in our lifetimes.
Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Executives and shareholders captured all of the increased profit margins from outsourcing, workers little or none of it. Additionally, the replacement service jobs those workers transitioned to provided lower total compensation. All that on top of increased costs for health care and other necessities.
Net result was drastically increasing inequality, and a political system with cradle-to-grave capture of politicians by the 1% (or 10% or whatever), using their increased wealth to fund political campaigns, lobbying of those politicians while in office, and to provide cushy revolving door jobs and board memberships when politicians leave office.
> Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Many politicans of one of the two major parties are denying the result of an election. Prominent members are calling for "Democrats" to be forbidden to vote when moving state (without protest from others). An let's not even talk about the whole constitutional convention movement. There are many politicians in the US who only pay lipservice to democracy.
>> They created an incredibly unequal world that has eroded democracy to the point where we can seriously discuss a US that isn't a democracy anymore in our lifetimes.
> Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Until the 1970s and 1980s we lived in a totally different world. Taxes on the rich were high. Productivity gains were shared with workers whose wages went up. After the 1980s (Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Fukuyama, and more broadly neocons) everything changed.
It's incredibly striking, you can see it even is basic graphs.
The share of wages as percentage of GDP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2KkM Until the 1970s it was pretty stable, then you have a steep downward trend. The capital class who owns things, now that they had many fewer regulations and didn't need to pay taxes, they decided to keep far more of the wealth for themselves.
Companies in 2022 spent nearly $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Those were illegal until 1982! That money would have gone to workers, instead, it's going to owners.
There's also been a huge shift in competition. Instead of competing with one another, companies now consolidate. This used to be a very rare event, now, in most industries we have only a few big players that absorb everyone else. That's a direct consequence of deregulation, not enforcing antitrust laws, and giving money to capital instead of people.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wyvntk8Krq0/WQdL-4X-WjI/AAAAAAAAI...
Guess why Trump talks about Making America Great Again? People have a collective memory of a time when wages were going up and when there was optimism about the American Dream.
The crisis we're seeing in the US today is all about these charts and this timing; it's really striking how the 80s are the focal point for all of the problems that people talk about today. People are hurting now, their wealth is sapped, their wages aren't going anywhere, they have little security left. They feel like they have no future and that their children't won't have a future. Not to mention that large parts of the country are deindustrialized.
It's really sad that instead of turning to organized labor, like we saw in the 19th century, these people are mostly turning to the exact people who marginalized them in the first place (conservatives, Republicans and large businesses).
> The claim that opening up trade with China would have a 'liberalizing influence on the country'
I mean that did happen. It's just that it wasnt for seen that it could be snapped back so violently.
China is still definitely more liberalized than it was in, say, 1980, even if it apexed in 2016 (with a long way to go) and retrenched itself since then.
But Taiwan, HK, Singapore, and Melbourne all did the same thing, extended lockdowns.
This wasn't autocracy, this was logical health policy: Do you overwhelm hospitals, potentially causing them to fail, or do you limit personal freedom? That's the question that they had to answer.
China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine".
> This wasn't autocracy, this was logical health policy: Do you overwhelm hospitals, potentially causing them to fail, or do you limit personal freedom? That's the question that they had to answer.
Except, the choice was nowhere as binary as you present and/or perceive it. If you look across the world you will see many different responses to the very same problem, but with different answers based on political, cultural, etc. differences.
I kept and keep hearing the usual responses as to why the PRC had to respond in a highly authoritarian manner: the citizens can not handle freedom as they are morally weak. This may be true, but is it not awfully convenient that this always leads to the answer being politically empowering the CCP? Cui bono?
I didn't say it was anything to do with being "Morally weak".
And you didn't see a "many different responses" -- you saw 1: Lockdowns. The whole world did them. Where they didn't do them, hospitals got trashed and lots of people died.
Lockdowns ended when vaccines began, China never got that option, because its population didn't take up any of the vaccines to a high enough percentage. Also, there was never enough mRNA vaccines available to supply the whole world + china, until recently (maybe still not even now).
It 100% was as binary as I present it. Italy, UK, Canada, US, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea... the list goes on: They all did lockdowns to some degree to slow spread, and help their hospitals. It had nothing to do with culture or politics... except in the US.
> I didn't say it was anything to do with being "Morally weak".
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that you did. Merely that this is the usual response I hear from those supporting the PRC position.
> Lockdowns ended when vaccines began, China never got that option, because its population didn't take up any of the vaccines to a high enough percentage. Also, there was never enough mRNA vaccines available to supply the whole world + china, until recently (maybe still not even now).
So, why did the PRC population not vaccinate? Could the government not mandate vaccines? If so, why not? Could it not better educate the population? Was the path via Sinovac the only option? Fosun International in Shanghai [1] had a license to produce
Comirnaty as early as 2020 [2] for example. These are just a few decisions that could have been made differently and yet were not.
I am not claiming to have answers here as for there being a better path through this chaos. However, I do want a healthy debate about the decisions and outcomes; I simply am not buying how you (and Beijing) are largely portraying the decisions as inevitable.
> It 100% was as binary as I present it. Italy, UK, Canada, US, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea... the list goes on: They all did lockdowns to some degree to slow spread, and help their hospitals. It had nothing to do with culture or politics... except in the US.
I strongly disagree. While I am not a scientist in this area, I am very familiar with the great differences between say the UK, Japanese, and Swedish responses for the people on the ground. Debating excess deaths, efficiency, economic impact etc. is something that I will leave for better scientists to iron out over the years to come, but it is inarguable that the responses (and outcomes) were far more nuanced than you describe them. This – to me – is enough to solidify my position that the whole “There was no other option”, which is commonplace for governments worldwide, is a load of hogwash in this case as much as it has always been.
Their vaccine (sinovac) didn’t work very well… there was no point mandating it.
Despite what you may have read Sweden also limited people’s movement and gathering and did localised lockdowns.
What other technique do you think is available to stop a contagion spreading? You limit people’s proximity or their susceptibility … that’s it. That’s the whole tool belt, you don’t need to be an expert, just intuitively it’s easy to understand.
The lockdowns enforced by those other countries/cities mentioned where way tame compared to what happened in China.
So no it wasn't comparable.
You wouldn't be at an amusement park and all of a sudden be forced to stay for hours so that everyone could be tested before you could leave. That definitely didn't happen... except in China. Neither would be left to rot to death without food and yet still not be able to go to a local supermarket because of "lockdown". Not the same.
> Their vaccine (sinovac) didn’t work very well… there was no point mandating it.
Okay…? How does this address my question about alternative vaccines? Including the fact that the PRC had a local company with an mRNA vaccine license? Was there scientific reasons for this? Lack of industrial ability and know-how? National pride?
Again, I do not have answers for these questions. But I keep being told that the government in Beijing is competent and that its actions were inevitable. To me, it stinks to high heaven and I believe mistakes were made (just like most governments did during the pandemic, like Boris Johnson stating that the NHS was well prepared in January 2020), but that there is an unwillingness to admit this and we get platitudes like “they had no choice”.
