China’s Silicon Valley Dream Bumps Against Reality | Hacker News Reader

China’s Silicon Valley Dream Bumps Against Reality

bloomberg.com

104 pointsraleighm99 comments

This is a very generic article. I would say made up even. China has a ton of problems. Unfortunately most Hong Kong based analysts spend more time partying in Hong Kong than in southern China. If the west wants to have a long term chance against what is happening in China we really have to stop with this feel good journalism.

What do you mean by „have a chance“?

This is obviously a long discussion, but in summary the world is changing and if one wants to have a say in that new world one can't pretend that it isn't happening. China is working on all fronts while the west is coming up with excuses why it doesn't matter.

Jack Ma summed it up pretty well — the US spent something close to $15 trillion fighting wars over the last century. China has been taking that money and investing it in building future economic advantage instead because it believes the wars of the future will be economic rather than kinetic.

Who do you think has a brighter future?

If you subtracted $15 trillion from the US GDP over the last 16 years (no need to go last century), it would still have been higher than china’s.

So I’m not sure what this factoid is proving about bright futures.

The elite of china spend their time protecting their power from the people. That's why they can't really project outward as much.

There is waste and fraud everywhere, including China. You can also find anecdotal evidence everywhere. It's impossible to piece this together into a singular narrative.

I think it's fair to say fraud is pervasive in China in a way that's not in many other western countries. Every time I have to do anything with China businesswise I'm reminded of that reality.

A lot of US Military spending is wrapped up in infrastructure too.

US Army Corps of Engineers for example maintains levees and dams throughout the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Corps_of_En...

Yeah, that's part of the DoD budget. Really weird, but that's how we budget for things in the USA.

Then there are mixed-projects, like Military colleges and schools. Officers are all college-educated, so when they leave the military, they still benefit private industry all the same. Or DARPA's contributions to the advancements of science (Adoption of TCP/IP and other long-term research projects)

> Yeah, that's part of the DoD budget.

$4.8 billion / $639.1 billion = 0.75%

It's a minuscule part of the DoD budget. A rounding error.

The majority is spent by the army, navy, and air force. The biggest expenditure category is operation and maintenance, followed by personnel, then procurement.

Wars are not one dimensional. Having a superior economy also doesn't mean you'll have a strategic advantage in the field.

I think the article could have benefited from some info on the efforts the Shenzhen government has been making on addressing the concerns raised, including setting up the Hong Kong University Hospital in Shenzhen branch and the giant "Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone", a free trade area in Shenzhen with corporate law based on Hong Kong's and very attractive tax benefits.

Whether that's enough to assuage Hong Kong'ers cynicism is a different matter, of course ;)

A thing about healthcare in China: while it is expensive on average, some serious interventions can be up to 20 times cheaper (cancer surgeries, complex fractures and soft tissue trauma, etc.) Emergency medicine is priced predatory though, in bigger cities, appendicitis can cost you $15k+.

I myself don't understand American obsession with healthcare, they are free to go anywhere in the world, and it will be cheaper for you than back home.

Health insurance in China is often flipped compared to how it works in the rest of the world, and definitely America. Instead of having a deductible, you have a benefit cap ($100k for the policy I got working for Microsoft). So the routine stuff winds up being very cheap to free, and the catastrophic stuff will bankrupt you. Well, not really, since Chinese hospitals will ask you to prepay your treatment, so bankruptcy isn’t an option.

This is how the USA was pre-ACA (but without the prepay requirement). The benefit caps were called lifetime maximums and were generally much higher dollar amounts. Still, they were low enough to bankrupt the average family if someone had a major catastrophe.

But that person would be alive. Also certain assets are protected in bankruptcy. https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/debt-manage...

I don’t have numbers handy, but IIRC a startling number of Americans have never left the country. It’s prohibitively expensive and simply out of reach for many (most?) people.

How is it startling? Some people don't care to leave the country? So what if it's not their thing? Not everyone cares to travel and even if you do, there is a million places to travel within the US, you'll never get bored, there is always something new to see. Why does it bother you that people enjoy doing different things than you in their free time?

