Comment by wahisurf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wahisurf | Hacker News Reader

> These endless rows of skyscrapers, put up in the construction frenzy of the last few decades, are ugly

And dangerous, and won't last more than a few decades. Just watch some of the tofu dreg videos https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1eyUAZCb3sA

> There were very few foreigners. In Beijing I might have seen half a dozen cumulatively across entire seas of people

Most foreigners from US and Europe have left after the COVID lockdown - they've seen with their own eyes the true nature of authoritarian/dictatorship regime. Also, the closer relationship of Russia and China has many unable to stomach supporting a regime that attacks Ukraine, another democracy. The foreigners are now from Africa, Middle East, or Belt and Road countries.

> Outside of Shanghai, almost nobody spoke English.

This is why China will be irrelevant in a few decades, as it recedes into its own shell. When most export manufacturing will have moved to Southeast Asia, when domestic goods is preferred over foreign goods, when export dwindles due to sanctions and tariffs, when it gets harder to harder for average citizens to obtain passports. China will be closed off just like the 18th century, just how Xi Jing Ping wants it.

> many young people expressed feeling stressed or overwhelmed

Imagine that you just graduated, and no one is hiring in your fields. And you can only drive didi or meituan, but the pay is decreasing fast, and there are 20+ idle drivers at lunchtime every day, and you are only making $300/month. And next year, there will be another 12+ million graduates - the size of the entire population of Sweden. You are trying to look for a job in another country, but travelling outside the country is discouraged and passports are hard to get.

> The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese VCs people at AI labs was how capital constrained they felt

China’s startup scene is dead as investors pull out—’Today, we are like lepers’ https://fortune.com/2024/09/14/china-economy-startup-creatio...

> And dangerous, and won't last more than a few decades. Just watch some of the tofu dreg videos https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1eyUAZCb3sA

Concrete quality requires vigilant testing, testers, and enforcers backing up the testers when they find bad concrete. It's a constant battle. A job as a concrete inspector is no fun.[1] Concrete testing machines are big, heavy, labor-intensive, and often require a forklift to move. This is why much third-world concrete is so bad. You need hard-ass honest inspectors with real authority. And backup inspectors to inspect again.

There's a market here. Design an automatic hand-held testing device you can hold against a concrete surface to get a good evaluation. Ship it with a set of small test blocks, known good and bad, as a check. Market it to home buyers, real estate agents, etc. in countries with poor inspection. It's a hard problem, but a combination of ultrasonics, cameras, ground-penetrating radar, and mechanical probes might do it.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlDm_BHyNAU

[2] https://geomodel.com/applications/concrete-and-rebar-inspect...

> One recent student I talked to said that they understand they don't have freedoms here, but they're willing to take the tradeoff in favor of safety

Recently there has been a string of mass vehicular/knife murders in China, some speculate due to the worsening economy: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-28/china-zhuhai-car-ramm... https://english.news.cn/20240727/7d5035a8b0b647f08b7a81df10b.... It has spooked the citizens of China, even Xi Jing Ping has commented on it. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dxz1vzdyzo

> One VC half-jokingly asked if I could help him get his money out of China.

Even Goldman Sachs has a hard time getting money out of China https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3287199/goldman-sachs-...

one of the ways bitcoin got so big was people getting their money out of China.

Tofu dreg is not as large of a problem as it once was but I agree on the other points. I am interested to see if their monoculture experiment works. My armchair analysis has always been they made mistakes alienating foreigners as much as they historically did pre covid. With the lack of any way to get citizenship and the general hostility towards non Chinese.

> Just watch some of the tofu dreg videos

The video you posted is from Falun Gong, a cult that is roughly analogous to Scientology. A few pictures of bad concrete do not say much about the quality of construction as a whole in China.

> This is why China will be irrelevant in a few decades, as it recedes into its own shell.

Given that China is the largest trading nation on Earth, China "reced[ing] into its own shell" is highly unlikely. China is highly interconnected with the rest of the world.

> "the pay is decreasing fast" ... "travelling outside the country is discouraged and passports are hard to get"

You're just making this all up. Pay has been increasing steadily in China, and is now higher than in Mexico, for example. Chinese citizens can get passports easily, and travel is not discouraged at all. Outbound tourism took a plunge during the pandemic, but it is recovering and is now approaching pre-pandemic levels (about 150 million outbound Chinese tourists per year).

> Outside of Shanghai, almost nobody spoke English. This is why China will be irrelevant in a few decades

that assessment seems completely off since in only a few years every visitor of China can bring their own babel fish. also there is hope that after Xi there will be a renewed opening up

Western oligarch media has been running China collapse stories for decades.

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