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They don't have to deal with the special interests and their corrupt money flowing to politicians. They basically have a one person rule which makes things so much easier instead of our cast of hundreds. They are free to make decisions for the good of the majority instead of who has the most influence and money.
China is eating our lunch and will continue to do so until we are all speaking Mandarin.
Envied:
In general, 1st and 2nd tier Chinese cities have the most enviable stuff.
- High-Speed Rail
- High-density apartments (when they are built correctly)
- New high capacity schools (when they are built correctly)
- Focus on education and advancement.
- Overall a massive improvement in living conditions during the last three decades.
Not Envied:
In general, the countryside and all 3rd tier and below Chinese cities are not great.
- Lack of preservation of history and culture.
- Government repression if you don't join the communist hive mind. (Though you can usually be left alone as long as you keep your fat nose in your coffee and don't have an iota of political thought.)
- Provincial people and the overall me-first nastiness of the majority of inhabitants of the PRC.
- Garbage central management, Guanxi, and systematic suppression of all new ideas.
- Being the source (possibly due to negligence) of the worst global pandemic in modern history.
- Central (political) control is more important than innovation, which is why China will always be the manufacturing copycat/implementer and never the technological leader. They will always be a few steps behind the West until their leaders no longer fear their people. That requires a reversal of their path into Despotism (or for the present technological leaders of the world to fall into Despotism).
This deserves more elucidation. Basically, when a brilliant researcher at one of the huge numbers of shiny Chinese universities comes up with a great idea, that idea has to get past the political wonks who are in charge of the companies that would implement that idea. Those wonks are crusty old men with great political savvy but zero technological know-how. The problem lies in the fact that the smart engineers and scientists recognize that Despotism is an unstable political system, and can't keep their mouth's shut about it, which does not keep them in high station. Furthermore, when you get innovators who do well, they become wealthy and powerful--and thus a threat to those in power. Compare the treatment of Musk or Zukerberg to Khodorkovsky or Ma and you see on the macro scale why Despotism necessarily retards technical and economic success.
- Finally, the flattening of the massive socioeconomic uplift. The Chinese are rightfully proud of the success story of their country from the 1980's to around 2018. However, there are a number of strains and drags on their progress that are going to become increasingly problematic:
= Demographic disaster due to the one-child policy (and slow government reaction, overall.
= Hastily-constructed infrastructure (sometimes with falsified safety measures) that is degrading very rapidly. No Brooklyn Bridges here.
= An expectation of continued economic success. The Chinese people expect to be rewarded for their hard work, education, and dedication to their country. They will have a hard time digesting any economic shocks, due to the fragility of Despotism.
I'd say a more enviable country is Taiwan. They are basically everything good about China, they mitigated most of the negatives, and they have a stable Social Democracy to boot. Of course, this is bad news for Taiwan, since the leadership in Beijing is not happy about having an thumb-in-their-eye example of freedom and success going hand-in-hand right next door, and ruining their narrative that representative government either doesn't work, or doesn't work for Chinese people.
Envied:
In general, 1st and 2nd tier Chinese cities have the most enviable stuff.
- High-Speed Rail
- High-density apartments (when they are built correctly)
- New high capacity schools (when they are built correctly)
- Focus on education and advancement.
- Overall a massive improvement in living conditions during the last three decades.
Not Envied:
In general, the countryside and all 3rd tier and below Chinese cities are not great.
- Lack of preservation of history and culture.
- Government repression if you don't join the communist hive mind. (Though you can usually be left alone as long as you keep your fat nose in your coffee and don't have an iota of political thought.)
- Provincial people and the overall me-first nastiness of the majority of inhabitants of the PRC.
- Garbage central management, Guanxi, and systematic suppression of all new ideas.
- Being the source (possibly due to negligence) of the worst global pandemic in modern history.
- Central (political) control is more important than innovation, which is why China will always be the manufacturing copycat/implementer and never the technological leader. They will always be a few steps behind the West until their leaders no longer fear their people. That requires a reversal of their path into Despotism (or for the present technological leaders of the world to fall into Despotism).
This deserves more elucidation. Basically, when a brilliant researcher at one of the huge numbers of shiny Chinese universities comes up with a great idea, that idea has to get past the political wonks who are in charge of the companies that would implement that idea. Those wonks are crusty old men with great political savvy but zero technological know-how. The problem lies in the fact that the smart engineers and scientists recognize that Despotism is an unstable political system, and can't keep their mouth's shut about it, which does not keep them in high station. Furthermore, when you get innovators who do well, they become wealthy and powerful--and thus a threat to those in power. Compare the treatment of Musk or Zukerberg to Khodorkovsky or Ma and you see on the macro scale why Despotism necessarily retards technical and economic success.
