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Comment by yanhangyhy | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.

Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” As for building roads — the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for itself. We’ve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique, and roads and railways all over the world. That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese person’s memory.

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> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.

They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas.

India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline.

Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.

>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated

Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.

Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.

>food is largely a solved problem

It really isn't...

*logistics of food is not solved?

Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer).

The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.

The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now

Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…

There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.

It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.

Distribution is an issue, but the imminent capacity issue perceived in the late 1960s when The Population Bomb was written was already being solved when it was entering the popular consciousness (but the impact of the solutions had not been fully appreciated) by the Green Revolution through high-yield crop varieties and other advanced in agriculture.

Yeah, spoken like someone who only understands food as something that magically and without fail appears on their local stores.

We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.

The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally.

Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.

We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.

>However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever.

All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis.

The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).

We are not on track for famines due to lack of food production. It's been solved.

There is more trade then ever people are richer then ever and therefore less likely to have kids. 1 child per family law was a gross violation of human rights that likely did not significantly change the birth rate compared to other countries

"We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem."

Solved problem for now. A large part of world's agriculture is dependent on stable rainfalls and temperatures. If climate change gets bad enough, a big collapse in world's food production capability might happen.

"Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here.

We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will.

There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.

The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production.

Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.

I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model.

People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.

What were those variables?

I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.

The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.

What's fascinating is the the Rat Utopia[0] experiment in overpopulation from the late 60's that Dr. John Calhoun ran.

As a result, more than fifty years ago, on tape, Dr. John Calhoun made some eerily accurate[1] extrapolations of where human population is going to be now, and how our TFR (total fertility rate) would collapse (which they basically are, particularly since Millennial & Gen Z generations).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFveSUmh9U "John B. Calhoun Film 7.1, (NIMH, 1970-1972)"

Since nobody pointed that out yet: rat utopia results are questioned now, based not only on a fact that the enclosed space where rats resided were sitting in direct spotlight, but also on a replicability issue. An experiment with results that couldn't be replicated should be dismissed.

It's entirely possible that the mice in this experiment were overheated, and dominant males didn't fight to "stay in solitude" but rather to be out of direct sunlight.

That's to say, if the cause for such mouseslaughter really was in the temperature, climate change could make original experiment relevant again.

Why would we ever want to revisit people like Erlich and the Club of wrong who were famously extremely off in their predictions? And when some of the writings contributed to forced

The claims that theyll be proven right /on track any day now decades after their predictions failed is hard to take seriously.

It's not the business as usual people who made sure that their predictions fail its people working to either improve the world or sometimes to make money that actually changed things. In fact it was the people who pushed neo malthusian thinking that assumed things would continue as usual and therefore get worse

The conflation of Ehrlich with the LtG team is an extremely dead horse that people should stop beating. The Population Bomb (Ehrlich's 1968 book) was an entirely separate production, with separate teams, separate conclusions, and separate levels of academic rigor.

Furthermore, Ehrlich's PR stunt with Julian Simon of a bet during the peak of a commodity cycle was neither epistemologically sound nor a proof of absolutely anything other than markets do what markets do.

I challenge people who reach for the Ehrlich card whenever these growth conversations come up to reflect on what they're acting on and to recognize that the road of thought on LtG is dark and overwhelming. In fact, it ends at a destination that implies deep unflattering things about our fundamental capabilities as humans and role on this earth. It is natural, and human, to meet this with reactive fear. Keep this in mind as you read what follows.

I mention revisiting Limits to Growth because if you read the introduction[1] you would notice that they state their conclusions as follows:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustain able far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.

3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

Furthermore, if you look at their 30-year update [2] published in 2002, you can get a few more notable quotes:

"We still see our research as an effort to identify different possible futures. We are not trying to predict the future. We are sketching alternative scenarios for humanity as we move toward 2100." (p. xvii)

and most telling:

"Our most important statements about the likelihood of collapse do not come from blind faith in the curves generated by World3. They result simply from understanding the dynamic patterns of behavior that are produced by three obvious, persistent, and common features of the global system: erodable limits, incessant pursuit of growth, and delays in society’s responses to approaching limits." (p. xviii)

The story Limits To Growth is trying to communicate is still pending and will be until ~2072. Nothing has failed and their nuanced commentary on the complexity of the issue has only aged well.

[1]: https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/

[2]: https://www.peakoilindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Limi...

> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.

For an interest take on this debate (?) I recommend the book The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (who also wrote 1491 and 1493):

> In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann

The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the demographic gap with migration policies.

In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that is still costing us.

The best usually leave the country after getting the prime education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip. Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life hell.

Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't understand how India can even be compared to China any more.

The talent drain is real... when the system doesn't create enough high-quality opportunities at home, people are going to leave, no matter how patriotic they are.

