How is it the US trusts Russia but not China in this regard?
Good on China for pushing ahead and developing their own space program and their own space station.
We should expect a lot more impressive things coming out of China.
China built 22,000 miles of high-speed rail in 15 years, for example.
AI, semiconductors, electric vehicles will be significant for them over the coming decade
I really wanted to write a post about this showing differences in regulation - but couldn't because the Chinese regulatory approach is too opaque to me.
There seems to be remarkably little information on what the facts on the ground are. And given the rumoured Chinese programs of influencing foreign universities I do think it is questionable which channels of information are reliable vs tainted by their propaganda.
Western media pick all the authoritarian measures CCP did or is doing and blow them up and make them all about China.
They ignored many things Chinese government (here most westerners or media couldn't tell the difference between Chinese administrative government and CCP and thought they were the same thing), and Chinese people did right in the past decades.
I often say China today has been built on three things:
1. Equality between men and women. China did very well in this. There are lots of problems still obviously but in general women in China are quite equal to men. China has the most self-made female billionaires, maybe more than the rest of the world's combined.
2. Unleashed entrepreneurship. No need to say much about it here.
3. A very solid education system together with Han Chinese tradition of valuing education. Nine years of free and compulsory education for the entire nation before high school and many options for next level education.
Quick googles shows this: https://chinapower.csis.org/china-gender-inequality/
And why is the gender ratio so skewed? Gender selection of babies. That doesn't signal equality.
I am surprised people didn't know there was a women's movement. If you look at the movement just by itself, the transformation of women's standing in the society and culture before and after is massive. Comparing across the global, it is still one of the largest transformations. But prephas it is all buried in the ccp, communism, and mao, all that bad rep. What actually caused, triggered, happened in the Chinese revolution between 1930 to 1960s is never talked about, never being looked at objectively. Only those who lived through that history, personally experienced it, knew the good, the bad, the legit and craziness. The world is not black and white. Things always happen for a reason. Before my grandma passed away, she had a portrait of mao in her home. And talked fondly of what ccp meant to her and the changes it brought to her life.
Communism requires equality, there was no independent women’s movement. Your families experience as you described corroborates that.
To strengthen my point: how many women are in political leadership positions? People’s Congress looks very male heavy…100%? communism brought equal participation, but didn’t stop patriarchy.
It started at the end of Qing dynasty and continued with up and downs until Chiang's China. You are also right too that communism naturally calls for equality between man and woman.
During the ccp revolution between 1940 to 1950s, women joined the ccp, and pushed for women liberation. They campaigned for no more feet binding, no more arranged marriages, the right to learn how to read and knowledge, women should do whatever men can do, become industrialized factory workers, soldiers, no longer confined to their traditional female roles. That was Chinese women's equal rights social movement. No less significant then women movements elsewhere. The saying was "women can hold half of the sky". ccp's leaders started the messaging, it resonated with the people, and then people reinforced that messaging. This is how the political movement had strength and kept alive. You have to understand ccp's revolution became a wide scale revolution because the political goals matched with people's desires. People voted with their feet. My grandma joined the ccp as well. She campaigned and learned how to read from her activities with the ccp.
My grandparents had 5 kids, 2 girls. My grandma was always a strong supporter of the girls, encouraged them to be strong and independent, telling them to chase big dreams and do want their hearts tell them to do. My grandpa not so much. He sided with the boys much more. Like the vast majority of Chinese families before 1990s, the family was resource constraint. They could only afford to eat meat during big holidays. My grandpa would try to give the boys better pieces of the meat to eat. Same thing with cloths.
