Anxieties of development: emerging voices in Chinese social media

> Collectively they depict a picture of a merciless ladder called “development” on which nations laboriously climb. At the top of the ladder sit countries with the highest per capita GDP, enjoying comfortable privileges, while other lower income countries fight to occupy favorable positions underneath. “Overall, the white world, Europe+North America+Australia/New Zealand+Israel, still makes up the top echelon of nations,” writes SN in a post responding to an IMF data release, “when per capita GDP goes above 40,000USD, only very few non-white nations can enter that area… Japan and a few ethnic Chinese economies, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore managed to achieve that. We should have confidence in ourselves.”

Well, correlation does not imply causation (those countries being "white" isn't necessarily the reason they're rich). But they're not wrong either. At this moment only Europe + European off-shoots and Japan/Hong Kong/Macau/Singapore/South Korea are developed.

The rest of the world is still lagging.

Of course, their racist argument kind of falls flat considering there's also poor "white" countries :)

It’s fascinating to read stuff like this and try meta-analyze the sentiments behind it.

One huge irony that strikes me is the idea of these ‘middle class bloggers’ raging against Western oppression whilst living lives that are basically upper-middle class EU/US: high income, property owners, international holidays, white collar jobs, $1000 smartphones from which they blog about progressive political issues.

China’s success and rise since the 1980s has been as much about wholesale adoption of Western business/science/cultural norms as anything else. And yet bloggers still see China’s situation in us & them terms?

The apparent expectation that China will eventually supplant the USA as an economic power has a long way to go. One obstacle is will democracies want to settle their trades in the currency of a de facto dictatorship? Ostensibly, not yet.

According to SWIFT, when looking at domestic and cross-border payments the RMB share as an international payments currency is 1.61% percent. The activity share is lower, (0.98%) if looking at cross-border payments only. The Yen is used almost four times more.

file:///Users/tonyaustin/Downloads/swift_rmb_tracker_special_edition_january2018.pdf

> Again using back-of-the-envelope calculations, he asserted in one of his posts that 1.4 billion newcomers to the industrialized club would “completely change the face of “developed economies”, which currently cover just 800-900 million people.

But can the limited resources of the planet accomodate 1,400 million more people consuming that way?

more than their apparent racism, I am worried about their seeming lack of environmentalism

This blogger SN is a bit delusional, like most of the nationalistic bloggers anywhere. China was merely a cheap labor source in the routine life of input/output process for a company seeking to produce commmodity products. Like many nations before and after, it will be merely a blip in the long history of factories moving to cheaper and cheaper labor.

SN believes that China can somehow end up like South Korea or Taiwan in terms of prosperity. But there are many factors why it cannot. 1.) authoritarian government skimming most of the profits and giving them to inefficient state owned operations. 2.) population is too large and most are uneducated. 3.) China will be old before it becomes rich. 4.) the culture of stealing and copying prevent it from developing a healthy middle class 5.) China have incurred debts too massive, and choose to invest in poor investment. 6.) it had angered its investors, namely japan, South Korea, Taiwan, US, Europe, with many of its belligerent actions 7.) it has angered many other developing countries. In short, most countries in the world do not want China to succeed

And so we have the reality today: China is way too indebted and a wave of defaults has commenced. Factories and firms have moved out of China. Luxury sales have crashed 50%. Home sales in 2019 have crashed 60%. account deficit will be negative for the year. Import and export are all down. And the hike in tariff is yet to come. This is all happening in the background of declining fertility, population contraction in 2030, and middle income trap, where most Chinese earn less than $1000/month.

Thanks for sharing. I've been looking for "news" sources from present day China. Very helpful.