It's not cost prohibited, discount airlines like Norwegian Air and Air Lingus run non-stop flights from the East coast to Europe for $100-$300. Flights to the Caribbean are not more expensive than domestic flights.

Cost prohibitive is relative.

Flying anywhere is cost prohibitive for a lot of families in the US. Buying 4 or 5 airline tickets gets expensive fast, even on low-cost airlines. The median family vacation in the US is probably a car trip to a destination within 4-5 hours of where the family lives.

This isn't as relevant for people without families, but many of them tend to be early in their career, so money and vacation time are bigger constraints.

Not buying it.

Median family income in households with children in the US is ~$80,000/year, mean is ~$100,500/year[1]. That's enough to afford $1,000 in airline tickets if you wanted to. Millions of people fly to kid-centric destinations like Orlando, Florida a year, and Orlando is incredibly cheap to fly to. It also amazes me how many people bring children on cruises and they even have kid centric cruises. The cost to fly is also at a historic low.[2][3] I see routes I took 10 years ago not increase in price since then.

Most people I know are not "travel people" and wouldn't take a "travel vacation" if it was free, so they are not buying airline tickets. Just cuz they aren't buying airline tickets doesn't mean that can't afford them if they wanted to.

My point was, if you're going to get onto an airplane it doesn't have to cost you significantly more to travel to a foreign country. Also traveling abroad isn't exactly something one "should" do, some people just don't want to.

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

[2] https://www.cntraveler.com/story/average-domestic-airfares-n...

[3] https://sfgate.com/chris-mcginnis/article/Hawaii-South-Afric...

> Some people don't care to leave the country? So what if it's not their thing?

It leads to an uneducated populace, ignorant of other cultures and with a very limited perspective of world affairs.

People's understanding of the world becomes limited to what you hear from the state department and the news media.

Makes it easy to drop bombs on people a world away if you never bothered to get to know the people or places you're destroying.

Oh, c'mon...

You can learn about foreign affairs and become educated without visiting other counties, it's not a requirement. You'll learn more in books than you'll learn drinking a margarita in Cancun resort.

Visiting other countries doesn't, by definition, lead to learning about foreign affairs and becoming educated of other cultures. I studied abroad and some of my fellow study abroad students didn't develop any understanding of foreign affairs or enlightenment about culture.

No place that has been bombed lately are where tourists will travel to.

Flying domestic in the US is crazy expensive when compared with budget airlines in Europe, where (if you look out for it) you can get a flight from London to Rome for £40.

International from/to the US is pretty much the same as everyone else in the world pays. This is based on my experience paying for and flying to 32 countries, many more than once.

My understanding about why Amercians don't fly international is the same as the UK used to be - not many even have a passport, and even less have an interest in cultures other than their own. For these last two comments I have no data, only hearsay.

> My understanding about why Amercians don't fly international is the same as the UK used to be - not many even have a passport, and even less have an interest in cultures other than their own.

There's a much simpler reason: the US is unbelievably large compared to European countries. The US equivalent to a London-Rome trip would be Washington, DC-Miami. Another example I give is that I used to live in Urbana-Champaign, which is "near" Chicago, which is roughly commensurate to saying that Paris is "near" Brussels.

And of course, the sheer size of the US also includes a massive diversity of climates and environments. The Florida Keys, North Carolina's Outer Banks, the Great Lakes, badlands in the Dakotas, Yellowstone, the Shenandoah Valley, Maine wilderness, Utah's canyons, Nevada's salt flats, San Diego--all of these places are completely different from one another. Not to mention we have our own Caribbean islands (US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico), subarctic wilderness (northern Alaska), and Pacific paradises (Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas).

When you can travel freely in an area basically the size of continental Europe without a passport, having one is not generally seen as a baseline requirement for being a regular person. This is a major change in mentality from many places where countries are smaller and crossing them not a rare event.

There might be a minor distinction to be made between having a no interest in other cultures and having £1500 lying around to fly to London.