> Despite what you may have read Sweden also limited people’s movement and gathering and did localised lockdowns.
And were any of these actions even remotely like what we saw in the PRC? A cat and a lion both qualify as “cats” (felidae), but if you tell me I will share my room with a cat and I end up with a lion I think you will agree that I have both a right to complain and be somewhat surprised. Sweden to the best of my knowledge had government recommendations issued (at least I know that this was the case in Japan), with no criminal prosecution in the case of breaches. Are you really in good faith arguing that what we saw in the PRC was in any way comparable?
> What other technique do you think is available to stop a contagion spreading? You limit people’s proximity or their susceptibility … that’s it. That’s the whole tool belt, you don’t need to be an expert, just intuitively it’s easy to understand.
No, I do not believe that the set of tools is as limited as you seem to believe and nor do I believe that you have showed this to be the case. On the contrary, the range of approaches we saw across the world over the last three years speaks in my favour.
> How does this address my question about alternative vaccines?
There is not enough of them. Even the local license doesn't mean china can suddenly manufacture 1 billion doses every 12 weeks.
> And were any of these actions even remotely like what we saw in the PRC?
Which country has remotely the kind of population and living density of china? India? Good example of what happens if you don't do what china did: Everyone gets sick, and hospitals fall over.
> No, I do not believe that the set of tools.
It was a question. What other tools do you think there were/are? Where did a country reduce burden on hospitals without either limiting human movement (lockdowns) or vaccinating the population (vaccines)?
I have tried to get through to you and clearly failed. You still keep repeating the same points: “no other tool” and “no other option”. I and others have demonstrated to you that far more lenient measures than those used in the PRC were applied across the globe, yet you keep on insisting that any level of forced isolation or even encouragements (without legal repercussions) are equivalent to what we saw Beijing roll out. At this point I will no longer assume that you are arguing in good faith and engage in discussions elsewhere.
I was arguing in good faith. You haven’t shown anything. You just kept repeating “a range of tools were used” but didn’t mention one.
This whole thread is standard anti-China rhetoric. It refuses to acknowledge the facts of the situation and prefers to go with the narrative of CCP are dumb and evil.
I don’t assume bad faith, I assume a kind of indoctrination of western group think. To have Americans (a large portion of folks replying here) look down their nose at chinas response while their own country had one of the highest deaths/capita is brainwash territory to me.
> You just kept repeating “a range of tools were used” but didn’t mention one.
Hogwash! I and many others have repeatedly pointed out to you that there was a spectrum of measures with and without legal consequences. Recommendations, lockdowns, police patrols, enforcing mask wearing, not enforcing mask wearing, closed borders, open borders, work from home, not work from home, closing restaurants early, etc. The list goes on and on and on. If you go back and read what I have written and open your mind somewhat, you will see that what I am objecting to is the perspective that Beijing had no other choice than going with what was arguably the harshest policies we have seen across the globe.
I doubly know that your facts about the world are faulty as I stayed in Japan throughout the pandemic and Japan arguably weathered it without any legal mandate at all and “only” closed borders. Now, you can argue that the PRC is not in any way akin to Japan in terms of its readiness, culture, political structure, etc. and that they had to use the policies they did based on those conditions. This is fine and I wrote as much in my very first reply to you (go ahead, read it again). Yet you have never engaged with this idea and simply gone off on tangents about “everyone did the same…”, etc. Which to me is supremely lazy thinking.
> This whole thread is standard anti-China rhetoric. It refuses to acknowledge the facts of the situation and prefers to go with the narrative of CCP are dumb and evil.
Hogwash – again! How about reflecting on your own behaviour and that you now paint me (a person you know next to nothing about) as soaked in anti-PRC rhetoric? Is it not conceivable that you are talking to a fellow human being that is trying to remain objective, while you instead carry somewhat of a PRC persecution complex?
I have a reasonably deep personal relationship with a number of PRC nationals and I would like to believe that this gives some nuance to my perspective as I know of their experiences throughout the pandemic. Likewise, have I ever argued for “dumb” or “evil”? No, I have argued that mistakes likely were made and things could have been done differently. Again, go back and read what I wrote and try to imagine that I am not some sort of “Western agent”. My perspective is very simple. I think that Beijing messed up, just like every other government. However, I know of no other government that is currently being able to shield itself with “we had no other option” in the way that they are and I think that is a load of crap. The PRC citizens as fellow human beings deserve better than this and thus I am countering this silly rhetoric whenever I see it.
> I don’t assume bad faith, I assume a kind of indoctrination of western group think. To have Americans (a large portion of folks replying here) look down their nose at chinas response while their own country had one of the highest deaths/capita is brainwash territory to me.
Maybe your indoctrination assumption is wrong? Also – spoiler – I am not an American and likewise certainly not defending any government as having the high ground. You remind me of how perplexed PRC nationals are when they have conversations with me and nod along as I criticise the historical and current hypocrisy of “Western” governments, only to somehow be surprised when I have another salvo ready for Beijing. Seemingly the complexity of the world allows there to be far more than simple binary positions and national cheerleading – funny that…
Actually this is the first time you’ve mentioned masks, or different closing times. You did mention countries being different but never expanded on those differences, in any of those replies.
But what you describe is still a lockdown, yes Japan could lower their spread without strict mandates. But it still told everyone to effectively stay inside.
This whole thread is anti China. You said yourself, all the countries mucked up in some way, I was pointing out they didn’t do anything that different to any other country. There was/is a harshness to some of the lockdowns in particular cities in China, but overall their response was not dissimilar to the rest of the world.
Maybe my indoctrination assumption is wrong. True, you’ve at least explained your own thinking. But it’s super clear others are just spouting crap. For instance anyone with any intellectual honesty would not refer to “Chinese Lockdowns” as a single things. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and their respective regions had massively different approaches to lockdowns. So when someone says “China did it wrong” - I know they are talking crap. It is equivalent saying “America did it wrong” as if Texas, New York and California all did exactly the same thing. So while you do want to take the high morale “fellow human being” ground… You still grouped up China as if it is one homogeneous thing, run by a single homogeneous government… it’s not… if any of that is surprising to you, then maybe my indoctrination assumption is not that wrong.
> Actually this is the first time you’ve mentioned masks, or different closing times. You did mention countries being different but never expanded on those differences, in any of those replies.
Okay…? So you claim that you were unaware of these things prior to me stating them? Yet you argued that there was near global homogeneity in terms of responses? Grouping together Singapore, Japan, the UK, etc. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I expect people in a discussion to do their own homework for their own basic facts.
> This whole thread is anti China. You said yourself, all the countries mucked up in some way, I was pointing out they didn’t do anything that different to any other country. There was/is a harshness to some of the lockdowns in particular cities in China, but overall their response was not dissimilar to the rest of the world.
I am just going to have to disagree with you on this.
> You still grouped up China as if it is one homogeneous thing, run by a single homogeneous government… it’s not… if any of that is surprising to you, then maybe my indoctrination assumption is not that wrong.
