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When I was in college,many moons ago,an Indian foreign student received a letter to apply for MC ,he did not understand what a charge card is,so when he got the card,he went spending ,thinking it is a gift,and he does not have to pay
Chinese will rent a room or share a room.or rent a bed,thats their home.
They are mostly migrant workers who send money back home to support their family.
When the Japanese housewife sweeps her home,she will come out into the street and sweep whatever is there outside her home,but the other Asians do not,they may keep their own home clean,but leave the street to the city.
Who said Chinese live in filth?may be they dont have carpeting or drapes and toilets,but thats a lower standard of living,
Have you ever seen off campus American undergraduate college students live?They live in pigsty!
American undergraduate college students have significantly better standards than Chinese students, which has significantly better standards than migrant workers. That should tell you something about how they live.
I used to think like you, they just can't afford carpeting, toilet, etc. But then I realized that they frequently buy expensive stuff and that is not expensive to decorate at all, and it is movable. I could make any migrant home livable for 1000 and nice if I can spend 5000 RMB, and it will only cost a few hundred next time they move. It's not about money or time, they just don't bother.
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Not Mao,but hundreds of years of political turmoil ,famine teach them to live below their m eans and save more,so they can run for their life when there is a sweeping civil war or famine.
The people who experienced pre-Mao are not alive today.
And judging by the young generation, it is not hereditary.
In terms of keeping inside clean and outside dirty, it is not due to private or public. Private gardens are often worse than public gardens, since there are no public cleaners.
Cleanness is more like a health issue in China, as many people believe that a dirty home is unhealthy. That is why you often see homes with no hair on the floor, but with furniture that is falling apart. They care more about their home being physical dirty than visually dirty. A dirty garden or hallway doesn't matter as they don't believe it is bad for health.
This is the case for the people who keep their home clean, others will just let it be a mess.
How can you use housing as an argument for China? Chinese home prices are among the worst in the world, and large amount of property is empty as people are buying them for investment. To fix this, China is testing out property taxes in a select few cities, while the USA has had significantly higher property tax for decades.
Rent is cheap, but the CCP does not protect tenants well like in Germany and also do not give them the possibility to put their hukou there. Not only does this screw over the poorest in Chinese society, but it pushes up property prices.
In addition, China does not have free health care, has massive income inequality and labour is often abused. How is that taking care of the wellbeing of the majority?
have you actually been to china? your claims are simply not facts and make no logical sense.
go visit and find out for yourself, not just the big four cities, go visit the second to 5th tier cities and see for yourself
there is nothing wrong with NOT having free healthcare,you own your body,it is your priority how to set it.
as to Chinese buying luxury items when their house looks like a shad,thats call SAVING FACE!
There is a saying,Punch your face in front of the mirror until it is red and swollen,before you leave the house so people will think you eat well !
so leaving the house with a designer handbag,shoes and perfume and clothes fit .
The theme of this post seems to have gone into a strangely different direction (cost of living in China?) but I see it as more evidence of Chinese espionage. that really should be the key topic here. The professor had ties to China, receiving funds from China at the same time he was employed by Harvard is a field where he engages in high tech applications protected as intellectual property. Certainly he was passing on his knowledge to China. He fell into the same trap that Al Capone fell into - tax evasion.
No surprise really. This is China's bread and butter - stealing technology. It doesn't even have to have military applications, they just want to steal technology and copy it to give them the edge in developing high tech products. It's the same reason why I return home with my laptop full of Chinese spyware and my activities are monitored in China.
have you actually been to china? your claims are simply not facts and make no logical sense.
go visit and find out for yourself, not just the big four cities, go visit the second to 5th tier cities and see for yourself
Lol
Unlike you, I live in China. Property prices in China are absurd, people often need to max out legal borrowing, borrow from the black market and borrow from their family to just buy a mid-sized apartment.
Only someone completely delusional would argue that property is one of China's strengths.
Unlike you, I live in China. Property prices in China are absurd, people often need to max out legal borrowing, borrow from the black market and borrow from their family to just buy a mid-sized apartment.
Only someone completely delusional would argue that property is one of China's strengths.
you may want to look it up, what % of chinese families owns property in china, compare that to the west.
of course the prices are absurd in hong kong and the big four cities, you can't generalize about china since it's so big.
maybe you have lived in china, but your mind set about china seem to set at around the time that Xi took power. things have changed dramatically since that time.
I can see that because you mentioned the issue with hukou, but that "issue" is simply no longer a topic of discussion in today's chinese society.
Xi may have done other questionable things, but he did keep the gap between by rich and poor in check. Like you said, he did major crackdown on the stock/high tech/rich people to keep them in check. At the same time, major progress was done to help to eliminate poverty.
as a result, the hukou means nothing now. about 10 years ago, there is no way to be rich without a hukou in the big 4 city as people from the countryside can only go to the big four city to find jobs. But now a days, if you go to a 2 to 5th tier city, you can see the urbanization has caught up. Everyone can live and work in the city if they choose to. Which new highways and HSR, the time between countryside and city is hours instead of days.
the result? people from anywhere can have access to luxury goods. that's why they can have tesla dealers in xinjiang of all places, in additional to 60+ spots around the country.
you may want to look it up, what % of chinese families owns property in china, compare that to the west.
of course the prices are absurd in hong kong and the big four cities, you can't generalize about china since it's so big.
maybe you have lived in china, but your mind set about china seem to set at around the time that Xi took power. things have changed dramatically since that time.
I can see that because you mentioned the issue with hukou, but that "issue" is simply no longer a topic of discussion in today's chinese society.
Xi may have done other questionable things, but he did keep the gap between by rich and poor in check. Like you said, he did major crackdown on the stock/high tech/rich people to keep them in check. At the same time, major progress was done to help to eliminate poverty.
as a result, the hukou means nothing now. about 10 years ago, there is no way to be rich without a hukou in the big 4 city as people from the countryside can only go to the big four city to find jobs. But now a days, if you go to a 2 to 5th tier city, you can see the urbanization has caught up. Everyone can live and work in the city if they choose to. Which new highways and HSR, the time between countryside and city is hours instead of days.
the result? people from anywhere can have access to luxury goods. that's why they can have tesla dealers in xinjiang of all places, in additional to 60+ spots around the country.
Learn yourself English. I said "I live in China", that is present tense. That means I still live there.
The high homeownership rate shows that the hukou issue is still there. Everyone need to own a place to get a hukou, so everyone tries to make sure they own at least one place. America would also have a very high homeownership rate, if it had the same Hukou system.
And there is actually a difference between owning a crappy 40 sqm place in a small city and owning a 200 sqm place in a small town in America. If you look at the statistics, Chinese homes are some of the smallest in the world, while America are one of the biggest. A lot of people want to upgrade to bigger and newer apartments in their own city or another city, but they can't because property prices are extremely expensive, because many has bought them as investment apartment and letting it sit empty.
Income inequality has hardly changed, it has only dropped from 0.49 to 0.46. Just in my city, I know Chinese people who earn 2500, and others who earn 30,000. And salaries in smaller cities are even lower.
Yes, many people are choosing to not go to a big city anymore, but that is not because is life is so great everywhere else, but because the life quality of migrant workers in big cities is extremely poor. They can't buy a place, so they can't get hukou. And without Hukou, they don't have rights. And even if they save up, max out borrowing and buy a place, hukou is not guaranteed and they most likely will have an extremely long commute.
If you actually lived here instead of getting your information from places like r/sino, then you would know that things aren't as great as you think.
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