> There might be a minor distinction to be made between having a no interest in other cultures and having £1500 lying around to fly to London.

1500? Easily doable for 500/600 return with some planning.

I get those values when searching MIA-London in Google flights, doable with other cities as well

If you live on the east coast you can get a discount flight to London for only $200 round trip. When these sales come up a group of my friends grabs tickets and go together, it's become a tradition.

San Francisco to London can easily run $2000 coach. That said, you're absolutely right! It's always possible to find a way to get around for much less than typical full price, and you are very correct to note this.

However, is it perhaps possible that the precise numbers might not be particularly relevant to the point? It's still at least an order of magnitude more than the cheap flight, for two major destination cities about as far apart and Detroit and Dallas.

Trying randomly for Detroit to Dallas vs Detroit to London on Oct 1 it was £51 vs £133 single. The London routing involved changing in Reykjavik though.

For anyone curious how that ~$170 USD fare is possible, it's WOW airlines and doesn't even include an overhead bin. It's great that WOW exists as an option, but it's hardly standard.

For example, from St. Louis, the cheapest round trip is in the ~$900 USD range.

The lack of overhead bins makes me go WOW.

You don't need a passport (as a European) to travel within the EU either.

That used to be true but countries started checking again since the latest refugee crisis. Austria / Italy. Austria / Germany you definitely get checked if you travel by train and sometimes car.

I don't think it's necessarily that we have less interest in cultures besides our own, it's more that we usually plan vacations around wanting to see something, like a national monument, or do something, like party at Mardi Gras. Combine that mindset with the fact that the USA is so big, and there isn't much of a reason to ever leave the country because you'll never be able to see everything it has to offer, plus you don't have to pay to fly across the ocean. And yeah, I personally don't know anyone with a passport, it seems pretty rare here. I think one reason might be because of our neighboring countries. Until a couple of years ago, Canada didn't require a passport or visa when crossing our border, and Mexican border towns have been viewed as unsafe for as long as I can remember, so people didn't really go to Mexico except by cruise ships.

It was more than 10 years ago that all changed. Not only that, US immigration officers even had personal discretion to let us in without proof of citizenship at all, and I'm pretty sure it was the same going North. Sucks how things are now, it just seems unnecessary to me.

>people didn't really go to Mexico except by cruise ships.

Cancun has always been a popular destination.

Note that it costs $145 to get a U.S. passport now

Amortized that's only $14.50/year, and renewals cost less.

I think that discounts the vast area, number of landmarks and tourist attractions, and multitude of different sub-cultures inside the US itself. When you can drive somewhere new and interesting in a few hours, and don't need any paperwork or currency exchange and don't have to worry about the language, that's much more appealing than expensive and time-consuming overseas flights.

All of that save the language is true for the EU as well.

>Flying domestic in the US is crazy expensive when compared with budget airlines in Europe, where (if you look out for it) you can get a flight from London to Rome for £40.

Its $60 for EWR-ATL and I didn't even look hard. $260 EWR-SFO and that's a 5 hour flight.

And KEWR-KATL is 650 nm direct and EGLL-LIRF is slightly over 780 nm. People forget how big the US is. Some states can really be considered separate countries by european standards.

Here's a map to illustrate the point.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/8fscnh/european_st...

Domestic flights in the US are relatively cheap if you're flying between two international airports. Cheap, as in less than $120.

In Europe, distances are much shorter, and they have a different taxation regime. This I think is the bulk of the issue.

> It’s prohibitively expensive

I understand they may think it is, but it's not. And certainly cheaper than having to pay for healthcare back in America for any serious intervention.

There are a lot of Americans who never set foot outside their own state.

That's simply not true. Most americans have traveled outside of their own state. Like 90% of americans. And the 10% who haven't are mostly young children.

The best estimate I can find for that is around 10%, which is also about the same percentage of people who have never left the UK.

> It’s prohibitively expensive and simply out of reach for many (most?) people.

