Extreme poverty is history in China, officials say
economist.com
economist.com
https://i.imgur.com/0tHsfxW.png
https://i.imgur.com/NCODvJY.png (under 450 exist because obviously not everyone employed, poverty alleviation has househould income calculations)
60% population still on less than USD 3700 per year. Very rough napkin estimate is bottom 60% generates 20% of GDP. The downside is there are still a lot of poor people in China, plurality in fact. Upside is they are so poor that the rest of the economy could elevate their conditions, but not by too much, so interventions must be strategic. Still a lot of work ahead.
Regardless of the poverty back home remaining overwhelming overall for generations to come, if no longer as extreme.
And even with a poorer outlook regarding income inequality compared to the US.
Also, will they subsidise and keep their manufacturing base in-house or follow the US/EU in out sourcing to cheaper countries...
Jesuschrist!, this have not been true at any point or place in history. People become more conservative when they become richer, which it makes sense, if you are wealthy and have lots of resources it suits you that the status quo remains.
The RICH liberal elite is "progressive" as long as their income is not touched.
The idea that professionals are more liberal formed one of the arguments in the book "The End of History".
"Rich" in this case means not living in poverty. It doesn't mean billionaire.
In the US things like NIMBY are in essence a conservative position taken by the middle/upper-middle class. The same happen with the school they choose for their kids, the self-segregated gated communities they live, the companies they work for and the closed social circles they frequent.
They CLAIM they are progressive. But supporting your also-white-upper-middle-class-professional gay colleague is a far cry from the things that leftism are really concerned about, like income inequality,gentrification,environmental destruction, third-world labor exploitation,imperialism. On these topics your liberal FAANG friends at best do nothing about it and at worst they are the cogs supporting the oppression machine.
The notion that tech workers are not substantially more liberal than average contradicts both my first-hand experience and the available data. This isn't surprising, or evidence of some anti-conservative agenda, since tech workers often exist at the confluence of both geographic distributions and educational backgrounds (usually bachelor's degree or more) that are more liberal than average.
But still, I'm really curious as to how you justify the claims you're making in this comment.
A center-right party.
In other words, the claim that tech workers are not liberal says a lot more about the perspective of the person making the claim than it does about tech workers. Tech workers are much more liberal than the general population. How many would qualify as liberal under this political delineation? Probably a single digit percentage.
Your typical tech worker will tend to be neoliberal, espousing socially liberal values but having much to lose economically and practically from touching the existing power balance or decreasing inequality in any meaningful way. The highest paid tech workers will tend to work for FAANGs that increase global inequality or at least contribute to entrenched interests.
You say this, yet the overwhelming majority of tech workers - especially those at FAANG companies, as per the donation data - choose to find the party that favors increased taxation, regulation, and government spending. At Netflix 98% of political contributions went to democrats. This is a staggering disparity. How you manage to conclude that this is indicative of neoliberal views (decrease public spending and regulation, less taxes) is a puzzle to me. Again, this seems to be an attempt to categorize tech workers as conservative by categorizing views common to both conservatives and liberals (e.g. preferring a capitalist economy over a command economy) as conservative.
>Again, this seems to be an attempt to categorize tech workers as conservative by categorizing views common to both conservatives and liberals (e.g. preferring a capitalist economy over a command economy) as conservative.
This is the exact crux of the matter if you consider the premise of most left-wing parties. They will naturally see the Rep-Dem divide as Capitalism and Capitalism-Lite. Looking at the continuation of policies under Clinton-Bush-Obama (especially in foreign policy) this is not entirely without merit. This is often humorously depicted as a drone shooting civilians but with a gay pride flag sticker on it. If you were to plot those policies on some sort of graph and compare them to left-wing parties, I think the comparison would probably be clearer. I don't know if anyone has done that yet.
Ultimately, this is due to a confusion around the term liberal itself. Since the other party skews to the right compared to the OECD average, the Dems become qualified as left-wing instead of center-right, although it is true that this has fluctuated historically if you look at FDR. A coastal Democrat tech worker will think that they support gay marriage or drug legalization and believe that pretty much makes them broadly left-wing while at the same time working for a surveillance capitalist business. In the end you get places like Silicon Valley with homeless people roaming the streets next to some of the wealthiest humans in history. Yet most tech workers there would fully believe themselves to be progressive and working for a world fundamentally different to the one today, with power balances completely different.
A tech worker (or anyone) who supports gay marriage, drug legalization, increased taxes, more government spending and a host of other liberal views is indeed a liberal as per the definition used by the overwhelming majority of people. Anti-capitalism isn't a mainstream liberal view. It is a far left view. Extremely few liberals, both in the US and abroad, support the replacement of a capital economy with a command economy. It's been interesting hearing about why you choose to categorize one of the most liberal demographics in the country as conservative. But for the sake of not repeatedly going down this tangent with so many other people as you go through life, I hope you understand that this is not at all the perspective most other people have. And making statements based on this perspective comes off a absurd to many, many people.
