Leaving China
persuasion.community
persuasion.community
Most people in the expat community I know went to Hong Kong and Singapore instead for the following reasons: 1) Easy to do business 2) Easy to get your money in and out. 3) Low taxes 4) Central travel hubs in Asia 5) Less backwards mindset as these cities feel more cosmopolitan and are interconnected with the outside world
With HK having less and less freedom, Singapore is really the only choice for foreigners to have a decent life quality in Asia. Tokyo could potentially be an option too, but it's really hard to live there due the very different structures in Japanese society and taxes are pretty high.
Everything else is just detail.
Expat life is still pretty nice. Soho is bustling. Restaurants are reopening, clubs open to 6am.
Stuff like SVB, CS, and flow on effect to legal is probably just a big an impact.
There's other things as well, but the above things are quite important to me. Your mile may vary though :-)
But I'm also looking for a way out. For the reasons outlined in the article, yes, and others. General sentiment toward foreigners has rebounded a bit since the early days of the pandemic, but it's pretty clear that the government would like all the Americans, Canadians and Brits to kindly GTFO. And everyone else seems to be leaving: I lost about half my friends in the last two years.
My (privileged) problem is that I can't stomach the idea of moving back to the US. I moved here because I wanted to do something different with my life; the idea of living in the US again makes me feel like life would be over. Friends are moving to Singapore, Bangkok, Bali, Berlin, so I'll likely end up following them. Five years ago HK or Taipei might've been good options, but not these days.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/travel/museums-stolen-art... [1] https://www.iheartberlin.de/2016/01/26/famous-exiles-of-berl...
A few of the people I met at the tech events I visited have lived in Germany long enough to get citizenship, but haven't applied because they aren't sure they could pass the language exams, and would have to take a lot of effort to get enough practice speaking - they work in English all day, and speak English to all of their friends.
Berlin is a different world from even the larger cities in southern Germany, like Munich or Nuremberg - reachable by high speed train in 3-5 hours.
For Americans, think NYC (Berlin) vs. Dallas (Munich).
If you already are a EU citizen, you simply won't bother with German citizenship. It will become an interesting problem for democracy to solve with Luxemburg have some 47% foreigners, not sure how many are EU-citizens [1].
Dallas = Munich, sad but true.
[1] https://luxembourg.public.lu/de/gesellschaft-und-kultur/bevo...
To be sure, Taiwan is going to face increasing pressure from China in the coming years, and there is some chance that it might escalate into a hot war. But the sense of existential dread is much less for me than it was in China. Despite their best efforts, the party is much more capable of ruining the lives of people inside China than outside of it. Aside from Berlin, I've never lived in the other cities on your list, so I can't really compare, but if you enjoy the lifestyle of a tier two city in China and would like somewhere similar with a much less oppressive government, Taipei is a pretty good option.
I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit darker. It almost felt like another Chinese city. I had even been to HK several times when I was in middle school in Taiwan (I was born in America, but was a “reverse import” to Taiwan) as well as a mandarin language tutor during university, and was always amazed by the richness of HK culture from fishing villages in Saikung to bustling life in Tsim Tsa Tsui and in Central with relics of British colonialism. Now many unique elements of HK life had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy, or in software terms a hard fork of an alternate reality of what China could have been. It has cultivated its own culture, and retained elements of Chinese culture cancelled during the cultural revolution. It has its own identity from the aboriginal population, the settlers from the dynastic period, Japanese colonization, and influences from the Republic of China refugees (or occupiers, depending on your POV, post 1949 Chinese settlers) and American forces. And since 2018, I’ve seen the Taiwanese double down on their Taiwanese identity and pride, and in many ways Taiwan is the envy of China (also literally).
If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history. Now I would probably live in Taiwan and Japan.
Edit: Taiwan hasn’t always been a democracy, and the path to democracy hasn’t been easy (just ask America). It’s not perfect like any other well-running democracy, but it’s the closest paragon we have in the Chinese diaspora. The presidency has transitioned peacefully to different parties since the 1990s.
A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s.
Anybody having different opinions must be burned to the stake!
However the reductio ad absurdum tactic you employ to dismiss pointing out actual problematic behavior is typical of trolling itself. My opinion? I don't think that's an accident.
The 1990s being, well, not now, the correct conjugation is either “was” or “had been”, not “has been”.
Which relates directly to why its irrelevant.
Hell, it took decades even for post-WWII Germany to shake the ex-Nazi-high-ranking influence in its politics, media, finances, and so on, and the Nazi rule was just 12 years, and they had far more horribleness and more shame as a motive to stomp out those elements after 1945...
The same has been true in post-Franco Spain, and any other place with such history.
Things seem to have worked out fine for Central and Eastern European post-communist countries. Also Portugal, Greece.
History is not a "that was back in the day, doesn't matter anymore" affair.
It also feels like a borderline attack, implying that I and others are somehow “absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history”. Pretty odd to make a statement like that in response to someone who you know next to nothing about, no? If you want to contribute to a good debate and hope to bring me around to your point of view, I would ask that you try harder.
Well, either the point you were making was even more tangential to what was in this thread - a general observation unrelated to what we were discussing, or (as I read it), aside from the literal point, there was a deeper implicit point pertinent to what was discussed.
In this case, I wrote something along the line of "as close as year X, Y was the case", so your response can be read as: "you might think this date is close and thus events from that era still matter, but we tend to overlook how close a period in living memory is, so they matter less than you think".
>Pretty odd to make a statement like that in response to someone who you know next to nothing about, no
It wasn't writing about you, it even explicitly writes "it's difficult for societies with populations (...)". I was writing about a cultural difference.
Certain cultures got it lucky and didn't have much history of the sort to concern with, and so don't have much of a historical perspective (and how history affects the present). It's easier to have that perspective when you have had huge events like wars, dictatorships, and so on in your local livable history, than when you just read about those in the media (if many even do much of that).
You are entitled to your subjective interpretation. But my own reflection was that I perceived 1996 to be closer to the present than 1969 would have been in 1996. Thus I wanted to state a bias that I had discovered in myself, along with a trick to make it more obvious to perceive it.
> It wasn't writing about you, it even explicitly writes "it's difficult for societies with populations (...)". I was writing about a cultural difference.
Your initial response (which is what I responded to) was phrased differently in terms of the first few words. I do not have access to it, but I think my interpretation was more reasonable before you (arguably) improved it.
Regardless, this is greatly diverging from my minute initial observation. Thus I will “leave it here” and look forward to seeing you in another discussion in the future.
That doesn't really describe Taiwan. I'm still not sure of the point you're trying to make, but it seems like you are really trying to push down the people who managed to break free of the dictatorship imposed on them for 50 years by the mainlanders who came to Taiwan in 1949.
I'm not sure what your beef really is, but I have yet to read any reason for dismissing the decades old democracy that now exists in Taiwan. People my age might have been born under martial law, but most Taiwanese alive today have lived their whole adult life under this democracy. That's not incompatible with having knowledge of recent history, and Taiwan also has schools.
This Taiwanese person told me that elections are for the loser. If the loser does not believe in the validity of the election, it serves no purpose.
That's why electronic voting machines are anti-thetical to the purpose of an election. Electronic voting machines exchange trust for a more efficient election. That is why Taiwan does not use electronic voting machines.
That is a pretty impressive insight that was absent from my American civic education. I was very impressed with the civic education in Taiwan, and I was impressed with the average level of education in Taipei.
My subjective experience as an American was that Democracy is more healthy in Taiwan than it is in America.
>My subjective experience as an American was that Democracy is more healthy in Taiwan than it is in America.
Cause why?
Taiwan has its issues with first past the post voting, quality of news media and control of media (eg by sketchy foreign corporations) and conga line of infotainment propaganda outlets. There's a big economic incentive in reunificiation for some actors which perverts politics and discourse to an extent.
But to be honest.. America is currently a really low bar for democracy in the first place (speaking as someone living outside USA as well)
As one smart guy wrote, there's three kinds of power: tradition, institutions, and personality. My coralary: weak institutions attract strong personality.
See the other conversation re: China & Taiwan below. It'd be a shame to see a good thing go away.
The idea seems correct, however, unsure how electronic voting machine comes into the picture, perhaps only in a mental sense, but people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
there's that, but an electronic voting machine is more complex. Election fraud for paper ballots is "easily" detected, but not really so for electronic voting machines.
This is probably the main paper you are referencing?
A few questions I would expect to be answered:
How do we know all votes cast were legitimate?
How do we know that the voting machines recorded votes correctly?
How do we know the auditors are good faith actors?
How do we know ballots weren't lost/delayed (mail in)?
How do we know legitimate looking votes were cast by the right person?
Should I have to take a quarter long class in election mechanics to be satisfied that our voting system is legitimate? That's a bit of hyperbole, but I truly don't know how our elections work and I don't think I could understand them in an afternoon and it doesn't have to be that way.
Taiwan's elections are simple and self-evident. American elections are extremely complex and require trust in institutions.
Taiwan's elections optimize for trust. America's elections optimize for cost. Trust is priceless.
I really would like an explanation of what audit means. I am open to the idea of being surprised by a satisfying answer, but I am also asking because I don't think the answer will be satisfying.
Every electronic vote has a physical record, and is checked against each other. Fraud/mistakes occur, but never at the scale to shift any election.
More: https://www.eac.gov/election-officials/election-audits-acros...
8% of Americans are basically illiterate. 54% read below a 6th grade level.
I am not trying to attack you with that statement. This is a statement form one liberal to someone else I perceive as liberal leaning:
Your education privilege is off the charts.
We could have a system like Taiwan, but instead we have an electronic voting system. How do they compare and contrast? Why were electronic voting machines pushed on us? Which one has better understand-ability properties? Which one has better trust properties? What are the properties of electronic voting machines that make them desirable? Why do we have to convince people that voting machines are good (implying a lot of people don't think they are)?
We don't. As said, every electronic vote has a physical backup that is audited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results
This has been thoroughly, repeatedly, exhaustively researched and debated. Which is why most jurisdictions (in the USA) have returned to paper ballots.
This is misleading. The vast majority will have had no exposure to that evidence (there's no big stage you can do convincing presentations on that everyone will see).
Heck, I wouldn't know how to go about finding that evidence atm.
If I don't trust the election, that means I don't believe I'm actually in the minority, and if I don't believe I am in the minority, then I am being subjugated and oppressed by people who are using power to get their way rather than a mandate from the people to execute the people's will.
I am extremely liberal and Trump is the avatar of everything that I hate, but I don't believe the election is legitimate either. A sitting president called an election official to sway the election, and 2 years later it's not clear there are going to be any consequences. The mechanics of mail in ballots was messed with during an election cycle, and the person who did that is still in control of the postal system. If there are no timely consequences for attempting to cheat, how can you trust the integrity of the system? I don't. There are clearly no checks and balances for actual and obvious attempts to manipulate elections.
I think you can talk to just about anyone who works in security and they will tell you there is no reason to trust voting machines. On slashdot, the technical community nearly universally said "this is a bad idea" when Diebold voting machines were first adopted. That sentiment has been strong through technical communities for a long time. Even today, I think if you asked HN "from a technical point of view are voting machines a good idea?" there would be a resounding, absolutely not.
Because we won, it's less of an issue for us, but had we lost, we would question the results too. We would look around us and experience that no one else liked trump and ask "how can these results be legitimate" too, the same way they look at the people around them and go "everyone liked trump, how can these results be legitimate?" He called a Georgian election official, are we sure that didn't work? Did he call other state's officials and we didn't hear about it because it did work? How do we know? How do we know Biden didn't do that?
Denial is the first stage of grief.
> people have shown that they will not believe in the validity of the election regardless of the evidence presented.
You are failing to have empathy for these people. Evidence cannot be presented, because the mechanics of elections are not able to produce evidence. I am a well educated US citizen, but I think our elections amount to "trust us." Of course people don't believe evidence presented, because the evidence amounts to "trust us." "Trust this extremely complex system that only a handful of people might know how it functions in depth."
You say "regardless of evidence presented," but what if the system is not actually capable of producing satisfying evidence? What if the evidence is actually not satisfying? What if there were systems that could be satisfying, bit this one isn't able to be?
In Taiwan I could go watch an election and I found the legitimacy of it to be self evident because I found the mechanics of it simple and hard to argue with. I don't think there is anything self-evident about our elections. In America, who runs the voting machines is an important question. In Taiwan, who facilitates the voting stations doesn't make much difference. "Are the voting stations being watched" is an important question in Taiwan. "Are the voting stations being watched" doesn't really make sense here since we have mail in ballots and other methods.
Taiwanese don't have to say "trust us" they can say "go watch the election happen."
A hard pill to swallow for most of liberal America is that conservatives can be right for very wrong reasons. It's easy to say "you don't think the results are legitimate because you lost," it's much harder to say "can somebody in good faith not trust the election results?" "what might we have done to decrease trust in elections?" "Can we make our election system more resistant to claims of bad faith?"
Losers who have stopped believing in elections will complain about any mechanism, be it electronic or analog.
(In the US, they typically don't believe the hand-recounts, either. They do believe in gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement, though, so that's how the game gets played.)
For the skeptical, check out videos of how ballots are counted in Taiwan. Individual ballots are lifted out on the ballot box, one-by-one, and held up for any and all observers to verify. Compare this to how the matter is typically conducted in the U.S., in near-secrecy behind closed doors, involving convoluted use of a congeries of machines, having closed-source software.
Growing up we used to politely nod at the common belief that the 1960 presidential race (Kennedy vs. Nixon) was decided by Mayor Daley's corrupt intervention in Chicago. And, of course, the wild 2000 Gore vs. Bush race decided in Florida further eroded hugely trust in the electoral system. And etc. etc.
Hell he declared the elections fraudulent before they happened. What can possibly be done to prevent that from an elections standpoint?
We know what rioters are capable of when they actually want to overthrow govt: look at the autonomous zones and capitals that got ransacked in the upper north west (Seattle, Portland, etc). Those were over weeks where cops weren't allowed into entire city blogs, they declared themselves autonomous, and people were killed to that ends. They also received tons of institutional support from media, politicians, and wealthy people.
I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup. At LEAST the other riots were coups too, or more truly, only the leftist partisan riots can be considered attempted local coups given their stated goals and actions.
If you remember how the narrative evolved in real-time: in the preceding months the talking point was "only leftists riot", then on the capital riot and following days, the dominant narrative was "SEE! right wing people ALSO riot". Only days after that did the language start to coalesce around "actually this was was a COUP", and even then it was seen as hyperbolic even on reddit. Now it's been repeated so many times it's just taken as fact.
Because the fairly explicit goal was an autocoup.
> There was no institutional support
False.
> nobody got killed except for a rioter,
Even a successful coup is possible with no one getting killed;
> they all cleared out promptly by curfew
Because the coup attempt had already failed.
> By all indications it was a riot and a pretty mild one at that given the previous summer. How is that a coup?
“Coup” is not defined by intensity but by objective. The overtly intent was to use intimidation and/or violence against government officials to coerce a rejection of the electoral votes from sufficient states to allow the sitting President to extend his term nothwithstanding having been defeated in the election, at the instigation of the sitting President. It is a textbook autocoup attempt by its goals and ultimate instigation, which failed because the rioters were held back long enough for members of Congress to escape, but not by a wide margin.
