2021 Letter
danwang.co
danwang.co
An incredible statement - made even more so by possibly being true.
It was less than ten years ago that Hong Kong might have been considered the leading city in all of China and certainly the most dynamic on the axes that he is considering.
FWIW, I think the CCP has made a tactical error in their handling of Hong Kong:
As a business owner in Hong Kong I was, previously, only peripherally and philosophically concerned with the behavior of the party throughout the rest of the country - it was possible to compartmentalize the "two systems".
But if Hong Kong is just another Chinese city and if there is only one "system" then I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are.
This makes me very sad - Hong Kong has for my entire adult life been my favorite city and the city I thought was the most interesting and exciting.
Who shapes the CCP's ideology? It seems to be shifting all the time, Is it one person?
The clarity, conviction, speed, and alignment in which they execute the ideology is breathtaking. I can't imagine a group being able to do this over what seems to be a long period.
A more complete answer is more complicated obviously. But he has been super effective in consolidating power from all angles.
You can take as hard a negotiating stance as you like, in most/all situations the leverage resides with them. Even being Apple won't get them to leave you alone, that should tell you something.
[1]: https://rsync.net
[2]: I'm a customer based in SEA that previously used rsync.net's Hong Kong site but moved to one of the US sites following the events in 2019.
You will know then that Apple Daily and Stand News were pushing "freedom of the press" into territory that no western media dares to push in their own countries, including actively calling for foreign military intervention in Hong Kong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfVGludKPWM SCMP - The insufferable hypocrisy of Western governments hell-bent on destroying Julian Assange
"the only solution to bad speech is more free speech"
"the only solution to a bad market is more free market"
"the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"
edit: Hacker News that bastion of "free speech" where all opinions not conforming to the "western liberal" doctrine gets downvote-censored because the readers are too fragile to read different opinions
> US media personalities calling for military invasion of Australia
(1) That's not the same thing as calling for military invasion of the US. (2) No government cares about random small articles that only random internet commentators know about to make a "irrelevant counterexample fallacy"; what matters is large-scale media exhibiting a long-term pattern of behaviour and trying to organise large numbers of people (which they failed at in HK; most people stopped going to the protests after a small group started extreme violence).
I recall very recently some US media personalities calling for military invasion of Australia; doesn't seem very different.
https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_world-leaders-offer-mixed-reac...
"If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States"
What is happening to assange is a travesty, but you are literally arguing against something that is demonstrably true. Try again.
Evidence-free invocation of "demonstrably true" is an oxymoron.
It would be more like if Trump or Q crazies took over power on Jan 6, then the NyTimes called for Canada and Britain to come to our rescue and restore Democracy.
"Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance. Personally, I think it has been a tragedy for the US that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley."
"The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports. Decades of American deindustrialization as well as an aversion against idle capacity has eroded domestic manufacturing."
"In the face of this challenge against a new peer competitor, the US has demonstrated a superb capacity for self-harm."
"For someone in the middle class, there has never been a better year to live in China. That comes down to the entrepreneurs, who are creating businesses to please people."
All, absolutely true as I've commented previously in other posts. The decline of America is primarily a story about misallocation of talent and the demise of the American middle class as a result.
I wish modern-day economists would be more aware of local maximums, which is the economic strategy the US seems to have adopted in the last 2-3 decades. Looks like China is targeting things beyond the local maximums, much like the US used to do back in the '50s and '60s, maybe also in the '70s.
Not sure things like the ARPANET would have been possible in today's world when the strategy of "looking for the local maximum" is the only one made use of.
Every rich Chinese I know is trying to leave China now. This includes even very well placed regime insiders.
A PLA 2 star general almost forcefully sent his daughter to live in Canada at the peak of COVID travel restrictions. I knew her from my days in a Canadian college.
A grandson of some revolutionary hero whom I took misfortune to acquaintance with by helping his daughter practice English, started recently asking me how immigration to Canada works, and if he can get along there without knowing English.
Even most zombiefied, hardcore pinkos who were going flag waving at West Georgia have shut up for good, and got in line for Canadian passports.
From the middle class you mention, factory owners I knew who were the most staunch, and stalwart when it came to hostile business environment, are now shutting down, selling at n-times discount, and pretty much running from the country.
It's done for.
North America is for the rich. There is no better place to be RICH (better than even Europe).
Western Europe is probably the best place in the world to be poor.
It seems that China is now the best place in the word to be middle class.
(I know very little about it, just basing it on the article and the other discussion here).
That the richest want to leave China for North America is not an indictment of China, it's an indictment of North America.
Majority of rich Chinese I know in Canada who aren't retired are essentially enjoying Canadian social services while contributing to PRC development. Their big spending improves niche BC economy while driving up housing prices. At end of day, Canada/West are just cheap retirement plans. Apart from capital flight which CCP can clamp down on, rich Chinese bailing to Canada aren't substantively detracting away from productivity in PRC.
>are now shutting down, selling at n-times discount, and pretty much running from the country.
And they'll get replaced by other PRC upstarts. Cycles of entrepreneur getting wealthy and then burn out in PRC only to retire abroad / in Canada has been happening since opening up. I saw first gen of new wealth capital flight in 2000s. It's nothing new. What is new is the number of PRC students who want to return and diaspora who went back to PRC to live in covid0. Reality is PRC is more enticing than ever, not enough for rich to ditch back up plans, but enough to keep growing.
>I read a lot of your previous posts. It feels you have zero idea how China works.
>You are too young, too simple.
I've read a lot of your China posts. You do good comment on manufacturing and industry post 2000s. Otherwise, from what I remember about your background, Russia / east Europe, schooling in Canada then work in SZ. It feels like you think your experiences when Russia was failing somehow explains a failing PRC that is mostly succeeding. You may have too much ex-soviet trauma like other east-european diaspora I talk to who try to extrapolate their experiences growing up in broken post soviet states to PRC because "commies bad".
I'm pretty sure I'm older than you, lived/worked in PRC before you (90s-10s) and stayed in touch with developments (beijing/shanghai) longer than you. Hardcore commies / regime insiders have been bailing China for comfy life in west since forever. Not the same industries will rejuvenate, things come/go according to industrial policy, but the cycle will continue. Xi killed industry my family was in dead for a few years, it's booming now. While other sectors stay dead. I've hanged with PLA generals, with more stars, and did all the "eye opening" experiences expats brag/allege gives real understanding of PRC. Except it doesn't. I also have family / relationships with PRC nationals who were part of elite patronage networks. Which is every bit as much of a shitshow as you allege, except I also recognize the broader political system largely works and read enough academic literature to have a sense of why. Whereas your recommended literature on understanding PRC at bottom of thread:
>The few people remaining brave enough to open their mouth are either from religious cults on one side, or former regime insiders themselves on another.
If this is cheek in tongue endorsement of FLG / Guo / other dissident media, then it explains a lot.
>diaspora decided to stay in the COVID ridden West, than to return to China.