In the American context, parties are skewed to the right compared to the Western average. This means that center/center-right parties like the Dems are perceived as left-wing whereas far-right parties like the Reps are perceived as right-wing. Sanders would be an example of a populist center-left politician by average Western standards, but he is qualified as far-left. His rise to prominence has led to clear tensions within the Democratic party structure.
Even among the far left, few parties today even question capitalism but rather advocate for a hybrid system, so it is not a question of being strictly anti-capitalist. Even taking this into account, there is a clear chasm between a typical liberal Dem voter and a center-left/centrist voter in the Western average, and a clear sense from the modern left-wing that Dems and Reps are more similar to one another than to them. This debate is burdened by the fact that the word "liberal" tends to mean "center left" in the US and Canada but but is used in the classic sense elsewhere. Note that the OP you originally replied to did explicitly say that FAANG friends WERE liberal! But this got lost in translation as based on your American-inspired perspective an American liberal is supposed to be indistinguishable from the left-wing, whereas this would be seriously questioned elsewhere.
Essentially the point I'm trying to make before we got lost in the specifics is that not seeing the Dems as center/center-right is indicative of a very specific American perspective. At the end of the day, tech workers overwhelmingly profit from inequality, a very free market, outsourcing, capital accumulation, and other classic neoliberal facets, while at the same time maintaining socially-liberal values other matters. They stand to lose greatly from a different partition of society, since by definition they are already among the chief beneficiaries.
Furthermore the average Silicon Valley tech worker is also substantially more liberal than the average American Democrat. I say this having spent 5 years working in Silicon Valley, and another 4 years in university in Silicon Valley. The statements you're making about tech workers - profiting from inequality and free markets - applies just as much to Canada and most Western European countries. Arguably it applies even more to export-oriented European countries like Germany with economies that are much more dependent on globalized trade. And absent from your comment is tech workers' responses to these developments. I've seen many more people striving to tackle inequality in tech than elsewhere. The "different partition of society" is something much more popular in Silicon Valley tech companies than the rest of the country. Sanders got more donations from Silicon Valley than Clinton in the democrat primary in 2016, for instance. The average tech worker is substantially more liberal than the average person I met in Europe.
The characterizations you're making starkly contrast with both my firsthand experience, and the available empirical evidence. Your (and the above commenters') assertion that tech workers are not working to tackle inequality, environmental challenges, or other liberal causes seems to be rooted in an assumption that no wealthy demographic would every support those things, rather than conclusion based on evidence or experience. How long have you worked at a Silicon Valley tech company? How much firsthand experience do you have with the people you're characterizing?
Nobody complains about gentrification because some hipsters moved to neighborhood, or even because they opened one of those atrocious coffee shops. The main complain is that the, intended or not, result is that low-income people, the people more at risk in the country are thus driven away from historical neighborhoods and pushed more and more to the margins (both literal and figurative) of society.
BTW, some ironic thing I've noticed is that many people will retort with "Well, that's how the economy works, supply and demand and all of that, besides, the original owners of the properties will make bank", but when the same dynamics is done to them by rich foreigners buying houses in western cities and driving the prices to the sky they scream murder.
So there's not really much overlap between liberals and the left - it's only the case in America, where the left is really emaciated, where liberalism and leftism become conflated.
About the time that book was written a friend working in finance said at a party, now that the war on communism is won the war against the middle and working class is on. To bad the suckers won't realize until it's too late.
I think you are confusing left and liberal. Which was a good short hand last century.
Liberal thinking requires exposure to art, travel, education. These all cost money.
Rich people protecting their money is not conservative.
Not surprisingly people took that word to mean a great many different things!
China is putting people into forced labour (or concentration) camps en-mass. Its arrested or exiled thousands of HK democracy protestors. Its going backwards on democracy and rule of law. Not to mention causing the largest pandemic of the 21st century (so far). Its support for North Korea is another whole mess. Oh, and it almost started a war with the neighbouring nuclear power.
If people are satisfied with that, they're pretty socially bankrupt imho.
What's more likely is that with absolute control of the media, the vast majority have no idea what's really going on. They're just reassured about how awful every other country is.
In fairness, the camps and the plague weren't a thing till after the 2016 end of the survey. Xi Jinping only really ramped up his authoritarian storm in the last few years.
I wonder how the average citizen there would react after an hour of straight forwards factual updates on the domestic situation.
All this aside, I am glad they have eliminated extreme poverty. That is progress, socially as well as economically.
The notion that Chinese people aren't perceptive and that they would adopt Western ideals if only we could reach out to them is pretty much orientalism 101 mixed with the End of History. There is a wealth of diversity in terms of opinions at all echelons of Chinese society, including inside the Party structure. This diversity will tend to touch on ideas orthogonal to the Western equivalent. Similar or identical in parts, but very different in others.
Picture someone whose only understanding of America would be specific events like Guantanamo Bay or a smattering of memes relating to Trump. You'd want to tell this person about the complex interplay of history and culture that shaped America into what it is today, and that they are missing out on 99% of it since they are so zoomed out. What I have described here is in fact the equivalent of what the typical person commenting on China thinks and knows about the country. I myself absolutely do not claim to be an expert, just that I got a taste of how much I don't know about the topic.