No it isn't. It's just that we have a huge country stretching from the western pacific ( guam, hawaii, etc ) to the arctic (alaska ) to the caribbean ( puerto rico ). We have a variety of cultures, regions, natural wonders and peoples than any country in the world.

Most americans can afford to travel overseas. But we have so many options within the US and its more convenient. Traveling from NYC to hawaii is far more impressive than traveling from NYC to London. And we have the grand canyon, mount denali, yosemite, yellowstone, florida, mount rushmore, new orleans, texas, chicago, endless list of places to visit. Most people, not just americans ) would explore their own nation first and then see the rest of the world.

It's generally europeans who brag about traveling and yet they mostly travel between tiny european countries. What's so impressive about someone in luxembourg traveling to france, germany and belgium in an afternoon? It isn't that impressive. But they could claim to have traveled to 3 countries even though those countries are pretty much the same as luxembourg.

To put this into perspective, the distance from moscow to berlin is 1100 miles. The distance from NYC to LA is 2700 miles. We just have a lot more land, lot more culture, lot more places to visit.

"We just have a lot more land, lot more culture"

LOL. You know the difference between America and yoghurt, right?

Sure do. And I know we have a lot more diverse culture than say sweden or spain or any european country.

Maine to NYC to new orleans to texas to california to the midwest to las vegas and throw in puerto rico, alaska and hawaii.

Feel free to show me another country that can match the diversity of peoples, cultures and land that the US has. LOL. Show me another country with the grand canyon, rocky mountains, yosemite, yellow stone park, etc.

I love people who laugh at american culture and yet watch our movies, tv shows, listen to our music, etc. So thumb your nose at us while listening to rock n roll, jazz, hip hop, techno, etc and watching game of thrones, friends, southpark, etc.

I gave an honest answer to why americans don't travel to foreign countries as much. It's because the US is the size of a continent. We have a lot of things to see here. We can literally travel thousands of miles and still be in the same country. In europe, you can drive through 3 countries in an hour.

The cost of any serious surgery needs to be weighed against the quality of the work and I would never go for the cheapest guy in some foreign country to cut me open.

Frontline, I think, once found that, while there are very good doctors all over the world, when you walk into any hospital in the USA, at least, odds are the doctor in front of you is very good but the odds of that happening in other parts of the world is far lower.

> odds are the doctor in front of you is very good but the odds of that happening in other parts of the world is far lower.

No, there is also a large bellcurve in terms of treatment outcomes back in the US between choosing the best in one's field and going to any hospital. That's not unique to international medicine at all.

The title of this article was poorly chosen. China's "Silicon Valley dream", if it has one, is much larger than economic development among the cities of HK, Shenzhen, Macao and Guangzhou. Problems linking those cities, which is what this article is about, are unlikely to block technological development in the country. The tech hubs in Shanghai, Beijing and other fast-moving Chinese cities aren't addressed here. Moreover, even if it's hard to link those southern Chinese cities, each one of them is huge, and booming in different ways. Shenzhen along houses more than 12 million people, while the entire SF Bay Area is around 7 million.

My opinion, state of things now:

1. Company registration - rules for company registration for all kinds of incentive zones keep changing monthly. That's insane.

2. Property protection: state has to give assurance that the 2009 style purge will not happen again

3. Personal safety - Shenzhen beats most cities in US on that, at the price of having a police post every 100m

4. Freedom of movement - you have to apply for 3 visas beforehand HK visa, China visa, Macau visa. APEC card works as a universal visa, but god know how one gets it. Last time I applied, the chamber of commerce said it is first time they heard of it.

5. Lifestyle - Shenzhen is one of world's most livable cities already, a head above of Silicon Valley

6. How much money you can make - not enough for somebody working in SV,or London already. A senior engineering cadre nets 25k-30k CNY per month. Cost of living, 7.5k CNY for a bachelor, even if you party hard. So, in the end you get around 3k usd to spare at current CNY price. I don't see much Americans, but for Eastern Europeans... 9 out 10 white people you see in factory districts speak Russian, or some other Slavic language. Lots of Indians, and Africans as well.