Pardon my French, but sod off. That is a low blow and putting words in my mouth and ascribing thoughts to my brain. Your holiness did not mention any diversity in terms of PRC responses until this very response; speaking about the PRC (and US for that matter…) as a single entity yourself. If I see your username in the future and remember this discussion, I will refrain from wasting my time with someone that throws ad hominem like that. You disappoint me deeply on a human level.
You are right that there is plenty of anti-PRC propaganda going around and people parroting it: screw them. However, you seem to me to be either a PRC-apologist or a good old anti-“West” propagandist and frankly I care just as little for these delusions and flavour of propaganda as I do for the anti-PRC one.
No ad hominem intended. Apologises where you read that. I’m neither PRC apologist nor anti west. China saved millions of people and deserve credit for it. They made mistakes, but their approach was logical given the constraints they had.
You shouldn’t be disappointed in people challenging your ideas. It’s the ideas I’m challenging, I’m sure you’re a great person. Even if we disagree on some subjects.
Taiwan, SH, MB did not do batshit insane things like spraying bleach on the streets, dna swab testing imported fish, metal vehicle surfaces, not to mention welding doors of apartment complexes shut, barricading entire neighborhoods, requiring full neighborhoods to take pcr tests en masse, quarantine camps, etc.
Oh you're upset about the testing fish. Agree, that's crazy, we should all be up in arms about the unnecessary fish testing!
Melbourne, 100% did lock people in their apartments, they didn't used welders, just Police, Guns, and force. They also required mass PCR tests, and had Quarantine Camps (though they used hotels).
Taiwan and Singapore did not do extended lockdowns. They had lockdowns, but we could still order food delivered, still go out to buy food or go to the doctor, and we had constant updates on the number of infections, as the rate went down, restrictions were relaxed.
You have no idea of how bad a Chinese lockdown can go. There are literraly two versions of lockdown in the world: the lockdown and the Chinese lockdown.
You claimed they had extended lockdowns. That is not true.
I said they had lockdowns, they did not have extended lockdowns.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
Edit: I also reframed for your last comment
> China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine".
But since you're defending it. People in China prefer paid western vaccines over free local ones. The CCP refused to allow western vaccines to be used in China for COVID.
You are now entering a pretty minor argument of semantics. Extended lockdowns vs non-extended?
Melbourne did lockdowns for effectively 4 months, longer than any single Chinese lockdown. So even on that point you are incorrect. This isn’t misinformation.
It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK (for a variety of reasons). There is not enough of them, that’s the problem.
> Melbourne did lockdowns for effectively 4 months
You claimed Singapore and Taiwan has 'extended' lockdowns. I called you out. Now you're back peddling and trying to justify your statement with "but but but melbourne, you didn't mention melbourne and they had long lockdown!!!"
> It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK.
It does refuse, and clearly you're not from China or you're just lying because China didn't recognize citizens who returned home with vaccines that were not Chinese.
No, my original point included Melbourne as well. Singapore and Taiwan both did lockdowns as well. Not as long as China true, so your point really is the semantics of length?
No, I'm not from China, but that has little to do with any point I've made. Vaccines were never an option for Chinese, they had a locally made one that didn't work well enough, and they could have never secured the number required of mRNA. If it refused them, then how did HK get them?
They were an option. China refused to approve Pfizer despite having distribution rights in HK/Macau/China, and manufacturing facilities to produce it in China. Instead opting for local vaccines.
You claim Singapore / Taiwan had extended lockdowns > This is false.
You claim China could never secure mRNA vaccines > This is false.
You claim Chinese are free to travel to HK (to get the vaccine) > This is false.
Singapore locked down from early April to June… 2 months. You don’t think that’s a lockdown? Did China have a lockdown last more than 2 months? I don’t think so. Shanghai was probably the longest and was roughly 2 months long (hard to tell because it started in suburbs only, unlike Singapore that was the whole city), or Wuhan itself in the beginning. So what are you talking about? Pretending that I’m making false statements. You invented this bullshit “extended lockdown” term then didn’t realise Singapore actually did do a longer lockdown than almost all Chinese cities. Good one. :D
Taiwan locked down very early in all cases taking spread to zero and then blocked anyone entering the country. Similar to New Zealand. You don’t call that a lockdown?
Show me where 6 billion doses of mRNA are being produced every 12 weeks? Then I’ll believe China could have procured them.
Chinese are free to travel to hk. There are exceptions of course. But the majority can visit (assuming they had the means) - but that wouldn’t change the fact that HK only had a few million doses so couldn’t possibly help on the mRNA front
> Singapore locked down from early April to June… 2 months.
Your point? Let's look at the difference.
In China when in lockdown, you cannot leave your apartment, period. There's no food delivery. You rely on the government to delivery food packages to you, if they aren't dumping it. You have daily covid testing, if you test positive you get taken away.
Singapore lockdown, leave home to buy food or see doctor, if you have elderly who are dependent on you, you may go visit them or take supplies to them. If you work in the food industry you can continue to work, including delivery drivers.
Taiwan lockdown, same as Singapore.
> Show me where 6 billion doses of mRNA are being produced every 12 weeks? Then I’ll believe China could have procured them.
I don't understand what part you do not get.
China > Refused > To > Allow > Western > Vaccines > From > Being > Used > In > China.
China had the facilities and rights to produce the Pfizer vaccine in China. It was not allowed to produced and used in China because China did not approve the vaccines for use.
They opted for their own home grown vaccine instead of a western one.
How hard is this to understand?
> Chinese are free to travel to hk.
No they were not allowed to freely travel to HK. There were exceptions for /some/ people to travel to HK.
And it doesn't matter if they go to HK and got an mRNA vaccine as China DID NOT RECOGNIZE IT and REQUIRED you to get THEIR vaccine. Even people in Singapore who needed to travel to China were required to get sinovac to go to China as their moderna / pfizer vaccine certs were not recognized.
You are describing lockdowns in “China” when you really mean Wuhans first lockdown, and Shanghai’s last lockdown. Guangzhou for instance was just like Singapores almost identical.
China does not require people to get the vaccine, that depends on local government policy not central government. Unless you are talking about international/returning people.
China invested in its own vaccine which was quicker and easier to keep and distribute (no cold requirement) it also turned out to be a failure. To re-pivot and set up manufacturing of mRNA that late would have been costly and still taken too long，leaving them with Covid0 as their only choice. I have seen no evidence they could have produced the required doses (initially 2 billion, and then ongoing 1 billion/quarter). If they had of tried purchasing it would likely significantly effect their economy… hard to know without understanding the pricing Pfizer were offering them.
lets Get into the real differences though:
Taiwan is an Island. Singapore is an island. The options available to you when you can effectively shutdown/control your borders lets you control people movement in a massively more effective way.
Let’s compare, somewhat comparable geographies:
- China
- Australia
- United States
Australia is a big island. So it could do a Taiwan and stop flights. But it still suffered an internal problem of people travelling between states. So what did they have to do? Super strict lockdowns.
