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Comment by tensalores | Hacker News Reader

I've also traveled to tons of cities in China and what I found is that many expats and local Chinese that hang around the expat bubble have a similar "doom and gloom" viewpoint.

Whereas when I started to hang around local, blue collar Chinese workers (who don't speak English or hang around expats at all), their outlooks were extremely optimistic about China's future.

It makes me wonder if this is more of a class issue. The poorer, blue collar workers will start to prosper more, but the upper-middle class will start to face difficulties.

I would also add that all my Chinese friends that stayed in China are wealthier than those that left. And of those that left, many are returning to China. But again, these are all people that are outside the expat bubble so perhaps their viewpoints would be different.

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Almost any foreigner who lives in china for more than a few years develops a healthy amount of cynicism to keep going (those that don’t inevitably leave). It has nothing to do with an expat bubble (most of us work jobs around mostly Chinese, and spent way more time in zhongguancun than sanlitun).

A lot of my Chinese coworkers left for the states while I was there. Something about “pollution and young kids” was their reason, not to make more money. You can make a lot of money in china, as long as you don’t mind knocking a few years off your lifespan (and just forget about it if you have kids, unless you can afford the private schools with full bubbles around them, and even then....).

I've made friends with many local Chinese workers; I speak Mandarin as well. The (very few) workers that are intelligent and knows about foreign things, usually tends to be very pessimistic about China. Most of the workers that only reads stuff put out by the government, and reads censored mobile contents, are optimistic (logically, since the government approved contents are optimistic). or they're just very afraid to speak their minds.

Ironically that's why China will fall sooner rather than later. It's because most people aren't aware of the downfall until it's too late, because of censorship.

"Local, blue collar workers" are generally completely uninformed outside of their little bubbles, much more so than the "expat bubble" you speak of.

They have a job and are making a reasonable salary? Things are great.

There may be all sorts of looming major issues for the country, but their existence is local, not looking at national debt loads, workforce statistics, and the like.

I don't think their outlooks are particularly useful other than as a measure of consumer confidence in their little area.

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"The poorer, blue collar workers will start to prosper more, but the upper-middle class will start to face difficulties."

Why? It's a serious question. Poor, blue collar workers in China (and elsewhere) are generally that because they lack useful skills to do anything higher-paying.

Are they going to suddenly develop those skills as adults?

Is China's economy going to have big increase in it's need for unskilled labor and a decline in it's need for skilled labor? (And if so, do you expect that is somehow also going to be paired with rising economic opportunity rather than a decline and return to sweatshops?)

I don't see how any of that is likely.

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