Wait, so you're saying everyone is leaving fascist USA, but China will be the beneficiary of that?
PhDs take a long time; do you want to commit 5+ years of your life to being in a place whose leaders are psychotic and don't want you around? Remember, if you are forced to quit your PhD program early, you don't get one and you have to start over somewhere else. And the time you've spent you're being paid nothing. Stability is key when you're making decisions like that, and it's something we've lost here inarguably in a big way.
To call the US a slightly less fascist regime than China is wrong. Go read up on human rights violations in China some time.
Other areas of concern include the lack of legal recognition of human rights and the lack of an independent judiciary, rule of law, and due process. Further issues raised in regard to human rights include the severe lack of worker's rights (in particular the hukou system which restricts migrant labourers' freedom of movement), the absence of independent labour unions (which have since been changing[3]), and allegations of discrimination against rural workers and ethnic minorities, as well as the lack of religious freedom – rights groups have highlighted repression of the Christian,[4][5][6][7][8][9] Tibetan Buddhist, and Falun Gong religious groups. Some Chinese activist groups are trying to expand these freedoms, including Human Rights in China, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, and the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group. Chinese human rights attorneys who take on cases related to these issues, however, often face harassment, disbarment, and arrest.[10][11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
The gap between the US and China in most measures of freedom and business rights is absolutely massive and isn't going to shift because six Muslim countries have restricted immigration. Maybe see how China treats Muslims in the western part of the country?
You aren't reading very carefully. They're speaking of a plausible hypothetical future. Whereas your evidence is from a past that, even if it's a few months ago, now seems quite distant.
I have little doubt that human and especially political rights in China are considerably worse than in the US overall, but you can live well anywhere if you're part of a preferred class and don't intend to rock the boat.
However your parent post was suggesting that this could extremely easily shift if it's hard for talented African/European/Asian students to get US visas, and China siezes the opportunity - investing heavily in R&D making student immigration easier.
Likely it won't change overnight, but it's not impossible to imagine a world where this scenario plays out - a few more Trump Executive Orders, a savvy couple moves from the CCP and you're not far off.
Another possible reality is that nobody benefits - the USA squeezes its intake of the worlds best and brightest, the EU is too busy puzzling over Brexit and similar distractions among South American, Asian and African nations (sorry I'm not familiar enough with their internal troubles to speculate) scupper their own efforts.
On top of that, from what I see most of the Chinese that came to US nowadays are becoming more patriotic, and more tolerant about Chinese government before they came.
In recent years, the US has turned noticeably anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-elite, and anti-government-support-of-almost-everything, including education, health care, the arts, science, and infrastructure. Whereas China has been energetic about pursuing global leadership in a variety of areas, and they're not shy about spending.
It would not shock me at all to see China take advantage of the US's turn to appeal to bright foreigners who just want to do their thing. The US previously did well because we were welcoming to immigrants and serious about having world-class universities doing world-class research. If we throw away our advantages and China makes up its deficits, why wouldn't more talent pick China?
The US gives grants citizenship to more immigrants each month than the PRC has in its entire history.
Another interesting statistic is the total number of people the PRC has granted permanent residency to ever. It's definitely worth googling.
Of course it is possible to reverse course and open up, but it would take quite a bit of time to change in the ways you're suggesting.
Interestingly, it might not need to open up all that soon to still reap the benefits. If in the future the US is also not very open, but China is apparently making strides to become more open, that could affect long term planning.
I also wonder if China, having more control and less ethos built up around inherent fairness of immigration (if that's true?) might be able to just say "10+ years in China as an academic or high end research position in X/Y/Z industries will get your pernanent residence."
It's also a relatively open place for foreigners, English is commonly spoken (and an official language, so all government documents can be completed in English, and all laws translated). Except when meddled with, it retains a high degree of autonomy from the mainland, and very much follows rule of law under HK basic law. Due to it's unique situation, it's also fairly apolitical.
HK companies also have the advantage of not being taxed on non-HK source revenue and have no trouble doing business with/in the mainland.
People are talking a lot about China in this thread, but I think Taiwan is the country to watch for. They already have a highly-educated population and are a major player in global high-tech hardware.
I've never been as fit as when I lived in Taiwan :P
Chinese is hard to pick up for sure, tones are not easy to intuit as English speakers are used to discarding that information. Mandarin is easier due to the smaller number of tones. It's also easier in many respects than English as there are no verb conjugations.
[1] https://www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/learning-english-ha...
You need to deal with almost everything the article claims to make learning English hard, when you learn Chinese. And it's often a lot more harder.
When it comes to grammar, English has much more well defined grammar than Chinese does though it might seem too flexible compared to many other European languages.
In addition, if you actually live in China, you most likely needs to deal with local dialects, which could sound like a entirely different language. That's why there are Mandarin and Catonese. There are a lot more inside China.
Because China is governed by an authoritarian regime guilty of a wide variety of human rights violations.
If you're brown skinned in China, you are treated far worse than you are in the US. Likewise, if you're Chinese (or look Chinese - people from the North East of India), most of India treats you very badly. And if you're a woman with Chinese features.. well let's just say that there's a (deeply pejorative) term for that in India.