United States also stopped flights (eventually). But its domestic and historic politics didn’t allow it to perform lockdowns nation wide, so instead it did localised ones, and spread was essentially uncontained. Lots of people died.
China suffered all the same things as the US, but could mandate lockdowns nationally. Bear in mind these lockdowns were implemented differently in every city. It saved millions of people, if the US lost 1 million with its half-assed lockdown, China would have lost more than 5 million people… insane that people are frowning at China here given their numbers were nothing close to that bad.
They do change, in mainland China they have devolved considerably under Xi. I have Family over there, and a lot of the optimism of a decade ago was already being squeezed out of the country before the pandemic.
It may also be possible that Xi is imagining the revival of china as a world empire that would rival that of the USA today, and this is born of both hubris, as well as egomaniacal desire of "washing away the shameful century".
I think people like that are the reasons why the world isn't at peace. China could've become the next japan. They could've probably overtaken the US that way too. But now, they've "alerted" the eagle, and the US will never let china become a superpower.
>"the US will never let china become a superpower."
It already is. To the less degree than the US for now. Could go either way in the future. But if you think that the US could go on forever dictating what other countries allowed to do I think you are wrong.
I think Xi also cares about China, and he truly believes that a fully managed state and economy is better than democracy and free markets. Also note that Deng was in control in 1989. It's a bit more complicated than good vs evil here (which is true generally).
Not exactly. Jiang / Hu were of a similar faction and were already secured. Xi came own his own and had to secure his place. A lot of policies were done in that direction.
Instead Jiang / Hu had their own agendas including moving vast amounts of capital outside and also for themselves e.g. some of the largest VCs there. Some of Xi's policies e.g. restricting movement of capital has to do with this.
Indeed. In China, we used to joke that Deng's opening policy has created the second republic, on the contrary to Mao's first republic. With Xi's coronation, the second republic has died.
I’m not sure what point you are making. Things change is such a trivially obvious point, that could be made about anything in any context, that it seems basically irrelevant to any reasoned discourse. We all know that things change, so stating that fact communicates no useful information.
It’s why and how things change that is interesting. In China things have changed because Xi and the Chinese communist party have chosen to change them in particular ways. It’s these choices and the consequences of them that we are discussing.
I mean change in the talking point at the time that if we just kept throwing money at China they'd magically become a democracy. As long as the CCP is in charge that's not happening and should have been clear based off Tiananmen. Allowing them into the WTO and continuing to trade with them just made their power stronger. Going to be seen as a huge blunder historically
Completely agree. There was even historical evidence that narrative was wrong and that an authoritarian government could co-exist with an industrial economy - pre-WWII Germany and Japan. Development, industrialization, and capitalism don’t automatically bring democracy, freedoms, and political liberalization. That was all just a BS fiction foisted on the US public and policy class by voracious banks, corps, and their media.
That was a decision that never should have been taken, due to the terrible risk of how things would turn out if it failed, as it did. This was possibly the most disastrous strategic blunder in America’s history. Like yanking defeat from the jaws of victory in the Cold War.
But consider that economic development helped turn south korea and Taiwan from brutal dictatorships to relatively stable and sustainable democracies. It wasn't crazy to think it would work in China, and it looked like there was buy-in and progress for an (if slow) gradual bringing into the fold process that suddenly t
reversed course in 2016-ish
The crucial difference everyone overlooks is that an ideological dictatorship like communism is more sticky than a run-of-the-mill non-ideological dictatorship like those of SK and Taiwan.
The core belief of the communist party is will to power - getting and keeping power by any means necessary. There is no balance of power, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent court system, separation of military from political party, constitutional review or law, individual human rights, etc. Hence the term totalitarian - total control of people’s behavior, speech, and even thought.
All of communist ideology is an elaborate justification and sophisticated plan for getting and keeping absolute and unrestricted power. It is too deeply ingrained, too sticky so to speak, in communist party psyche and identity. Unlike SK and Taiwan it was never going to liberalize and discard itself in favor of democracy, an ideology directly counter to its core beliefs.
> The crucial difference everyone overlooks is that an ideological dictatorship like communism is more sticky than a run-of-the-mill non-ideological dictatorship like those of SK and Taiwan.
There’s very little evidence that Leninism and its derivatives are any stickier than any other authoritarian system, and essentially all authoritarianism (and most non-authoritarian systems of government, too) appeals to some ideology for its justification (often local nationalism), so your attempt to divide the world of dictatorships into ideological and non-ideological dictatorships is flawed from the start.
> All of communist ideology is an elaborate justification and sophisticated plan for getting and keeping absolute and unrestricted power.
It’s…not. In fact, the part of Leninism that serves that purpose (vanguardism) is its key departure from Marxism, and notionally an adaptation of Marxist Communism to bypass the need for capitalist development as a prerequisite to the socialist stage.
After the USSR collapsed, the CCP intensely studied why, looking for ways to avoid the same fate, and succeeded. That's one non-trivial bit of evidence.
And I don't consider nationalism an ideology, since it's never as philosophically developed as say communism or US liberal democracy. It's just a useful, easy, naturally occurring fallback for dictators looking for way to rally their population against the "other".
And you can argue till the cows come home about what Leninsim, Marxism, and Maoism are supposed to be, but what they actually become in reality is clear. Totalitarian.
> an ideological dictatorship like communism is more sticky
So east Germany, Germany and Italy (fascism), the Baltics, Czech, Slovakia, Moldova, Georgia (where Stalin came from), Romania (ciaucescu) etc. Have no hope of ever being democratic?
Almost all of those converted to liberal democracy after communism economically collapsed in the Soviet Union, and West Germany and Italy after a literal war forced them to.
If we could go back in time and not economically prop up communism in China, and let it collapse the same as the Soviet Union, then I would anticipate a similar outcome there too. But you have to let communism collapse and become totally discredited in order to achieve that outcome.
> Allowing them into the WTO and continuing to trade with them just made their power stronger.
Eh, it could have worked. Not that hu jiantao is a saint or anything but it's pretty clear that he was unhappy with the direction that china is going down and blindsided by what xi has unexpectedly turned in to.
The Western narrative about Tiananmen is frankly detached from reality.
Anyone who chooses to believe something like "It was Kent State, but bigger and more evil!" is just projecting.
>Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred. Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city or were removed from the square so that they could not witness the final chapter of the student story. Those who tried to remain close filed dramatic accounts that, in some cases, buttressed the myth of a student massacre.
The idea that it's "covered up" is also, likewise, nonsense:
>Beijing Municipality has checked and double-checked all the figures from the Martial Law Command, the Public Security Ministry, the Chinese Red Cross, all institutions of higher education, and all major hospitals. These show that 241 people died. They included 23 officers and soldiers from the martial law troops and 218 civilians. The 23 military deaths included 10 from the PLA and 13 from the People’s Armed Police. The 218 civilians (Beijing residents, people from elsewhere, students, and rioters) included 36 students from Beijing universities and 15 people from outside Beijing.