Not for a lack of trying. Flights into PRC was extremely limited on top of quarantine. Most people with means I knew tried to go back, but couldn't due to hassle. Eventually they just waited out for vax.
Remember comparative value, which is a real thing.
China had very cheap labour that the US could never compete with.
China made outrageous amounts of stuff, and stocks Wallmart and Amazon shelves with it.
In my own lifetime, I have seen a seismic shift in material consumption of Americans, mostly for the better: the quantity, variety, quality of goods and even foodstuffs in a Wallmart today - cheap and accessible to most Americans - would blow someone from 1975 away.
The giant piece missing from the economic equations is 'consumer surplus' which is the 'profit' that consumers derive. When consumers get more choice, more quality and lower prices, they are making huge 'profits' that we simply don't put in the equations. Consumer Surpluses have been massive for the West.
At least for low-end manufacturing, it's been a massive neoliberal win-win.
Obviously, the storyline is changing, and for more advanced products it's a different issue. But for most things so far, it's 'good' trade.
Not a case now.
Skilled assembly line workers cost more in South China than in cheaper US states.
Amazons, Googles, Facebooks still keep pouring into China like there is no tomorrow.
I think a little of critical thinking will point to problem not being with the cost of labour.
Thought, the initial US MNCs push into China was definitely motivated by the borderline free workers.
Yes, it's the case now.
Average mfg. wages in China are still short of Mexico, and US salaries include all sorts of overhead, especially healthcare.
"Skilled assembly line workers cost more in South China than in cheaper US states." - for some things, not for most things.
"Amazons, Googles, Facebooks still keep pouring into China like there is no tomorrow." - Yes, and?
Without 'cheap labour' China would not exist, even today, the economic machine depends on it.
The surpluses wrought by the American/Western consumer are massive.
Walmart would have 1/2 of the goods, and they would be more expensive.
Americans consume considerably more goods than they would otherwise, and that's a measure of the enormous surplus being created by comparative value trade between the two nations.
The 'anti comparative value' argument made in the article is just hot air and speculation without a lot of data to pack it up.
Adam Smith is as correct as Isaac Newton, you can't just say 'gravity doesn't exist anymore'.
Irrelevant when 2/3 of inputs are in China and overseas shipping rates are 2x what they were 2 years ago.
The west self-harm is contradicting itself by allowing both heavy labor-regulations in their own countries and trade with countries with basically no labor-regulations. It's just like they hate their own low skill workers so much that the politicians intentionally destroyed the factory job market.
This is the problem but you have the motive wrong. It wasn't intentionally destroyed, it was a complete lack of concern about whether or not it was destroyed.
You have, on the one hand, unions and others who lobby for more regulations. They have perverse incentives. If they get a new regulation that increases US manufacturing costs by 2%, they get credit for protecting workers. But they don't get credit for regulations passed in the 1970s, so they're always asking for more, so the cost of US manufacturing is always going up.
Manufacturing companies would have the incentive to counterbalance this by lobbying against them, if they didn't have the alternative to offshore manufacturing to countries without this. But they do, so they do that instead.
So regulations that can't pass a cost benefit analysis, or that no longer make sense because things have changed or we know more now than we did then, are still on the books and have no obvious path to being removed.
Politicians have no incentive to fix this because their incentives are to make the lobbyists happy. The unions are happy that they get to take credit for passing more regulations all the time and the corporations are happy that they get to avoid all the regulations by manufacturing in other countries, so who is the lobby to fix it?
China arguable has better protection when it comes to mandatory severence pay and most workers don't work by the hours, or depend on the tips to survive. On the other hand, China don't have hyper-active unions, overtime limits are not strictly enforced. However, I remember reading a piece about a janitor in San Francisco who worked so many hours he's getting paid more than a regular programmer. So when it comes to that, regulations can't do much when someone's determined to get that overtime .
The core thing is, however, a lot more Chinese workers are willing to work that overtime and get that extra pay without complains, and the cost of living is simply way lower.
For an outsider, $15 per hour in the bay may seem high, but even if you work the full hours, you can save very little after housing and food. However, those workers in China are housed, fed, and they get to save all that they get.
The US has mandatory unemployment insurance which serves the same purpose, and none of the jobs that get paid in tips are in manufacturing.
Also, waitstaff in the US in practice generally get paid more than minimum wage, because the ones whose service is so poor they can't get more than that in tips will quit and take a job where tips aren't part of the compensation.
> The core thing is, however, a lot more Chinese workers are willing to work that overtime and get that extra pay without complains, and the cost of living is simply way lower.
The cost of living, especially the cost of housing, is certainly a major factor. But that's still a regulatory failure, because in that case the cause is zoning regulations.
There are tons of US PhDs working in manufacturing. Most of the interesting and high-leverage problems in manufacturing are in Chemical/Biochemical Engineering, Robotics, Controls, ...
When it comes to "stuff phds do in the manufacturing sector", the US is still a leader.
> The west self-harm is contradicting itself by allowing both heavy labor-regulations in their own countries and trade with countries with basically no labor-regulations.
This is accurate. If you want manufacturing capacity in the US, the correct thing to do is to raise the bar globally. Want to import? Great. Meet a minimum standard of labor and environmental regulations, perhaps different than the US labor regs, and even possibly lower in some dimensions, but qualitatively similar.
Of course, this is far easier said than done.
> It's just like they hate their own low skill workers so much that the politicians intentionally destroyed the factory job market.
WRT environmental regulations, it's much easier to turn a blind eye to something happening half-way around the world than something happening in your own town. Especially when that "something" is "Pittsburgh's skies blacker than night at noon due to cancerous smog".
WRT labor regulations & cost, you seem to claiming that the workers rights movement hated workers? Again, it's easy to say "make jobs safer and pay people more". It's much harder to so "and also we're going to accept permanent double-digit inflation."
I think, instead of malice, we can attribute the US's current situation to the fact that policies which make manufacturing more expensive are largely popular even among manufacturing laborers and policies which make imported goods more expensive are (a) horrendously difficult to "get right" and (b) largely unpopular.
I don't think they want to put more PhDs in manufacturing. They want to produce less PhDs.
What they want to copy from Germany is its Apprenticeship.
Super short term thinking.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-ame...
Overall, American households are increasingly wealthy, class divisions notwithstanding.
[0] https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/05/most-americans-consider-th...
I was asking, and still hoping to see, the metrics and data that point to demise of the US middle class.
Also, as a Physics PhD holder myself, I dislike that Physics PhDs are held up as the archetypal smart people to be allocated in society's best interest. My opinion is that most of them, myself included, were foolish to go that far in their education and would have better served themselves, and society, if they had stopped at a BS. We could unlock a large economic gain if we went back to fairly matching job responsibilities with the minimum required education.
It's circular -- while I think ads are absurd and am actively trying to remove as many of them from my life as possible, it's not like technologies that have been subsidized by optimizing ad clicking haven't come back around to help science out.
Just curious, especially if you mean the former.
I reserve the right to claim at some future date, possibly in the next few hours, "the circular payoff is mostly tapped out".
