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Comment by pciexpgpu | Hacker News Reader

This comment is regurgitating stats and numbers without much context.

I feel that over-priveleged peoples in the West with a really good life and pretty much every comfort available, often tend to just look at these superficial charts and numbers and tend to gloss over the context in these other countries.

It's pretty sad really that you are comparing China to the USA in this way just by mentioning that the USA is a oligarchy and somehow that's worse than being in China. The US at least has the option. Chinese people do not.

This worshipping of communist governments and downplaying the USA's freedoms and comforts really need to tone down a bit.

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I find the US, the UK, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all absolutely horrific in different but often surprisingly similar ways. Europe, Japan, and a few smaller nations less so - moderately, but not trivially.

There are superficial differences in the tribal totems and rhetorical promises used to promote conformity, and in the mechanics of manipulation and repression.

Beneath that, the dynamics are very similar.

Life can be quite pleasant in any of the above if you're upper-middle class.

If you're on the wrong side of any of these regimes and on the receiving end of institutionalised government violence, it really isn't.

So - as an overprivileged person in the West, I believe I am happier living in the US than in China. There are a lot of freedoms and comforts available to me as an upper-middle-class person. Were I not, I suspect I'd be happier in China.

And there's no shortage of e.g. college students from China who want to return after their studies instead of trying to stay around America and get a work visa. They're smart, and they're under no Chinese censorship when in America, so it seems to me that one is not vastly better than the other.

(Also the unspoken question is how China, the USSR, Korea, etc. would be were it not for their economic suffocation by the US. I didn't bring this up in the context of the Great Firewall, but if we're talking about quality of life it's absolutely relevant. It's important for the US to buy Huawei because not doing so when they have a better product is just repeating the same immoral economic suffocation.)

20 years of indoctrination, obvious and covert, tends to produce a very strong national identity. This coupled with a sufficiently different culture at home makes one unwilling to settle in a country full of strangers worshipping money and freedom of individuals. They come to the US to learn from the best and replicate what works back home for the country.

Of course, there are those that don’t. That’s beside the point, there always are.

Majority of Chinese students would want to stay in the US. Based on my very informal unscientific study over the last many years. Recently the visa backlog implicitly pushes people away, no lack of demand. In fact too much demand.

That used to be the case but that has changed in the last five years.

From memory it used to be about 80% and now it is closer to 20%

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