> Shenzhen is one of world's most livable cities already, a head above of Silicon Valley

Why do you claim so? I’ve never been to SZ, but if it’s anything like Guangzhou or even Hong Kong, I don’t see how the quality of life there is obviously better than Silicon Valley, especially if you are into outdoor activities and dislike heat and humidity.

Or so you mean SZ has much better traffic than SV? Even that I would doubt. Better air quality? SZ is good for China, probably worse than SV. So what are the metrics for “most livable city?”

> A senior engineering cadre nets 25k-30k CNY per month. Cost of living, 7.5k CNY for a bachelor, even if you party hard.

Those numbers are laughable even for Beijing, I hear SZ is way more expensive still. 30k/month is junior engineer territory, and you are lucky if your one bedroom apartment is only 7500/month in rent.

7.5k for a bachelor is not enough for a bachelor partying hard. Paying 5k for a 60 square meter 1 bedroom apartment right now in Shekou in Shenzhen, and that's on the cheap end of the scale without living way out in the boonies; searched long and hard for this deal.

That would leave me 2.5k for other expenses per month. That's about 83 RMB per day? Yeah, I think I could do that if I have zero partying and ate only the cheapest food each day. baybal2's numbers are way off. Many people do this, but many of them are doing it because they're not making nice engineer salaries. The ones I know and meet seem to like the finer things in life.

I live in north Nanshan and spend about that much per day on food and I am not very frugal and don't cook myself. If you want the cheapest food it would be about 15 rmb per meal or less, so 83 rmb per day is a very decent ration, unless you only eat western food of course.

It's always personal preference how much you spend on food. But even cooking for yourself can be expensive. My wife bought a portion of shrimp to cook lunch, the shrimp alone cost 40 RMB, and that was from a local grocery (big shrimp admittedly).

There are very few Chinese restaurants these days that charge only 15 RMB for a meal, depending on where you are in Shenzhen. Only hole in the wall shops, which are few and far between in most high tech parks. With waimai delivery, minimum cost 20 RMB for a nourishing meal, usually 30. Yes, life is feasible, I'm doing it.

But my main contention is that someone with 7.5k take-home pay can party hard. Don't think so. Unless party hard means watching movies all night on one's phone. Even a high-quality pearl milk tea will cost 30 RMB. Most Chinese (not western) restaurants that my wife and I visit now and then have a final bill of 100 to 200 RMB.

By the way, is that '9 out 10 white people you see in factory districts speak Russian' true?

Not sure about "factory" districts, but overall there is a lot of Russians, Ukrainians and Serbs here.

>Or so you mean SZ has much better traffic than SV?

Yes, whoever is a city planner here, he is genius.

>Better air quality?

Yes, for simple reason that prevailing winds come from the sea

>outdoor activities

Every sporting event you can imagine, thanks to all things left over from universiade, and there is Da Peng peninsula, Zhuhai, and lots of greenery. If you don't mind getting malaria, and be bitten by monkeys, you can brave nearby hiking venues.

>dislike heat and humidity.

+30 is quite livable by my standards, and I spent almost half of my life in East Russia and *stans

30k is the junior engineer territory if you compare it with standards of Western run companies.

Here, a local without English gets so much in a company having nothing to do with dot com business

And yeah, the weather is totally fabulous around this time of year

> Those numbers are laughable even for Beijing, I hear SZ is way more expensive still. 30k/month is junior engineer territory, and you are lucky if your one bedroom apartment is only 7500/month in rent.

In Beijing, junior engineer typically earn 17k-21k and that's before tax. His numbers seems quite right from my experience

In computer science coming from a tier one or even a tier two university? Sounds really low from what I know about the market.

I'm curious how havibg never been you find tg the numbers "laughable"? 7500/month is at the high end of the scale.

I’m using my experience living in Beijing as a basis where Shenzhen is known to be more expensive than Beijing when it comes to rent.

