Public transportation, affordable healthcare, & weechat are all things that are significantly better in China.
— An American that spent a few weeks in China.
— An American that spent a few weeks in China.
Basic research in (for example) AI is probably on par with the west, I think it’s fair to say the engineering/applied side is ahead. This is helped by essentially zero concern for privacy = more data. WeChat translate CN-EN is miles ahead of Google. Any kind of large scale tech that has anything to do with surveillance, things like CV, deep-packet inspection, would be unmatched I’d say.
It’s definitely not free of racism.
That's interesting!
At the same time, deepl.com is also miles ahead of Google, so I'm not all that impressed by Google Translate anymore. (Deepl itself is impressive is heck!)
I could see myself reading a whole book through Deepl if I had a reason.
Quite impressive, especially that DeepL (and every other machine translation application) makes use of research done at Google.
Public transportation and affordable healthcare are the norm in most highly developed Western democracies such as the UK, France, Sweden, etc.
As for quality of care, obviously the facilities in the U.S. are nicer - they better be, you are paying 10x - 100x for that! For the treatment, most friends of mine from China complain the doctors in the U.S. don't do anything; they just give you some advil and send you home. However, antibiotics are probably prescribed too liberally in China, and IV injections used too much.
Of course there are some drawbacks too. First, the flip side of "no surprise bill" is everything is due upfront, so it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money. Second, since healthcare is so cheap, people usually don't carry health insurance other than the government provided one, which has a maximum payout amount per year. As a result, if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially. Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones.
US healthcare is notorious for its problems so I was ready to believe your initial statement. But actually you say:
1. "Nobody goes bankrupt from going to the doctor", but "if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially". Those two statements are direct contradictions of each other.
2. "you can walk into the hospital and be seen pretty quickly" but also ... "it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money". Again, being seen pretty quickly and not being seen because you're trying to find money are in direct conflict.
Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones
Everything in China is cheaper than in the US. It's still a poor country.
Honestly both systems sound just as bad as each other, or rather, the Chinese system sounds far worse. I'd rather be alive and bankrupt, rather than refused treatment entirely, because I didn't have the cash at the exact moment I fell ill or there was some SNAFU with payment systems.
If more and more people choose to buy health insurance, that sounds like China is well on the way to a US style model as it develops.
I wouldn't want to end up in hospital in the US or china. Think the only countries I would feel at ease in are Singapore and Taiwan.
Chinese people's attitudes toward the one-child policy and also sex-selective abortion are complicated and varied, but they don't seem very similar to Americans' attitudes at all!
In the U.S. it's common for people's religions to completely formally proscribe some forms of birth control and/or abortion. This has led to a big political debate about what the scope of their legal rights to avoid subsidizing these things for other people should be. It's not surprising that that debate should exist, but also not surprising that it would be uncommon in China where (1) the most practiced religions largely don't have these teachings and (2) people don't have a common expectation that the state will give their religious practices and beliefs a considerable amount of deference.
I think a median American attitude is that nobody else should pressure you to have more or fewer children than you want to; if your religion encourages you to have children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that, and in modern times, if you just don't want children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that. (In blue tribe environments having many children is suspicious and in red tribe environments having no children is suspicious, but in both cases people are increasingly effective at pushing back socially against other people's scrutiny about this, and even at pushing back against their own families' judgments or preferences.) (These considerations don't necessarily apply the same way outside of opposite-sex monogamous married couples.)
I don't think these norms are common in the same way in China or in Chinese cultures elsewhere. In particular, I think even if Chinese people don't all think their parents, or governments, should get to decide how many children they have, it doesn't seem like many will reach U.S. levels of offense that prospective childbearing couples' parents, or governments, have an expressed preference and actively try to influence this.
The sweet pleasure of being spied upon by the CCP ?
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On an aside, but related to the broader conversation, the YouTube channel AsianBoss regularly visits China and conducts very revealing interviews with Chinese people on similar topics to those discussed in this thread: https://youtu.be/sTzgE1nvxZs
There's literally a WWII scale Holocaust going on in China right now. You have a lot of nerve asking "what's the difference?"