- Finally, the flattening of the massive socioeconomic uplift. The Chinese are rightfully proud of the success story of their country from the 1980's to around 2018. However, there are a number of strains and drags on their progress that are going to become increasingly problematic:
= Demographic disaster due to the one-child policy (and slow government reaction, overall.
= Hastily-constructed infrastructure (sometimes with falsified safety measures) that is degrading very rapidly. No Brooklyn Bridges here.
= An expectation of continued economic success. The Chinese people expect to be rewarded for their hard work, education, and dedication to their country. They will have a hard time digesting any economic shocks, due to the fragility of Despotism.
I'd say a more enviable country is Taiwan. They are basically everything good about China, they mitigated most of the negatives, and they have a stable Social Democracy to boot. Of course, this is bad news for Taiwan, since the leadership in Beijing is not happy about having an thumb-in-their-eye example of freedom and success going hand-in-hand right next door, and ruining their narrative that representative government either doesn't work, or doesn't work for Chinese people.
Excellent post, couldn't rep you. C-D owes you. Charge them high interest.
The lifting of the greatest number of people out of poverty in the shortest time in human history.
The low fertility rate in China is worrying, as well as many other countries in the world with a fertility rate lower than 1.5, particularly their resistance to immigrants from the West, and the immigrants won't be coming from the south, as the fertility rates in SE Asia has become that of Europe.
When they allowed women to have 2 children, 70% of the women polled had no interest in having a 2nd child. And now, they've upped that to 3 children, and very few takers.
Perhaps that's why they've been hurrying things along, building faster and faster, because they know what may be coming, besides a huge aging population, fewer workers.
But I do believe China will overcome this with more and more robots. They already have robotic caregivers in Japan.
They don't have to deal with the special interests and their corrupt money flowing to politicians. They basically have a one person rule which makes things so much easier instead of our cast of hundreds. They are free to make decisions for the good of the majority instead of who has the most influence and money.
China is eating our lunch and will continue to do so until we are all speaking Mandarin.
The world used to believe the same thing about Nazi Germany too. Turns out they were funding all their projects with debt and their whole system was unsustainable. It's called Window Dressing and one can get by with that for a surprisingly long time, but it does eventually crash. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are both great examples of that. It's too soon to tell but I would bet against China. China is just another resource based economy like Saudi Arabia, Russia, South Africa. Its resource is labor. That is eventually going to bite them hard.
Another residential building collapsed. No report of casualties yet.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-06-1...DGo/index.html
19-Jun-2021
Rescue underway as residential building collapses in C China's Hunan
The rescue mission is underway after a residential building collapsed in Rucheng County, Chenzhou City, central China's Hunan Province on Saturday.
The accident took place at around 1:00 p.m. local time, while the casualties remain unknown.
All those rebukes only drove them in one determined direction.
Apparently, Xinjiang not only produce cotton, they provide 80% of China's market share of tomatoes.
Trip report Ürümqi - Lanzhou by (bullet)train (Silk road part 7 Netherlands to China by train)
•Oct 24, 2019
Trainviking
Envied:
The Han are the largest ethnic group in the world. They value education and have above-average intelligence. Confucianism was an excellent social order for the time and produced the stability and continuity of Chinese culture.
Not Envied:
China is not the best piece of real estate. The western two thirds are sparsely populated, forcing most to live in crowded conditions in the east. There are few rivers for a landmass the size of China, with only two major ones and only the Yangtze is navigable. This makes the Chinese hinterland shockingly poor compared to the coastal areas. China is also directly in the path of the Eurasian steppes, the traditional highway of destruction in human history.
The Han prospered by being in a comparatively remote part of the world compared to the cradle of civilization, allowing them to develop a unified culture and acquire lots of territory without major rivals nearby. However their exposure to invaders from the west and north has had an unfortunate consequence, with the Han being ruled by foreigners for about a quarter of their history. The threat, military and epidemiological, from the steppes won't go away.
If you're wondering why I'm going on about geography, it's because geography is the main driver of cultural differences.
Yes, the air pollution, which they're working on, is certainly not to be envied.
As well as the debt that finances all of that. And the ability to use dictatorial power in a way that would make Robert Moses envy. Overall, not good.
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