It may be funded by advertising, but Search is incredibly useful. And Facebook keeps me in touch with my extended friend circle, which as far as I'm concerned is an unconditional social good. Most of the people working on those products aren't working on the advertising part. And if a small percentage are, well, you can't fully optimize every system of humans.
I don't think this argument holds water.
By focusing on how they are funded, you're losing track of the fact that these companies provide incredibly valuable services.
It's probably less than that, in engineering. The real headcount numbers for advertising are in sales and sales operations.
I think that is a stretch beyond snapping point for Hong Kong. Most days in Hong Kong I could see the air pollution obscuring buildings in the distance. It's AQI is terrible https://aqicn.org/city/hongkong/ . There are nice mountain walks and nearby islands but it is extremely dense and urban. It's one of the places Ghost in the Shell used for reference!
Also the narrative here feels mostly from the mainland China point of view; having to go and deal with "problematic" Hong Kong. But problems between Hong Kong and the mainland began when Beijing used its influence to restrict Hong Kong's traditional democracy, so only "approved" candidates could be voted into office. And since then it's increasingly clamped down on the freedoms Hong Kong previously enjoyed, most recently doing things such as removing the Tiananmen Square memorials (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-59764029). At this point the writing is on the wall and bit by bit Hong Kong will brought in step with the rest of mainland China.
Unlike the author I found the Hong Kong bureaucracy fast and effective. Enforcers "sometimes able to look the other way" sounds like corruption to me and people with better guanxi being able to bend the rules. I'd rather have the laws fair, clear and applied to all equally (though that's always going to be a gradient).
Despite all that, it's undeniable China is on the rise and that's going to be the dominant story of this century. There's potential for that to be a great boon to the world and I hope that's the reality that comes to be.
I think that remains to be seen, for two major reasons:
1. Countries whose primary political system devolves into "cult of personality" tend to fare very poorly in the long run when it comes to global leadership (note, I think this warning applies to other countries besides China).
2. China has an undeniable demographic crisis on the horizon. Of course, so do many countries, so my hypothesis is that countries that are able to accept and integrate immigrants will do the best. It's an open question which country that is, but it definitely doesn't look like China.
If by 2030, first kids are born in "factories", governments will plan for the future in a different way than if they know that there are no alternatives to natural births.
Who would raise the artificial kids? Who would pay for it in the first place?
Maybe government. Or scarier some company.
It would be awesome if we could fully support children and education. It would be gross if the only way to do that was capitalistic incentives.
Maybe that's a sick sci-fi startup idea to pitch (more like write a book about).
Raise kids from scratch, long term 50 year roi horizon returned from the increased earning potential from having raised the kids and educated them better! I doubt VC money would go for something unless you could speed up development to get your unicorn in 5 years lol
Joking aside it seems to me the answer is way simpler and doesn't require magic tech. We still have working bodies. We just have to support them with free childcare, great education, healthcare, and other social support for parents. But we can't seem to get enough votes for that. Immigration is an easy solution too but same thing...
Given how specialization works in other areas of life, I would expect "professional parents" to emerge, adopting 5-10 artificial kids over their lifetime. Possibly even more. That could actually be a reasonable job for people who are otherwise less qualified.
In more authoritarian countries, I would expect government-run boarding schools to emerge, preparing boys for future careers in military or the Party, girls ... well, that would depend on local culture, probably.
"Joking aside it seems to me the answer is way simpler and doesn't require magic tech. We still have working bodies."
If it were so simple, some countries would be able to solve it. I would, on the other hand, say, that it is as "simple" as solving the obesity crisis: a problem that looks straightforward from a distance, but turns into a maze of nightmarish "devil's details" up close.
We do not really have working bodies. Peak fertility is in late teenage years and early twenties, but societies which highly value education must shift childbearing to much later age. And after 30, a lot of people who want to have kids are no longer capable to do so without medical help, and this process is so tedious and stressful that you will wind up with smaller families than wished for.
Already about 5 per cent of kids are born out of IVF, which indicates that the cohort of people struggling with fertility is significant.
No, they aren’t. Assisted reproductive technology (including IVF) is involved in about 2.1% of US [0] and 0.3% of global [1] births.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/art/state-specific-surveillance/index.ht...
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/03/02/218...
Interesting thought about gender separation in authoritarian countries too. A lot of outdated concept of gender is rooted in the role of motherhood, which in this scenario wouldn't really be a thing. More a specialized career.
Yeah I guess my meta point was a lot of people wait to have kids because of their careers and the ginormous cost of raising kids. But that's a good point about education; even with all the resources in the world it's hard to raise kids and attain grad school or higher education. But graduating college by 21 still leaves a lot of time.
The same time in the past was 1846, when railway was barely a thing and Morse's telegraph just entered experimental use.
The problems in Hong Kong didnt start 2 years ago, they started when the UK came in, and we inherit a difficulty I know well where I come from (Europe, full of Corsica, Basque Country, Northern Ireland, Brittany, Catalonia and so on).
Beijing reacts like we all reacted 2 centuries ago, and will slowly learn to deal with it, especially if they invade Taiwan and have to stop killing because unlike Xinjiang there's nothing to mine there and only cost cost cost to maintain an aggressive colony that builds processors as only output of value.
I think the CCP is no more evil than Napoleon, and ask a Frenchman today and he'll rave about what he did that transformed eventually the country, at the cost of 200k+ young people's lives to invade Russia, if you can believe it.
Things progress and China has to experience it for themselves, sadly. There's no shortcuts that I know of for such a big place.
Just to correct you here, the only aggressive country between these two is the Chinese side, which is "buzzing" Taiwanese airspace daily to keep them mobilized and exhausted and has built a full scale replica of central Taipei [1] in which the PLA does drills simulating its capture.
That's not peaceful, those are the heights of aggression.
If the CCP wants peace, they need to start showing it with action.
[1] https://thediplomat.com/2015/08/satellite-imagery-from-china...
As a half-related aside, I think the solution is what we eventually did with the EU, a mutually assured dependency that would force everyone to keep the peace we longed for millenia, and I think the British forgot a bit too fast the vain inter massacres our ancestors rushed into at each disagreement when they yelled for Brexit to give them back their "independence".
Wish China could see it but afraid they have to try every other stupid way first :( Praying for the British and us our fishing disagreements and submarines rifraf dont escalate. Could Taiwan compromise with a soft border economic Union called the Greater China Union that would make everyone cool down ? Meh.
Hong Kong and Taiwan are way ahead of China.
Common prosperity would mean literally just leaving them alone - or even promoting and supporting their independence (!).
Healthy, free, mostly democratic and sovereign Hong Kong and Taiwan would probably be in China's best interest in every way but their nationalist view of identity. It's their choice - but let's not pretend that Hong Kong and Taiwan are gaining Napolonic bureaucracy wherein there was none before.