Was it a hastily conceived, poorly coordinated, amateurish autocoup attempt? Yes, absolutely. Does that reduce its severity as a crime? No, no it doesn’t.
> I don't get how any honest assessment takes the actions by the partisans in DC as a coup.
It was a coup attempt, specifically an attempted autocoup. It wasn't a coup, because it failed.
> At LEAST the other riots were coups
No, none of those were coups, or even coup attempts. (The “Autonomous Zone” might be viewed as a hyperlocalized secession attempt, but that’s a distinct thing from a coup, seeking to separate territory from the control of an established government, not unlawfully take or extend control of said government.)
You just seem convinced of a coup and nothing will shake you. What did they do that was wholly different from a regular riot? Even on the inside they're just taking photos and walking around.
My assertion is that Taiwanese elections are much more simple and therefore much more understandable and much more trustable. American elections might be cheaper per capita.
If we are choosing a method of elections that is more complex and results in less trust, why are we doing it that way?
Election day isn't even a holiday.
I am having a little trouble taking that in good faith. For one, the evidence presented is not of a holiday shared by everyone (friends who could watch kids, partners who also have jobs, etc).
That's before asking if it's right that children cannot be with you to vote or if that could be done better. That's before asking if there was higher turnout in other groups, like underpaid teachers.
Other than bankers and people who work for the government (like teachers) few people get government holidays in my experience. There is a surge of temporary daycare workers for those days so parents can still go to work. Poorer parents dread those days. Public school, especially post pandemic has turned into free childcare and little more due to teacher shortages.
Early voting seems like a good thing to continue to me.
Fixing the issues that make your vote irrelevant at the national level unless you live anywhere but a very short list of places would be much higher on my list than a holiday. The gerrymandering is painfully obvious on the voting maps.
This is a distinction without a difference, no?
So was Czechoslovakia. What is your point?
Many Taiwanese don’t want war, but they already are functionally independent. The PRC has never governed in Taiwan. The ROC, which governed China from 1912 to 1949, governs Taiwan and its child islands.
Many young Taiwanese just want to be Taiwanese and left alone, but the vast majority want to keep the status quo as long as it’s tenable (it’s not, Xi Jinping has indicated a timeline). The big question is how this might be possible without poking the bear that resembles Pooh… It’s obvious to most Taiwanese that China won’t keep its promises, since it made clear violations of promises made to the HK people and UK.
Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.
Maybe data suggest otherwise?
The number of Taiwaneses that support Taiwan to "Maintain status quo, move towards unification" and "Unification as soon as possible" has been dropped from 12.8% and 5.0% in 2018 to 7.5% and 1.4% in 2019. Meanwhile the number of Taiwaneses that support "Maintain status quo, move towards independence" has been rised from 12.8% in 2018 to 25.8% in 2020.
Note: I am a one of the HongKongers fled to Taiwan after the Anti-Extradition protest in 2019.
[0]: https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7801&id=6963
Taiwan was in negotiations with Hong Kong to extradite him and the protestors were afraid of the implications.
In the end, a much stronger National Security Law was passed after the riots and the murderer still walks free.
Taiwan: fine, we can negotiate the extradition if you insist on us taking the case.
HK gov: actually we are gonna make an all encompassing law that deals with extradition. It also makes extraditing criminals/political refugees/booksellers/whoever the ccp request quick and easy but please ignore it.
No.
The HK government broke off the negotiations on purpose. They want to use that as an excuse to pass some laws that gain Beijing more control over HK.
It was the proposed laws that terrified HongKongers, not the negotiations.
I don't think this will end well.
I don't understand a lot about it, but wouldn't people expecting an invasion from a much larger country want universal compulsary service and as much training as they can get? Even for those less motivated about winning, it would help them survive a war.
Throwing bodies at it won't work.
If something happens it's likely over air/sea/tactical weapons than lots of foot soldiers.
And yet most of the young people I encounter are somewhat resigned to the inevitability of invasion.
Prior to the HK affair, some older Taiwanese I met would suggest that closer integration could bring economic benefits, but I don't hear that these days.
With a number of HK journalists that I respect now in prison or having fled, I can only agree. The HK spirit and culture that once thrived in the city has all but disappeared, as the Chinese government applies their embrace and extinguish approach to cultural assimilation. When you can be imprisoned for life for uttering the wrong words, it tends to silence any dissent.
Lots of producers of different kinds have had their technologies copied, skills learnt and then abandoned for and only to hire them on a consultancy basis for when things break.
In hindsight it has likely hurt Taiwan's economy more than it has helped.
It's not my personal opinion. These are the polls from varies institutions in Taiwan (in Chinese): https://www.modernchinastudies.org/cn/issues/past-issues/106...
The first column is date (ROC year 80 = year 1991, etc), the second is pro one-country-two-systems, the third is against it.
You can see the percentage of pro went from ~10% to ~30% then back to ~10%. It has never been the majority.
A strong majority want to maintain the status quo or gradually move toward independence. Very few want unification. It's important to understand that China promises to invade if Taiwan declares independence (the Anti-Secession Law requires that response), which means many people would ideally prefer independence but in practice support the status quo because de facto independence (the status quo) is better than being invaded. Both sides of Taiwanese politics formally support the status quo, although the DPP has stronger pro-independence leanings.
Taiwanese identity (as opposed identifying as Chinese) has also trended up in recent decades and now most people only consider themselves to be Taiwanese and not Chinese. https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7800&id=6961
Table of contents:
- Taiwan: Taiwan is a vital island that is under serious threat
- The past: How Taiwan is shaped by its history and identity
- The economy: It is time to divert Taiwan’s trade and investment from China
- Semiconductors: Taiwan’s dominance of the chip industry makes it more important
- The home front: The battle with China is psychological as much as physical
- Defence: Taiwan needs a new defence strategy to deal with China
- Politics: Taiwanese politics faces a crucial election in early 2024
- What Taiwan needs: Taiwan desperately needs support from the world
I had no idea how wide it is until a family member married someone from Asia and he explained ot me that his family thinks of themselves as ethnically Chinese, although they're totally disconnected from China.
Then the comment, paraphrasing, "they think they're Chinese when they're not Chinese nationals at all". If their ancestors were from China, they don't "think" they're ethnic Chinese, they are ethnic Chinese. Unless you get into the nitty gritty clans and groups of the gigantic landmass. The use of "think ... although" indicates you disagree with how they identify their ethnicity. Thus I assumed you felt it was a problem.
Apologies if I read intentions that weren't there.
Just as an example of something with a flimsier premise. Say a German American who doesn't speak the language, don't have known family there, have no loyalty to Germany, celebrate none of the German festivals, and the only indication left is a last name Schmidt. We don't say, "huh the German diaspora is everywhere" when these people say their ancestors are from Germany.
Consider the way Russians-in-exile perceive themselves in the current geopolitical context.
This is super common in Europe. We have people who think of themselves as X and speak Xian as their mother tongue even though the region has been part of Y country for centuries.
Slovenians, for example, managed to survive under foreign rule for about 1100 years before re-gaining independence.
Nationality and ethnicity are very different concepts.
for a more American example: Ask any of the indigenous peoples how they feel about their American, Canadian, Mexican, etc. nationality.
> Consider the way Russians-in-exile perceive themselves in the current geopolitical context.
Those who I've spoken to identify themselves as Russian citizens temporarily in exile, whilst I am ethnically Russian who has no connection to the country at all. I don't think these are the same.
You have Bretons that are ethnically close to Irish/Scotish, Alsaciens who are ethnically Germans, Basque who are similar to the Spanish Basque, Corse who want to be independent...
A better example of a country that more or less encompass an ethnicity would be Germany, or Japan. But even there you'll find exceptions (Ainu in Hokkaido, Okinawa being also ethnically different as Ryukyu vs Yamato...)
The fact that it has substructure and blurred lines doesn't mean it isn't a valid abstraction.
Another interesting tidbit is that after a civil war in China, part of the Chinese army that lost the war fled to northern Thailand. And there they settled in the mountains [0].
From my understanding (from a Dutch man that lives nearby who used to be a travel guide in Thailand) many (Thai-)Chinese people here in northern Thailand still maintain very close ties with their families in Taiwan. Also, several villages here also have their own little "China-towns", which can be interesting places to visit.
> The soldiers' war did not end after their own "long march" from Yunnan to Möng Hsat in Burma's Shan State. The Burmese soon discovered that a foreign army was camped on their soil, and launched an offensive. The fighting continued for 12 years, and several thousand KMT soldiers were eventually evacuated to Taiwan. When China entered the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a desperate need for intelligence on China. The agency turned to the two KMT generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China for intelligence-gathering missions. In return, the agency offered arms to equip the generals to retake China from their bases in the Shan State. The KMT army tried on no fewer than seven times between 1950 and 1952 to invade Yunnan, but was repeatedly driven back into the Shan State. The ending of the Korean War in 1953 was not the end of the KMT's fight against the communist Chinese and Burmese armies, which continued on for many years, supported by Washington and Taiwan and subsequently funded by the KMT's involvement in the Golden Triangle's drug trade.
>In 1961, Tuan led some 4,000 battle-weary KMT troops out of Burma to a mountainous sanctuary in Mae Salong in Thailand. In exchange for asylum, the Thai government allowed them to stay on the understanding that they would assist in policing the area against communist infiltration. As a result, most of the village's inhabitants today are ethnic Chinese and direct descendants of those KMT soldiers. At the same time, General Lee of the 3rd Regiment established his headquarters at Tham Ngob, north-west of Chiang Mai. The KMT army was renamed "Chinese Irregular Forces" (CIF) and was placed directly under the control of a special task force, code-named "04", commanded by Bangkok.
> After the soldiers reached Mae Salong, China and Thailand struck an agreement to transfer the administration of the group to the Thai government. The provincial governor of southern Thailand, Pryath Samanmit, was reassigned as the governor of Chiang Rai, to oversee the KMT division, but upon taking up his position, Samanmit was killed by communist insurgents. Soon afterwards, the KMT division was ordered to assist the Thai government in countering the advancing armies on Thailand's northern borders and the internal threat from the Communist Party of Thailand. Fierce battles were fought in the mountains of Doi Laung, Doi Yaw, Doi Phamon, and Mae Aabb, and the communist uprising was successfully countered. The bloodiest operation was launched on 10 December 1970, a five-year-long campaign that claimed over 1,000 lives, many from landmines. It was not until 1982 that the soldiers were able to give up their arms and were discharged to settle down to a normal life at Mae Salong. As a reward for their service, the Thai government gave citizenship to most of the KMT soldiers and their families.
---
I saw lots of chinese people at Pica Pollos across the country, but never saw them outside the restaurants and don't know much about where they live or what life is like for them in the DR. I'm not sure if each pica pollo is run by a chinese family that lives on site at the restaurant.
And they are often a distinct community, with their own language (a dialect from where they came from in China). They were often economic migrants, so tend to be seen as a "merchant class" in these countries and hold quite a lot of political power.
The Peranakan in Malaysia are a good example. And there is continued strife in those countries as these Chinese-Malaysian often have much more political power than their numbers alone would suggest.
[0]: Actually I think this is true of most of South East Asia where the Chinese community doesn't have as distinct a separation as Malaysia and Singapore
Bangkok is ethnically a mostly Chinese city, and is also Thailand’s richest region by far.
Do you have a source for that because that has not been my experience?
> As of the 2000 census, there were 6,355,144 registered residents in the city. However, this figure does not take account of the many unregistered residents and daytime visitors from the surrounding metropolitan area. More than 50% of Bangkokians have some Chinese ancestry.
They are still Thai, they often don’t even speak Chinese, just ethnically Chinese (and then I guess it depends on how you count mixed ancestry).
This is like saying “most English people can speak French” vs “a majority of English people learn some French at school”
So it is quite possible that the argument of Thai people being Chinese would parallel more strongly; English people don't just speak a bit of French, they have the same ancestors and may as well be French. Hopefully the ethnic Chinese entered Thailand under more rosy circumstances!
That’s not really true though unless you take an excessively liberal interpretation of what it means to be French. The Celts weren’t French, the Danes weren’t French, the Romans weren’t French, the Saxons weren’t French, and even the Normans had only been in France for a century before invading, although they picked up the local language pdq. The only people to successfully invade after 1066 were the Dutch, and they would assure you they weren’t French.
> and the Thai tourist economy at least likes their money
Yeeees, but the government (regardless of which) has been talking about trying to move to richer tourists since forever, and discouraging large numbers of Russian and Chinese tourists who they think spend less. So yes, lots of Chinese tourists, but if they could wave a magic wand to replace those with Japanese, Korean, and American tourists, they'd do it in a heartbeat
> Bangkok is ethnically a mostly Chinese city
This is untrue, although I've heard (and would believe) that the majority of middle-class Bangkok has some Chinese heritage
> and is also Thailand’s richest region by far
Actually, until Covid's effect on tourism, that crown was held by Phuket, although Phuket also has a high Chinese influence.
Places like koh chang (my personal favorite) become really deserted, not devoid of people, but you might be the only person at some lazy restaurant or bar that was full and bustling just a few weeks ago.
It turns out most Chinese tour operators throughout SE Asia run a completely vertical business, wherein they own all touchpoints their guests interact with (e.g. the restaurants, the bus company, the gift shops, etc.). Further, these are all staffed by immigrant Chinese. This results in all tourism profits being captured by Chinese nationals and businesses (and being exported back home as remittances) while burdening local infrastructure. Locals hate this.
For what its worth, I never heard / witnessed any hostility towards local ethnic Chinese (Peranakans), whose status, as the parent comment notes, is locally prominent. (Though there have been some bloody clashes in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_Chinese...
[0] Living in SE Asia, lots of extended chats with locals throughout the region.
I heard the exact same complaint in Italy. Chinese tourist groups come to Venice, annoy all the locals by dropping trash on the floor, but only buy their souvenirs at Chinese-owned gift shops. And they sleep on the Chinese-owned cruise ship.
The current map of China is one variation of many, many historical maps, which vary considerably. (Ask the Tibetans, in particular.) It might look like a cohesive government today, but so did the USSR - the Communists suppressed the ethnic differences, but the USSR exploded into many different countries when the Communists lost power - including Ukraine, Belarus, Modova (afaik), the Baltic states, Central Asian countries, and more.
I wonder what the truth is of China now; it's a question nobody asks.
If the European Union had been more successful and had a couple more generations totally immersed speaking English, you could imagine some Chinese people in the year 2123 saying 'wow, Europe is actually a whole Civilization politically unified as a nation. Who would have thought".
That'd be true today in a timeline where Napoleon won.
Or a timeline in which the Roman Empire never collapsed. Which is what I think is a better comparison to China.
No, it's unrealistic to think the the ROC would ever effectively surrender to the PRC however HK's reintegration was managed.
It was originally a time of optimistic hope that China would become more and more democratic, and the integration of HK back to the mainland will not have been hard (at least, china would meet somewhere in the middle).
I don't know who was optimistic. The West? Definitely not those in HK. It was a time when anti-China sentiment was high and supported by the media, artists, etc as the trend (vs the crackdown now). There were songs and campaigns supporting those that wanted freedom. Learnt from history many of the older generation that have witnessed the war and after knew of how CCP and army worked.