Yes and it creates a mad scramble for people to get out to any other place they can find. An immense incentive for corruption, crime and trafficking.

I believe automation can solve this problem. Perhaps the government believes it too. But there are still many people who don’t believe it. I sincerely hope automation can solve this problem.

The main issue with a demographic decline is that fewer people can live of their wealth.

This is in particular a problem for the older generation.

But if you are not a big believer in retirement, then there are no issues with demographic shifts.

There are MANY issues with a demographic decline, "that fewer people can live of their wealth" is the least of it.

Less productive hands (60 year olds are not as productive as 20 and 30 year olds, especially in any industrial and labor intensive field, but also in intellectual ones - who would have thought?). More older people in need of health support. Less dynamic society. Slowing economy.

Beyond some (not very low) point it's also a self-reinforcing feedback point to relatively quick (in historical term) elimination of a whole people.

From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage.

Living of wealth does not only mean your own wealth. That is also state wealth as in getting services redistributed to you.

>From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage.

I state the opposite: the younger people, who are being able to work as much, are the ones at a disadvantage.

That's regardless if the older people live off their wealth, have state services redistributed to them, or are just left to die. You could even confiscate their assets and kill those old people, it wont fix most problems associated with a shrinking demographics.

The economy has fewer productive people, so the (fewer) younger ones have to work more, while at the same time the economy contracts around them because of fewer consumers. Infrastracture built at X level of population also can't be maintained (due to cost, political justification, and capacity) as the population drops far below X.

The younger ones have to live in a staler society, which an increased average age (in some countries the average person is already over 45 - used to be the average person was merely over 20-25 in the same societies decades ago), more decisions taken by people on their way out and not to their benefit etc.

This is simply not correct.

The "the young people have to work more" argument is only valid as they are working for the older generation.

If we follow your proposal to euthanize every one over 60 then there really is no additional work.

>The "the young people have to work more" argument is only valid as they are working for the older generation.

Nope, that's just a tiny part of the problem.

An economy has a certain size, which depends on how many people support it (work) and how many people buy stuff (consume).

Fewer young people means (everything else being equal) less productivity. That's regardless if the old people are kept around or euthanized (!) or whatever.

Seems you forgot that declining fertility also means less young people each year, not just a larger percentage of older people. Even if you ...kill anybody above 40 years old, the number of 20 and 30 year olds will still drop because of the declining fertility.

Smaller worker and consumer base then means contracting economy.

I see what the issue is - you see a contracting economy as being a problem in itself. It is not, as another commenter pointed out.

Ah, ok, if another commenter pointed it out it's not a problem, I guess it's fine then!

Let's check back in 20 years.

Well, there is not reason to rewrite what another commenter wrote.

But I agree, let's check back in 20 years

If the population is declining, it's not a problem that the economy is also shrinking, assuming the rates are equal. What matters is GDP per capita not decreasing, it doesn't matter if total GDP decreases because the population shrinks.

The only real issue is the demographic shift - and old people will bear the brunt of that, not younger ones.

> But if you are not a big believer in retirement, then ...

Unfortunately, "believer" or not, modern Western medicine has gotten extremely good at keeping infirm elderly people alive.

From a Capitalist medicine PoV, that's optimal for extracting their wealth.

From a macroeconomic PoV - "retired" or not, the net economic input from the top decades of the demographic curve will be nothing so positive as you seem to assert.

Not at a whole-population scale level to any real significance though. There are just an abnormally large number of baby boomers, exacerbated by the subsequent massive fall in birth rates following them.

It's a "law of large numbers" problem - if you have a big population, you'll just have more people who live longer within that population then a similar, but smaller population.

US life expectancy has actually been falling somewhat recently - the whole "people are living longer" thing has always been a massive over simplification of long term historical effects and pressures (i.e. life expectancy didn't change all that much with the discovery of medicine, but it changed a lot because infant mortality stopped dragging down the average).

Old people all have massive long term health issues. That's where most of the healthcare costs in universal healthcares go. Change the balance way more towards old instead of young being generally still healthy and feeding the system financially, and it just doesn't work anymore and becomes unsustainable.

There are partial solutions, ie adding some small fees for each visit (since a lot of retirees are lonely and go for the doctor visit just to talk to somebody or complain, and as I said they all have various mix of long term issues). Where we live healthcare isn't fully free and you have to chip in a bit, and this ain't such an issue (apart from wealthy old people).

a better solution would be imo to move resources from mindless consumption to healthcare

And why would people work if they do not get to consume? Okay some amount of self-actualisation. But doing some real work say manufacturing goods used in health-care. The factory part of that?

With such move, there would like to be move to general welfare as well. So enough people might just cut down their labour to match the minimum level they would be getting anyway. And then you have no more surplus for healthcare...