It's just understood differently than how Americans wish it was understood. Probably because "heroes" like Liu Xiaobo said things like:
>[It would take] 300 years of colonialism. In 100 years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would require 300 years as a colony for it to be able to transform into how Hong Kong is today. I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough.
What do you win or get out of the attempts to rewrite atrocities like they have never happened in history? What did the victims that died that week do to you? https://imgur.com/a/q8ZIS
I'm Latin American and very, very happy we have China as an alternative to America's tyrannical Monroe Doctrine.
The demonization of China feels incredibly absurd, like when someone wearing an exceedingly ugly outfit, lacking self-awareness, tries to criticize someone else's fashion.
And yet you are writing it on an american website and no one is censoring you.
In China you have to be very careful of what you say and write, or you may just disappear from society, they don't need to kill anyone anymore, they even did it to former president, live. They remove you and that's it.
In America, working class people get killed by cops and corporations with little recourse.
In China, elites get disciplined by the party with little recourse.
It's a matter of which class you see yourself in.
>According to Harvard University’s large-scale 2003-2016 study tracking the evolution of public opinion via 32,000 individual respondents, at the time of the study’s conclusion “95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing.”
My friend's wife's family completely disappeared because they said something bad about the local government on WeChat. Their house was empty when she went to check up on them (after COVID). Neighbors said the police came in and they haven't seen them since. She now blames herself for not bringing them to Canada.
The reason the surveys are so high is because they fear it's a trap. If someone asks you if you like the government, your answer better be an outstanding yes.
This sort of flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
He isn't. State governors sued him over the potential loss in tax revenue and SCOTUS is likely going to rule against it because the court is stacked with right-wingers. Also see gun laws being nowhere near as strict as people would like, and Roe v. Wade being repealed, with hard anti-abortion laws and bans being enacted in states where a majority of citizens are pro-choice. The politics of the general American populace is far to the left of what the spectrum of "left" to "right" within the government allows.
The only citizens whose interests really matter in the US are conservatives, Christians and (of course, because the US is an oligarchy) billionaires. Everyone else is a serf who takes whatever scraps fall from the table.
I mean, Americans are bringing child labor back. Do you think the majority of Americans support child labor? No. Does it matter? No, because even with a Democrat (ostensibly 'leftist' but, being pro-military, pro-cop and anti-labor nowhere near it in practice) in charge, American laws are moving further right than ever.
So the Biden administration isn't really trying to cancel student debt? They are faking the attempt, secure in the knowledge that courts will strike it down? That sounds like an A-grade conspiracy theory to me.
> The only citizens whose interests really matter in the US are conservatives, Christians and (of course, because the US is an oligarchy) billionaires. Everyone else is a serf who takes whatever scraps fall from the table.
So all my non-conservative, non-Christian, non-billionaire Bay Area tech worker friends, who are doing very well for themselves, are "taking scraps"? Come on, that's ludicrous.
Your account was created 15 days ago and is used exclusively for posting inflammatory political nonsense. Also, you do realize that China is the most hyper-capitalist country in the world, don't you?
I'm just a communist programmer that hasn't been here for ages because I got bored of the hive-mind. Literally anything left-of-right-of-centre immediately gets flagged (if not outright banned by the mods), all in service of sheltering little liberal coder worker bees from scary labour propaganda.
I came back for a bit to get the latest on ChatGPT, and then noticed that, unsurprisingly, this place is crawling with demented Chinaphobes spreading whatever third-hand hearsay they can find about China. I'm vastly more knowledgeable about this subject than probably everyone here, and have tested my resources against way more capable critics, so sharing some disruptive well-chosen resources here and there isn't too hard.
The fact that the average stance here is something like "I'm not a Marxist, I don't like Marxism, I don't actually know much about Marxism, but I do know this: China isn't Marxist" is just hilarious to me.
Oh and then there's "Dang is a totalitarian liberal thought policeman", "banned every single prominent right winger", "extremely left-winged", "most people on HN are liberals", "socialist hell-hole", "this site leans left", "leftist bots", "always politically left", "skews quite left", "Obviously this website is rigged for the liberal agenda", "the level of wokeness is just absurd", "leftist ideological echo chamber", "run by radical leftists, so no surprise", and much more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
Someone may get called lots of names from "both the left and the right."
It doesn't mean they have, therefore, achieved some kind of enlightened balance.
The fact that you can cite a lot of angry right-wingers trying to pull discourse in their direction through whining just means there's a lot of right wingers posting here trying to form critical mass, as one would expect given the composition of America as a country.
You don't get more of those kinds of critiques from communists because 1) there's barely any communists here and 2) we don't argue like that.
You've been badly stoking this thread with political and ideological flamewar. We ban accounts that do that. I actually just banned you but then changed my mind (I'll explain that below).
Lest anyone think I'm scolding you out of some ideological bias: I've personally spent countless hours defending users who have advocated minority perspectives (including on China), even when they've sometimes broken the site guidelines. That's not because I agree or disagree but because I understand how difficult it is to advocate for a minority view on the internet without getting attacked by mobs—and I don't like mobs. If you or anyone wants examples of how this has played out on China-related topics, I put this list together for a user about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod.
So the problem isn't that you're arguing for a minority view—it's that you're doing it with snark and tropes and talking points. From that point of view your comments in this thread have been abusive. It seems clear that you're a seasoned internet flamewarrior with this stuff, because those skills only get honed over many years. For HN, this is a bad sign, because we're really trying for something else here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If you would, however, please calibrate your HN comments to the intended use of the site, we'd really appreciate it. That means no snark, no flamewar, and no disrespect to others (specifically or in general) regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. I know lots of people routinely break those rules—I spend my days asking them not to. But we need users, and especially users with formidable internet powers, to resist the temptation to respond in kind. Otherwise we just get a downward spiral and this place will burn to a crisp.
No doubt HN is filled with comments that you personally disagree with and find offensive, but that's inevitable given that HN is a majority western community (albeit highly international) and that you hold minority views (within such a population) on provocative topics. I'm not asking you to change your views, but if you would please take care to avoid provoking or being provoked here in the future, we'd be grateful.
"Your sources are compromised, here's a quote from Fidel Castro and a random blog titled "China Has Billionaires" that doesn't actually talk about China at all, just "US is bad China opposes US therefore..."
Self-awareness is not your strong point. And your mix of conspiracy and partisan bile being challenged here is evidence this is a healthy online community, not the opposite. Perhaps you would feel better somewhere that confirms your beliefs instead of (rightly) mocks them.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. We've had to warn you about this before, and if you keep it up we're going to have to ban you.
Edit: it also looks like your account is on the verge of using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which ideology you're for or against, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do that. More explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
With all due respect, i'm calmly pointing out another users' inflammatory comments and clear trolling. I wasn't overly polite to him, is the rule literally to take abuse and remain robotic in response? Not being cheeky, genuinely curious.
"Self-awareness is not your strong point" was an egregious personal attack. You can't do that here. Ditto for "You aren't as complicated as you think you are", "I'm pointing out what you are.", and plenty of other things you posted in this thread. If I look at those comments cumulatively, you crossed the line very badly. The fact that someone else was also behaving badly doesn't change that.