"leaving them alone" is straight-up naivete, especially when you consider the US military presence. I cannot imagine anyone who has seen a world map seriously advancing the idea of HK independence, it's not even what HK itself wants. Their current methods seem shortsighted and heavy-handed but China's objective of national security is eminently rational. To say it's in their best interest to leave them alone is simply absurd and clearly only accounts for Western perspectives
GDP/c, PPP/c, HDI, World Happiness Report, Global Health Security Index, World Press Freedom Index, ...
While there might be some possibility of US defence of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, there is no material threat to Chinese territorial integrity otherwise - from anybody.
There's no airbases, no missiles, no naval base, no ballistic missile launch points for US forces on Taiwan.
There is zero military justification for China to invade Hong Kong or Taiwan.
The capture of Taiwan and Hong Kong is 100% a Nationalist Imperialist objective of Han Supremacy and their version of identity, history etc.
Militarily, the invasion of Taiwan is going to be extremely expensive, hugely disruptive, and will risk giant swaths of Chinese trade, their international standing and participation in so many things. In fact - it already is. China faces a great deal of pushback for their moves on both HK and Taiwan.
...
"I cannot imagine anyone who has seen a world map seriously advancing the idea of HK independence,"
There is a 100% chance, that if a choice were given to Hong Kong citizens today to either continue on the path to integrating with China - or - to be independent - they would chose independence.
Why don't we find out and give them the choice?
Hong Kong would dump China the instant they had the opportunity.
If the CCP had not moved towards controlling the political apparatus, Hong Kong would have been independent in 1997 whereupon China used the threat of violence to stop anyone from considering otherwise, as they do now: violence as the only instrument of power.
...
"way ahead? On what metrics?"
Hong Kong and Taiwan are ahead of the mainland on all metrics.
2020 GDP/capita in USD:
HK $46K Taiwan $33K China $10K
In terms of quality of life, education, healthcare, political freedoms - Hong Kong and Taiwan provide immensely better for their citizens than China ever will.
The capture of Hong Kong by China is already resulting in it's decline, the same would happen to Taiwan.
Hong Kong serves as an important financial gateway for China into the 'real world' - the only reason that financial opportunity exists is because the historical independence of Hong Kong.
No more independence - no more special financial status - and so both China and Hong Kong lose.
China has no plans of invading Hong Kong, where in the world is this nonsense from.. As for the consequences of invading Taiwan, of course. Which is why I am very certain it will not happen.
> There is a 100% chance, that if a choice were given to Hong Kong citizens today to either continue on the path to integrating with China - or - to be independent - they would chose independence.
There is no other way to describe this other than complete bullshit. There are polls. Hong Kong citizens can be communicated with. I suggest you find them and do that. And while you're at it, explain how Hong Kong will survive economically and resource-wise in this fantasy scenario. There's no point in continuing any discussion when these basic facts cannot be agreed on. This is a laughably naive idea that is only feasible through Western delusion.
Re: economic comparisons, fair enough, I let myself be dunked on by framing the question in that way. It's skewed by the long tail of rural Chinese - _especially_ in the case of Hong Kong, which cannot be fairly compared to China as a whole, but I wasn't clear. I'd just suggest looking at growth metrics instead. Taiwan and HK economic stagnation is an old story.
? How did Hong Kong survive before 1997 without being part of China ?
? How does Singapore, a small state exist without being part of a major nation ?
How does any nation 'survive' on it's own?
The question is upside down:
Hong Kong flourished while 'not being part of China'.
Now they are going downhill as 'part of China'.
The question is 'How will Hong Kong survive now that it's under the thumb of China'.
It probably won't - it will become a much less important city.
--- "There is no other way to describe this other than complete bullshit."
This is deluded. Probably from propaganda.
To believe that the obsequious and fearful 'kowtowing' by many in Hong Kong amounts to a real expression of their will, is not reality.
There is an easy solution: give Hong Kong the right to vote for itself, and elect it's own members of government as it chooses, not chosen by the CCP.
What are you afraid of?
That people would completely reject China given the chance?
That other parts of China would want to do the same?
It's probably true, and something to consider.
simply the first result from google, among many https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-security-poll-ex...
Napooleon also abolished the Spanish Inquisition. Invading Russia was always a stupid move.
The comparison is laughable. Napoleon didn't starve millions of his own citizens.
Let’s see where this trend goes, I think the golden age of entrepreneurs are ticking
Perhaps he knows that to get away with it, he has to include lots of praise. But both the praise and the criticism seem authentic. It's a valuable piece, I learned a good deal from it.
Which government? Beijing would absolutely not allow the publication of a piece that uncritically regurgitates Washington's narrative about "mass detention of minorities". It's Saddam-has-WMDs-and-is-allied-with-al-Qaeda all over again. Fool me once.
It's best read as a letter for Western/liberal audiences. That is clearly the intended audience.
These aren't equivalent. We have plenty of evidence of the Uyghur genocide from 3rd party journalists and satellite imagery. The only evidence for WMDs came directly from a new government agency (named "Office of Special Plans") created by Dick Cheney and not independently verified by any 3rd parties.
No, we don't. The vast majority of primary "evidence" comes out of the ETIM lobby (WUC, Adrian Zenz, et al.) and war lobby (ASPI, etc). All of it massively signal-boosted by the mainstream corporate media. Both sources have a very, very clear (conflict of) interest in manufacturing anti-China sentiment.
Grainy satellite imagery of ordinary schools and prisons is only admissible as "concentration camps" if you're a shameless propagandist.
It's quite literally the same playbook as "Saddam's WMDs", with similarly cynical goals. Because it worked. And it's been similarly effective at duping the average media consumer.
Do you have any primary evidence that isn't blatant hearsay, Google Earth speculation, or bad-faith mistranslations? In my extensive research, virtually 100% of "the evidence" falls into these 3 easily manipulated categories.
The year is 2022. There should be convincing photo and video evidence of the supposed atrocities. Western intelligence community has high-resolution aerial cameras. China has a billion people on social media, some using VPNs. There would certainly be whistleblowers. Smoking guns of this alleged Holocaust should be everywhere, on a daily basis. But they're suspiciously absent.
WMDs all over again.
In any case, have a wonderful day!
There are tons of sources showing that the facilities you can see plainly in satellites are internment centers. And schools which you can see barbed wire etc.
BUT how about looking at the opposite. What you can see erased.
One can view a cultural genocide from the air plain as day. The erasure of Uighyer cultural and religious spaces. Just a couple sources below.
Let me save you your reply, that's fake or some US government plot planted BS, that's not a primary source (even though the articles give the primary), etc.
I read through your profile and I'm pretty surprised by the huge volume of consistent comments so I guess good for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/07/revealed-new-e... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/25/world/asia/xi... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/07/revealed-new-e...
There are countless reasons why a building might be there one day and look differently a while later. Renovation, relocation, temporary decoration, disaster, weather, different time of day/year, different camera, different postprocessing, etc. Maybe a mosque even was used as a training site for violent extremists and was transformed/demolished for that reason. Maybe one photo is doctored. Maybe PRC is populated and ruled by comic book villains that do Wicked Evil Stuff for no discernable reason.