In both countries, if you're white (occidental), you'll be treated MUCH MUCH better than a darker skinned person.
And if you're black.. it's even worse.
So it's not easy for Indians to move to China, or for a Chinese person to move to India. Of course moving back to your own country of origin is (usually) easier.
Those people are dangerously ignorant.
That said, parent is just as wrong to call the original comment "dangerous" as well.
And would be interested real and objective criteria for assessing which country is "worse" ethically or "worse" by some criteria you select.
I can think of none.
If it's about the abortions, apparently there's two types of action taken[1]. If it's in an urban area, they apparently either charge a fee or don't assign a household register to the child (not sure what that means), but if it's rural they do apparently force abortions. If you're okay with the social policy, it seems like there are solutions that don't require forced abortions (such as implanted birth control). Whether that aspect is still ethically worse than the U.S. or not probably depends on your view on reproductive rights.
1: https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-a-family-disobeys-th...
One possible argument might be that the social cost of that unborn child is so high that is it is morally reprehensible to have conceived it in the first place, and that such an action is a horrible crime.
Plenty of places suspend human right to imprison or even execute people who have committed crimes. It could be seen that such an action isn't even isn't even punitive, just corrective. Some might feel that the government simply removes the child before it is born, and then is lenient because the mother is not imprisoned for her indiscretion against society.
Other possible arguments could stem from the long term environmental harm that the child will have on the environment. If someone places higher value on nature than on human life this argument naturally follows.
- Paying taxes
- Child schooling
- Vaccination
- Health care
A population growth policy that targets birth is not so entirely different from those, as fundamentally different as it may feel, depending on your background. Giving people the option of either birth control or an abortion if they get pregnant would be one way to handle that. Have a fundamental disagreement with abortion? Use birth control. Have a problem with birth control too? Take it up with the state, just like in those items above.
I'm not advocating for this, I'm just pointing out it's not fundamentally different than other things we already do.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system#Effect_on_rural_w...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_in_China#Hukou_refor...
Stepping into the murky quagmire of ethics, I could argue that the 2 to 4 million Vietnamese who died defending Vietnam from American invaders is much worse than censoring the Internet. That Internet is largely made by those same murderers and they have the largest spy agency in the world, the CIA, trying to break in and spy on seemingly everyone, so it must be filtered.
One could also argue that enforced family planning allows for centralized natural resource and pollution management. China per capita pollutes much less than the United States.
Again, I am not taking or defending these arguments, but it is easy to see that it is not clean and objectively true that one nation is always ethically superior to another.
If you (or anybody else) wants to count casualties, approximately 8 million Chinese dies in the Chinese Civil Wars. Surely the life of a Vietnamese person is not more valuable to America than a life of a Chinese person is to China.
And we also ought to include the lives of the between 15 and 45 million who starved to death in Mao's "Great Leap Forward."
It is also worth noting that China was largest foreign backer of North Vietnam, providing "both financial aid and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of military personnel in support roles" (quote from wikipedia), so it is untrue to say that the United States in uniquely culpable for the war's casualties.
For example different people will pick different ways to count. Some will distinguish between domestic and foreign, claiming that there some ethical difference. These people might claim that a government should kill its citizens that cause problems in the name of social order, and that the US is unjust and horrible because they don't kill enough dissenters.
Some will claim that lives lost in mistakes are different than lives lost in oppression and war. These people might claim that the great leap forward was good in intention, but lacked nuance in execution that could have saved many lives.
Some will claim that government and corporations should not be separated so will point the all the slave owning corporations and humans rights abusing industrialists in the USA and lump them in with the government.
All I am saying is that there are gray areas here, and that I cannot see a way to see different perspectives as objectively wrong or right. In some things there is objective right and wrong. Does Man-made CO2 change the climate, yes unambiguously no amount of perspective wiggling changes this. Is it ethical to make social that mildly harms one group to prevent a perceived larger harm to another, this seems fuzzier and innately requires something to be 'perceived' correctly.
But things change. US is becoming more fascist which is potentially leading to an exodus of intelligent minds - who are perhaps going to be migrating to one of their main competitors, China.
The one good thing about China is that they are open to changes in their policies (but can't change the party).
It will be interesting to see how this plays out with all the immigration talk. I really hope Brexit and stuff like this don't actually happen. To me it feels like the reversal of the Fall of the Berlin wall.
It's an extreme example, but I want to underline that enforcing birth policy is not automatically immoral. China has a lot of people, of course they enforce birth policy.
By any objective measure the US's record on human rights far exceeds that of China. Has the US violated human rights? Sure. Does it try and remedy those situations? Yes.
China has zero qualms about putting people under house arrest for voicing opinions contrary to the Party. It doesn't come back and say "that was an injustice" it says "this is the right thing to do for China". Add on top of that forced abortions, mock trials, etc. The two countries aren't even comparable.
China is an actual authoritarian regime guilty of many human rights violations. I can say whatever I want about Trump in the states. Try that in China against Chinese leadership.
And if they can't get in the US, well that's an easy call.