No 1 wanted a death sentence either. Those have worked in the mainland know the "law" doesn't exist as it does in the West (including HK at the time). Gang activity vastly dropped post-1997 because of a fear of the death sentence. A lot of them and their money left for other countries.
The ROC/Taiwan was also happy to see the British go and their regret was that the communists succeeded where they had failed (and in fact did nothing at all as all foreign settlements were kicked out by the PRC).
It's a lack of cultural and historical understanding not to realise that.
Likewise the focus since 1949 has always been Taiwan. It's HK that has been used as a distraction and 'tool' by the West.
Reunification? Maybe welcomed by the elders, among the young people, majority prefer to be independent
Obviously, the context the meaning was that there was a cause to effect link between how things were going in China and, especially HK, and the likelihood of a reunification with Taiwan.
So I pointed out that the situation in HK is not really relevant because, even if it had gone perfectly 'well' the ROC would still never had surrendered to the communists. The bottom line is that regime change on the mainland is a necessary condition.
...
>If I were to live in Asia, it might have once included Hong Kong because of its unique British history
OTOH this attitude is why PRC finally calibrating HK for PRC nationals/one-way permits instead of privileged foreign expats was long overdue. Mainlanders I know in HK find the new mix PRC/HK mix more preferable than UK/HK, less visible discrimination etc. Local nativism still exists but less overt than pre NSL. Applies to the mainland as well - first exodus of privileged discontent expats who thought they were indispensable in the mid 2010s - only to be replaced by qualified nationals. Think of it as PRC fixing their H1B problem. Something many in tech have comparably aligned opinions on.
E: over comment limit @charlieyu1
That's ~2 years worth of one way permits from PRC. Xi can snap his fingers and send 1M unemployed college educated mainlanders to HK tomorrow if he wants. Let's not pretend it's a big / existential loss, reality is PRC now has an abundance of talent who are much more deserving of living/running HK than most HKers who were merely privileged to be born in a city with constrained immigration requirements that puts mainland hukous system to shame. Under any reasonably fair system, HK should be treated like just ANY OTHER CHINESE CITY, like how under qualified people get squeezed out via gentrification in tier1 cities in every other country leading to local culture changes. It's not pretty, but it's how most of the world functions.
Ultimately HK "culture" is the result of undue privilege enforced by 2 systems that benefit locals and expats instead of 1B+ PRC nationals. Expats I get, because some expertise needs to be imported and you need foreigners in the country for track2 diplomacy. But unlike pre 2000s when PRC human capital was borderline North Korea, there's nothing particularly deserving about a person born and raised in HK anymore. If anything they are increasingly less deserving, with a particularly bad human capita / talent pool. HK _still_ some of the poorest tertiary education statistics by high income standards (~25% when it should be 40-50+%) to stay competitive. Meanwhile PRC is spitting out 8M+ higher-ed a year, there's no reason why HKers or expats should have priority over qualified mainlanders anymore. If HKers want to emigrate, go ahead, there's no shortage of deserving replacements in mainland with 100x more bodies to draw from. For mainlanders, continuing HK privilege simply doesn't make sense anymore.
And why people born and raised in Hong Kong have to give way to privileged mainlanders who don't share any culture with us at all?
I find that asians often have very rosy ideas about the UK, but once they're here they're bound to notice that it's a decaying shithole and leave. Or maybe commit suicide like that 27 year old woman in London.
Not like people don't commit suicide elsewhere. UK might not be the best but it's still a lot better than some places.
And yet for all its problems it is still a modern, vibrant, multicultural, successful democracy on the doorstep of Europe. Which is why so many people continue to emigrate there.
You seem to be way too flippant about cultural genocide.
Que similar REEEs from a bunch of young, privileged HK nativist about dirty mainlander shitting on their streets, taking their jobs and leeching their benefits (all somewhat true). But in America/west they're not called freedom fighters, they're called alt right protecting white culture, and (not accusing you) tends to adopt the flippant narrative accusing immigrants mixing their own culture as "cultural genocide". In HK’s case, mainlanders get lumped together, as if there's no regional diversity from a huge country of 1.4B people. It's the familiar culture war pattern of privileged locals mad at poor mainland (Mexicans) doing menial labour while being unsightly eyesores, while skilled mainland labour is taking their jobs and rich mainland pig farmers are buying their penthouses whilst flaunting wealth and reminding locals that HK was great when PRC was poor, so lets make HK great again.
Broad point being, in-demand urban centres in PRC (and around the world) have experienced dramatic shifts in demographics due to rapid urbanization and migration patterns (both domestic and international) causing city folk to collide with country bumpkins or dominant supremacists with ethnicities they find "inferior". But most places largely integrate while life and culture moves on. Until the alt right, or those nativists/localists parallels in HK politicize en masse and rally against filthy foreigners (alien mainland "locusts") and lose their shit and burn down the city over the fact that culture is changing to accommodate/reflect these inferior outgroups.
I'm not even unsympathetic to groups including in the west who think identity / culture has changed too much too fast. But I'm also not going to shed tears after they get stomped when they operationalize their nativism. All these arguments defending that only HKers should determine HK culture forgets that PRC "immigrants" to HK are NEW HKers and get a voice too, even if the flows inevitably shifts them towards becoming "just another Chinese city" - as if Chinese cities are all homogeneous. From a mainland perspective, the alternative vision of a British HK, lashing out to forever be untouched from 99% of "one" country, is absurd.
Maybe think about the "why" instead of just complain? Try to understand things instead of just saying they suck?
- Can you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc in China? No.
- Do you get a death sentence in China? Yes.
- If you say something against the current government can you get arrested? Yes.
- Do you know what happened to Jack Ma and many others?
- Can you move your hard earned money out of China?
And lots more...
No it's not the same. HK provided what China mainland couldn't. It was seen as a paradise at 1 point and PRC wanted to get rid of this superiority. It made more $$$, had better jobs, better lifestyle, etc. People wanted to go here like in the "gold rush". The hype train was setting foot on HK = getting rich. Of course this didn't happen. This created a huge divide.
It's not that the culture changed. It's not that things moved fast. It's that it's driven away the essence of what made HK great.
And it's not like Americans don't complain about Mexicans. Trump even wanted to build his own wall :)
Sure it's not the same anymore, but HK status quo was not sustainable, especially on national security grounds from where they basically had carte blanche to commit treason and be spy capital of Asia/PRC by slagging on NSL implementation for 20 years. Bringing "rule-of-law" to pirate cove sucks for the pirates. Yes they had a very good setup where they can flaunt increasingly unearned superiority to the mainland, but no reason why the mainland should maintain that arrangement in perpetuity, especially when it's received so ungraciously. As for your list, post NSL HK, you can still access foreign social media, death penalty still abolished in HK, you can still talk shit about gov (granted you don't conspire with foreign powers / undermine one country security), like a handful of folks renditioned by PRC post handover is pretty mild for the shenanigans HK was up to pre revolution, and HK still hotbed of capital flight. Yes a lot of perks are justifiably constrained, because they never took the one country part of 1C2S seriously.
Again, I get why locals went nativist and think post NSL HK is reduced - and it is - but they're still dripping in special administration privileges. Meanwhile it's great for PRC nationals now, which is frankly how it ought to be. The optimism that mainland would move closer to the HK system instead of vice versa was always hubris to anyone who looked at the numbers. State side, alt right Americans got away with as much as HKer nativists, until they stormed capitol/legco. That's when the hammer drops anywhere.
Is that just your vision of the country? As per the other comments before Xi started the country went in a different direction. Just because you're supporting another faction does not make HK a wrong?
> Meanwhile it's great for PRC nationals now, which is frankly how it ought to be.
Your bias is clear as day... so let's leave it there as it's pointless. Like those hands are very clean.
> by PRC post handover is pretty mild for the shenanigans HK was up to pre revolution
Because you're turning a blind eye to it all? Like when they hold up your family, your business, etc hostage just to ensure you cast a vote on a PRC supported candidate and claim the election is clean?
> especially on national security grounds from where they basically had carte blanche to commit treason
The nation isn't CCP. Clearly I give up. To take the analogy you're saying that America = Trump and anything else is treason.
No, that's the OG 1C2S vision, and frankly anyone with half a brain should understand why. HK was to implement NSL on her own, with PRC having unilateral ability to implement if HK politics took too long or security situation dictates. Boils down to this:
PRC gave HK 20 YEARS. 20 YEARS where HK existed in a national security state of exception where they can operate as a spyhub into PRC and HKers can conspire with foreign influence consequence free. That patience/benevolence on the CCP part is bordering on retarded. Literally no country in the world that's not a basket case would allow such a lapse in security to exist. Including HK under british admin. Every CCP leader since handover has hounded HK to pass NSL on their own. They failed, because they never took 1C part of 2S seriously. HK is wrong because when given the opportunity to govern itself, it failed with respect to national security, which is near #1 thing on the list of sovereign priorities.
Of course the west/US looks at this absurd situation and tries to defend it because it benefits them. But it’s not complicated - national security oversight applies to all subjects and every inch of a sovereign soil is the norm. HK is not special in that way anymore, but IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSE TO BE,
>turning a blind eye to it all
It's mild because most they did was arrest and purge a bunch of compromised candidates with connections abroad, again treason. Incumbent HK political class drunk on western influence was overdue for purge post NSL, like why would anyone allow compromised candidates to run for office? Except PRC did for 20 years, leading to accumulation of rot. ~200 arrested and ~125 charged almost 3 years post NSL is kid gloves.
>Trump and anything else is treason
I'm saying storming the capitol hill / legco in HK will get your movement stomped regardless of affiliations. Heads roll when gov building starts being attacked.
So really you are talking about the cultural differences developed from 1950 to now. Which is still quite large because of the cultural revolution... but "Cultural Genocide" seems like not the correct term.
I have many Singaporean friends of Chinese ethnicity, and most would see themselves distinct from China—not Chinese but of Chinese heritage.
That said the PAP has used the legal system to exclude opposition candidates and the election districts are gerrymandered [0].
But even with these issues resolved I believe the PAP would still win elections [1]. They've steered the economy well. The PAP regularly receive praise here on HN because of their effective technocracy.
[0] - https://newnaratif.com/how-gerrymandering-creates-unfair-ele...
It only takes one person going "rogue" to topple this system of trust. Is it so hard to imagine that not all authoritarian systems could be continuously benevolent?
Which is why the preparations should be prevented, even against someone who seems benevolent at the time.
Also, Singaporean of Chinese descent are generally not huge fans of China. While some older folks have drunk the CCP Kool-Aid, among the young there is a lot of straight up racism/prejudice against "PRCs" (mainlanders), especially around ten years ago when there was a huge wave of immigrants, many of whom didn't even try to assimilate (learning English etc). Taiwan, by contrast, is viewed very favorably.
How does this assertion fit in with the polls cited in the Wikipedia entry for China-Singapore relations [1] and other polls [2]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Singapore_relati...
[2] https://www.iseas.edu.sg/media/commentaries/singapore-in-the...
I don't want to reduce what you've said, but the fact is that Taiwan grew rich because of US support that helped integrate it into the global economy, and that wouldn't have come without its opposition to the mainland.
Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR. India plans on doing the same wrt to China, but that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO.
People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream.
Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth (regardless of what 'expats', who often both fetish-ize and dehumanize Asians, think).
Sure, during the 2000s they moved ahead as they weren't stupid and didn't blow that chance, they're smart and hard working, but their rise is ultimately due to the US great interest in that island for military/strategic reasons.
What a romantic reinterpretation of reality. TSMC was founded by a guy who studied at MIT and then worked in semiconductors at Texas Instruments for over twenty years, after which he was tasked by Taiwans government to develop the country's technological sector.
> USA have given a few planes here and there but that's not even close to 1% of the support to have given Taiwan's rise.
Maybe if you total it over the last 6 decades or so. It's hardly surprising they don't need financial support for their economy today. In the 50s, their GDP didn't even hit one billion yet, and over that decade and the early 60s, the US provided more than 2 billion dollars in financial aid, in the early years over 10% of their GDP. No other Asian country ever received that much financial aid (in relative terms). This was absolutely a relevant factor that jump started their economy.
> China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR.
China's split from the USSR began in the early 1970s under Mao. The first seeds of economic growth didn't sprout until the late 1970s under Deng Xiaopeng. Most of China's economic growth didn't happen until after the USSR was gone.
https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download/p...
> Since the 2000s, India has made remarkable progress in reducing absolute poverty. Between FY2011/12 and 2015, poverty declined from 21.6 to an estimated 13.4 percent at the international poverty line (2011 PPP $1.90 per person per day), continuing the historical trend of robust reduction in poverty. Aided by robust economic growth, more than 90 million people escaped extreme poverty and improved their living standards during this period.
And, as another reply noted, China grew rich after the USSR collapsed. So your facts are wrong.
But even apart from the facts, your thesis doesn't make much sense to me. "Western powers helped Taiwan and China grow rich because politics, and this is bad because ..."?
Taiwan didn't get rich because of the US. Taiwan got rich because of mainland china. The rise of Hong kong, taiwan, singapore and even to some degree south korea all resulted from the opening of china in the late 60s and 70s. The chinese elites' decision to open up trade with the world is what resulted in the rise of the asian tigers.
> Similarly, China wouldn't have grown rich had it not been a pawn against USSR.
Had nothing to do with the USSR. China was never a pawn for or against the USSR or US or anyone else. China got rich for the same reason saudi arabia got rich or any other nation got rich. China decided to utilize their greatest resource ( a billion relatively cheap labor ) after the USSR fell.
> People underestimate the power of the Anglo-Empire which the British passed over to the Americans, one they continue to run to this day, without so much as a squeak from the mainstream.
Who underestimates it? The entire world order is understood to be an american world order by everyone on earth.
> Given that the West is banking on India to do their bidding, I doubt anyone will halt China's growth
Barring ww3, I doubt china's growth can be slowed. We shall have to wait and see.
Very interesting. Would you go into more detail?
Of course there might be similarities, but the Hong Kong story is still completely different.
Precisely, I couldn't say it better.
As a sidenote, the author says he does not like his kids playing "war" in Chinese playgrounds - I wonder how he will feel about the active shooter drills that are now part of every kids life in the US.
Note: I'm not Chinese.
Sometimes, the political system is better.
People? There is nothing new under the sun.
Maybe Im missing your point, but to take a hyperbolic example, surely you wouldn't live in north Korea and say "There is no place, and no time, where people are better than what you see before you right now."
(Agreeing with you btw)
People can become hardened, callous, mean, and damaged to a greater or lesser degree in durable ways that outlast political circumstance.
If you beat and abuse a child, and that child will be more likely to beat and abuse others. This is called the cycle of violence. You can absolutely have times and places where this is more or less prevalent.
"people are people" on a slave plantation as well, but their behavior is not the same as those living in Seattle. If you flipped a switch on the political system overnight, the people would not flip with it. You might expect to see trauma and damage to impact behavior for generations to come, even if you magically teleported them to Seattle.