The rule is to stick to the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) regardless of what someone else does. That's how rules work, no? No one's asking you to remain robotic, but you do need to remain respectful.
I'm having a lot of fun, actually. But you can keep pretending you know what you're talking about, citing Wikipedia. I guess from your perspective that's fun too.
>Since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself. In other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity. For it is in the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.
Generally speaking when someone asks that question it is with an eye to disqualifying a speaker they don't want to listen to, on the basis of ad-hominem.
Latin America? "You're ignorant, you know nothing!"
China? "You're under their sway!"
America? "Hypocrite!"
I tend to prefer to simply not allow the discussion to veer in that direction, and keep people guessing if they must.
> I'm Latin American and very, very happy we have China as an alternative to America's tyrannical Monroe Doctrine.
It sounds like you don't understand your own history.
Latin America has excelled at destroying itself from the inside while blaming everything on anyone else --a national sport in most countries. Of course, the US is a favorite punching bag in LATAM.
Before you explode into "you don't know what you are talking about", my family had business in the US, Argentina, Peru and Ecuador throughout my entire young life. I lived there for years at a time. Went to school there. Was there during military rule. Etc. I know the history very well. Probably better than most natives because I was not in the grips of the intense reality-distortion-field (indoctrination) pushed onto the masses.
In fact, I call LATAM a time machine for the US.
Everything that has happened in the US over the last couple of decades was, in many forms, tried and tested in various LATAM countries before the shit ideologies arrived here. The problem here is that US students are so ignorant about the history of other part of the world that they actually believe shit like various socialist utopia stories. In a sane society people like Bernie and AOC would be laughed off the stage...because, at the very least, the shit they push has destroyed LATAM over the years.
If you want to get a dose of LATAM historial perspective and reality, take a break from ideology and watch a few presentations from Gloria Alvarez. Here's a video to get your started. This is a quick history of LATAM history starting with the "gifts" from Spain:
It's interesting to observe that pretty much every nation conquered by Spain ends-up, well, a mess. If one is to be honest, there's something to learn there.
Regarding China and LATAM: They are going to absolutely destroy every nation they touch. They are there to own all natural resources, extract as much juice as possible from every corner of LATAM. They will destroy all industrial capacity. The next logical outcome is LATAM economically enslaved to China. You shouldn't be happy about China's involvement in LATAM, you should be horrified.
I think GP is delusional, but you're not seriously suggesting Latin American countries vilify the US for no reason, right?
US interventions in Latin American affairs are well documented[1].
You can't just kick the can to Spain, when the US had a much more direct and recent involvement. It doesn't seem you learned much from your time there, as this history is discussed openly and known in detail, from school children to people who actually lived it. The resentment towards the US is very well deserved, in most cases.
Regardless, this is not a thread about the US, so let's not feed GP's whataboutism, and keep acknowledging how evil China is.
It's fitting that you tried to cozy up to that American guy by 1) demonizing a fellow Latin American, a 2) regurgitating American lies you've heard about China and never scrutinized, and that your reward for it was being treated like a still-too-uppity subject.
> you're not seriously suggesting Latin American countries vilify the US for no reason
I am stating an absolute fact:
In LATAM, blaming others for everything is a national sport. And the US is a favorite bad guy. I can't tell you how many times I have heard this in person in the context of social gatherings, local news and even government/political party communications.
The point is they blame it all on the US. Always.
I did not say the US and other nations have no fault at all. There are subtle and not-so-subtle dynamics at play here.
It's funny how is never their fault. Ever. I guess these are all perfectly run nations and big-bad-USA comes in and fucks them up all the time. Otherwise, it's pink unicorns and bubble-gum for everyone. Right.
World politics being what they are, yes, of course, countries will take advantage of each other when possible. There is no way to claim any nation is without fault in any comparison. Today, China is taking advantage of LATAM in more ways than one...and the people actually think it is a good thing.
The other thing you have to remember is that LATAM governments have been corrupt forever. Entire generations of political families have enriched themselves and their extended circles at the expense of the people and countries. They make deals with countries like the US and international corporations and then turn-around and royally shaft the entire nation. The easiest way to explain things not working when you steal hundreds of millions of dollars and ruin the country is to blame others.
Stories abound of LATAM governments inviting external investment only to later nationalize the companies boosted by this investment and kicking the investors out. They appoint brothers, cousins, family members, extended allies, military leaders to run and pillage the companies and enrich the ecosystem that supports them. Then they turn around and blame others, the US, the IMF, anyone.
I mean, the military government of Argentina invented an entire war over islands nobody gave a shit about just to defocus from the horrors they created.
So, yes, blaming the US for everything isn't only unfair, it's stupid. These countries would have done far better over time had they made an effort to create solid lasting partnerships with the US. Quite a few of these countries could have been manufacturing hubs for world products. That requires focus, hard work, dedication, stability and more. The US and Europe would have gladly outsourced such work to LATAM nations. It didn't happen because the corruption in these nations turned them into sad circus acts everyone took advantage of whenever they could. I know it hurts to put it this way, yet this is the truth.
Trust is a delicate thing. Once you lose it, the only people who are going to engage with you are those who are going to ensure ROI by taking every possible advantage. And you have zero negotiating power. Once again, I point to what China is doing in LATAM.
> You can't just kick the can to Spain, when the US had a much more direct and recent involvement.
Not kicking that can so Spain at all. Spain's legacy is a culture of corruption and a range of social issues Gloria Alvarez discusses in detail in the video I posted. I have not been able to find a version in English, sorry.
You are missing the important point: The blame for all negative outcomes in LATAM is alway, always, always outward-facing.
If you observe what they are saying you’d think these are perfect societies where everyone would have pink unicorns and bubble gum, were it not for external evil actors. And, of course, the US and the IMF are at the top of the blame list.
I can't imagine literally submitting a House.gov link and some gusana YouTube clip link to try to tell a Latin American that they need to side with the U.S., to save themselves from China.
> I can't imagine literally submitting a House.gov link and some gusana YouTube clip link to try to tell a Latin American that they need to side with the U.S
Second, if you studied Logic at all (obviously not) you would understand that attacking the source is one of the fundamental logical fallacies. In other words, you have no point at all. You can't insult Alvarez and point to House.gov and invalidate what they are saying.
And, of course, calling a woman trying hard to make a difference in LATAM a "worm" is really classy on your part.
Por favor, educate porque realmente no tenes idea de lo que esta pasando en America Latina. Ni idea.
Thank you for your comment with relevant citations. The dominant version of the story in western circles is too often accepted uncritically. There are many other elements to consider. Same for many stories regarding China.
I hope you were paid more than 50 cents for all the bootlicking you have been engaging in through this thread. If the West is as bad as you say, please just move to China and leave the rest of us alone.
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, and the site guidelines are entirely clear about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Normally I would post a warning rather than ban you for this, but it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle, and that's a line at which we ban accounts, especially when (as is the case here) we'd already asked you to stop. (Btw we do this regardless of which ideology the account is battling against or for.)
