Comment by dcposch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcposch | Hacker News Reader

China is fascinating.

On one hand...

- China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction. Chinese policy since Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence poverty. Free markets were a big part of this, but so were Special Economic Zones starting with Shenzhen, a culture of sharing IP, massive govt investments in infrastructure, research and education.

- China are also the most successful urbanists today. Many of those 100s of millions of former rural poor are in cities now. In the time it took California to debate building a single High Speed Rail line from SF to LA, China connected their whole country with trains that are much faster, much more useful (because they go directly into urban centers and connect to fast local transit), and much cheaper. Ours still isn't done.

--

And yet, at the same time, China also seems to be prototyping some kind of grim meathook future.

- Extremely aggressive surveillance. Near zero respect for privacy. Govt deputizing the tech sector to spy and censor on their behalf.

- Cities with toxic air. Check out this glorious ad in Beijing right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg

- A closed, censored alternate internet

- "Social Credit" Scores based on surveillance, which look like a frighteningly powerful way to neuter dissent

China moves faster than we do, both for better and for worse. I guess our challenge is to emulate the things they're doing right (eg the vastly more efficient and effective way they build transit), while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach.

> China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction

This is only true if you're applying a ludicrous double standard. China has done better than most other countries at this because China was extremely poor just a few decades back. Nowadays, much of China is still very poor. Of course it's much easier for China to slash its poverty rates than for an already-developed nation. The real thing to ask about is how long it will take China to bring a western middle-class style quality of life to its citizens.

Im comparing China to other countries that were similarly poor in 1980-- much of the world, including the second biggest country, India. China did much better than them.

I don't think any other society in history has lifted as many people out of poverty in as short a time.

Did American corporations not gift China with a massive amount of free, working out of the box technology to get them going?

Are you referring to surveillance/data processing technology specifically or technological advances in general? If it's general advances, I don't see how it's really relevant. To some extent, similar technologies are available to all countries at this point, so its down to governments and society wrt how productively these technologies are leveraged.

The classic example of this is how landline telephony is much less prevalent than cellular in much of Africa. Landline technology was effectively skipped. I don't think African governments and societies are benefitting at the expense of western cell phone businesses. It's not a zero-sum game in this respect.

No, just that they were more or less a third world country with extremely cheap and hard working labor, I'm under the impression that American (and European, etc) companies went over there and provided equipment and expertise to set up fully functioning manufacturing plants, China had to provide the labor.

It seems fairly unlikely to me that China turned into the manufacturer of the world in such a short period of time without being gifted the skills and technology to do so. And now, companies like Xiamoi can now challenge (or, at least run with) the tech leaders.

Pretty impressive transformation in < 20 years.

"History is like a grandmother; it loves the younger grand-children. To the latecomers it gives not the bones but the marrow, while Western Europe has hurt her fingers badly in her attempts to break the bones."

That seems ignorant of the cumulative advantage that Europe enjoys to this day. If anything it illustrates how technological development is shared on a global scale, allowing anyone to catch up to the latest standard of industrialization if they can find the necessary investment.

This sounds interesting but I don't think I'm catching the full meaning....

Not really... Like US government even banned Intel from selling certain chips to China, and Chinese rocket scientists are somehow not able to attend any conference hosted by NASA (not sure about this one).

Why not compare China to countries that were similarly poor in the 1950s? China, Korea, Taiwan were comparable then, but Korea and Taiwan have leaped ahead now due to saner government. If anything how poor China is in PPP GDP per capita terms vs Taiwan/Korea should be taken as an indictment of how terrible the government's been.

Because getting something to happen in a large country is much much harder than in a smaller country. China is literally 20 times the size of Korea AND Taiwan.

To achieve growth in a small country, you can be nimble and find relatively small market opportunities and then exploit them relentlessly. That simply doesn't scale to 1bn+ people.

> To achieve growth in a small country, you can be nimble and find relatively small market opportunities and then exploit them relentlessly. That simply doesn't scale to 1bn+ people.

Economic reality is actually the opposite of what you state. A big country represents a big domestic market - you don't need export niches or even good products, but can just build to service the internal markets, with massive economics of scale - and then muscle your way into foreign markets when all your corporations are 800lbs gorillas.

If Taiwan is wealthier than the PRC, it is not because their economy and population is so tiny - there is another reason...

All countries with the highest GDP per capita are small:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

You need to get to Norway before you see a reasonably sized country.

If what you claimed was true, the US would be on top.

Almost 40 times, actually. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area+of+china+%2F+(are...

Because then, you would have to account for geopolitics. China didn't receive the kind of helicopter money non-communist countries in the area received. China (but also, e.g. Vietnam) also got access to consumer markets much later.

By conscious choice by the Chinese government though. If a government criminalizes capitalism, they can hardly cry foul if countries that don't do that reap enormous rewards from allowing inward capital investment. Especially when China later reaps the same rewards when they do finally allow it.

We're discussing two very differents topics. I'm trying to explain why the chinese or the vietnamese situation is quite different from e.g. the south korean or the japanese situation, which makes it hard to compare them. You on the other hand, are discussing about the fairness, or moral justification of the events I talk about.

These two discussions are completely orthogonal.