I guess you could go lower end, something much more decrepit should be 3-5k/month (think pre boom apartment buildings). However, this would chip away at ones sanity and I don’t recommend it for a westerner. Also, most of SZ’s housing stock is much newer in Beijing, so you won’t find that low end as accessible. Instead you probably have to move way out into the suburbs to find rent that cheap.

I now spend 4200 + utilities for a one-bedroom apartment in not a very old building (definitely not older than 20 years). Taking subway to all the central areas takes around 30 minutes. I guess Beijing prices are much higher.

How many sqm? To get that price in Beijing I would have to be outside the 4th ring road at least, or in some box with a concrete floor and white/blue lighting.

50 sq meters

Wow. That is definitely a studio. At the tier I was looking at, I never saw anything under 70, the smallest place I rented was 78sqm.

But it's not a studio. Bedroom, living room and kitchen are separate.

Ok, then just a very small 1 bedroom.

In the US, you can get an APEC card as a checkbox with Global Entry. During the interview the agent had never heard of APEC before but I got it, and it has a very low sequence number.

It’s great using the diplomat line throughout Asia.

> APEC card works as a universal visa, but god know how one gets it. Last time I applied, the chamber of commerce said it is first time they heard of it.

The US (and Canada) APEC card isn't very useful because it doesn't work as a universal visa, since the US (and Canada) wasn't willing to reciprocate and honor other APEC cards as visas.

“livable cities already, a head above of Silicon Valley”

You are kidding me. What are you smoking?

Safe uncancerous air: SV

Safe water: SV

Safe food: SV

Safe medicine: SV

Freedom: SV

Nature: SV

Education: SV

Healthcare quality: SV

Salary: SV (10x-20x)

Food: SV (China has Chinese food and not much else. Most of the time you are stuck eating hot pot. There is pretty good food from China in SV)

Food diversity is much better in China these days. Last time I was in GZ, I had a lot of options (Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc....). Also, cheaper of course. (Again, I’ve never been to SZ before, but I assume it’s at least as good as GZ).

I am talking about GOOD food. Anybody in the world can make burgers, hummus, and tacos. But is it authentic and delicious? Not in China

In my experience it’s as good as SV, sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse. Nothing like Tokyo, but SV is a much lower bar.

It’s not unless you’re just comparing Chinese food. The only thing consistently better is price

The valley is a low bar though. Pho isn’t going to be better in SV for some reason, and a first tier has plenty of mid-high end Japanese options (eg Hatsune’s) that you won’t find in the valley without looking really hard. Even high-end hamburgers in China often taste better than the states because they are using Japanese and Australian recipes (beetroot and egg work on a burger).

No, Asian food isn't going to be much better. It's the Western food that is by a lot.

I doubt that, having lived in the bay area and Beijing. The western food available in the latter was much better.

Shenzhen is a notch above Beijing, so I doubt it would be any worse.

I love to talk crap about Shenzhen as much as the next person but you’re talking out of your arse. The food in Shanghai and in Hong Kong is amazing even if the selection of foreign cuisines is limited. Cantonese food is absolutely amazing and local to Shenzhen. You’re also not going to have trouble finding food from anyplace else in China in a city that’s well over 90% immigrants from other parts of China. Sichuan food, Yunnan food, Jiangnan, Northern, Xinjiang, Manchurian. Chinese food is amazing all by itself. You can find Japanese food in any Tier 1 city in China even if the quality is hit and miss, ditto Italian or French.

I am sorry but SZ is not one of world’s most livable cities. Not even close. Have you ever lived in Palo Alto? It’s insanely convenient and I don’t have to bump into people every three feet. Almost everyone will prefer to live in the US over China at least until the communist regime fails. It is also becoming easier to live in rural America (or else where in developed countries).

> Almost everyone will prefer to live in the US over China

Look at per cent of Chinese students staying in US after graduation. It's not that big, considering the student visa to working visa is the easiest legal way into US.

It's huge considering the difficulty--assuming you're talking long term and not just short term OPT.