I know families that fled the cultural revolution in China, and it still has behavioral impacts on people 60 years later, including children who have never even been to China. Many viewed their neighbors as threats, thieves, and informants and are less "nice" to strangers as a result. It changed who they are as people in durable ways that outlasted the causal circumstance, and informed how they teach their children to treat strangers living in Seattle 60 years later.
Surely you can imagine a place where conditions are not conducive to "being nice" and as a result, people are less nice overall. You might see the same absolute range, with examples of extreme kindness or terrible behavior, but the mean and typical behavior can be shifted.
Anyway, I think the original point is that you really live in the small group of friends and your interactions with strangers, while also part of life, it's less meaningful. So, you can find a culture that matches you more closely, but unless the culture you are in is completely disgusting to you, you're probably optimising the wrong thing.
I would push back a little bit on the idea that these differences are purely superficial. Humans can have real cultural differences regarding where they find meaning in life, how they relate to others in society, and if they ever find satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment in their own lives.
Just because such differences can not be summed and weighed against each other to determine which culture is "better", does not mean they are the same.
This is the post-modern sentiment that I reject. E.G the differences can not be compared so therefore they are the same.
I grew up in the US but I've lived in South Africa for nearly 10 years. I've also lived in Switzerland and Mexico.
So I've seen enough of a range of how people live to know there are better and worse conditions. Maybe there is no true perfect country or culture, but there are definitely tradeoffs.
You might love the culture and hate the government, or love the government but hate the culture.
Like I love how friendly South Africans are, but my God the government is so corrupt. I love how the Swiss government works, but Swiss people aren't known for being easy to make friends with. God forbid you flush the toilet after 10pm.
So depending on what you are optimizing for, some places really are better than others.
In retrospect, were you searching or escaping?
Hope you find your happy place. Good luck :)
Spain (the government and regulations around renting places) was unfriendly to newcomers as its a very socialist country and not very welcoming to digital nomads. Everything there is built in a way to expect a local bank account, local job, etc. From the moment of trying to get a local ID card it was clear that you were not really wanted there. Processes made purposely difficult and requirements differ from police station to police station. Beautiful country, but given that I do not intend to stop working remotely as a contractor it made basic things there very difficult. Spain is quite corrupt however so if you have money you _can_ get around these issues via some lawyer agencies who get you through the door in a matter of days of what otherwise can be a half-year wait in queue, but I just found the system fighting me too much.
Finland is great though, everything runs efficiently, most of everything can be done online, just like in Estonia, but much like Estonia, very difficult to make friends and the culture in general is quite closed and people keep to themselves a lot. Most people I know here have had the same friends since highschool. So when it came down to Finland or Estonia, I just chose the one I already had friends at.
Columbine was 1999. I think he'll be more surprised by the level of political division and general impoliteness there is in the US.
https://globalbrief.ca/2020/06/zeal-and-chinas-wolf-warrior-...
This goes way further than most to explain "Chinese characteristics" (my term usage not link's).
China is very complex and belies any simple summary. I definitely think it's a vastly smarter state than Russia... who by comparison it must now regard as a baby sitting project.
You’re not just paying in your own freedoms. You’re paying in the freedoms of others, like the Muslims that the Chinese government have decided aren’t compatible with the “great society” that you seek.
It's not like China was a beacon of human rights until "now". I don't think SA is really a little brother either. They still behead people in public squares. The whole "human rights" issue in China is really just a pretext and use of U.S soft power to isolate China. But "everyone" know that at stake is really the economic and millitary rivality. The U.S couldn't really care less about the muslims in China. Just look how much it cares about women in Afghanistan. Let's stop pretending we are little children. China is starting to influence our way of life and we should push against that but I just hate the B.S pretexts. It feels like propaganda and we hate propaganda, don't we?
Are you making the argument that because there are things that are possibly worse, we should ignore the bad?
Does China provide that? Honest question, I don't know much about it.
I visited Beijing once, and it ranks on the bottom of the cities I'd like to live in. Of course, it's just my personal impression and Beijing is obviously not representative of the whole China.
China has a ton of problems that aren't readily apparent unless you are feet on the ground. The majority of the culture of china is, "dog eat dog" in that you will be scammed and taken advantage of unless you speak fluent Mandarin.
You will run into problems with excessive Chinese bureaucracy both with the government and services you need. The only way to break through is with a bribe.
Things we take for granted like food and product safety are secondary.
In the first month, I got incredibly sick for a food born parasite (this was from a good grocery store too nonetheless).
Don't ever eat from street vendors (google gutter oil).
You also run the risk of getting physically attacked when relations with America are rough. I heard stories of a guy that got jumped by a group of chinese men after Trump was elected. He didn't even vote for him and the police did not care.
China is the type of place you visit, make a bunch of money, and get out.
In all honesty, you'd be happier living in a 2nd or 3rd tier Benelux or Dach town.
Seems that term isn't common in English.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-A-CH
https://www.statista.com/topics/4623/dach-countries/#dossier...
Hope you are white. If so, I'm certain you'll have a great experience. You'll be shown the modernity and good side of living under the regime, and probably made to believe they are the rightful holders of the "Mandate of Heaven". Make sure to stay in Han dominated areas, and don't document of film anything that could make the regime lose face.
> Note: I'm not Chinese.
Why are you explicitly spelling it out? So we don't immediately assume this is propaganda?
Don't worry. If they like you enough, you'll even get paid for comments like these!
The surface-level infrastructure was interesting, it felt like Los Angeles - much more than it did Manhattan or SF aboveground - just blown up 3-to-5x. Wider streets with more lanes of cars, big mega apartment complexes just all four times taller than the common 5-story ones, etc.
The drive from central-ish Shanghai (Wujiaochang) to PVG was mindblowing because of the scale and frequency of the apartment megablocks ringing the city: identical enormous tower after identical enormous tower, lining the wide (but at the time oddly empty) thoroughfares. Felt like an alt opening scene to a Judge Dredd movie.
Some fun/awkward differences though. For instance, I had imagined it would be easy to find a laundromat - I didn't want to pay the hotel prices for cleaning. Ended up almost accidentally offending the people I was asking - "why would we need to go somewhere to do our laundry, we have laundry machines, we aren't poor" - while since a lot of US cities are older in the dense parts of town, laundry machines in-unit were less common even for sometimes pretty pricey places.
One of my big takeaways is that development is a lot easier and cheaper than redevelopment. Building a ton of new housing? Put in today's amenities! It might be crappy quality even in "luxury" new construction (whether here or there) but it's gonna be a lot easier than retrofitting into a bunch of units from 50 years ago. Want a QR-code/app-based payment system to take off? It's gonna be easier if you're one of the first widespread options to replace cash (like in China at the time) vs if you're competing with ubiquitous credit/debit cards in the US. Really illustrative of how things are path-dependent - and why I'm bearish on "super apps" replacing what we already have here.
In many (most?) European countries, debit cards and cash transfering apps are more common than credit-based payments. I have a credit card but I don't use it often (mostly for some online transactions, such as buying plane tickets), and many people only have a debit card.
That's the drukkhar architecture (we'll get to hear this word more often in the future). They are only missing giant grey flat-top pyramids: jusy as cold, efficient and brutalistic.
It's efficiency (fewer variants to make) + risk-minimization (design as a way of offending as few as possible for $$$ maximization instead of a way of expressing something).
Fuck that. Our freedoms are already getting screwed by various acts of governments. Personal freedom is the most valuable thing for me.
I’m genuinely curious because every person defines personal freedom differently. And great society is very subjective.
> I’m genuinely curious because every person defines personal freedom differently. And great society is very subjective.
I couldn't agree more! I believe that all of us have to give up some personal freedom if we want to live in a functional society. I may want to blast music from my rooftop at 3AM but I must curb that urge out of respect for the society I live in. How much of this personal freedom we are willing to give up is different for different people. On this spectrum, I think I lie towards giving up more if it gives me a comfortable society in return.
I am willing to mask up if it means that fewer people in my vicinity may "possibly" get sick less. I am okay with video cameras and facial recognition in public places if it means less crime in my neighborhood. I am willing to pay more taxes if it means public infrastructure can be improved and schools can get better teachers. I might be wrong though, because these things can clearly be taken to an extreme.
Usually it becomes a problem because you are infringing on someone else’s personal freedom. So it’s still about maximizing personal freedom in that case.
> I think I lie towards giving up more if it gives me a comfortable society in return
It seems like you are very practical minded, which I appreciate.
I think the fundamental skepticism that those of us who tend to be more "libertarian" minded is whether you're actually getting value in return for giving up liberties.
> I am willing to mask up if it means that fewer people in my vicinity may "possibly" get sick less.
I think this was the mentality of the majority of people who supported universal masking, and I think it came from a genuinely good place. The issue that I had with it was the lack of evidence to support universal masking, and the draconian implementation without regard to potential negative consequences. It struck me at the time as being the TSA of pandemic response, more theater than effective intervention. Time and research seem to have borne this out.
> I am okay with video cameras in public places if it means less crime in my neighborhood.
Except they don't on their own [1], but they are an incredible weapon and boost in power granted to the surveillance state.
> I am willing to pay more taxes if it means public infrastructure can be improved and schools can get better teachers.
The relationship between taxes and education outcomes is complex (at best) [2], and you need only live in the North East for a short period of time, pay those exorbitant taxes and drive 95 and the Jersey Turnpike to understand that higher taxes don't necessarily translate to better infrastructure.
Drive from New Mexico, through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama to Florida sometime and compare the roads and bridges.
I've lived all over the U.S. and experienced the difference between many states. They each have unique challenges, but I can tell you one rule that's held true in all my travels: granting more power and money to the government past a certain point doesn't translate into a better quality of life for the people.
[1] https://www.mtas.tennessee.edu/knowledgebase/there-empirical...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/01/21/a-connec...
TBF it's much easier to maintain infrastructure in a mild climate.
There's significant quality differences between them that are noticable as soon as you drive across the state line.
I've done the drive many times, and it's always stood out to me.
That affordable downtown housing which is on par with costs in Manhattan, where you'll hear someone renovating until 9pm every night and smell the sewage gas wafting from bathroom drains because what's a u-trap and inadequate underlying infrastructure.
Agreement between citizens that if they can cheat the laowai, or any mark really, or cut someone's line then they will.
Try living there for a bit. It's nice enough if you don't mind seeing the sun a few weeks a year through the smog.
China is actually fun to live in, but it's not a good place to live if you value your health, physical or mental. At least not the cities.
When I asked a local about it they got very angry, like I was insulting them. The need to save face in China is real. But I get it, "who is this American who thinks they can tell us how to do things?"
I didn't find the smog to be bad everywhere, though. Beijing was pretty bad in the morning/early afternoon. But from what I remember Chengdu was nice smog/weather wise.
I think it's hard to really "know" a place, and frankly your experience anywhere will vary.
Granted sometimes people just need a change.
Travellers become unhappy both at home and abroad ...
There are so many great countries/cities in Europe for exactly what you are looking for! And much more. You will avoid all the negative points from China that someone listed on another comment. While improving your life beyond work. 1-3 hours to so many wide destinations from Paris to London, Amsterdam, Oslo, Jerusalem… All while beyond guns you will have same to more freedom. Less crime. On the health side unless you need the best surgeon in the field, you will find overall better healthcare across all level. Education is great to on part with the best (for kids with countries like Norway or Sweden it’s definitely the best. Others are catching up). And I can go on and on with cost of living compare to major US cities, the variety of cultures, landscapes, way of life etc… all packed in a US size continent.
I think if Americans are easy to the idea to leave the US and sacrifice some things, they will find a wide range of interesting opportunities.
...
>China fits the bill
All those things may exist but sheer concentration of population = QoL / "dynamism" still gets very uncomfortable and cut throat. PRC pace = good cities with livable QoL mix rapidly develop until they're not. Hence you get expat commends like Chongqing reminds me of Shanghai in 2000s. On the otherhand, plenty of big cities at varying degrees of development to bounce around, but that's a very different life style.
Well obviously, since if you were Chinese you'd know that kids in China are doing drills to protect themselves against psychos with knives who attack schools. Like actual grownups with machetes randomly killing children. Those attacks are happening all the time by the way.
The drawback of Taiwan is that there isn't nearly the level of "white monkey" opportunities and you aren't as exotic.
China is also more extreme. You will have more extreme positive experiences and more extreme negative experiences.
There's a simple way to navigate what you are talking about - look at actual immigrants. People vote with their feet and there's still a ton of Chinese and everyone else trying to come to the US, hardly a trickle going the other way.
Living in the US is amazing. Most of the problems that you are aware of aren't actually impacting you or anyone you know (like, school shootings are clearly top of mind for you but have you met anyone who met anyone affected by one? Probably not.)
- Dense cities: Yes. I grew up in the suburbs and love the density here and how walkable everything is.
- Affordable housing: A good place in a popular location in Beijing or Shanghai is about $2k USD a month. You can get that down to $1k if you have roommates.
- Great public infrastructure: public transit, yes, but I rarely need to take that anymore. Public parks aren't great. You can't drink the tap water.
- Modicum of agreement: political discussion is so thoroughly suppressed that we all engage in self-censorship. I guess that could be called "agreement", but when I think of agreement I think of a place like New Zealand.
Here are the great things you're maybe not seeing:
- There's a bit of friction in everything in daily life, and that somehow makes life more enjoyable for some kinds of people (including myself). I think a big reason for that is that most people here don't speak English.
- It's incredibly easy to make friends.
- Most people you meet are interesting: either they're an expat and they moved here because they didn't want to coast through life, or they're a local and they're curious about people from other cultures.
- Some jobs pay incredibly well. For example if you're a teacher (not a "teacher"), China is a big step up.
Here are the not-so-good things you're maybe not thinking about:
- Air pollution is still a thing. In some cities, half the days you'd like to go outside for a run, you shouldn't because the air is too bad.
- Things like national parks are more crowded, less natural, and less tastefully done here than in any other developed country.
- As a foreigner you can only stay at maybe half the hotels and guest houses around the country. The others will simply not allow you to stay.
- As an American you'll deal with special attention from the government.
- Going to a hospital where nobody speaks your native language is one of the most stressful experiences you will have.
You can live in those places with far less political, language, thought-police concerns than mainland China.
What I see in Southeast Asia, though, is quite different. While there is a lot of uncertainty about the direction of global geopolitics, and while this also has a strong effort at finding a direction towards economic development on their own terms. Indonesia is becoming increasingly assertive in this regard, for example banning export of nickel ore (and ending up in a legal fight with the EU over that), and planning to do the same for bauxite soon as well. These bans are designed to ensure that those who want to exploit the nation's natural resources have to contribute directly to its economic development on Indonesian and not WTO, US, or EU terms.
Indonesian approaches to social management and rule of law are still quite foreign to me but these (even more than in the US) are very decentralized. A majority of the population still works independently or for small family businesses though the largest employer is the government. I still struggle with the disconnect between rules and laws. But the optimism here, in part born by the hope that the legacy of colonialism may finally be drawing to a close, is contagious.
I think sometimes leaving the great powers can be liberating.
"the West": This term is meaningless to me. Does this include Africa, South America, AUS/NS, Middle East?
"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.