Scrutiny is required.
Yet ideologues act as if "genocide" is the only possible answer. Unspeakably deranged.
Ironically, this propaganda campaign makes it easy to understand how Nazi Germany could get to the point of industrial genocide. Because it turns out the people are eager to believe deranged, racist, hateful conspiracy theories about the "enemy", in this case the Chinese Communists, as long as the mass media plays along.
On an unrelated note, anti-Asian hate crimes are way up in America.
Little Eichmanns.
i believe scrutiny is required when reading anything you write on this site, based on this and past comments.
For additional info, there are multiple books written on the topic as well, ex:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5968247-dragon-fighter
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8137115-the-uyghurs
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57894290-menace
You can find many more if you do a Google search
For the last time, if a literal genocide of millions of people is happening in 2022, and perpetrated by the public enemy #1 of the only media superpower on the planet, there would be primary evidence everywhere. Yet all you guys can do is point to a mountain of bullshit and say "go find the needle".
Cowardly and disrespectful.
Thanks!
Aaron Maté has done a lot of thorough investigative journalism into Bellingcat's lies and shady affiliations with Western intelligence.
There is tons of irrefutable evidence of an ethnic genocide and internment of minimally thousands and thousands, likely millions over the course of time.
There is also irrefutable evidence of a propaganda campaign orchestrated by Washington and various SIGs that have a vested interest in destroying the PRC. For example, the Countering Chinese Influence Fund signed into law which provides $300,000,000 per annum exclusively for the production of anti-China propaganda.
Connect the dots. Use your brain. Stop regurgitating headlines.
Can you expand on this? Are you talking about consumers wanting to buy chinese brands (eg. huawei instead of apple), or some sort of officially state sanctioned brand?
This so called national team, is a myth. It never manifests itself. Apparently, national team backed national captical, executed by nationally-owned enterprises, are not agile and innovative enough when competing with private businesses. That's simply a human nature-driven market econmomy law. Chinese people are not living in an alternative universe where economy laws do not apply.
> Other major state-owned automakers have rolled out their own ride-hailing brands: FAW Group established Yiqi Chuxing in 2019; Hong Kong-listed Dongfeng Motor launched Dongfeng Chuxing in 2018;
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kr-asia.com/chinese-automak...
I don’t have data to prove they competed unfairly to DiDi though but we know didi has been punished to death now
This is a bit dated (2015 ?) but I was wandering around Shenzhen very late at night. After midnight. I came across a Lamborghini dealership and I thought it was noteworthy.
Then I noticed that it was open.
Apart from anime Japan is pretty much a cultural desert for us, Westerners, right now. Compare that to the excellent movies they made back in the '50 to the '70s, back then they were on the vanguard of world cinema together with the French (la Nouvelle Vague) and the Italians (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini), as Hollywood was on its dying bed.
Taiwan is even more a cultural wasteland, I can only name you Tsai Ming-liang (who apparently has just filmed his last ever feature film) and Hou Hsiao-hsien, other than that it's only the idea of money and of making money that comes out of Taiwan.
South Korea is a little bit more complicated. There's K-Pop that's definitely a thing among younger people (I'm personally 40+ so I'm not in their target demographic) and there's Korean TV dramas, which rival Turkish TV dramas in many parts of the world, but I would say that's not probably what the author had in mind. SK used to have a very, very vibrant movie scene in the 2000s and a little in the early 2010s, its Busan film festival was one of the most interesting movie festivals in the world at some point, but for some reason or another all that is a thing of the past now.
Others have mentioned videogames, where Japan is more influential than all of Europe combined, this being the biggest (by revenue) cultural industry by far.
In literature then, Japan has one of the most popular still-living authors in the world, Haruki Murakami.
Japanese cuisine and culinary design (pottery, tea paraphernalia) is extremely influential everywhere in the world - with some amount of mix up with Chinese symbolism, to be fair. Japanese visual designs are influential in fashion.
It's true that in cinema and music Japan's influence is small and even shrinking (especially given that they had titans like Akira Kurosawa). But Japanese culture is still an item if fascination and influence in much of the world.
Japan's influence on world cinema is bigger than just "movies made in Japan".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniqlo#United_States
Americans remain fascinated with all aspects of Japanese culture, from food ("Jiro Dreams of Sushi" and sushi/hibachi places) to clothing to martial arts to Marie Kondo. Haruki Murakami's books are sold at Wal-Mart. Judo and karate studios still populate strip malls. Pokemon's going strong more than 20 years on. I would say Japan's second only to the UK in terms of visible cultural exports here.
Wearing a pair of Uniqlo jeans right now. Every time I look for the best made (accessible) consumer goods, I seem to end up with something made in Japan. Kitchen knives, charcoal, blue jeans, and even food items like beef, rice, or uni. It just seems that a lot more care goes into creating high quality goods that are meant to last. I think I read somewhere that the last shop that actually made blue jeans in San Francisco closed recently.
That's really interesting, I haven't been to the States until now so that is really news to me. To be honest I had thought that the Japanese "mania" (if I may call it so) had run its course back in the '80s (the "Karate Kid" movies, Akira as an underground (?) cultural phenomenon, the Nakatomi Corporation), with an important continuation in the '90s through the anime mania, maybe also in the 2000s, when many people (re-)discovered Miyazaki and Takahata. Also the JDM car scene that was made famous by the first F&F movies. Anyway, I thought all that was in the past, for example a Mk4 Toyota Supra sold for a record auction price recently [1], I thought there's no way that culture is still part of the mainstream, joining it has become too expensive.
I certainly do notice the fascination Japan as a country still holds among many in the tech-crowd scene like is the case for many HN-ers in here, but I thought that was a local and contained phenomenon.
[1] https://www.thesupercarblog.com/toyota-supra-a80-mark-4-rm-s...
Then the Japanese bubble economy burst and new bogeymen (terrorists, China, etc) took center stage, and now the popular image of Japan is blue-haired anime girls squealing "kawaii!".
Also, I dont know in which world he lives (I suppose most of his friend were Asian-Canadians) but your average westerner cannot name even 1 single cultural production of Taiwan. In the case of South Korea, most of the stuff they are known for (mainly KPop, and great movies/tv shows) has been produced in the last 20-25 years when the country reached an economic level and show business know-how that allowed them to flourish. China is not there yet.
China produces lots of good stuff, that for many reasons (distribution, advertisement, political hostility) are not known in the west.
Just one example, this is a fantastic TV show. I even say it is the best show I've watched in 2021, and you can watch it, legally and for free:
https://www.iq.com/album/the-bad-kids-2020-19rrhl1l3l?lang=e...
The quality is there, it needs to be more wisely advertised. Lots of mediocre productions too of course, but that is just Sturgeon's law in action.