You broke the site guidelines egregiously with this (and also with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233124 - we can't have users attacking other users based on where they're from). I actually did ban you, but changed my mind after I looked through your comment history and didn't see you having made a habit of this.
You can't do this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and the site guidelines are quite clear about it. No more of this, please.
My only comment on that matter would be that one need not reside in any particular location to work for the CCP, they have workers all over the world, from many different backgrounds. I wasn’t implying that he/she was of any particular ethnicity, race, or nationality - not have I denigrated such. To further that point, I then asked where they were from to gain perspective on their comments, there was nothing insulting meant in my asking. (I actually meant to go back and change the accusation of working for CCP comment, and overlooked it.) However, it did seem like they were a new account, with comments not made in good faith (imo), and they were pushing a distinct CCP narrative that I see often in my research in this topic.
Thank you for taking a balanced hand to moderation here. I understand it can’t be easy.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Internet users are far too quick to accuse others of manipulation/astroturfing/etc.* When we dig into the data we nearly always find that someone is simply posting from a different background than the majority here. Different backgrounds lead people to have different views. No doubt there does exist conscious manipulation and abuse; but the dangers of mob effects coming from users who feel like they're seeing that, and then gang up on someone who actually is just coming from a different background, are much more of a threat to the community.
* I mean on political/ideological questions and the like; user intuition tends to be more accurate when it comes to people promoting products and so on - though the two bleed together in the case of big corps and that's a separate thing again.
TL;DR: every dictatorship inevitably follows the same path of self-destruction. How many generations should pass for people worldwide to realise there is no viable path to long-term prosperity than a democratic social order?
I suspect China's draconian, desperate attempt to eliminate Covid entirely was largely due to official guilt. They knew that their poorly managed reckless science program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak, and they wanted to somehow prove they could wipe the virus out entirely (which they couldn't). Eventually they had to give up.
I wonder what happens to people in China who point this out? Probably not good for the social credit score... Of course, WIV got a lot of funding for their CRISPR-gene-editing-of-bat-betacoronavirus program from the USA's NIH via the EcoHealth Alliance outfit, so the blame doesn't rest solely with them. Not that discussing that issue publicly in the USA was good for one's social credit score on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. either, although I imagine the outcome in China was significantly worse for such speech.
One does get the sense that certain US authorities and institutions are somewhat envious of China's ability to censor its own people, though.
Let's entertain the possibility that China wasn't responsible for a lab leak, and that the zoonotic theory is true. Whatever the source, we know that the Wuhan wet market was a super-spreader event, which Chinese authorities concede. Following this, China grounded all domestic flights in January 2020, yet still allowed outbound international flights well into March 2020. Countries were left to ban flights from China on their own, which was a heavily politicized topic.
We can say that we don't have enough information to condemn them and all other countries involved in the lab leak theory, but this one mistake is solely on China's shoulders. Had they grounded all outbound international flights, countries would've had more time to prepare, yet we saw the meteoric rise in cases worldwide in February.
I have heard this version of events many times, but that's not how I remember it.
I remember the only international flights allowed as being the repatriation flights. (e.g. when an overseas government organised for some non-Chinese who were in Wuhan to be able to come home). And presumably the return flights for planes that would otherwise have been stranded in Wuhan.
And anyway, there's something wrong with the whole idea: if domestic flights were banned international flights were still allowed, wouldn't the people of Wuhan who wanted to get to Beijing just fly via Bangkok or Seoul? A ban on domestic-only flights wouldn't have achieved anything.
Those articles are only referring to flights directly from Wuhan (ignoring the fact that neither Wikipedia nor the WHO are credible sources). International flights were still allowed from Beijing and other cities.
From a NYT article[1]:
> “I was surprised at how lax the whole process was,” said Andrew Wu, 31, who landed at Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from Beijing on March 10.
> Sabrina Fitch, 23, flew from China to Kennedy International Airport in New York on March 23.
> About 60 percent of travelers on direct flights from China in February were not American citizens, according to the most recently available government data.
So these were not only repatriation, but commercial flights.
The flight data also shows plenty of activity in February and March[2]. Whether those were only domestic flights or not is difficult to say, but clearly the shutdown wasn't total even domestically.
Even so, from late December to 23rd January is a long time to still allow dozens of international flights everyday from Wuhan. Incompetence is ruled out because domestic flights were suspended right away.
The coverup of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is a far worse crime than if it did accidentally leak from a lab. The coverup has done serious harm to our ability to understand how these diseases emerge at large scale in human populations.
And to be clear, the coverup was at least a two-handed effort of Chinese Communist Party and Ecohealth Alliance (US-based nonprofit pandemic/virus research org that operated in Wuhan.) Ecohealth was all-in to prevent inquiry into the lab leak possiblity from the start, including ghostwriting/astroturfing an op-ed pretending there was scientific consensus against a lab leak.
> yet still allowed outbound international flights well into March 2020
I keep hearing this, but I imagine if they banned outbound flights they'd be criticized to this day for trapping people in the country during the outbreak
> "Another study by Australian scientists, published on Thursday in the Scientific Reports journal, used genomic data to show SARS-CoV-2 binds to human receptors far more easily than other species, suggesting it was already adapted to humans when it first emerged."
I think the evidence is steadily getting stronger for Sars-CoV-2 being the result of the accidental infection of a lab worker with a CRISPR-modified bat betacoronavirus that was being tested in human cell lines and/or genetically modified lab animals. From there it spread globally by train and airplane.
It was detected in European samples (Spain, Italy) collected as early as March 2019 and is likely to have been spreading around the US by that point already.
I suspect it had less to do with official guilt and more to do with the fact that Xi Jinping wanted to leave absolutely no opportunity open for an opposition to his 3rd term to form.
It’s not a coincidence that China maintained draconian controls for years, but within months of him getting his 3rd term (and immediately purging all viable political opponents from the party), he completely opened China at the first sign of protests.
This is a very controversial set of claims on a very heated topic, so you should not make such bold claims without a link to further reading or some sources in your post. Otherwise you just make a lot of heat with no light.
The regime has trumpeted the superiority of their political and governing system since the second month of covid-19, in
stark
contrast to the decadent and degenerate
west, daily
news started with data of how many more thousands died in the US.
That’s a good 2 whole years on
a
roll, no matter how illogical it seemed, it worked.
I think a more likely scenario is that all countries did what they could and China succeeded better than any other major land country. But then, as victims of their success, the costs of doing less increased with each new wave and when Omicron hit Hong Kong, the death rate soared in a way it didn't in the West.
Hong Kong was not the only place to have high death rates from Omicron. New Zealand did as well. But none of the countries which had difficulty controlling earlier Covid outbreaks did.
We are often prisoners of our own successes more than we are victims of our errors.
They wanted to push their own locally developed vaccines, which didn't work as well so had no other choice. If they mass imported other vaccines it'd kill their own industries.