I think you know what "The West" is when you are outside it. If you look at which countries are sanctioning Russia, it overlaps almost entirely with that list (i.e. that list of states minus Japan and Korea though some folks might argue that Japan and Korea are in fact Western -- not including quasi-states like North Korea or Taiwan in that assessment). That doesn't say
'"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.'
Certainly there is less than in the US due to the fact that free speech law binds the private sector as well as the public sector and that, in theory, discrimination on the basis of political or other opinion is forbidden.
That being said, I watched protests during the Covid years treated differently depending on political views. In essence protests for in-favor causes were given go-aheads while protests for out-of-favor causes were restricted or banned. This may be changing now in Germany at least for the better.
I don't like the far-right but when legal far-right parties are restricted in an ability to rally because political opponents to them blame the spread of Covid on them (overlooking more likely causes like cross-border commuting to a country with far higher problems), then I get nervous since usually I find myself, more often than not, fairly far left economically at least.
You would get fired in Sweden if you spoke against mass immigration just 15 years ago. The social democrats still ban people who have romantic relationships with an individual of the nationalist party.
Working corporate in the west is about having the correct progressive opinions, dissent means you are an evil conspiracy theorist. Just 2 years ago it was evil and racist conspiracy theorist to say that Covid came from a lab leak.
It's evil to say the the truth until the emperor becomes absolutely naked, such as the case with mass immigration in Sweden. When you suddenly have more murders than the UK (a 7x larger country) and bombings every day it's kinda hard to deny that immigration has a link to crime.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1315123/sweden-homicide-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/288195/homicide-rate-uk/
> It’s difficult for me to imagine a better place to have lived for the past two decades than China.
I cannot understand how one mind could [fail to] reconcile these two statements. Obviously a place without state terrorism would be better! The author writes about political oppression as though it were merely a color of paint!
Also the mindset of deciding for the people instead of deciding by the people is pretty unpopular but people can't do much. The cultural inertia is strong. Whenever there is an issue, people automatically turn to a bigger government. The government tries to manage everything from the top, which creates a huge chain of issues.
This all looks fine when the economy is good and booming, but when not then it's a different story. Basically the people transfer all power to the government in exchange for prosperity. Chinese people are materialistic in heart so a better material life mitigates all other problems. But what if everyone has to sacrifice for the "common" goal set from the top? It's hard to tell.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97835/difference...
Emigrants leave and immigrants come. It's two sides of the same coin. You can't emigrate without immigrating. Except if you manage to become stateless and remain on international territory.
Migrants is just the term without the direction. Which is unnecessary if you're not talking about the country they leave or move to.
An immigrant has an intent to settle, an expat doesn't. In America, one could theoretically lose work authorization should he refer or present himself as an immigrant.
Maybe wanting to move forever (i.e. migrant) is more common, if one is from a poorer country, which could explain why some others here thought that "immigrant" implied "poor and less educated".
2) Expatriate The term “expatriate” means— (A) any United States citizen who relinquishes his citizenship, and (B) any long-term resident of the United States who ceases to be a lawful permanent resident of the United States (within the meaning of section 7701(b)(6) ).
To all the other people talking about intent to settle or not: read the post. The author lived in China for 20 years and built a family there. They're not an "expat" under any technical definition of the word.
And yet he's leaving. He calls the US "home". So evidently he was an expat.
No he doesn't. He says it once, in the tagline, and gives no details.
It's not hard to understand.
At the same time, it's also clear that the status of the country determines whether people call themselves immigrants or expats. In the US people are immigrants, in Japan they're expats, for example. US citizens in particular very rarely refer to themselves as immigrants in my experience.
It's likely not an intentional choice, but a learned one, since other westerners around them use that term.
I can move to japan and marry a Japanese wife, work for a Japanese company, pay Japanese taxes, and speak fluent Japanese, but I will never be Japanese because my skin is white.
People can move to America, and as long as you speak English without an accent, there is an assumption that you are American.
If the place you move will assimilate you, then I would call that migrancy. If the place you move will never accept you, then I would call that ex-patriotism.
People who move to civil societies migrate, people who move to ethnic societies become ex-patriots.
I strongly recommend reading this: https://www.amacad.org/publication/what-does-it-mean-be-amer...
It really puts into perspective conservatism and liberalism by showing their contextual effects on immigration.
> I will never be Japanese because my skin is white.
> and as long as you speak English without an accent, there is an assumption that you are American.
> and speak fluent Japanese
I don't doubt your experience. I was projecting myself onto others, probably too much...
America is a big place. If you don't have that experience in big west coast cities, I would be a bit surprised. Likewise, I would expect well educated folks to also assume that lack of accent means American, not in an intentional way, but an automatic one.
There are large swathes of the US that I doubt would see anyone who isn't a white evangelical christian as American.
My intention was not to be black and white or absolutist, though I see how what I said reads that way.
> without accent?
Yes
> are you saying "Japanese" to mean "fit in as japanese" or "japanese nationality"?
In a way, I meant both. I meant for a Japanese person to apply the word "Japanese" to me casually. To see me as part of "us" when a Japanese person says "us" to mean Japanese.
I think if you read the article I linked, what I am trying to express will be clear. It is an extremely meaty read, but I feel like it is somewhat like taking the red pill when it comes to understanding politics and the political forces that govern us. American education has poked at the ideas in that article without providing the philosophical basis. I've heard "diversity" so many times, but never a real, non hand-wavy, explanation of why diversity is important or why we apply energy to it.
1. Russia -15000
2. China -10000
3. India -8000
1. UAE +4000
2. Australia +3500
3. Singapore +2800
I never held any fraternal feelings with the country, even though I am ethnic Chinese, nor I had any delusions about making long term plans there.
In my years there, I kept seeing rose coloured glasses wearing American expats. I met Tim Cook during his first travels to China as CEO at some random event in Shenzhen, only to see him regurgitate the official drivel.
Since around 2016, I kept seeing more and more Western high flyers coming to official events there, seemingly trying to network with locals, and only to see them freak out at that.
My regular conversation with them:
- it's a damn communist regime, do your business and get out
- no, it's different! there is no more communisms in China! no, it's state capitalism! no, things will change! no, I have a special plan from EY China expert!
Most of them lived there for 2-3 years, and got out just as I told when the truth hit them. In the end, I outlived all of them there.
China is a communist regime, though a very well doing for some years.
Way more, many times more rich Chinese are fleeing China now, when it reached some level of wealth, and industrialisation, than back 10-15 years ago, when China was incomparably poorer, and everyday life was incomparably harder.
All of that was easily predictable. You have a terrible regime, you give it money, and power. It only becomes stronger, and more terrible, not less.
Communism is irreformable.
I applaud you for your clarity on the country of your ancestors. It is a shame.
In a country of 1.x billions, it shouldn't be surprising that there would be at least a few tens of millions of hardcore, actual socialists, who genuinely believe in some distant future communist utopia.
Even if the entire rest of the population were the most perfect paragons of virtue imaginable, it's still likely going to be the hardcore folks willing to fight to the death en bloc that end up with the actual power. That's just how the cookie crumbles in every country.
Whether it's ultra-Maoists in China, or ultra-Hindus in India, or ultra-muslims in Islamic countries, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, etc..
The real question is whether or not the bulk of the hardcore group can be enticed with enough potential rewards to moderate their views.
Wealth works if there's a lot to go around, like in the U.S., EU, etc., but otherwise the hardcore group needs to be paid in some form of power, geopolitical, cultural, etc.
My view from the outside was that it's really similar to climbing the ladder in a corporation, mouth all the platitudes but only suckers believe them.
Humans are not perfect deceivers, even the average Joe can usually tell if someone's fishy within a 10 minute face-to-face conversation.
There do exist really expert and cunning deceivers, but the folks higher up in the hierarchy will also commensurately be better equipped to see through it.
So for a large enough hierarchy, the practical impossibility of duping so many means that only genuine believers end up near the top.
You don't even need to go Beijing to see this dynamic play out, there's a company in Cupertino where many folks allege this is the case (though to be fair some allege the non-believers are also moving up the ladder).
After Hong Kong, there was a strong message of "Americans caused this," likewise after covid there was a strong message of "this didn't start in China, this actually started in America."
It wasn't just a message of "America is our enemy," but looking at how the People in Hong Kong were robbed of due process from an impartial justice system it was clear that if there was a problem we would also not get due process.
The Canadians arrested without due process in response to Huawei leaders being arrested was another story that says "China might do bad things to you in response to things you don't have control over."
As an American I felt it was made clear that we were the enemy and we would not get due process.
I was planning to spend several months in China, but chose not to because of Hong Kong. My choice was re-inforced because of the covid response.
I am open to the idea that international media was being unfair to China, but I had experiences which made me realize this was not the case.
- I met a person who just got out of china. She was an early 20s English teacher who didn't know why she was put in prison, but spent a couple weeks in Chinese prison until the US state department said 'give her back, now.' She figured she failed some kind of political question she was asked or made a statement about Taiwan she shouldn't have. She said she probably would still be there if her boyfriend hadn't called the US state department saying he hasn't heard from her and didn't know what happened.
- Another woman I met on a plane said that the people who ran the school she taught at threatened to revoke her visa trapping her in China. She said she was leaving for "vacation" but was not going to go back. She was also visibly shaken.
- A Hong Kong person I met broke down the way China was destroying Hong Kong culture and acting like an imperial ruler.
- Hong Kong went from feeling like a lively place to feeling like a dominated place. The energy left the city.
- Seeing the video of Triads in the train station made it clear that the Chinese government was in bed with organized crime. Seeing triads be the foot soldiers of the CPC was something I had never seen before. It made it clear that if China wanted to achieve a goal, it would use any method regardless of how right or wrong it is. It was just one more element of "our legal system is pretext, we will do what we want."
- I spent some time in China with a Chinese woman and she was constantly "correcting" me about any implication that Hong Kong or Taiwan was a country. It made me realize that I can't just hide my beliefs, they will manifest in my language, and that will put me at risk.
How did the reasoning work here? Not sure if this speaks to poor education, propaganda, something else, or all of the above.
The propaganda was immediate and overwhelming.
I know someone working as an architect in China and apparently his company holds onto his college degree. Hes concerned he won’t get it back if he doesn’t remain on good terms. I was told this is a common arrangement.
If it’s that simple he will be relieved to here it. Frankly I’m not sure why it’s such a big deal either.
In America a degree is a piece of paper. I could go to my college and ask for a replacement and they'll give me one for $50-100.
A company could call my college and verify I earned a degree without ever seeing a piece of paper.
I know I've read something similar to what you are saying, so I don't think your comment was bad faith, but I forget the specific mechanics of the type of coercion you are talking about.
I suspect it might be China invalidating a Chinese citizens degree if they do the wrong thing or China invalidating the verification of a degree that's respected in China, leaving a person in China without credentials that are respected in China. Alternatively it might be about controlling people who earned a degree in China.
I couldn't find the type of coercion you were talking easily with google. A simple article explaining the mechanics of what you're talking about would likely clear everything up.
There's an easier way.[2] "But now it's easier than ever to purchase a fake copy of your diploma. At Same Day Diplomas, we provide high-quality copies of your college diploma. Our products are crafted to match the design, seals, and color of your university's diploma."
Which is why it's become much harder to get a duplicate real one.
There's online third party diploma verification, and it probably works about as badly as most other online credential services.
[1] https://studentservices.stanford.edu/diplomas/how-do-i-order...
[2] https://samedaydiplomas.com/blogs/news/oops-i-lost-my-colleg...
Not necessarily. From my understanding, in Asia the actual diploma is often used as a credential for obtaining employment. (The context is reading about a con man who set up a fake job listing to attract Western job candidates, obtained copies of applicants' diplomas, then used them to construct a fake diploma that he used to get a job for himself.)
Pros:
- very vibrant, never bored even though when I went I didn’t know anyone really
- I was paid a Silicon Valley salary so high income compared to the typical local. Can afford a very nice lifestyle
- due to demographics and being an “actual” expat, as opposed to English teacher, was respected
Cons:
- general quality of life. Traffic, pollution, food and water safety etc
- can be hard to make deep connection except with other expats. Just different cultures and values.
- lack of freedom and censorship. Vpn needed for everything, and even then doesn’t always work. Certain topics are avoided
- there is a surface level fakeness that I personally really dislike.
It’s a fun place to be for a while when you have the income and status. But for me at least not a place to be long term.
EDIT: to provide more details. Total comp of 200k USD and up at some of the larger (e.g. BAT companies) isn't uncommon for the more senior folks.
The food was great. You could find fresh cooked stuff everywhere and fresh vegetables at the market every day. Getting delivery was cheap, easy and fast.
As a well-paid tech worker, housing was affordable.
There is a sense you are taking part in something important. That's difficult to explain, and it's something Americans in particular probably can't understand because their country is the same but even more so. When you come from a smaller or less powerful country, there is something exciting about becoming part of a society which has great influence internationally. When stuff that's happening locally ends up being major news because your country actually matters to the rest of the world, that's a neat feeling.
The public transport and urban infrastructure was really good, even in low tier cities, although when the COVID restrictions hit all of that changed.
And that's what made me realize that despite the benefits of centralized rule, it also can turn the country into a prison state overnight.
Anyone living in China is familiar with seeing police and other uniformed and armed officials all over the place. Cameras all over the place. Party propaganda all over the place. But it doesn't seem all that sinister when it doesn't get in the way of your own personal life. When you can go to work, and go to the market, and go to the restaurant, and it's just a backdrop. It's only when those agents of oppression mobilize that it really sinks in how messed up it is. When uniformed officials in their tens storm in with clipboards and mancatchers to shut down your favorite restaurant or street vendor because someone important has decided it should no longer be open. When something the party doesn't like is said on a website you read every morning and suddenly that website is no longer available, period. When walls get erected around every neighborhood in the city and all those markets you used to visit in different districts are now behind checkpoints you cannot cross because you don't have the paperwork to visit them.
Things improved after those first few months of COVID, but for me that was the real eye-opener. A lot of local people realized it too, and there was talk of how "now we are all Uyghurs". Of course, as the holder of a foreign passport, I had the privilege to be able to leave when I was fed up with the oppression. Most Chinese do not have that privilege.
There are lots of other bad things about living in China. The blatant corruption, for one. The endless boondoggles and scams and the greedy scumbags who buy into the system and prop it up to enrich themselves.
The classism is shameful for a so-called "communist" country. The way the urban middle class looks down on anyone who comes from the countryside or works low class jobs or didn't get a good education is depressing.
Foreigners are second class citizens and always will be. Threads here ask about why people are called "expats" instead of "immigrants", and the answers are missing the point a bit. In China, as a migrant worker, you have no choice to become an immigrant. You must maintain your job or your visa will be canceled. There is no chance of getting citizenship. There is not even a hope of getting permanent residence. There is a strong undercurrent of racism that the government allows to exist, in so far as it doesn't actively stamp it out like it does other topics they prefer the people do not discuss. At every step of your life there, you will be reminded you are an outsider. When you can't sign up for the same services local people can because you don't have the same ID card, when you are told you can't stay at a hotel because management doesn't want to go to the trouble of registering you with the police daily, when yet another landlord refuses to rent to you despite you having all the money and the paperwork. However, having lived as a foreigner in other countries, I can say that these things aren't unique to China, they are often part of the migrant experience, and a lot of countries should do better.