The other spice of life and drama formulas seem incredibly derivative. Japan does those better to my tastes when I’m going over the in flight media options on a long trans pacific flight.
china seems better at historical/costume dramas (wuxia/xianxia being my current streaming obsession), especially for the costuming (obviously), sets, landscapes, and cultural history. they're not great for plot (holes out the wazoo), editing (quantity over quality), or writing/dialogue (uneven at best). they all lean much too heavily on tired tropes, like love triangles and (weirdly) amnesia, but are still really entertaining on balance.
i've been on the look-out to see when wuxia/xianxia really crosses over in popularity with american/english-speaking audiences, given that it's basically the chinese version of the cowboy western, simple morality tales set in (seemingly) simple times. star wars, a westernized takeoff of xianxia (but in space) seemed like a logical stepping stone, and crouching tiger, hidden dragon (one of my all-time faves) even made the leap, but didn't establish a wider popularity for the genre. shang chi, marvel's recent and modernized foray, doesn't seem to have made much of a splash either.
Japan of course has many name brand consumer and engineering product companies.
Taiwan has TSMC and Foxconn which while two of the most important companies in the world aren't well known outside of tech because they dont sell directly and don't do branding (like Intel for example).
Nobody was claiming that these places had no export economy.
It's all mostly food related though. Boba, Night markets, Taiwanese breakfast.
On the "namebrand" side, there is TSMC as well, though I feel that's gained notoriety in the last few years from the US's media push, not necessarily through Taiwan's own efforts.
There's still a fair amount of association with Taiwan <--> Chinese culture in many American's minds, but there's certainly some differentiation.
Again, potential California bias.
[0] https://yunhai.shop/collections/su-chili-crisp/products/su-c...
That's the thing, Japanese cinema back in the '50s-'70s was pure art: Mizoguchi, Ozu, Oshima, Naruse, Misumi (my favorite), Kinji Fukasaku, Seijun Suzuki (even though you could say he was more on the "entertainment" side) were defining the cultural norm for many in the world. The same goes for the Italian and French cinematographies that I had mentioned.
The more interesting question out of this particular discussion, though, is this: are video games part of culture? I absolutely agree that it is, but the fact that neither you nor the original post brought it up tells me that it is not for a certain percentage of the HN crowd here.
Back in the late '90s - early 2000s the "Cahiers du Cinema" were beginning to treat them like culture, if I'm not mistaken they used to have a relatively small (but important, given the context) "chronique" in each issue talking about a specific game. Then came a "reactionary" backlash, as is typical with French cultural institutions, the directorship of the magazine got changed and there were no more "chroniques" about video games and Michael Jackson. I think Les Inrocks might still give the video-games world a fair representation but to be honest I haven't read them in a long time.
In the Anglo world a magazine like Sight&Sound just ignores video-games almost completely, or that's what they seem to have been doing since I first started reading them (10+ years ago). More generalist media institutions like The Economist, the Financial Times (both of these I try to read pretty constantly), NY Times or the Guardian don't seem to allocate too much space to video games reviews in their Arts&Culture pages, or at least I don't remember having read too many of them (if any, to be honest).
And I do know that video-games have been available for a few decades now, but the thing is that they've become quite compartmentalised from society's point view. More exactly if you like video games or if you're into video games most probably that means that you're the kind of person that is spending tens of hours per month (week?) hooked to a PC or a game-console, ignoring the outside world, hence the outside society. Culture, by definition, was meant to provide some "glue" to society, to embrace it, so to speak, today's video-games (or most of them, anyway) run counter to all that.
Culture has various definitions that it can be interpreted by but by your comments, your views on culture appear to be that relevant to the youth of the mid to late 20th century but are much less relevant to the youth of today. The culture around video games is more dynamic and popular compared to that of cinema which has serious issues drawing eyeballs outside of the repetitive blockbuster films. There's a reason why the CEO of Netflix was more concerned about the threat from video games to their product.
"Apart from anime Japan is pretty much a cultural desert for us, Westerners, right now."
Japan is much much much more than just anime when you consider the country from a cultural perspective, EVEN from the western viewpoint.
I'm a late millenial and I would completely disagree. In fact from my perspective growing up and living on the West coast I'd argue that the only significant cultural imports into the US are from Mexico, the UK, and Japan, and to a much lesser extent Korea.
For one, sushi is incredibly popular amongst virtually everyone I know. Probably the single most popular foreign food choice, perhaps in a tie with "Mexican" which I put in quotes because American Mexican food is typically significantly different from authentic Mexican food while American Sushi is far closer to the real thing, at least in my experience.
As other people have mentioned video games are another absolutely huge cultural import from Japan, and the Japanese have created at outsized number of the most beloved franchises. I'm not sure I know a single person who isn't familliar with at least one Japanese-created video game character, Mario and Pikachu have a lot of reach! I don't think I could say that about even US videogames. Pokemon all by itself is absolutely massive, and I think in this conversation it is noteworthy that Pokemon Go! is the only successful AR title to date (that I'm aware of).
Not to mention Samurai and Ninjas are well known amongst virtually everyone I've met. I can't claim similar about the warriors of other countries.
It's also worth noting the Made in Japan is very much synonymous with high quality, and they have tons of brands that are very successful in this vein: Toyota, Honda, Sony, Hitachi, Makita, Nikon/Canon just to name a few.
Finally I think saying that "apart from anime" is a pretty huge cop out. Most people around my age watched a significant amount of anime shows growing up, and many still do. These aren't tech bros either-I didn't grow up in the Bay- just normal people with blue collar careers who will very much talk your ear off about anime. If we're talking about movies, Studio Ghibli continues to be extremely popular even amongst people who aren't into anime.
Elsewhere in the thread you say that you were under the impression that Japanese fever had eclipsed, but I really don't think it has, you also wrote
>I certainly do notice the fascination Japan as a country still holds among many in the tech-crowd scene like is the case for many HN-ers in here, but I thought that was a local and contained phenomenon.
I can honestly say nope! fascination with Japan is a very common phenomenon amongst a lot of people, from many walks of life and I honestly don't see it changing.
I will say this, though: just because paganel considered Bong Joon-ho's 2003 film Memories of Murder to be his best work doesn't mean that Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 meant absolutely nothing in terms of South Korea's state of its cinema scene. If anything, it's even more indicative of South Korean cinema scene's stock rising in the global stage in recent years. To put it in Civilization terms (which I'm sure he won't understand due to his dismissive outlook of video games), South Korea's going for the cultural victory. Soft power really is a thing!
South Korea’s cultural export boom is finally going mainstream in the U.S.- Squid Games, Parasite, etc.
I disagree. While K-drama plots are mostly superficial their execution is quite good and is done with very talented actors. Same goes for the K-pop scene. The competition is overwhelming. Turkish dramas on the other hand are just like South American telenovelas.
Culturally just about everything is bearish right now. I think it has to do with the generally pessimistic feel: the pandemic, the social rift, the threat of a new financial crisis, tensions with China and Russia. Quite a bit like in the 80s behind the Iron Curtain.
Parasite, Train to Busan, and Squid Game have really helped bring in a lot of eyes.
Netflix seems to be invested in growing Korean market, better yet if they can get more english language viewers of Korean language content! I just put Silent Sea on my list looks interesting.