重男轻女(preferences for boys) is Chinese culture and custom issue. Its people's thinking, its the culture, not desire or mandate of the government. The government didn't tell the people to have only boys and not girls. Its the people who did that. If you want the official and legal stance, since 1950, Chinese constitution says "women enjoys same political, economic, cultural, social rights as men". Marriage law says "Both parties must be at will, no third party shall interfere". So technically, my grandpa's action of favoring boys is against the constitution. Before the 90s, there were still places that practiced arranged marriages, technically its also illegal. You could say it the government's fault for not enforcing the laws. The reality is preferences for boys is ingrained. And if the government enforces bans on practices like arranged marriage, people say its destroying traditional culture, limiting cultural freedoms.
I think the government was trying to change people's mentality and culture on gender. One of the important action was making education mandatory. This forced parents to give girls and boys both education, regardless of the social economic status of the family. And when I was going through Chinese school, we were all taught on respecting each other. Text books have many stories about heroines, women liberation, equality etc. My classes treat everyone the same, everything was based on merits. Girls did well on grades, and the teachers would tell the guys "shame, look at the girls". Many class reps were girls. At least I view girls with utmost respect. And the common saying goes "In front of women, the women is always right"
I think for the young generation of Chinese, the mentality and culture is changing. Women are very much independent. Guys showing respect to a women is the baseline. There are still gender discriminations in the workplace, like some employers are reluctant to hire girls because they fear girls would get married, have kids, take parental leave, causing hassle to the business schedules. We need to fix this. But still, female bosses, engineers, managers are pretty common. Did you know one of core founder of Douyin/Tiktok is a women? Or many team leaders and managers in China's space program are women. And lots of people today actually prefer having daughters over sons.
Compare the women's society standing in 1930 and now. Of course one shouldn't ignore all of the current problems. But one shouldn't dismiss the progress and efforts made in the past.
From what you yourself say, women in china are not quite equal to men. There's ways to acknowledge progress that's been made without literally saying women are quite equal to men. It was a very patriarchal society, it's gotten less so but it's still unequal.
Here is a another article, apparently many government jobs openly state they prefer male candidates. Here is a key line from the article: "Nearly a fifth of postings for national civil service jobs listed a requirement or preference for male candidates; a trend repeated in advertisements for prestigious positions in other industries too, according to a 2018 Human Rights Watch report." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/9/29/china-women-still-b...
Great, so progress has been made, but letting a claim like "but in general women in China are quite equal to men" go unchallenged seems just wrong given how unequal women are still being treated.
And to be fair, the united states has some serious issues with regards to gender equality too.
https://www.ted.com/talks/yasheng_huang_does_democracy_stifl...
as evidenced by gender ratio in 0-14 and 15-24 brackets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
Oh, we do.
1. Chinese society is extremely competitive and hard working, and that work is cheaper to harness due to 996 and similar trends. It's no wonder they have more man-years to spend on developing.
2. They could copy a lot of Western technology due to outsourcing, a trend that only being reconsidered as of a few years ago. Because of that, they have the baseline of production lines, IP, and expert/process engineering knowledge. If they know how to replicate tech, they know how to improve it.
3. Their society is less squeamish about surveillance tech. I will speculate that this is part of the reason why they are better at AI and telecommunications: these areas are ones you want to have a really good grip on if you want to control the population. In a related point, I think that their military may be why they have more expertise in building affordable drones, because that accumulated knowledge trickles down.
4. The Chinese government is free of humanitarian considerations. This enables them to harness resources that the West is not keen on touching for fear of condemnation.
Chinese culture does elevate hard work, I think that could be a factor. 996 is a thing, but I’m not sure it exists across the entire workforce, it’s more a tech workforce culture, even then not ubiquitous.
The copying trope is frustrating to keep seeing. Who did they copy the space station off? It’s just not true at all.
Your point on privacy sounds closer to the truth. Culturally they view privacy differently to say American culture. I think this is more related to Chinese historically have always been socially/community minded, America by contrast has championed the individual.