Of course, in China the bad things are compounded by the authoritarianism, and in the end, that just outweighed everything for me.
We (myself and my wife, who is Chinese) moved to Bangkok and I can confidently say it is a much happier and healthier place in every aspect.
Many things about China are amazing:
- e-commerce speed and proximity of everything, I work in SW/FW/HW intersection (IoT) and the ability to prototype things within a week was liberating,
- public transportation and infrastructure is amazing, perfect roads, huge subway systems, CRH,
- completely cashless society.
Many things are not so amazing:
- stifling censorship of everything even slightly critical,
- food is just not good in Shanghai, quality- and taste-wise, Bangkok is much, much better,
- terrible, overcrowded, dehumanizing healthcare,
- outside of city center the city is rather gray and ugly,
- everything is gargantuan in scale and feels built for aliens,
- rudeness, constant shoving, spitting, loud speaking, smoking everywhere,
- in Shanghai downtown every sidewalk is completely lined with rental bikes, scooters, people's bikes, often there's nowhere to walk but the street,
- everything "historical" is fake,
- terribly overpriced real estate,
- the fact that after 15 years in China as an expat with an own house and Chinese family you still get nothing, no PR, no citizenship, nothing,
- 996 is real, everybody is always stressed and overworked,
- no real justice system, there is no attorney-client privilege,
- entire industries can be decimated overnight by some new policy,
- everything is "chabuduo", faucet leaks, chabuduo, just tape it with scotch tape,
- complete lack of empathy to animals, don't watch Chinese tourists in the zoo (and don't go to local zoos),
- there's a single purpose in life — make money,
- no diversity, everyone is Han, everyone thinks pretty much the same,
- no real religion, temples are there to gather money and bless your new business or a car,
- if you drive a Bentley, you're a king of the road, yield only to Rolls-Royce,
- ...I can continue, but probably this is enough :D
In many ways his early life, the political downfall and persecution of his father and Xi's own persecution during the Cultural Revolution had me primed to think that he might be a reformer. Someone that could possibly carry on in the footsteps of Deng Xiaopeng and really bring China across the finish line and into the world as a powerful and positive force for the planet at large. Instead the opposite happened.
By 2013 what Xi was about was starting to come into focus. He carried out "anti-corruption" reforms but it didn't take long to see that these really just targeted his opponents (and the occasional ally that was worth making an example of... in Chinese 杀鸡给猴看 trans. kill the chicken to show the monkey). As crackdowns on China's fledgling independent media and various minorities intensified the curve on my chart dips and starts to dip hard. Now it is as low as it has ever been and heading downwards in freefall. I declined an opportunity to go back this Spring and part of me is very sad about this but China is headed to a dark place and I don't want to be there when it happens. Unfortunately when the time comes it will drag much of our world down with it, I fear.
2000 – The government is kidnapping people from their beds in the middle of the night but that's a minor inconvenience. I'll just shut up and enjoy the economic gains. China is the best!
2022 – I can't believe the government is coming for my money and lifestyle. The tyranny was only supposed to affect the other people.
Even if China did conqure the land of Taiwan, it's difficult to support tens of millions of population to its pre-war living standards. Both mainland and taiwan had pension+aging population problems of their own. Conquest was the easy part, surviving the aftermath is difficult. Destroyed Taiwan economy, international boycott, etc.
Opinions?
Imagine all those who are trampled today by that caste system in china having a chance to shine. All those brilliance we will never see, cause it gets censored to dust by old bureaucrats could shine. 1 generation from now, china could have been culture wise something similar to japan or south korea.
Instead we got this. The old errors, of walling oneself off from a percieved "hostile" outside world, of thinking one could be stand alone and the lack of seeing the need to change, to get away from the "conquer nature" mindset to a more symbiotic view of things.
Its so sad. We had a glimpse, of what could be, but then it was back to the old imperial gameboard and the people turned back into figurines.
- “Taiwan is acqshually a dictatorship”
- “The integration of HK was managed extremely well”
- “China may have X, but whatabout Y in the US/decadent West/Europe”
- “That’s it, I’m moving to China. Any tips?”
I’m not saying any positive comments about China are manufactured. But given the amount of money and effort China spends on these type of influence operations, the context of this thread, and the type of audience HN attracts, chances are they are.
- A supposed Latin American account; only comments (whitewashing really) are on posts, issues or themes related to China - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RedCondor
- An account with no comments elsewhere, bar this thread, commenting on how they want to move to China because: affordable housing, "great Chinese society", "going to let go off freedoms, but whatabout public shootings in the US", etc etc. etc. This is the identical messaging to what China is using on other SM platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tiny_ta
- A Chinese / Chinese nationalist's account. If you look through their comments you see they leave mostly political comments with the themes of "russia is winning" (China has been following russia's propaganda almost in almost a complete lockstep.), "USA has not right to intervene vis-a-vis Taiwan", "US elite", posting garbage from "resources largely excluded from the American mainstream" (as usual), 'conflict in Ukraine'. They left comments in this thread as well (a sad attempt at whitewashing Tiannamen). This is more relevant, however: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xtian&next=34628768#...
Now back to this thread. This is a curious case of an issue being relevant from both internal and external angles. The former - like I said before, the aim is to influence you. The latter - anyone within China who is contemplating to leave the country, just like the author is doing. China has been known to focus heavily on retaining people with technical skills within the country and also campaigning for skilled Chinese nationals to return back 'home'.
Chinese influence operations have been detected everywhere: from 4chan boards to youtube videos and [insert your social media platform here]. What would make HN an exception?
With your logic I can probably conclude that Warren Buffet is a CIA shill.
The entire western world is so addicted to cheap labor I don't know what would happen when there is no more cheap labor to be found. There will be a huge social disruption when everyone everywhere in the world demands 100k salary a year with social benefits. That or AGIs come out and we get a disruption on the same scale.
Fun fact, Vietnam is moving from 5 days work week to 6 days work week while the rest of us are demanding 4 days work week here in the US.
Arguing over “what if AGI” is like arguing about nuclear war and winter. It might happen, but no plans you form for it will survive contact with reality, so there is very little value in spending cycles on optimizing for it.
AI = control of how to wield the Capital and defend against intentional damage
What are the obvious limits?
400 years ago? Hardly.
The party has been making deep investments into the regions and is developing significant political and social capital at the same time that the West is retreating from them, cutting foreign aid, etc.
I think it’s more “want” than “see.” They might see Vietnam as next in line but outsourcing to ME and Africa suit their interests better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Vietnam
i wonder how long it will take before we start hearing "i hate the VCP but i love vietnamese people/culture". probably when they get powerful enough to challenge the regional US interest in anything significant.
In fact, a few times DC sent some diplomats to Vietnam, the govt over there responded by sending their diplomats to China. Basically saying they prefer China over the US. It makes sense to them since China is closer and have higher trade value than the US. But because of that I don't see how Vietnam can be a "strong ally" to the US.
Can you explain more or cite your sources?
I read this a few years ago, not sure how much it reflects reality. Anecdotally, immigration from Vietnam is still strong, except the more recent immigrants I've met are pro-communist (as opposed to the first and second generations of Vietnamese immediately following the war).
I'd imagine that the US and Vietnam are allies in the same way that Israel and Egypt are allies. Publicly, they have to show opposition, but privately they work together economically, militarily, and everyone knows that they aren't actually at odds with each other.
It is more likely that Vietnam is playing both sides and try to appease both China and the US. But no way they are an ally or even a potential one.
china imports huge amounts of everything critical to manufacturing and food.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Yea...
chinese companies also operate factories in vietnam, that's another aspect people just kind of gloss over.
Big countries with big population
Maybe Nigeria and Indonesia too, but it wouldn’t happen this century
culture is not the reason these people are leaving China, but an open hostility towards foreigners during recent years that is creating a very difficult position for expats living there
China and Vietnam share a long history and culture. They are also right next to each other and have the same government type. Vietnam has openly showed their desire to work with China at the cost of the US. They sent some top diplomats to China right after the US diplomats came to visit them. That is pretty clear to me which country they prefer more.
Investing in Vietnam is basically the same thing as investing in China in the past. It will end the same way, with a strengthened opponent in Asia.
The last global conflict had the current Vietnamese government sided with China and the USSR against the US. I think you already lost that bet.
I would like to ask you for sources on Vietnamese sentiment regarding China and the US. But that is probably irrelevant. What the majority of Vietnamese think ultimately doesn't mean anything, because it isn't a democracy. What the communist party think is more important. And I would bet two communist parties are probably chummier with each other than with the US.
I didn't claim a bet, but anyhow I don't know how to tell you this, but that was 40+ years ago. Even then you're not quite right, they went to war with each other in the 70s. The world is much different now and China at that time was not considered a global power. Now it is, and a lot of its neighbors don't like it. That includes countries like India and Vietnam.
> I would like to ask you for sources on Vietnamese sentiment regarding China and the US.
Ok, here is one of many.
"Based on the latest ABS data, only 25 percent of Vietnamese respondents believe that China has exerted a positive impact on their country, but for United States, the number goes up to 85 percent. "
https://thediplomat.com/2021/05/china-and-the-us-who-has-mor...
Can you explain how? They are a communist government sure and to get fairly large as a private company you do have to cut the government in (ie: Vin company, Viettel, Sunworld etc) but they do appear to be much less repressive and much more open than say a china. Especially socially.
They are still relatively underdeveloped. Cracking down too hard on dissidents would hurt their FDI from places like the US. Not to mention they probably don't have the money and manpower to spare on that. China was the same when they were at the stage Vietnam is in now. And it is very likely Vietnam will do what China is doing now soon enough.
I have been to Vietnam too and I think for the time I stayed there, I got to experience a pretty authentic feel for their political and cultural systems. And all it reminds me of is China, a decade or two ago.
Vietnam seems much more open. Their internet is largely open and accessible. Even easy to register sims. They have no quarantine or vaccine requirements for entry or visa etc.
All in all much more open and light. Similarly in good company they would be fairly open about the government and problems etc.
It definately isnt on the same level of freedom as America but definitely didnt seem as repressive as china and i didnt see the will there to move that way. In fact they seem like they wanted to remain open for the financial benefits of doing business in the west.
This is patently false. I do not know what time period you went to Vietnam but recently their country literally went into lockdown and did not open until much later. They still require proof of vaccination to enter the country and I was told to present my ID and visa before I was allowed to get a sim card. They also blocked many social media and news sites like BBC. Any content remotely critical of the party over there is blocked and their authors arrested. It is very reminiscent of early China.
They definitely can ramp it up once they get their hands on more surveillance tech.
There is no proof of vaccination required and hasnt been since at least the beginning of this year.
I did not notice any blocks of internet on Viettel (and BBC is in my news feeds).
I would periodically hop on a VPN i own and use Firefox Focus if i was googling something that the government may have viewed as controversial. But I wasnt given a reason to, I am just a bit of a privacy freak and assume they are logging traffic.
And the sim card did not require any ID. When we arrived one of our friends handed them out, about 10 of them to all of us. I even went as far as to call and upgrade it to a higher plan as 1GB/day wasnt sufficient.
I don't think this is the case. The average person wants a lot of things for cheap. Also, more expensive items like computers and phones would increase in price. People like having the newest phones, but might be priced out of it if it increased.
most of those are just Chinese shell companies or doing final assembly on parts made in China to get around sanctions and as a PR stunt by big companies to appease DC by claiming they are moving out of China
This is the only thing that allows rich to get richer while still keeping peasants under the boiling point. Without cheap labor living standard in developed countries would drop like a rock. What comes after nobody knows.
This is literally because they need to increase manufacturing output and efficacy if they're to have a hope of competing with China's economies of scale. (It's probably not going to work out, on the whole, and a large amount of Vietnamese "manufacturing" is tightening the screws on products that were 90% assembled in China.)
> while the rest of us are demanding 4 days work week here in the US.
This is because a huge chunk of American jobs are bullshit make-work. If the US had a better legal/regulatory system, you could move to a three-day work week and nobody would notice a thing.
I also used to believe the common phrase that Vietnam was a "mini China". Reality is different. It's no where near as repressive.
Real Christianity & Buddhism is all over the place.
Everyday people don't speak with the self-censorship I've seen in China (and I don't certainly don't censor myself the way I felt forced to in China).
The internet is no where near as censored (or softly censored) as in China! This is a night-and-day level of difference.
Ironically, in some regards, VN is more capitalist than the USA. Just go down any average street in Saigon and see how many entrepreneurs you find. And never saw 'chengguan' bossing people around in VN. Part of the reality is that communist policies failed so hard in VN after the communist takeover, many people had no choice but to stand-up-against-policy and be entrepreneurs regardless of official laws and that is baked into the culture now.
Part of the reason VN's communist party isn't as powerful as China's communist party is because it does not have as much resources. But I would argue that part of the reason is the government really doesn't have the desire to be anywhere near as heavy-handed as the CCP. At some level, Vietnam seems to me like 'one big family' with a certain level of warmth to it, whereas China is just too big with too many intra-China conflicts for Chinese people to extend trust to other Chinese people. In my experience, there is a much further sense of distance in relations with PRC Chinese people (not e.g. Taiwan Chinese) that is difficult to overcome.
People in the US/Europe forget that Vietnam had a border conflict with China following the France/VN US/VN conflicts -- the difference about the China conflict is that China truly does want to take over some of Vietnam's land for keeps -- this is understandably ingrained in everyday Vietnamese people's minds.
Everyday VN people are commonly quite welcoming to visually-obvious-foreigners, whereas everyday PRC Chinese people are often times quite wary.
Vietnam also operates within ASEAN. Singapore/Malaysia/Thailand/Indonesia/Philippines political opinions and security concerns impact Vietnam.
I would say things in VN have changed a bit since Nguyen Phu Trong's leadership and Covid (globally democracy on average has taken a step back during this timeframe), but I've come to realize that calling Vietnam a "mini China" misses many important points.
I can hear some of you saying "...but, but, China would never... because that would be so stupid...". It doesn't have to be a good idea! Russia's invasion of Ukraine a) wasn't a good idea, b) wasn't in Russia's best interest, c) had predictable devastating consequences for Russia's economy, and d) wasn't wanted by anybody (except Putin). Yet somehow it still happened.
It happened because autocrats are all the same. They're always surrounded by enemies, because neighboring countries don't want to be subjugated. Once the autocrat gets the domestic opposition under control their attention turns to foreign enemies. The CCP has always been fixated on Taiwan. The mere existence of Taiwan refutes everything the CCP tells its people about why they can't have nice things (like democracy and individual liberty).
The invasion will come when China thinks they can pull it off. Leave China now and protect your business.
If financial forces were any use they should already now divest from China as hard as they can.
I recommend watching reports from RealLifeLore, Whatifalthist, CaspianReport and Peter Zeihan.
The PR benefits of pulling out of Russia outweighed the negligible revenues these companies were earning from the country.
Saying goodbye to Taiwanese manufacturing is instead a death sentence for them, and probably for a large chunk of the western economy as a whole. China knows this, and they know how much there is to gain economically by keeping the system running.
