China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world

This doesn’t absolve Maoism of its policies which led to millions dying. (And yet we shouldn’t absolve the global capitalist system either which leads to millions of preventable deaths each year.)

Colonialist exploitation has been major historic driver over this timeframe (shifting to neo-colonialism in the world system post WW2). Admittedly it hasn’t been the only one. But our understanding of world history loses nuance if we gloss over colonialism and neo-colonialism over this period and treat historic events as due to the supposedly essential traits of this or that nation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you many times not to.

Of course there is room for improvement and there are political challenges, for instance to enact the pension reforms needed for the demographic changes but Europe has achieved also a lot we can be proud of. Without Europe and without the single market, we would be facing the same issues Britain is facing: Being too small, unable to regulate anything on their own, dependent on foreign trade partners, etc.

An action is not a justification for itself

They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process.

If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.

The US, for the record, also steered it's economy well enough during Covid. But that was a 2016 Trump administration, which still had adults in the room, and a 2020 Biden one.

Post 2024-MAGA isn't able to steer a bicycle.

By "own" you mean 70 year leases with ??? renewal conditions?

> Urban land use rights in Mainland China were typically granted for fixed terms: 70 years for residential, 50 years for office or industrial, and 40 years for commercial purposes. As these terms approach expiration, the question of renewal becomes paramount. The legal framework, primarily the Property Law and the Urban Real Estate Administration Law, provides a general outline but leaves specific implementation to local governments.

> Mainland China’s Property Law (Article 149) and The Civil Code of Mainland China (Article 359) guarantee automatic residential land use right renewals but provides no specific arrangement in respect of non-residential terms. Currently, without detailed implementation guidelines, local governments devise varied approaches, skewing valuations and unsettling investors. This uncertainty hinders market efficiency.

https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/greater-china/insights/b...

But yeah, you could argue that you have to pay property taxes in USA and if you don't, you'll eventually lose your land

A lot to unpack here. You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village, no eminent domain payments necessary.

> If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?

If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.

Yes. There is. Obviously both are happening simultaneously because the world is complicated.

I’d never want to live under Trump's censorship, lack of civil rights, the weird errors caused by centralized economic control

And yeah, credit where credit is due, I think no observer seriously doubts the great feat China pulled off in such a short period of time, even if the stats are not reliable. People travel there, Jobs warned about this years ago.

And between US, Russia and Israel, China is the least obnoxious villain in my news feed. They somehow conquer the world without cringe overdrive and the undignified post-pretending social media executive memefare. China does not make me wanna drive a dining fork into my frontal lobe, it’s more like the cough that doesn’t go away.

Anyway, it got me thinking that mostly the freedoms we are afforded, which are very precious to me, seem to come at great cost. A cost people under countries like China would rather bear when the affordances are clean streets, no or little homelessness and the freedom to consume luxury assets.

Every time I visit the US (frequently) I'm just assaulted by its continual, very visible rot. Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles are just fundamentally unsafe places to walk around in. The huge climb of school shootings over the last decade should have everyone alarmed. Americans appear to be stuck in the race to the bottom of who can be the greatest victim and the truly extreme painting of the Left or Right depending on which side you're on because people would rather obsess and come into conflict over what gender they can identify as or race guilt (or its opposite if you're a minority) rather than unite over common class struggles that are eating the country alive.

I think most people would rather pick comfort and safety over the freedom to say what you want and a right to privacy. I'm not sure I blame them when the alternative is getting sexually assaulted trying to walk to your car in LA (speaking from many many second-hand stories of American friends) or having your kid shot and killed in school.

We like China's progress. But let's keep it real.

It’s clear you didn’t read your links because this one concludes with:

> "Scholars in China and at the UN have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has 'discovered' such a huge discrepancy." ... "China has had at least three censuses since the start of the millennium, and there has been no evidence that more than 100 million people are overreported in China," Wang said.

The US is in serious trouble. If you don't believe trump has already done irreversible damage, he will soon.

The per capita (not median, so skewed upward) yearly expenditure of a Chinese household in 2024 was Yuan 28,227 [0]. The per capita urban household in China had around Yuan 34,000 a year in expenditures in 2024, and the per capita rural household in China had around Yuan 20,000 a year in expenditures in 2024.

61% of a per capita Chinese household's expenditures are just on food, residence, and healthcare. And that becomes 75% when factoring transit and telephone/internet bills.

Only 11% of a per capita household spend was on recreation, 5% on clothing, and around 3% on miscellaneous services.

This means the mean household in China only had aroud Yuan 7,000/$1,000 in all of 2024 on anything that is a non-essential or discretionary purchase. This is abnormally low for a country with China's GDP per capita and highlights a very real problem for the bottom half of Chinese households.

Heck, in Thailand in 2022, the median household only spends 1.4% of their income on medical care [1] and with a significantly higher household disposable income ($600/mo) and significantly better health indicators.

