Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

stronglikedan

> Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes.

The vast majority of us were over that decades ago. Please catch up for the sake of all humanity.

View on HN

Yesterday your vice president referred to the Chinese as "peasants".

all part of the negotiations :)

I think the current US government is missing the negotiation part of the word negotiation.

Something like 35% of China's population works in the agriculture sector, many of whom are poor with little or no land holdings living in small villages. Is there a word for that kind of person?

That number has been falling since 2012 and was around 22% as of 2023 (ignoring the hand-wavy conflation of the entire agriculture sector and stereotypical rural farmers)

https://tradingeconomics.com/china/employment-in-agriculture...

You could just as easily massage statistics to call the US a nation of gig workers or something, but neither is productive or informative.

Peasant has a more specific meaning than this. More importantly, it has been used as a pejorative for a very long time now and that is clearly the intent the vice president had in mind.

Would you call a midwest farmer in the US a “peasant” or just a farmer?

Let’s not pretend that peasants and farmers represent the same thing

> Would you call a midwest farmer in the US a “peasant” or just a farmer?

All peasants are farmers, but not all farmers are poor.

So, no, not as a group. Midwest farmers, on balance, are going to be some of the richest people you can find in the country (mostly because of their land wealth, which Chinese farmers don't have). There are likely to be individual farmers in the midwest who you would call peasants, though.

Chinese farmers, on the other hand, are likely to be very poor. Some individual farmers in China are rich, but as far as the group goes... It is not as bad as it once was, but as that group they still lag well behind the typical urban dweller. As that group they are peasants.

Fair, but he's not exactly a shining beacon of the best we have to offer.

Half your voting population deemed him to be fit enough to represent them

yea all voting population voted. ironic comment talking about intelligence.

the non voters didn't think he was bad enough of a representative to vote against him then. Equally complicit

oh you are a mind reader now ? great

Unfortunately in a democracy the best we have to offer isn't what we actually offer.

No, he said “"We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants make”

He did not refer to all Chinese as peasants. China would like you think that though.

While it is true that Vance did not literally refer to all Chinese people as peasants, I do worry that such rhetoric will stoke the flames of racially motivated anti-Asian/anti-Chinese attacks.

I don't want to discuss whether he is genuinely racist; I think that's besides the point. Words can have a lot of impact, especially when uttered by a public figure in such a powerful position. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the Vice President of the United States to carefully weigh the consequences of his words before speaking.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the Vice President of the United States to carefully weigh the consequences of his words before speaking.

He did carefully weigh the consequences of his words. He deliberately chose the most inflammatory and insulting of possible words. Knowingly and intentionally.

So then the actual bona fide peasants are the ones owning the T-bills? I thought holding USD reserves was national policy, with strict currency controls and whatnot. So my basic reading of that quote puts it closer to a dog whistle blanket characterization, and your promotion of the equivocation is quite disingenuous.

It was an unnecessary slight by the vice president of the United States. Vance is a provocateur, and I'm not sure he's an intelligent one.

Definition: Peasant: 1. A member of the class constituted by small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers on the land where they form the main labor force in agriculture. 2. A country person; a rustic. 3. An uncouth, crude, or ill-bred person; a boor.

You unsurprisingly choose the third option. Uncouth, crude and or ill-bred people are probably not especially productive in their working life.

We do know that in China, rural people flock to the cities (where they have diminished welfare provisions and 'rural' status, do the work and are then expected to return to their homes in the country.

Vance does not get the benefit of the doubt.

The reality is that most USians and EUians still have some 1990 view of what Asia and China is. Or they cope with some 'freedom' or 'slave labor' anecdotes.

My comment on another thread about how China is now a developed country was downvoted by some HNer who swallowed some Guardian anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43627315

Exponential growth is a hard concept to internalize.

HN frowns upon griping about downvotes, and encourages a discussion around why someone's point or rebuttal might be wrong. Just sayin'...

Developed country covers a huge swath of living standard.

China has a development level similar to Thailand, which while not undeveloped, is far from the living standards in the US or Western Europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com