So the end result is likely going to be – China pulls off a bloodless coup of Taiwan, and companies continue doing business there as usual.
a) wasn't a good idea: pretty much everyone thought Russia would win and could not fathom the incompetence of the Russian armed forces. It's possible that even with it's incompetence, if they had successfully taken Kyiv in the early days they would have won.
b) if Russia holds on to arguably outdated concept of geopolitical strategy, it's easy to see why it's in their best interest. Demographically, Russia is in decline and so they had at most 5-10 years to expand out to defensible geographies -- close up to the bessarabian gap and border to the Carpathian mountains.
c) it's not entirely clear even now that the Russian economy is going to collapse. Remember, Russia is a producer nation. It will (relatively) suck as modern shit starts breaking but Russia is barely starting to deficit now. While economic sanctions do have an effect, if the government falls I think deaths of young Russian men (esp if they are forced to meat grind muscovites and st. Petersburgians instead of just ethnic minorities from the hinterlands) is more likely to play into that sentiment than prices going up at tasty period (McDonald's).
d) a large part of the Russian polity wants this, not just Putin.
PS: 很高兴认识你;)
it's amazing how people were able to delude themselves for so long, Tiananmen should have been enough to make people and governments realize things weren't going to change
It’s why and how things change that is interesting. In China things have changed because Xi and the Chinese communist party have chosen to change them in particular ways. It’s these choices and the consequences of them that we are discussing.
But Xi seems to care about Xi.
Instead Jiang / Hu had their own agendas including moving vast amounts of capital outside and also for themselves e.g. some of the largest VCs there. Some of Xi's policies e.g. restricting movement of capital has to do with this.
I think people like that are the reasons why the world isn't at peace. China could've become the next japan. They could've probably overtaken the US that way too. But now, they've "alerted" the eagle, and the US will never let china become a superpower.
It already is. To the less degree than the US for now. Could go either way in the future. But if you think that the US could go on forever dictating what other countries allowed to do I think you are wrong.
That was a decision that never should have been taken, due to the terrible risk of how things would turn out if it failed, as it did. This was possibly the most disastrous strategic blunder in America’s history. Like yanking defeat from the jaws of victory in the Cold War.
Maybe eventually it will, would just take long time. There are always ups and downs.
The core belief of the communist party is will to power - getting and keeping power by any means necessary. There is no balance of power, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent court system, separation of military from political party, constitutional review or law, individual human rights, etc. Hence the term totalitarian - total control of people’s behavior, speech, and even thought.
All of communist ideology is an elaborate justification and sophisticated plan for getting and keeping absolute and unrestricted power. It is too deeply ingrained, too sticky so to speak, in communist party psyche and identity. Unlike SK and Taiwan it was never going to liberalize and discard itself in favor of democracy, an ideology directly counter to its core beliefs.
So east Germany, Germany and Italy (fascism), the Baltics, Czech, Slovakia, Moldova, Georgia (where Stalin came from), Romania (ciaucescu) etc. Have no hope of ever being democratic?
If we could go back in time and not economically prop up communism in China, and let it collapse the same as the Soviet Union, then I would anticipate a similar outcome there too. But you have to let communism collapse and become totally discredited in order to achieve that outcome.
There’s very little evidence that Leninism and its derivatives are any stickier than any other authoritarian system, and essentially all authoritarianism (and most non-authoritarian systems of government, too) appeals to some ideology for its justification (often local nationalism), so your attempt to divide the world of dictatorships into ideological and non-ideological dictatorships is flawed from the start.
> All of communist ideology is an elaborate justification and sophisticated plan for getting and keeping absolute and unrestricted power.
It’s…not. In fact, the part of Leninism that serves that purpose (vanguardism) is its key departure from Marxism, and notionally an adaptation of Marxist Communism to bypass the need for capitalist development as a prerequisite to the socialist stage.
And I don't consider nationalism an ideology, since it's never as philosophically developed as say communism or US liberal democracy. It's just a useful, easy, naturally occurring fallback for dictators looking for way to rally their population against the "other".
And you can argue till the cows come home about what Leninsim, Marxism, and Maoism are supposed to be, but what they actually become in reality is clear. Totalitarian.
Eh, it could have worked. Not that hu jiantao is a saint or anything but it's pretty clear that he was unhappy with the direction that china is going down and blindsided by what xi has unexpectedly turned in to.
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/east/09/18/china....
See Clinton's Mar 2000 speech:
> "By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy's most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say."
Of course it was all nonsense, Clinton and Bush were just listening to Wall Street interests who saw massive profits in moving US manufacturing overseas to cheap labor zones. (Importing cheap labor to do jobs that couldn't be outsourced, in agriculture, construction, etc. was the other side of that coin).
I'm not a fan of either Clinton or Bush, but this is unfair. There was far more going on.
At the time, there was a strong sense that democracy had won, and that it was inevitable. That empowering people economically would eventually, without fail, lead to democratic reform. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" is one of the most influential books of the period.
But, Fukuyama and people like him (Reagan, necons, Bush, Clinton, etc.) turned out to be fatally wrong. They created an incredibly unequal world that has eroded democracy to the point where we can seriously discuss a US that isn't a democracy anymore in our lifetimes.
You should read the book. It's an interesting case of someone who originally set out to help people, but who created a hellscape instead.
Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Net result was drastically increasing inequality, and a political system with cradle-to-grave capture of politicians by the 1% (or 10% or whatever), using their increased wealth to fund political campaigns, lobbying of those politicians while in office, and to provide cushy revolving door jobs and board memberships when politicians leave office.
Many politicans of one of the two major parties are denying the result of an election. Prominent members are calling for "Democrats" to be forbidden to vote when moving state (without protest from others). An let's not even talk about the whole constitutional convention movement. There are many politicians in the US who only pay lipservice to democracy.
> Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Until the 1970s and 1980s we lived in a totally different world. Taxes on the rich were high. Productivity gains were shared with workers whose wages went up. After the 1980s (Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Fukuyama, and more broadly neocons) everything changed.
It's incredibly striking, you can see it even is basic graphs.
The share of wages as percentage of GDP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2KkM Until the 1970s it was pretty stable, then you have a steep downward trend. The capital class who owns things, now that they had many fewer regulations and didn't need to pay taxes, they decided to keep far more of the wealth for themselves.
This is also what gives rise to this famous graph https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2016/10/unn... The gap between labor productivity and labor compensation.
Or just look at a graph of who owns what https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1415721490539/Wealth_line-chart... You can see it clearly, in the 80s the top 0.1% take off and the bottom 90% of people start to lose.
Even our language clearly shows what's going on. Look at when the term "Rust belt" became a thing: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Rust+belt&year...
Companies in 2022 spent nearly $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Those were illegal until 1982! That money would have gone to workers, instead, it's going to owners.
There's also been a huge shift in competition. Instead of competing with one another, companies now consolidate. This used to be a very rare event, now, in most industries we have only a few big players that absorb everyone else. That's a direct consequence of deregulation, not enforcing antitrust laws, and giving money to capital instead of people. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wyvntk8Krq0/WQdL-4X-WjI/AAAAAAAAI...
Guess why Trump talks about Making America Great Again? People have a collective memory of a time when wages were going up and when there was optimism about the American Dream.
The crisis we're seeing in the US today is all about these charts and this timing; it's really striking how the 80s are the focal point for all of the problems that people talk about today. People are hurting now, their wealth is sapped, their wages aren't going anywhere, they have little security left. They feel like they have no future and that their children't won't have a future. Not to mention that large parts of the country are deindustrialized.
It's really sad that instead of turning to organized labor, like we saw in the 19th century, these people are mostly turning to the exact people who marginalized them in the first place (conservatives, Republicans and large businesses).
I don't believe the conversion of the industrial manufacturing heartland of the United States to a region now called 'The Rust Belt' was accidental or unplanned. Nor was the destruction of much of the West Coast garment and electronics manufacturing industries.
This has been a deliberately planned policy with a known outcome by its architects, and it's been going on for about four decades. See for example:
https://www.epi.org/blog/nafta-twenty-years-disaster/
> "By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today—channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton—the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe."
From your link:
> The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.
So they're saying that jobs moving from the USA to Mexico increased the flow of Mexican workers to the USA? That makes no sense at all.
The neoliberal project in a nutshell involved the outsourcing of unionized well-paid domestic manufacturing jobs overseas, on one hand, and the import of cheap expat labor to fill jobs that couldn't be moved offshore, driving down labor costs and creating hundreds of new billionaires, who used their money to buy more politicians to lock in the programs and prevent any change.
I mean that did happen. It's just that it wasnt for seen that it could be snapped back so violently.
China is still definitely more liberalized than it was in, say, 1980, even if it apexed in 2016 (with a long way to go) and retrenched itself since then.
This wasn't autocracy, this was logical health policy: Do you overwhelm hospitals, potentially causing them to fail, or do you limit personal freedom? That's the question that they had to answer.
China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine".
Except, the choice was nowhere as binary as you present and/or perceive it. If you look across the world you will see many different responses to the very same problem, but with different answers based on political, cultural, etc. differences.
I kept and keep hearing the usual responses as to why the PRC had to respond in a highly authoritarian manner: the citizens can not handle freedom as they are morally weak. This may be true, but is it not awfully convenient that this always leads to the answer being politically empowering the CCP? Cui bono?
And you didn't see a "many different responses" -- you saw 1: Lockdowns. The whole world did them. Where they didn't do them, hospitals got trashed and lots of people died.
Lockdowns ended when vaccines began, China never got that option, because its population didn't take up any of the vaccines to a high enough percentage. Also, there was never enough mRNA vaccines available to supply the whole world + china, until recently (maybe still not even now).
It 100% was as binary as I present it. Italy, UK, Canada, US, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea... the list goes on: They all did lockdowns to some degree to slow spread, and help their hospitals. It had nothing to do with culture or politics... except in the US.
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that you did. Merely that this is the usual response I hear from those supporting the PRC position.
> Lockdowns ended when vaccines began, China never got that option, because its population didn't take up any of the vaccines to a high enough percentage. Also, there was never enough mRNA vaccines available to supply the whole world + china, until recently (maybe still not even now).
So, why did the PRC population not vaccinate? Could the government not mandate vaccines? If so, why not? Could it not better educate the population? Was the path via Sinovac the only option? Fosun International in Shanghai [1] had a license to produce Comirnaty as early as 2020 [2] for example. These are just a few decisions that could have been made differently and yet were not.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosun_International
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID%...
I am not claiming to have answers here as for there being a better path through this chaos. However, I do want a healthy debate about the decisions and outcomes; I simply am not buying how you (and Beijing) are largely portraying the decisions as inevitable.
> It 100% was as binary as I present it. Italy, UK, Canada, US, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea... the list goes on: They all did lockdowns to some degree to slow spread, and help their hospitals. It had nothing to do with culture or politics... except in the US.
I strongly disagree. While I am not a scientist in this area, I am very familiar with the great differences between say the UK, Japanese, and Swedish responses for the people on the ground. Debating excess deaths, efficiency, economic impact etc. is something that I will leave for better scientists to iron out over the years to come, but it is inarguable that the responses (and outcomes) were far more nuanced than you describe them. This – to me – is enough to solidify my position that the whole “There was no other option”, which is commonplace for governments worldwide, is a load of hogwash in this case as much as it has always been.
Despite what you may have read Sweden also limited people’s movement and gathering and did localised lockdowns.
What other technique do you think is available to stop a contagion spreading? You limit people’s proximity or their susceptibility … that’s it. That’s the whole tool belt, you don’t need to be an expert, just intuitively it’s easy to understand.
Okay…? How does this address my question about alternative vaccines? Including the fact that the PRC had a local company with an mRNA vaccine license? Was there scientific reasons for this? Lack of industrial ability and know-how? National pride?
Again, I do not have answers for these questions. But I keep being told that the government in Beijing is competent and that its actions were inevitable. To me, it stinks to high heaven and I believe mistakes were made (just like most governments did during the pandemic, like Boris Johnson stating that the NHS was well prepared in January 2020), but that there is an unwillingness to admit this and we get platitudes like “they had no choice”.
> Despite what you may have read Sweden also limited people’s movement and gathering and did localised lockdowns.
And were any of these actions even remotely like what we saw in the PRC? A cat and a lion both qualify as “cats” (felidae), but if you tell me I will share my room with a cat and I end up with a lion I think you will agree that I have both a right to complain and be somewhat surprised. Sweden to the best of my knowledge had government recommendations issued (at least I know that this was the case in Japan), with no criminal prosecution in the case of breaches. Are you really in good faith arguing that what we saw in the PRC was in any way comparable?
> What other technique do you think is available to stop a contagion spreading? You limit people’s proximity or their susceptibility … that’s it. That’s the whole tool belt, you don’t need to be an expert, just intuitively it’s easy to understand.
No, I do not believe that the set of tools is as limited as you seem to believe and nor do I believe that you have showed this to be the case. On the contrary, the range of approaches we saw across the world over the last three years speaks in my favour.
There is not enough of them. Even the local license doesn't mean china can suddenly manufacture 1 billion doses every 12 weeks.
> And were any of these actions even remotely like what we saw in the PRC?
Which country has remotely the kind of population and living density of china? India? Good example of what happens if you don't do what china did: Everyone gets sick, and hospitals fall over.
> No, I do not believe that the set of tools.
It was a question. What other tools do you think there were/are? Where did a country reduce burden on hospitals without either limiting human movement (lockdowns) or vaccinating the population (vaccines)?
This whole thread is standard anti-China rhetoric. It refuses to acknowledge the facts of the situation and prefers to go with the narrative of CCP are dumb and evil.
I don’t assume bad faith, I assume a kind of indoctrination of western group think. To have Americans (a large portion of folks replying here) look down their nose at chinas response while their own country had one of the highest deaths/capita is brainwash territory to me.
Hogwash! I and many others have repeatedly pointed out to you that there was a spectrum of measures with and without legal consequences. Recommendations, lockdowns, police patrols, enforcing mask wearing, not enforcing mask wearing, closed borders, open borders, work from home, not work from home, closing restaurants early, etc. The list goes on and on and on. If you go back and read what I have written and open your mind somewhat, you will see that what I am objecting to is the perspective that Beijing had no other choice than going with what was arguably the harshest policies we have seen across the globe.
I doubly know that your facts about the world are faulty as I stayed in Japan throughout the pandemic and Japan arguably weathered it without any legal mandate at all and “only” closed borders. Now, you can argue that the PRC is not in any way akin to Japan in terms of its readiness, culture, political structure, etc. and that they had to use the policies they did based on those conditions. This is fine and I wrote as much in my very first reply to you (go ahead, read it again). Yet you have never engaged with this idea and simply gone off on tangents about “everyone did the same…”, etc. Which to me is supremely lazy thinking.
> This whole thread is standard anti-China rhetoric. It refuses to acknowledge the facts of the situation and prefers to go with the narrative of CCP are dumb and evil.
Hogwash – again! How about reflecting on your own behaviour and that you now paint me (a person you know next to nothing about) as soaked in anti-PRC rhetoric? Is it not conceivable that you are talking to a fellow human being that is trying to remain objective, while you instead carry somewhat of a PRC persecution complex?