This scientific recklessness should be broaden out, because (to my knowledge) gain-of-function research is still happening and even laboratories with the highest security lab-leaks happen.
> I suspect China's draconian, desperate attempt to eliminate Covid entirely was largely due to official guilt.
OR it was because they didn't have a vaccinated population and they couldn't build and staff hospitals fast enough to deal with a nation wide exponentially growing infection.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good rant though.
It could actually have been a lot worse than nothing. Compare covid deaths in Japan and Korea prior to the mRNA vaccine rollout in 2021 to afterwards; afterwards the infection and death rates sky-rocketed.
Sinovac was something terrible like 50-62% efficacy. While also not provably stopping transmission. The spread would have continued and there was no evidence it would have reduced the burden on hospitals. It would definitely be worse for people.
The reason PRC never said it publicly is because that would have been terrible for them politically as well.
Oh well, the fact that e-cigarette pneumonia at the end of 2019 and the samples were not allowed to be inspected, and that those US military members who went to Wuhan to participate in an event showed symptoms, is conveniently forgotten.
Can we at HN at-least refer to the author as immigrant as opposed to expats? what's an expat anyways ? why does the western world to get to make these tiers where they are expats but arabs, asians, africans etc are all immigrants ?
An immigrant hopes to settle down in the host country, have / grow a family there, own property and even become a citizen. Of course, if the host nation does not have a citizenship program for foreigners, then everyone who isn't a citizen is an expat.
An expat hopes, even plans to move back to where they came from. They're in their host nation for work reasons only because, at least according to the expat, where they're from is a "better" place than their host country.
The author has lived there for 20 years, married there, has kids who go to local schools, yet calls himself an expat, and everyone here seems to accept that as an obvious truth. Meanwhile a million+ people coming to the USA on temporary work visas fully intending to go back to their home country (or illegally with no path to citizenship) are obviously immigrants. At some point people have to come to terms that this isn't about some technical definition of "immigrant" vs "expat" but a deeper prejudice.
China does not have a citizenship program. If you are not born Chinese, you will never be Chinese. Everyone who moves to China is an expat.
What you call yourself, "immigrant" or "expat" is up to you. For example, plenty of Indians call themselves expats in the US. Other Indians call themselves immigrants.
Personally, I'm a fan of the word "alien". God Bless America! :D
Joining the military can lead to citizenship if they're young enough.
Marrying a citizen can also lead to citizenship.
Even without becoming a citizen, their children, if they're born here, will become citizens.
There is a distinction between people who follow immigration protocol and those who don't. I China, even following approved, official protocol, it becomes very difficult. The US on the other hand routinely grants American citizenship to foreigners. China makes it very difficult for foreigners immigrating legally and following protocol to become Chinese citizens.
Do they have the intent (legal or not) to stay permanently?
An immigrant has an intent to settle, an expat doesn't. In America, one could theoretically lose work authorization should he refer or present himself as an immigrant (if he or she is on a legal status that doesn't allow for immigrant intent).
Same thing in Europe. Thousands of EU citizens live and work anywhere in the EU outside their home country but have no intent on permanently staying there. Often for decades. They are very much expats.
Chinese nationality is super hard to get if you're not born with it, but it's technically possible to get one, especially in cases as described in the GP.
>The author has lived there for 20 years, married there, has kids who go to local schools, yet calls himself an expat, and everyone here seems to accept that as an obvious truth.
If they refer to themselves as an expat, why are you questioning this? Do you demand proof when someone refers to themselves as male or female too?
I know people living in the US who have been there for 20 years and call themselves expats too. They have no intention of retiring in the US: they plan to move back to their home country at that point in their lives.
>Meanwhile a million+ people coming to the USA on temporary work visas fully intending to go back to their home country (or illegally with no path to citizenship) are obviously immigrants.
Is that what they call themselves? I would normally call them expats, unless they say otherwise.
>At some point people have to come to terms that this isn't about some technical definition of "immigrant" vs "expat" but a deeper prejudice.
At some point, people like you need to stop trying to make everything about racism.
> >At some point people have to come to terms that this isn't about some technical definition of "immigrant" vs "expat" but a deeper prejudice.
> At some point, people like you need to stop trying to make everything about racism.
But it is. (Kinda.) If you don't look East-Asian in China, the predominant assumption is that you're an "expat". And statistically this is almost always true -- Chinese nationality is extremely hard to obtain if you're not born with it, and probably 99% of Chinese nationals look East Asian and has East Asian ethnicity.
Sure, because China basically allows no immigration, but that's not what the OP was referring to, he's complaining about privileged white people and their use of the terms.
Calling yourself an expat is a legitimate attempt to think you have got rid of prejudices against migrants so by calling yourself expat, you perceive they do not apply to you.
Interesting, so why don’t we ever see the word expats associated with the millions of laborers from poorer nations working in the Middle East with no path to citizenship ever referred to as expats ? Let’s be honest here, it’s exclusively only ever used when it’s someone who’s predominately white and from the west (and either rich themselves or come from a rich country)
You answered the question yourself: they're laborers, brought in by a third party for a specific purpose like construction, living their lives entirely controlled by the company (housing and food provided, etc) and kicked out as soon as they become unneeded.
Expats have a great deal more agency about their lives: where they live, where they work, when to return, etc.
To be clear, I don't particularly like this distinction, but it absolutely is a thing in the Middle East down to separate immigration lines at airports, and if anything glossing it over by calling the Bangladeshi construction worker living in a container in the brutal heat and sharing a latrine with 50 other guys an "expat" does nobody any favors. Or was the American South powered by African "expat" labor too?
> Resident Alien - I think that’s how USCIS calls people who do intend to stay but not immigrate
Resident alien is a general term (not specific to the US) for someone who permanently resides in a country without citizenship; it is also an IRS tax term for someone who is either a permanent resident alien or who meets the “substantial presence test” so that they are treated as residents for tax purposes.
A permanent resident alien is another term for someone with a green card, which is for people who intend to (often, already have) immigrated before they qualify for naturalization.
I live outside my home country, and have done for 15 years. I personally dislike "expat", as for me it conjures up an image of a particular sort of person. People can describe themselves however they like though.
I was being snide. But there’s a kernel of truth here: the term expat and immigrant describe the same people. But there is a racist and/or culturally chauvinistic implication in how they are used. Mexican person coming to the US? Immigrant. American moving to Vietnam? Expat.
A lot of economic migrants from the global South are not technically forced to leave: you can live a life of subsistence almost everywhere nowadays. They just think they'll have a better future elsewhere, exactly like expats.
Most people in the expat community I know went to Hong Kong and Singapore instead for the following reasons: 1) Easy to do business 2) Easy to get your money in and out. 3) Low taxes 4) Central travel hubs in Asia 5) Less backwards mindset as these cities feel more cosmopolitan and are interconnected with the outside world
With HK having less and less freedom, Singapore is really the only choice for foreigners to have a decent life quality in Asia. Tokyo could potentially be an option too, but it's really hard to live there due the very different structures in Japanese society and taxes are pretty high.