Literally reducing the per capita Chinese household's healthcare spend to the same ratio as Thailand's would unlock an additional Yuan 2,200 a year that can be used on discretionary spend. That itself could unlock (back of napkin math) almost $161 billion in potential discretionary spending or an additional 0.7%-0.8% of GDP growth, thus allowing China to hit the 5% GDP growth target while also reducing overproduction and increasing health standards.

And that's just healthcare.

This is why China needs a LBJ and FDR style Great Deal and New Deal reform. China is growing much slower than it should be because of pigheadedness at the upper echelons of leadership preventing this kind of development.

[0] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501...

[1] - https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...

[1] By age chart: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/indicator/spending/per-c...

In America, the average age of medical bankruptcy is 45 years old, that's not really that old. [2] 17% had to declare bankruptcy or lose their home and 45% of Americans worry a major health event will bankrupt them.

[2] https://www.retireguide.com/retirement-planning/risks/medica...

I might personally spend more money if I had a difficult health condition and reasonable healthcare, vs being uninsured and crippled by financial costs. If I live every day in fear of bankruptcy, I'm not very willing to spend money on much of anything I don't "really" need.

Having worked in the government, the pension thing is difficult. They exhibit a J-shaped accrual pattern, where young workers don't get much, and long term workers are difficult to pay for. So the motivation is to burn people out and then get rid of them before the pension costs get to be too much.

They're "supposed" to be funded to an adequate amount to pay for the benefits, yet political pressures and less rigorous accounting standards result in excessive commitments to employees and retirees, but inadequate contributions. In the American gov that has resulted in a lot of attempts at buy-outs, early retirement schemes, and almost anything to get people off the pension payrolls.

Personally, an acceptable result was the employee matched retirement contribution. That worked acceptably from my own experience in the government. Generous ceiling on how much we'll match, and employees who actually use the program are effectively getting a 3-5% pay raise because of contributing. IE: "I put in 5%, and my employer matches my contribution with 5%"

Yep. Turkiye is in a weird position where there is hyperinflation but also economic expansion. It's the hallmarks of an overheating economy.

A lot of this was due to the run-up Russia-Ukraine War, which saw significant capital outflow from Russia to all over the CEE, Balkans, and Turkiye (as is reflected in their GDPs per capita), along with Turkiye's then abnormally low interest rates in order to subsidize the construction industry, because Turkiye had it's own Evergrande 10-15 years ago.

Turkiye - just like leadership in China who were in their 20s to early 30s in the 1980s - was influenced by the development of Malaysia and Singapore. Mahatir Mohammad was the original Erdogan (infrastructure driven growth mixed with a large welfare state mixed with a heavy dose of Pan-Islamism), and both he and LKY used the same economic model and had a love-hate relationship with each other as they were in the same circles in their early career, but it's easier to develop a 4 million person city state like Singapore instead of a 15-20 million country like Malaysia under Mahatir.

Additionally, much of the Chinese economy in the 1990s and 2000s was developed thanks to the Chinese Malaysian diaspora heavily investing in China. The ethnolinguistic group (Hokkien) in the province Xi spent most of his career in (Fujian) itself represents the majority of the Malaysian Chinese business class, and they heavily invested in Fujian (along with Guangdong) during Xi's time there, and were a major reason why China's economy opened up in the 1980s-2000s.

Even the urban safety net is gated behind getting an urban hukou which has income requirements and stable residency requirements - both of which are difficult for the bottom half of society becuase of the chicken-and-egg situation. But the added issue is migrants on a rural hukou do not want to give up their rural hukou because oftentimes this means losing the right to any rural landholdings they may have - which for someone earning Yuan 2,000 to 4,000 a month doing gig work on Meituan is basically their only appreciating asset if the local prefecture decides to say expand a road or create an LGFV and thus entitling them to some (relatively) decent compensation.

This is the crux of the issue. There are very table stakes reforms that the central and provincial can conduct to help alleviate inequality, yet the bulk of spending is essentially expended on capex investments or subsidizes, which while great for building high value industries aren't generating a significant number of jobs because those industries require a college education.

No provincial government will work on expanding a social safety net without it becoming a priority at the Central level because everyone wants to climb the ladder, and there just isn't much fiscal leeway to expand that without central intervention.

> They can't afford to build a comparable one for the rural areas too as rural productivity is too low

That didn't stop Thailand or Malaysia. They might not have the same GDP per capita as China, but the median household disposable income of both is significantly higher (1.5x in the case of Thailand and 2.5x in the case of Malaysia).

Unlike both Thailand and Malaysia, the central government in China has much more leeway to expand the welfare net if it was a priority.

To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.

- plenty conservatism

- weak welfare state

- big

- diverse-ish, but with single dominant ethnic group

- aging gerontocracy (but that's everywhere)

- real estate fetish

If you don't mean it, then don't say it. Your original comment can read as if you look down your nose at 'lefties' because they like the CCP.