The American Dream Is Alive in China
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Such an analysis would also be useful for comparing the rich and poor within a country. here in the US: someone earning 100k in the midwest is much wealthier than someone earning 150k in palo alto. Of course, if your basket of goods comparison is how many apple cell phones they can buy, it's not gonna be an accurate comparison
Consider their new Silk Road initiative. 3rd world/developing countries and America's numerous enemies alike are lining up to ally themselves with China.
Meanwhile the USA shits on its closest allies.
I guess anything is possible but I highly doubt it. Do you really think culturally, linguistically, militarily, politically and even economically china is going to lead the world? Every major international instution in the world from the UN to the ICJ to the WTO is in western nations.
> Consider their new Silk Road initiative. 3rd world/developing countries and America's numerous enemies alike are lining up to ally themselves with China.
Sure. But they are also working to contain china as well. You really don't understand politics in a local or a global setting if you think china is going to be leading in asia, let alone the world.
If you think the likes of india, japan, korea, vietnam or even iran will let china lead, then you don't understand geopolitics. And lets not forget russia with their thousands of nukes along china's border.
The day that the US doesn't control the world is the day regional competition and violence begins as 2nd rate powers vie with each other for influence within their regions. Nobody, especially china, is going to replace the US as the leader of the world. Once we are done, it'll be back to regional power plays.
China's economy will probably be the most powerful in the next twenty years, but that's not nearly enough. People vastly underestimate how interconnected and influential the US is economically and militarily - the idea that the US will not be the world's dominant superpower for the next fifty years is click bait in the era of Trump.
We're also quickly increasing the number of unknown variables as the years go by - no one knows how or when the next financial crisis will play out in China, or the volatility of their governmental system - countries often do well until one day they don't. The same could be said about the US, but the country has proven itself to be incredibly stable thus far.
> 3rd world/developing countries and America's numerous enemies alike are lining up to ally themselves with China
As you mentioned, 3rd world - they are playing the long game, certainly longer than twenty years. The payoffs they are hoping for are fifty to one hundred years away (in Africa, etc.)
Factories were both directly paying good wages for non-high-skill positions and fueling a myriad of local businesses where those workers spent their money. Then globalization happened, and those factories went to China. Entire local and regional economies collapsed and a lot of them STILL haven't recovered.
Great opportunity for Chinese people, not so good for American people.
You might think from this that I hate the Chinese, or the poor, or something. That's not true. I just think we need to find a way for regular Chinese people to have hope and opportunity, that doesn't involve taking hope and opportunity away from regular American people.
Billionaire Ray Dalio said in a recent interview that 8 of 12 times there's been a rising power situation like the current one with China, it's turned into a shooting war.
My own opinion: If people's hope and opportunity are taken away, they start to get into the mood for a shooting war with the people they think took it. Bringing hope and opportunity back to regular Americans could prevent World War 3.
How do we do it?
space, humans have been stagnating since the 60s. the earth cannot support all of us anymore,it's breaking down
Of course this is overly dramatic and just wrong but you have a good point, in very very very long time frame this is viable option and provides big "goal" to achieve. Latest NASA promo video mentions Moon, Mars as next goals, I'm wondering if they are not setting narrative/preparing ground for more efforts targeted towards space.
- For starters, teachers in China are responsible. They care about the subjects they teach, and spend countless hours finding challenging problems for students as well as grading students' solutions with detailed feedbacks. Parents could just leave the education of their kids to school. They didn't have to worry about tutoring at all, because they knew that their kids would be sufficiently challenged in school. This is true equality, isn't it, as financially challenged families did not have to worry about not being able to afford tutoring. In contrast, teachers in Cupertino, a town known for good schools, asked parents to grade students' homework.
- Second, they believe in their students. No no no, I'm not talking about this "every student is unique and therefore it's okay to not doing well in academically" crap. When I grew up, my teachers were tough, but they were tough by being honest, by telling me that I didn't do well in exams because I didn't try hard enough, because I didn't use the right techniques to study, or because I didn't focus on the right things. In other words, we truly believed that I could excel in school work. They didn't give up on me or other kids just because we did poorly in homework or in exams. They were truly happy if their students did well in school, and then they told the students that they could do even better by assigning more challenging problem sets. That is, they believed that their students could grow by keeping themselves in their discomfort zone. In contrast, Why did the US schools keep lowering their standards just to keep students happy?
The K-12 education systems in the US are great for two types of students: those who are really challenged academically, and those who know how to push themselves. For the former, they enjoyed the love from teachers or the policies like "no kids left behind". For the latter, they got excellent resources, such as taking advanced classes in universities, and participating in all kinds of competitions. It is the students in the middle, the majority of the students like me, who will lose, big time. The students in the middle will not be challenged enough, who will falsely believe that they are good at STEM and then get shocked or even defeated by not-really-so-hard courses like calculus or organic chemistry, those who could've had a wonderful career in STEM but bail out because they didn't get enough training in high school. How sad is that?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Chinese K-12 did everything right. I spent way too much time preparing for the national entrance exam. I spent way too much time mastering all kinds of problem-solving skills that are not needed in college. I didn't learn advanced subjects like calculus or stats until college. That said, my teachers truly prepared me, like they did millions of other ordinary students, for advanced STEM subjects. They injected passion and a sense of pride of studying STEMs. I wouldn't be able to do what I do today without my teachers' dedication and caring. That's what matters, isn't it?