I have to agree with this mindset. Technology is neither good nor bad, but it could be used for bad/good things. We should strive to progress society forward and we need to be careful with profitable distractions.
The North:
- Beijing sucks up all the resources, just like Moscow. People in the surrounding regions hate it, but it's also their best bet to make a fortune.
- Many regions feel post-Soviet. Industries are falling apart, the neighborhoods feel depressing. Young people leave and go to Beijing, Southern China, or abroad. It feels like how Eastern Europeans are making livings in Western Europe.
- People who stay in their hometowns are desperate to get jobs in the public sector.
- There are substantially more propaganda banners on the street.
The South:
- Just like op said, there are no obvious leaders. The cities in the two delta region create more network effects rather than suck up resources.
- The south is much more vibrant. People are more adventurous to make fortune in the private sector or start their own businesses.
- The vibes are less political, more economical.
Reader Dude - January 1, 2022 at 5:59 pm:
> Dan – I love your letters as always. In terms of China commentary it’s about as good as there is in the English speaking world, but unfortunately that bar is pretty low these days.
> I have to say – I’m a little disappointed re: your indictment of Chinese production of culture and some of the platitudes re: repression. The government can be heavy handed and has shown zero agility to respond when it comes to the propagandizing from the west, but you yourself are taking a western lens to what culture means and it’s embedded in your whole spiel (your references, your bit on classical music, etc.). In fact, writing from the states, one might even uncharitably call it the soft internalized racism (unavoidable) of ingesting a western standard of values.
> Why must the arbiter of cultural quality be what appeals to a commercialized western marketplace? Is it somehow a bad thing if China doesn’t produce manga or Kpop? Frankly it’s a failure of the state in some ways given that those cultural products help soften image on the world stage, but in short – Who is to say?
> Is not the rejuvenation of the Chinese people (something many subscribe to) a culture? Is not the rising patriotism and pride in China’s accomplishments by the vast majority of actual Chinese a culture? The rising “cultural level” (volunteers in Xi An delivering food as the area is in lockdown, the galvanizing of philanthropic attitudes after the Sichuan earthquakes) – Are those not cultures?
> Are we mistaking culture for entertainment? In 30 years are the artifacts you mention “culture”? Or some footnote in the history books, much as Madonna might be here stateside?
Though I certainly don't always get it right.
This was said about Japan 40 years ago. How would you compare/contrast the outcome for Japan versus the prospects for China?
Mostly, only very the well connected, or elite members themselves from original population managed to stay in the city through late seventies, early nineties.
The current "natives" are mostly people who descended from the new population who came into the city in seventies, and later.
The real reason native beijingers are hard to find these days in Beijing is because Beijing has grown rapidly in the last 20 years. They are “less” only because 外地人 are more. During my first trip to Beijing in 1999, the taxi driver would always be a native city Beijinger who couldn’t understand your Chinese unless you used lots of 儿话. That is no longer the case (the taxi drivers are still from Beijing, but from the outer counties rather than the central city).
But most of those people probably returned in the ensuing growth.
I wonder if the city is anywhere like my childhood two decades ago.
Things changed quickly when it returned in 2002, and then when I moved there to stay for almost a decade in 2007. It is a completely different place from my memories. The feelings, the momentum of society, the industries.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/chinas-reform-...
Can someone explain what this means? What does this governmental "charge" look like? Is it just a zoning thing, or is it more personal?
The infamed communist 5 years plans barely mean anything for the real economy.
South China got ahead in manufacturing due to market economy reaching it first.
Shanghai got banks because Jiang Zemin lived there, and he wanted money like every proper communist.
Chongqing seen its development as the only inland China big city, and lack of any other alternative.
Beijing is now late to the party, and bureaucrats there basically ordered it to become another "center" through administrative fiat.
I am not sure your basis for this. The presence of the policy itself is effective in guiding the human mind and interests, also broadcast certain information national wide. The policy is comboed with fiscal policy, i.e., easier loan for the designated sectors. And more effective use of nationally-owned enterprises, research facilities, etc.
Of course, policy needs to be realistic by matching the regional characteristics. As you said, one cannot industrilize the inner cities first, because the global economy is centered on marine transportation, so naturally it starts from Shanghai and guangdong, which are close to sea ports. But that does not make the policy less coherent. It just means that the policy is sensible and meaningful.
Does anyone know what this refers to? Is it prosecutions of Chinese researchers in the US?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/politics/charles-lieber-harva...
And there may have been another similar case, I can't recall. I believe the US line is that China was trying to steal research or something.
I don't believe any of the people implicated were charged with treason or spying or anything like that. It's been more mundane "failing to disclose bank accounts" kind of stuff. Whether that's indicative of anything is up in the air.
The US targeted mostly Chinese Scientists working in the US. His thesis is that caused excess harm to scientific productivity.
During the Trump administration, the US government began investigating a large number of ethnically Chinese scientists in the US. The initiative was supposedly about rooting out espionage, but it has ended up being more of a witch hunt.
The two worst cases so far are Prof. Anming Hu of the University of Tennessee (thankfully acquitted, after getting fired) and Prof. Gang Chen of MIT (this hasn't yet gone to trial, but it looks like the government is essentially going after him for doing his job).
The reputation of Mozart's three Da Ponte operas, along with The Magic Flute, are uniformly high and any ranking would come down to personal preference. Speaking as someone who is decidedly not an opera buff, it's the ostentatiously showy parts (the fugal exposition and chorale prelude pastiche in the magic flute; the three orchestras playing dances in different meters simultaneously in Don Giovanni; and of course the marvelous ensemble numbers which make up the act finales) which attracts me to Mozart operas. These displays of compositional virtuosity are sadly lacking in his Italian successors.
Some devotees of pure instrumental music may occasionally sneer at comic opera and consider it frivolous. This is undeserved since the rhythms of comic opera underly the classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The remarkable thing isn't that Mozart wrote great Italian comic operas as a German, but that he wrote much of his pure instrumental music as if they were comic opera.
[1]https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/04/22/the-ridiculous-s...
The lack of 'stupid culture wars' within the treatise is refreshing.
How many popular American outlets are addressing these kinds of issues?
The media in the US are rabidly obsessed with either demonizing or 'heroizing' a kid in Wisconsin's questionable and difficult-to-place-actions, whereupon in a spectacular bit of irony there was actually a lot of nuanced and thoughtful insight about the subject on TikTok of all places.
Pew's political topology is out [1] it's really good, but it doesn't bode well for the US as it identifies hardening, outrageous voices on the far end of 'both sides' that I suggest amounts to a serious cancer on the nation as those voices seem to consume everyone's energy on civic issues.
We're not even talking about the right things and when we start to get onto the right subject, it seems as though it's radicalized for clicks & views, or trivialized so the writer/commentator can 'seem smart'.