All of this matters greatly since it has an effect on how the West will conduct its strategy going forward.
“ At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.” “
Also, they note they don’t poll migrant workers, those citizens with the worst lives.
She said that people in China simply do not think of it in those terms. Being "happy with the government" struck her as a particularly Western way of framing the question. I pressed her further and asked if she thought that they governed in a way that improved people's lives or made them worse. She said that she thought they improved people's lives, and that a country like China needs a strong government to hold it together, and that the CCP is succeeding in that respect.
I don't know if this is a representative view, but take it for what it is: an account of what a single Chinese lady told a random person on HN.
> We tend to forget that for many in China, and in their lived experience of the past four decades, each day was better than the next,” Saich added. “Our surveys show that many in China therefore seem to be much more satisfied with government performance over time, despite rising inequality, corruption, and a range of other pressures that are the result of the reform era.”
Of course, the level at which it’s appropriate to omit to mention an ongoing atrocity is difficult to determine. Clearly it’s somewhere above a sentence, and clearly it’s beneath the question of broad strategy. But I would suggest that understanding China’s broad strategy for poverty alleviation (in the Han heartland) is a discrete topic that can quite reasonably be discussed without inviting this sort of response. In fact, if you don’t understand topics like this, it’s likely that your response to China is going to be handicapped.
Uyghur forced labour is certainly widespread and bad. I am not sure that it’s fundamental to the Chinese economy though. If we say that there are 20 million Uyghurs (which is a very large overestimate), out of 1.3 billion that’s not very much. Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour. And sterilisation means that they’re unlikely to be relied upon economically in the long term—elimination and economic exploitation are very difficult to reconcile, as indeed the Nazis found.
If you’re discussing some market in a small village far from Xinjiang—of course forced Uyghur labour in some way impinges on it, but, well, it would be odd to discuss the camps as the most important determinant of what’s going on in those camps at all times. You can’t develop an understanding of the whole without understanding the component parts, and that involves occasionally e.g. reading articles that don’t mention the Uyghurs.
The obvious analogy is the Holocaust. Nobody complains about books about the Nazis that contain e.g. chapters mostly concerning matters other than the Holocaust. That’s for good reason: you have to pay attention to the other components too, even though the aim of extermination is an important overall reason to understand the Nazis.
In the frame of my original comment, i.e., ‘at what level should one focus on specific individual parts even at the expense of overall important atrocities?’, I agree that discussing the economy writ large whilst ignoring the Uyghurs would neither lead to a good factual understanding of the economy nor be appropriate morally. But the question of poverty alleviation in the Han heartlands to me is a discrete one that (a) is important to broadly understanding the economy and (b) is a sufficiently narrow topic to be discussed without necessarily focusing on the Uyghurs.
> Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour.
is rubbish interpreted in the natural sense. Of course I meant without the use of forced Uyghur labour as we see at the moment. It is arguable that growth 1970s-now mostly was not underpinned by forced labour, but the strategies of the 50s-60s certainly involved a lot of what we should call forced labour.
- China is in the midst of a major famine
- the CCP is demolishing houses to resell the land
- there is major unemployment due to corona and the trade war.
The CCP is building a wall along the Vietnam border to prevent Chinese citizens from escaping from China.
And there does seem to be some evidence that China is facing, while not a direct famine, then at least potential food insecurity issues [0] serious enough that the leader started operation clean plate, encouraging people not to waste food, the same campaign Mao ran before the great famine[1]. In addition the virus hit at a point where farmers couldn't sell their crops and earn enough to buy seeds and fertilizer for the next year[1] China was also badly hit by the African Swine flue, resulting in a loss of 40%(!) of the Chinese pigs[1] which of course is not great for the pork prices.
You can also see [2] but note that this is by a former political prisoner so it is biased. This article [3] says that the answer is that China is not facing a famine nownow, but may do so in the future and the the leader is running the campaign because most of the food is imported.
They all seem to unanimously agree that prices have gone up, in some cases (pork) dramatically so (but the increasing prize of meat will not a famine make).
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2020/07/28/china-f... [1]: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/11/23/is-china-on-the-brink-... [2]: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/516607-another-fam... [3]: https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/china-food-security-and-geop...
On the other hand, quarantines probably stressed their distribution networks pretty bad-- cutting major internal routes off, diverting supplies for cities in lockdown, dealing with goods perishing on loading docks and unharvested crops plowed under. Every kilo of demand saved is a kilo less they have to cram into the transport infrastructure.
But then again; with the means of a tyrannical dictatorships I guess it's pretty easy to implement the policies that will do that. It just needs the leadership to overcome the vicious cycle of coup and purge and get their paranoia enough under control so they can stop promoting out of loyalty and start promoting out of competence. That is something that i.e. the USSR never quite achieved.
The last time China voluntarily invited an "expert" opinion from the west it ended in a massacre. They simply are not willing to change unless you force them to change.
Many other governments are like that. They can easily do better but unless there is a power that forces them, they will stay the way they are forever even if it is worse.