Student visa to H-1B is difficult even for a software engineers. Outside of software engineering, it's much more difficult without a PhD or a high demand masters.

For the vast majority of graduates an H-1B is the only real option and there are only 85k of those given out per year total.

> Student visa to H-1B is difficult

Comparing to? There is no easy legal way into US (if we consider the 'marriage to stay' not legal as we should).

By the way, many other factors are there, from Chinese patriotism to cultural differences, students demographics and American colleges business on foreign students. It's understandable from American perspective to be sure US is the best place on Earth though. But reality is more complicated.

> One 2016 survey of nearly 1,000 Chinese students studying at Purdue University – a large public college in rural Indiana – found that 29 per cent reported developing a more negative attitude toward the US since their arrival.

> Forty-four per cent said their attitude toward China had become more positive since coming to the US.

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/arti...

>Comparing to? There is no easy legal way into US

That's the point. There is no easy legal way to become a permanent resident. There are far more Chinese students who want to stay than can, so your evidence doesn't support your claim.

And a statistically equal amount developed a more positive attitude. I'm not sure what a survey of 1000 Chinese students at a random college is supposed to prove. Students who are willing to travel to the other side of the world are more likely to hold an unrealistically optimistic view of the US before coming here, so it's expected that some percentage of them will have to reconcile fantasy with reality.

> Forty-four per cent said their attitude toward China had become more positive since coming to the US.

Rosy retrospection [1]. People have a tendency to judge the past more positively than the present. If you asked those students the opposite question after living back in China for several years, you'd likely get a similar result with respect to the US.

>It's understandable from American perspective to be sure US is the best place on Earth though.

I can think of several other places that are better in terms of quality-of-life for the average person. China isn't one of them.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

I believe this is more a general indication of Chinese students' inability to find acceptable jobs more than their desire to stay in the US. Even for the perceived prestige of adding a significant work experience abroad, most international students will choose to work at least a couple of years here in the states. This is of course not true if you were lucky enough to be sponsored by a gov't agency or corporation.

I really don’t understand the reasons behind building a sea bridge connecting HK and Macau. I can’t help but think this is a project drawn up by some inexperienced policy maker. Other than it being a grand landmark public project, and ignoring cost-benefit, can someone tell me about the engineering aspects of it with all the obvious natural challenges?

Edit: appears the project was delayed since 2016 due to various issues.

I'm not knowledgeable about the engineering, but on the political side it's an attempt at integrating HK and Macau physically and make everybody understand it's now PRC land, quite overbearingly. There's been a crackdown on "disent" over there. The government also seems to be betting on pump money into giga-infrastructure (see Belt and Road Initiative) to keep slowing growth at bay.

Before the bridge the only way to get from HK to Macau/Zhuhai by land was 4+ hours. Now it's 20 mins. There other bridges being built further up the delta (like the Shenzhen-ZhongShan bridge which will cut a 2 hour drive to 10 mins).

You mentioned the cost-benefit. Making is easier for a region of 60 million people to get around obviously has a very high benefit.

Well, think most people were taking the ferry between the two cities (~1 hour ride). In addition, it appears there's a low daily cap in terms of the number of cars from HK that can enter Macau? Also has Macau developed into something other than a gambling destination? I wasn't initially doubting the cost-benefit (though at first blush I am starting to wonder), but the engineering challenges of this incredible project.

Gosh, you'd think they'd build a fast train that goes around the Silicon Valley then :)

China has an advantage that it has no large ethnic underclasses, and minimal welfare state.

But the country would have been undoubtedly better off if the Nationalists won the civil war - and the place ended up like Taiwan.

It's far from obvious that a Republic of China that wins the Chinese Civil War would have developed, reformed, and democratized in the same way that the rump ROC on Taiwan has.

I'm not sure what Silicon Valley has to do with this apart from headline clickbait. The TL;DR is "China is trying to integrate HK, Macau and the rest of the coastal economy into a single conurbation like Kansai or BOS-WAS but it's hard"

Slow cooked Chinese food is always better.

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