The humanitarian point is pure propaganda. The west does not fear condemnation… they literally invaded and occupied two countries, and committed war crimes in them (see Australia’s SAS involvement). Modern day Chinas closest resemblance to that is it’s forced take over off Hong Kong (20 years after it’s hand over, but it promised 50). It’s just not even in the same league of humanitarian breaches as “the west”
They seek to set a precedent for an Orwellian nightmare across the whole world. As a citizen of an ex-communist country (who was thankfully born after that era), I am keenly aware of how dangerous an extensive surveillance, censorship and propaganda network can be. They stifle thought, and in China's case, I am afraid that this time it will work. They have the track record. The West (or let's face it, those keen to join in with the US militarily - and not all of the West participates) might have killed people, but China wants to kill independent thought. This is the one principle that I consider near-sacred. Without our free will*, what are we as a species? I know my view is extreme, but China is doing nothing to reassure the West that it's not actually planning on doing that.
I did not mean to suggest that they are merely copying, on the contrary. My point is that they bootstrapped their own understanding and manufacturing of the technology, and then took it much further and in a different direction to the West. It's not a bad thing as such. It just means that they got the Western "tech tree" (for lack of a non-video game analogy), recognised the value of what they are holding, then made it their own and did honest work to build upon it. The same likely happened with the space station. Even if the current one is more Russian than Chinese in its design, you can be sure that this ratio will rapidly shrink in favour of Chinese designs and expertise.
* Yes, I know there are debates about whether it's actually free. I'm talking about the apparent effect.
Is Fox News, or the news media in general not just as much a threat to free thinking as an actual “propaganda department”.
2. The government in China is extremely strong and centralized. The top officials want something, the lower officials do it. And since every Chinese business is a government business, any long-lasting Chinese company does what the government wants. So, the government can actually try to direct the country of China, compared to the USA for which conflict is the main point of the government and therefore centralized institutions (various companies, the military) emerge as the main powers.
3. China has a culture of ingratiating themselves (through feeding, using relatives, outright bribery) to people who can give them what they want. Apparently (I don't have a source), corruption can actually increase production because it greases wheels that were rusted by bureaucracy.
I should also note that since China is the world's production center, they have all the manufacturing chains, so if you want to make something in China it is very easy compared to many other countries.
With regards to regulation: IIRC, China has fewer regulations than America, but they are more "restrictive" (e.g. can't criticize the government), though citation needed.
1. All businesses are not state run or directed.
2. Your characterisation of Guanxi (relationships) is kind of the western negative interpretation of them. America has lobbyists literally bribing politicians… sorry I mean campaign donations.
I’m not sure any of the above describe why China is pushing so far out in front in technology and development… it is more a list of things the west tries to tell itself so they don’t have to confront the fact that they are potentially being outpaced.
2. Sorry if it came off that way. It's just that in my personal experience, China is much more dependent on this kind of ingratiation compared to America. (e.g. I've never had to give the people who reviewed my college application gifts to increase my chance of admission or anything like that.)
From what I can see, the reason China is pulling out ahead is basically:
- they have a humongous population, with a fair portion in poverty, giving easy access to productivity gains by lifting them out of it
- they possess probably a majority of the industrial complex of the world
- they have a reasonably competent government
All of which breed technological development. You probably have different insights though.
(Also, things like patent and technology copying, etc. probably help.)
The cold war with the one is over and won, and the cold war with the other one is just now spinning up
This can't be the correct explanation since the China exclusion is not recent.
Is anyone still investigating who started that Bloomberg fake news that kick-started the entire 5G/Huawei conspiracy ? I mean there was no proof that anything weird is happening so I am still wondering if there was a government Agency or some rich dudes that started this.
American FDI in China even under the last administration went up, and both the EU and the US were busy signing free trade deals with China. I don't remember Apple building computers in the Soviet Union. Follow the money, not the news headlines. There's going to be no second cold war because there is no ideological competition and China is deeply integrated in just about every value chain on the planet.
Without Russia, the ISS launches you.
Errr, I mean : without the Russians, it would be impossible to operate the ISS.
Today they would not be involved. In fact Russia has said that they will leave in 2025.