I feel sorry to say this, but there is really not much rote learning of STEM subjects in Chinese K-12. How can you rote learn when you need deep and intuitive understanding of fundamentals to excel in your math exams? That's what my teachers tried hard to instill in us every day. On the contrary, there's a lot of rote learning in that of the US. The reason is simple: students resort to rote learning because it works, and it works only because the problem sets they deal with are so simple and mechanical. That's not the case in China.
I agree that the US's academic and intellectual culture is good for the intrinsically motivated, but, speaking as a graduate student who teaches classes at a top public US university, most undergraduates arrive thoroughly institutionalized and are primarily motivated by their grades. I believe in project-based learning that gives students an opportunity to apply their skills and knowledge to problems they are personally interested in, but it is difficult to do this effectively when students have been trained to be motivated by their grades. I am not trying to focus here on criticizing the grade-based system (with which I have many qualms), but the broader culture that we see in early education. I think your point about teachers offering concrete feedback to students in terms of study skills and dedication is important. Much of the US middle class seems to expect success without feeling that they have to earn it, even as they expect others with less privilege to work harder. The US is experiencing the downside of an individualistic culture: those in secure socio-economic positions do not feel the need to work hard in order to help provide to the collective good.
I think my favorite critic of The American Dream™ is our old friend George Carlin: "The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."
However, the ever connected world is not blind, and can see the dramatic fall China has suffered in the last 2 years in terms of stock market, yuan weakness, capital outflow, human rights, massive debts, international relations, factories leaving, fake GDPs, and much more. $250B in tariff on Chinese imports in January 2019, followed up with potentially rest of the $600B in tariff on Chinese imports in 2019, will crash China.
A couple of points that leads me to think China will dominate the world in the next decades (if it has not started already):
* With the Belt and Road initiative China is building deep relationships with half of the countries of the world.
* Their industry is not slowed down by regulation, so they iterate and learn quickly. For example, some people think they'll be the first to widely deploy self driving cars. Yes there will be a ton of accidents because their technology will suck at first, but they'll be able to improve faster than any company in the west. An other example is everything related to medicine (e.g. gene editing).
* Their culture values hard work. If it were not for the quotas MIT would be 70% asian.
Regulation: deadly vaccines. deadly milk powder. Their citizens then choose to buy foreign goods only
hard work: they are at their job 60 hours a week. but only working 20.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location...
[2] https://www.thebalance.com/china-economy-facts-effect-on-us-...
You forgot about the billions of foreign direct investment that actually helped China to get to where it is today, now leaving the country.
You forgot about the real estate bubble in China deflating. The one that has the middle class of China paying for $1M house with their $1300/month income.
More serious problems than US tariffs may well crash China's economy, but if you now want to argue so, you'd better bring (correct) numbers and analysis, not just handwaving about "millions of jobs that disappear" and so on (and keep in mind that a million in a country of more than one billion is not a whole lot of anything).
The real estate market is tied to GDP growth so there is such an excess of housing that there are ghost cities. It's also when you hear stupid stories about power plant shutdowns and going green.
I've been in China for over 5 years and can assure you that almost all news that is presented in the west is either misleading or just wildly out of context, to give a vastly different perception.
But there is far more DIY opportunity in China, but you have to do it yourself. Nobody is going to show you how or help.
Regardless, There are lots of opportunities to consolidate capital and run your venture SUPER quickly in China.
Also as we are comparing China and US, there are plenty of counterpoints that you would probably trivialize as a whataboutism.
So instead of that, honestly you should look at US prohibitions as an instruction manual for what you CAN do in China. Nuanced financial stuff you wouldn't have thought of on your own, just written in plain text and available to do in any growing economy
Many billionaires are minted there because even things like stock market listing standards are much more liberal. The main country's index being comprised of companies where only 1% of the float is trading, with the other 99% being owned by 1 person. They liquidate, you know. You wouldn't see this on the Nasdaq or S&P.
There are plenty of ways to make money from nothing over there, and the barriers of entry are almost impossible in the United States for a working class person with working class friends as you'll never be able to pull off a proper Regulation D offering because nobody can invest in it. You'll never have capital to cover all the bases and scale. You have to spend too much of your life to pull of your one shot, and that has a high failure rate so its back to wage work for you. Whereas the serial entrepreneurs already have a different form of stability and take many shots. Its like playing a game the first time ever and only having 1 life, versus the person that has infinite lives. China doesn't offer any of this in an extremely egalitarian way, but there are multiple extremely high growth regions and service providers that are willing to play ball such that the opportunities are just available.
Doesn't mean the destination is America though.
Ps. Why would big Chinese companies translate their open source in English and have research hubs outside of China