If you look only at raw numbers, there are literally two candidates. But if you look at proportions, there's a different story to be told. Chile 1973-2000 comes to mind, or some colonial governments, which, like China, achieved success by replicating strategies already known to work. In fact one of the best examples pf this is Stalin's Russia, and an analysis of this general pattern is given by Paul Krugman in this 1994 article:

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ102/readings/myt...

Japan 1960-1985 is another good example.

With regard to the authoritarian structure of China, one disease that persistently affects these systems is adverse selection based on cultural evolution, i.e. the populace "learns" to get around the system and it works as long as the system is sufficiently oppressive that most people sympathize with the rule-breakers, see also the War on Drugs and de facto legalization of marijuana in some small towns. The thing about corruption in bureaucratic heir-choosing (Caesarian?) systems is that once corruption gets in there's almost no way to get it out whereas a democracy can rebel

They can never achieve that without political reform that removes collectivism and replaces it with individualism and I'm not even sure that is possible with 1.5 Billion people or whatever they are up to now.

> western middle-class style quality

I don't think there is unified western middle-class style quality in every western country. US on average is richer than many european countries, where average wage is around 1k per month, is this middle class or not?

Much of China is still poor. There is also 50-100 million estimated Chinese now can afford modern cozy life(income 16k to 34k dollars per household), whether that is western style(air quality is certainly not :p), I don't know. Both exist, no point using one to deny the other.

Only emphasizing the poor part of China, overlooking the fact there is rising urban population seems like a lot of people are still in denial of the fact China is already a serious competitor in many fields.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-middle-class-is-explod...

China was the world's largest economy before about 1900. They have done an impressive job at screwing that up and then recovering a bit. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/06/23/article-2163610-13...

Sorry, but judging by how things are going in western nations, especially in the USA, we're more likely to emulate their "mistakes and authoritarian overreach" before we even break ground on that rail from SF to LA.

That is incredibly depressing. Good chance you're right, but that doesnt mean we should give up.

Politics is critical, and as technologists we can't just opt out and hope things will work out. We have to win these fights.

But we can't really discuss these type of issues at length on HN. It'd be deemed to political.

As technologists, we're often the ones implementing and designing the systems, infrastructure and algorithms that make such a thing not only possible, but likely :(

I have witnessed that very thing more times than I like to admit. I fail to understand what, other than sheer greed, motivates tech people to help build these police states. It's going to come back at us in terrible ways. Technology doesn't care whether it kills us all, it is completely value neutral. Only we can make the right choices.

I once worked at a place that was bidding on surveillance tech for some public transit systems in Australia and the cavalier attitude that management had about privacy was sad, to say the least. They just didn't think it was their job at all to decide what is right or make any ethical judgements whatsoever. To them, mass surveillance was merely a way to make a lot of money and that's all. They didn't care who got hurt when that tech eventually makes it to less democratic nations to be used to suppress and destroy the human spirit.

Well, that company went under, but others succeeded.

Yup, the US is increasingly heading towards the worst of both. We're investing massively in building a police state, while completely neglecting infrastructure and quality of life.

Ground was broken on January 6, 2015, but perhaps your point is still valid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_California_High-S...

> before we even break ground on that rail from SF to LA

We already have, here's video of the construction: https://youtu.be/1lsiYkyEW0w

Monthly construction updates: https://www.hsr.ca.gov/buildhsr.html

This is sad. I thought I'd be able to see a map showing green as part of the rail line that was complete or percentage complete. It just has some random project names where there's some work going on. I drive to Fresno every other month and cant wait to ride this, but nothing on the route seems to indicate any urgency to complete this project.

China is very interested in appearing successful. My impression is that they focus on this appearance (building large public projects, making internationally-tracked numbers go up) more than on the human costs involved.

I'd argue that the vastly more efficient and effective way they build transit is possible because of the authoritarian overreach.

It has to be easy to build a new railway when you can just send the police to evict everyone in the way.

I wish at the very least that our tech companies would stop abetting these crimes against humanity. We should be trying to liberate these people, not use tech to forever enslave them. It's sick.

> while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach

But you can't so easily dissentangle the one from the other. A lot of their development is so quick because they ride roughshod over property rights, safety standards, environmental concerns and individual liberties to push them through.

I like the phrase "grim meathook future"

Apparently its origin is https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2005/09/the-... (which I didn't know). Edit: thanks to people in this thread for pointing out JWZ's anti-HN redirection and a workaround to hide the referer header.

copy the link and open it in an incognito tab - apparently the web host really doesn't like Hacker News and redirects the link to a NSFW image.

https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2005/09/the-...

I tried presenting the bit.ly link as HTTPS to avoid making the link use HTTP.

I initially posted the bit.ly link thinking it would strip the referrer but then when I tested it I was still getting the imgur page so I looked for something else.

Regardless I almost don't want to give someone traffic who does obnoxious things based on http headers.

Thanks for the revised link; I've edited my comment to use it.

Edit: there's some irony in the way the post on that page criticizes someone for making the contents of a URL unstable ("because he doesn't know what the 'U' stands for") while the page itself displays deliberately different contents depending on how people found it.

...and with an earlier partial origin from Hunter S. Thompson, with "reality" predating "future":

http://www.whysanity.net/monos/fearandloathing.html

It has a cyberpunk ring to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com