For example, for as much as I very much respect and support Elon Musk's work and achievements, most of his public commentary is glib and uninformed and he's not remotely prepared to start answering questions on these kinds of subjects (unless they are very specifically within his domain). We spend way too much time gawking over his Tweets instead of materially addressing 'manufacturing v. financialization'.
And we need to consume much, much more quality news coming out of China and the rest of the world.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v...
> A lot of macro indicators on China are disappointing, like a rise in the amount of credit needed to create growth and a fall in total-factor productivity growth. But we can’t let these poorly-measured data points govern as the gospel truth to understand this economy.
The reader is left to interpret the overly broad hand-wavy navel-gazing adjectives and adverbs.
I'm not sure what this very long "letter" is supposed to inform a reader about. There's no substance. I'm not sure it's intentional, but it's obvious.
Edit: A nice little tidbit also is that I’ve written comments on all sorts of contentious topics. But only when bringing up this specific factually based truth my comments tend to be downvoted within minutes. I wonder why.
(I didn’t downvote your comment.)
> That’s due to the operation of detention camps for ethno-religious minorities
I think a lot of people simply cannot wrap their head when they view from the Western angle. As a result, they sometime just fixate on some main-stream idea without realizing that those views are from limited exposure to the ground.
It's true that China has not produced much other attractions than 3body and tiktok, even 3body is heavily influened by US SF writing, and tiktok is originally produced in US by musically. The point is that these productions are easier to be accepted by the Western socieity, because they themselves are linagage from the western tradition, with a more tainted cultural identity than the indigenous stuff.
In reality, China have produced enourmouse amount of culturally diverse and innovative work for the domestic audiance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdkAyt9Q2A I'll give you one example of a recent production of a Cantonese opera mixed with modern filming tech of the classic Bai She Zhuan. And Pop star signing Song Dynasty Chi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t9VT9Dwiqg.
Of course, these color productions are very distant from the Western cultural heritage, and people from the West simply cannot appreciate their wonderfullness and depth.
It's unclear to me though if it is deliberate in this way for there not to be many cultural exports like this and if having a strong domestic scene is enough, however purely from a number game I would have expected more (which the author goes onto address later in the essay in the section "Strangling the cultural sector")
I don't think California deserves this label anymore. I propose we rename Silicon Valley to "MetaSoft" valley.
Ugh. California urban discourse is insufferable. Crazy to see a write up like that about booming livable cities without getting dragged into a quagmire about who's rightly deserving of a place to live.
They were not willing to compete. Intel and Cisco’s directors had plenty of net income they could have used to compete, but decided to reward shareholders in the present instead, rather than invest in the future.
A little over a hundred years ago we hadn't invented flight. We probably have many thousands of years left. Who says there's no way to build a city that makes our cities look the same way we look at a medieval town? Our 'developed' world is boring and stagnant because we've made a choice to not push towards the future, and instead relive the 80s pop culture in VR.
The fallacy of “rapid growth forever” has been repeatedly asserted multiple times in history, to be knocked down each time. The last time we went through this was with Japan, where, in the early 80s, the prediction was made that Japanese would be twice as rich as Americans by the year 2010. And then their real estate bubble crashed and they lost a couple of decades. China today is like Japan in the early 80s with an even more insane property bubble.
The developed world keeps developing, just at a far slower pace than the developing world. If China avoids the middle income trap and reaches developed status, then they will experience slow growth just like other developed countries do. But rapidly aging demographics is a huge challenge for China to overcome in sustaining its current rate of growth before reaching developed status.
Our developed world is stagnant because once you go from an agrarian undeveloped state into a state with vast quantities of built infrastructure, it becomes increasingly hard to economically justify ripping it all up to rebuild it better.
Let's say you build a tremendously good enough sewage and public water delivery system. Water quality is practically perfect. Then a technological breakthrough happens and you could build an even more efficient, environmentally responsible system, but the cost is you have to dig up every municipal water system around the country -- that's already working -- and build this new system. It is far far harder for a country to justify that if it already has a working system vs a developing coutry which might not even have municipal water.
And I'll point out that much of the architecture in European cities has preserved buildings that go back 1000 years. People aren't exactly tearing down 500 year old buildings to build modern glass and steel office buildings. The internals of these buildings have changed, like the Google office in Munich hid inside of an old city wall structure.
The reality is, China's growth is going to slow, for many reasons. 1) They have passed the low hanging fruit, and each new improvement becomes more expensive and requires more investment. 2) there is tons of inherent corruption and malinvestment in the system, they seem on the verge of a 2008-style or Japan-90s style crisis in real estate. 3) The one child policy harmed their demographics, and the median age of Chinese citizens will be much higher than it is in the US, couple that with a political system that can't attract or encourage significant overseas immigration to replace that low birthrate, and you have a recipe for stagnation.
This letter reminds me of lots of articles written during the 80s about Japan. Oh no, Japan is now spending on the Fifth Generation Computer Project, oh no, Japan just built this super impressive new manmade island airport, etc. Every month, a new article came out extolling the incredibly futuristically advanced Japan and how the US was falling far behind. We stopped making VCRs and TVs, Americans were bulldozing piles of CDs in anger. But the reality was that Japan's super impressive development run was going to hit diminishing returns, and Japan would become a nation like the US, or the countries of the EU, in terms of growth rate.
This will happen to China too, as surely as it happened to all of the other "Asian tigers". The CCP doesn't have a magic wand here, and if anything, it may hasten the stagnation.
And sure we might be in an era of stagnation for 100 years and all the singularity people may be crazy but how likely is it really, that in the grand scheme of things there's not another era of rapid change, and that some country in principle can find a mode of governance that doesn't end in 'late stage Japan'?
And eventually the Chinese people will want to enjoy life more rather than work hard to develop even more (especially since so many will be at or past retirement age).
Fascinating insights.
The gaping hole in his assessment of "Chinese cultural exports" is the failure to account for China's population and GDP per capita, which currently is only about $17k PPP. This is no position to be exporting culture to the globe from; that would just be a waste of resources. Culture is a result of being rich, not a cause of being rich.
In other words, China is not "culturally-stunted" than any other country with a similar GDP per capita PPP.
Chinese culture is also all in the Chinese language, and China has no strategic reason to make any effort to export it globally into English, a foreign language, where fitting translations would cost even more resources.
A lot of KPop and Anime was exported to the US by fans, who free of charge as a labor of love, did translation and distribution. In the 70s, 80s, even 90s, a lot of this happened by an underground distribution network, people would make copies and trade.
Indeed, I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching lots of Hong Kong Kung-fu films, eg Shaw Bros, Golden Harvest, etc. There didn't need to be a "strategic reason" for HK canto films to have atrociously bad translation and dubbing slapped on them and marked to Americans. It was done because someone noticed that Americans loved watching these things.
You're making excuses for the fact that domestic mainland Chinese art is suffering a crisis of creativity caused by the crushing censorship of the state. People only make "safe" art in China. If you make any art that criticizes the establishment, or tells history in a way other than they want it to be seen, you may find yourself punished.
Ask Ai Weiwei. This is not a conducive environment for artistic expression.