I have a reasonably deep personal relationship with a number of PRC nationals and I would like to believe that this gives some nuance to my perspective as I know of their experiences throughout the pandemic. Likewise, have I ever argued for “dumb” or “evil”? No, I have argued that mistakes likely were made and things could have been done differently. Again, go back and read what I wrote and try to imagine that I am not some sort of “Western agent”. My perspective is very simple. I think that Beijing messed up, just like every other government. However, I know of no other government that is currently being able to shield itself with “we had no other option” in the way that they are and I think that is a load of crap. The PRC citizens as fellow human beings deserve better than this and thus I am countering this silly rhetoric whenever I see it.
> I don’t assume bad faith, I assume a kind of indoctrination of western group think. To have Americans (a large portion of folks replying here) look down their nose at chinas response while their own country had one of the highest deaths/capita is brainwash territory to me.
Maybe your indoctrination assumption is wrong? Also – spoiler – I am not an American and likewise certainly not defending any government as having the high ground. You remind me of how perplexed PRC nationals are when they have conversations with me and nod along as I criticise the historical and current hypocrisy of “Western” governments, only to somehow be surprised when I have another salvo ready for Beijing. Seemingly the complexity of the world allows there to be far more than simple binary positions and national cheerleading – funny that…
But what you describe is still a lockdown, yes Japan could lower their spread without strict mandates. But it still told everyone to effectively stay inside.
This whole thread is anti China. You said yourself, all the countries mucked up in some way, I was pointing out they didn’t do anything that different to any other country. There was/is a harshness to some of the lockdowns in particular cities in China, but overall their response was not dissimilar to the rest of the world.
Maybe my indoctrination assumption is wrong. True, you’ve at least explained your own thinking. But it’s super clear others are just spouting crap. For instance anyone with any intellectual honesty would not refer to “Chinese Lockdowns” as a single things. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and their respective regions had massively different approaches to lockdowns. So when someone says “China did it wrong” - I know they are talking crap. It is equivalent saying “America did it wrong” as if Texas, New York and California all did exactly the same thing. So while you do want to take the high morale “fellow human being” ground… You still grouped up China as if it is one homogeneous thing, run by a single homogeneous government… it’s not… if any of that is surprising to you, then maybe my indoctrination assumption is not that wrong.
Okay…? So you claim that you were unaware of these things prior to me stating them? Yet you argued that there was near global homogeneity in terms of responses? Grouping together Singapore, Japan, the UK, etc. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I expect people in a discussion to do their own homework for their own basic facts.
> This whole thread is anti China. You said yourself, all the countries mucked up in some way, I was pointing out they didn’t do anything that different to any other country. There was/is a harshness to some of the lockdowns in particular cities in China, but overall their response was not dissimilar to the rest of the world.
I am just going to have to disagree with you on this.
> You still grouped up China as if it is one homogeneous thing, run by a single homogeneous government… it’s not… if any of that is surprising to you, then maybe my indoctrination assumption is not that wrong.
Pardon my French, but sod off. That is a low blow and putting words in my mouth and ascribing thoughts to my brain. Your holiness did not mention any diversity in terms of PRC responses until this very response; speaking about the PRC (and US for that matter…) as a single entity yourself. If I see your username in the future and remember this discussion, I will refrain from wasting my time with someone that throws ad hominem like that. You disappoint me deeply on a human level.
You are right that there is plenty of anti-PRC propaganda going around and people parroting it: screw them. However, you seem to me to be either a PRC-apologist or a good old anti-“West” propagandist and frankly I care just as little for these delusions and flavour of propaganda as I do for the anti-PRC one.
You shouldn’t be disappointed in people challenging your ideas. It’s the ideas I’m challenging, I’m sure you’re a great person. Even if we disagree on some subjects.
So no it wasn't comparable.
You wouldn't be at an amusement park and all of a sudden be forced to stay for hours so that everyone could be tested before you could leave. That definitely didn't happen... except in China. Neither would be left to rot to death without food and yet still not be able to go to a local supermarket because of "lockdown". Not the same.
Melbourne, 100% did lock people in their apartments, they didn't used welders, just Police, Guns, and force. They also required mass PCR tests, and had Quarantine Camps (though they used hotels).
I said they had lockdowns, they did not have extended lockdowns.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
Edit: I also reframed for your last comment
> China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine".
But since you're defending it. People in China prefer paid western vaccines over free local ones. The CCP refused to allow western vaccines to be used in China for COVID.
Melbourne did lockdowns for effectively 4 months, longer than any single Chinese lockdown. So even on that point you are incorrect. This isn’t misinformation.
It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK (for a variety of reasons). There is not enough of them, that’s the problem.
You claimed Singapore and Taiwan has 'extended' lockdowns. I called you out. Now you're back peddling and trying to justify your statement with "but but but melbourne, you didn't mention melbourne and they had long lockdown!!!"
> It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK.
It does refuse, and clearly you're not from China or you're just lying because China didn't recognize citizens who returned home with vaccines that were not Chinese.
Not everyone is allowed to travel to HK.
So your statement is completely false.
No, I'm not from China, but that has little to do with any point I've made. Vaccines were never an option for Chinese, they had a locally made one that didn't work well enough, and they could have never secured the number required of mRNA. If it refused them, then how did HK get them?
Which statement that I've made is false?
You claim Singapore / Taiwan had extended lockdowns > This is false.
You claim China could never secure mRNA vaccines > This is false.
You claim Chinese are free to travel to HK (to get the vaccine) > This is false.
Taiwan locked down very early in all cases taking spread to zero and then blocked anyone entering the country. Similar to New Zealand. You don’t call that a lockdown?
Show me where 6 billion doses of mRNA are being produced every 12 weeks? Then I’ll believe China could have procured them.
Chinese are free to travel to hk. There are exceptions of course. But the majority can visit (assuming they had the means) - but that wouldn’t change the fact that HK only had a few million doses so couldn’t possibly help on the mRNA front
Your point? Let's look at the difference.
In China when in lockdown, you cannot leave your apartment, period. There's no food delivery. You rely on the government to delivery food packages to you, if they aren't dumping it. You have daily covid testing, if you test positive you get taken away.
Singapore lockdown, leave home to buy food or see doctor, if you have elderly who are dependent on you, you may go visit them or take supplies to them. If you work in the food industry you can continue to work, including delivery drivers.
Taiwan lockdown, same as Singapore.
> Show me where 6 billion doses of mRNA are being produced every 12 weeks? Then I’ll believe China could have procured them.
I don't understand what part you do not get.
China > Refused > To > Allow > Western > Vaccines > From > Being > Used > In > China.
China had the facilities and rights to produce the Pfizer vaccine in China. It was not allowed to produced and used in China because China did not approve the vaccines for use.
They opted for their own home grown vaccine instead of a western one.
How hard is this to understand?
> Chinese are free to travel to hk.
No they were not allowed to freely travel to HK. There were exceptions for /some/ people to travel to HK.
And it doesn't matter if they go to HK and got an mRNA vaccine as China DID NOT RECOGNIZE IT and REQUIRED you to get THEIR vaccine. Even people in Singapore who needed to travel to China were required to get sinovac to go to China as their moderna / pfizer vaccine certs were not recognized.
You are describing lockdowns in “China” when you really mean Wuhans first lockdown, and Shanghai’s last lockdown. Guangzhou for instance was just like Singapores almost identical.
China does not require people to get the vaccine, that depends on local government policy not central government. Unless you are talking about international/returning people.
China invested in its own vaccine which was quicker and easier to keep and distribute (no cold requirement) it also turned out to be a failure. To re-pivot and set up manufacturing of mRNA that late would have been costly and still taken too long，leaving them with Covid0 as their only choice. I have seen no evidence they could have produced the required doses (initially 2 billion, and then ongoing 1 billion/quarter). If they had of tried purchasing it would likely significantly effect their economy… hard to know without understanding the pricing Pfizer were offering them.
lets Get into the real differences though:
Taiwan is an Island. Singapore is an island. The options available to you when you can effectively shutdown/control your borders lets you control people movement in a massively more effective way.
Let’s compare, somewhat comparable geographies:
- China
- Australia
- United States
Australia is a big island. So it could do a Taiwan and stop flights. But it still suffered an internal problem of people travelling between states. So what did they have to do? Super strict lockdowns.
United States also stopped flights (eventually). But its domestic and historic politics didn’t allow it to perform lockdowns nation wide, so instead it did localised ones, and spread was essentially uncontained. Lots of people died.
China suffered all the same things as the US, but could mandate lockdowns nationally. Bear in mind these lockdowns were implemented differently in every city. It saved millions of people, if the US lost 1 million with its half-assed lockdown, China would have lost more than 5 million people… insane that people are frowning at China here given their numbers were nothing close to that bad.
Was India's lack of lockdown, hospitals failing, people dying in the streets on mass "better" than a Chinese lockdown?
Things can still change.
I wonder what happens to people in China who point this out? Probably not good for the social credit score... Of course, WIV got a lot of funding for their CRISPR-gene-editing-of-bat-betacoronavirus program from the USA's NIH via the EcoHealth Alliance outfit, so the blame doesn't rest solely with them. Not that discussing that issue publicly in the USA was good for one's social credit score on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. either, although I imagine the outcome in China was significantly worse for such speech.
One does get the sense that certain US authorities and institutions are somewhat envious of China's ability to censor its own people, though.
We can say that we don't have enough information to condemn them and all other countries involved in the lab leak theory, but this one mistake is solely on China's shoulders. Had they grounded all outbound international flights, countries would've had more time to prepare, yet we saw the meteoric rise in cases worldwide in February.
I remember the only international flights allowed as being the repatriation flights. (e.g. when an overseas government organised for some non-Chinese who were in Wuhan to be able to come home). And presumably the return flights for planes that would otherwise have been stranded in Wuhan.
FactCheck matches my memory...
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/trumps-flawed-china-travel...
Wikipedia for 23rd January says all outbound flights were banned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
And anyway, there's something wrong with the whole idea: if domestic flights were banned international flights were still allowed, wouldn't the people of Wuhan who wanted to get to Beijing just fly via Bangkok or Seoul? A ban on domestic-only flights wouldn't have achieved anything.
From a NYT article[1]:
> “I was surprised at how lax the whole process was,” said Andrew Wu, 31, who landed at Los Angeles International Airport on a flight from Beijing on March 10.
> Sabrina Fitch, 23, flew from China to Kennedy International Airport in New York on March 23.
> About 60 percent of travelers on direct flights from China in February were not American citizens, according to the most recently available government data.
So these were not only repatriation, but commercial flights.
The flight data also shows plenty of activity in February and March[2]. Whether those were only domestic flights or not is difficult to say, but clearly the shutdown wasn't total even domestically.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/coronavirus-china-trav...
[2]: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/the-chinese-roller-coaste...
I keep hearing this, but I imagine if they banned outbound flights they'd be criticized to this day for trapping people in the country during the outbreak
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/first-covid-19-case-coul...
> "Another study by Australian scientists, published on Thursday in the Scientific Reports journal, used genomic data to show SARS-CoV-2 binds to human receptors far more easily than other species, suggesting it was already adapted to humans when it first emerged."
I think the evidence is steadily getting stronger for Sars-CoV-2 being the result of the accidental infection of a lab worker with a CRISPR-modified bat betacoronavirus that was being tested in human cell lines and/or genetically modified lab animals. From there it spread globally by train and airplane.
One funded by the EcoHealth Alliance and NIAID and whose research was known to Fauci.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...
https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/nih-admits-us-funded-gain-of-f...
Hong Kong was not the only place to have high death rates from Omicron. New Zealand did as well. But none of the countries which had difficulty controlling earlier Covid outbreaks did.
We are often prisoners of our own successes more than we are victims of our errors.
And, adjusting for population, the USA has had > 4x the number of COVID deaths that NZ has had. I don't think makes NZ a "victim of its own success".
OR it was because they didn't have a vaccinated population and they couldn't build and staff hospitals fast enough to deal with a nation wide exponentially growing infection.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good rant though.
To make vaccination mandatory they'd have to admit, kill off their own producers and import. It'd be a political disaster.
The reason PRC never said it publicly is because that would have been terrible for them politically as well.
That’s a good 2 whole years on a roll, no matter how illogical it seemed, it worked.
Until spring 2022, from where it lost control.
for decades
> daily news started with data of how many more thousands died in the US.
using unverifiable numbers about Chinese cases, and jailing people who challenge the data.
> Until spring 2022, from where it lost control
of the media message.
It’s not a coincidence that China maintained draconian controls for years, but within months of him getting his 3rd term (and immediately purging all viable political opponents from the party), he completely opened China at the first sign of protests.
Resident alien is a general term (not specific to the US) for someone who permanently resides in a country without citizenship; it is also an IRS tax term for someone who is either a permanent resident alien or who meets the “substantial presence test” so that they are treated as residents for tax purposes.
A permanent resident alien is another term for someone with a green card, which is for people who intend to (often, already have) immigrated before they qualify for naturalization.
An expat hopes, even plans to move back to where they came from. They're in their host nation for work reasons only because, at least according to the expat, where they're from is a "better" place than their host country.
What you call yourself, "immigrant" or "expat" is up to you. For example, plenty of Indians call themselves expats in the US. Other Indians call themselves immigrants.
Personally, I'm a fan of the word "alien". God Bless America! :D
An immigrant has an intent to settle, an expat doesn't. In America, one could theoretically lose work authorization should he refer or present himself as an immigrant (if he or she is on a legal status that doesn't allow for immigrant intent).
Same thing in Europe. Thousands of EU citizens live and work anywhere in the EU outside their home country but have no intent on permanently staying there. Often for decades. They are very much expats.
Joining the military can lead to citizenship if they're young enough. Marrying a citizen can also lead to citizenship. Even without becoming a citizen, their children, if they're born here, will become citizens.
If they refer to themselves as an expat, why are you questioning this? Do you demand proof when someone refers to themselves as male or female too?
I know people living in the US who have been there for 20 years and call themselves expats too. They have no intention of retiring in the US: they plan to move back to their home country at that point in their lives.
>Meanwhile a million+ people coming to the USA on temporary work visas fully intending to go back to their home country (or illegally with no path to citizenship) are obviously immigrants.
Is that what they call themselves? I would normally call them expats, unless they say otherwise.
>At some point people have to come to terms that this isn't about some technical definition of "immigrant" vs "expat" but a deeper prejudice.
At some point, people like you need to stop trying to make everything about racism.
> At some point, people like you need to stop trying to make everything about racism.
But it is. (Kinda.) If you don't look East-Asian in China, the predominant assumption is that you're an "expat". And statistically this is almost always true -- Chinese nationality is extremely hard to obtain if you're not born with it, and probably 99% of Chinese nationals look East Asian and has East Asian ethnicity.
Expats have a great deal more agency about their lives: where they live, where they work, when to return, etc.
To be clear, I don't particularly like this distinction, but it absolutely is a thing in the Middle East down to separate immigration lines at airports, and if anything glossing it over by calling the Bangladeshi construction worker living in a container in the brutal heat and sharing a latrine with 50 other guys an "expat" does nobody any favors. Or was the American South powered by African "expat" labor too?
A spanish banker reassogned to London is somehow an immigrant .
A white immigrant.
My point wasn’t about skin color though.
Just imagine being black in the US.