It is really astounding that there is not a clear divide between younger worker people and older richer people in voting if you think about it.

Especially when basically every single thing is about money in politics

What’s astounding is that for basically any obvious voting block or political pain point there’s basically no effective political organizing anywhere I’ve lived. We’re more connected than ever, and yet none of that connection matters if we can’t leverage it into positive action.

Overpopulation is not the problem of India. Mindset towards public areas and public behavior is - and the very much active in practice caste system, still excluding millions from full participation in all of society.

And inversely, demographic collapse if fertility falls will be a problem, just because it will hit after 2065 doesn't mean it's something to ignore.

European here.

One of the problems is that many of our society's systems are predicated on a growing population. Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. People take more than they give. Fixing that will be painful, but possible.

More worrying is how many countries' birth rates have fallen below the replacement rate. Some SE Asian countries are interesting case studies here (Japan, S Korea), but it's not looking good, and much of western Europe is heading in the same direction. Maybe the worry is overblown and populations will eventually stabilize at a lower point, but currently it seems like a declining population will just add to the stressors that are putting people off from having children, so it could just as well keep snowballing.

All that's to say, I don't worry too much about over/underpopulation, but I do worry about a shrinking population.

> Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person.

I'm from a western country and I agree with your statement and have a similar fear. My country is doomed because of the pension system.

BUT this doesn't apply to China. Their system isn't structured this way, therefore this is mostly irrelevant for them.

As long as China have a working population bigger than most countries, as well such amazing universities, they will perform better than all those countries.

Even with the population decline, they'll still have more able workers than all western countries for at least the next 100 years.

Let that sink in.

The problem with most current pension systems is the inability of the last boom to plan for that boom to become part of it. And people hating on immigration, not realising it is massively needed to offset the negative replenishment rate. We might also have a negative growth rate when the boom generation starts dying but that might not actually be a bad thing. Note: the boom lasted from about 1948 to 1974 so it will take a while.

We are already seeing the effects of this. Rich people still get to take more than they give, poor people increasingly do not.

Neither Japan nor Korea are in SE Asia

Damn, I goofed, thanks for calling that out. Can't edit the comment anymore unfortunately.

> for every old person we should have more than one working young person.

I never understood this thinking. Doesn't it assume infinite population is possible?

Occupy Mars!

No, it does not. If, for example you define old persons, as persons above the age of 90, you suddenly have many young to old persons.

It's not like people sat down and said "clearly we'll have infinite population and hence a pyramid like scheme for social support for the elderly is ideal".

It was more likely something like "for the foreseeable future we'll have population growth and therefore a pyramid like scheme is a good solution for now".

Ideally the scheme should have already started adapting to the changing population dynamics, but humans for the most part (unfortunately) tend to kick problems down the road.

Politicians don't tend to get rewarded for solving tomorrow's problem when their populace tend to me more interested in having more money to spend right now.

So here we are, living large today with little regard for the cost to our future.

At a steady population number, it just requires people to work for longer than they are retired. Which is mostly already the case.

> Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person.

Canada saw the demographic writing on the wall, and solved its public/government pension problem in the 1990s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_refor...

Good book on the history of the CPP, and how the reforms were determined and enacted (Fixing the Future by Bruce Little):

* https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831

There's no reason other countries could not have done something similar earlier (or even now).

In France it is reported that retirees now have higher (average?) incomes than workers:

* https://archive.is/https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/m...

This is completely ludicrous. For retirement planning purposes, it is often recommended to assume you'll need 70% of your working age income for the same lifestyle (you have fewer expenses—live not having a chunk of your income go to retirement savings), but in many situations it could even be ≤50%:

* https://archive.is/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-inv...

To have the same (or more) in retirement generally means you "over saved" while working, and you could have had more resources for enjoyment of life earlier (after all, we don't know when our time will come).

> In France it is reported that retirees now have higher (average?) incomes than workers

It may not be exactly true, but it's close to be true, and then like you said the workers have way more expenses (rent, children).

I will point out that in the 90s we in France already knew that the retirement system was unsustainable. It is quite obvious if you look for 2 seconds at the population pyramid :-)

Generations of politicians tried and failed to do something about it, thanks to the left (and sometimes extreme right wing) saying that there was enough money and we just need to tax the rich more.

Exactly.

In the current pension system (at least the ones in the Nordics), the new generation pays for the old generation. This mechanism is broken, as it expects (as you pointed out) an ever-growing population, which is of course unrealistic.

Fixing [*] the broken pension system in a sustainable way is politically unpalatable and seems to have been so for decades. Lifting the pension age is the only "innovative" action available that is even discussed nowadays anywhere in public, as if that were the only viable alternative, which of course it isn't.

I've pondered why. Hammering out the details of a new system and taking care of a transition period etc. cannot be unsurmountable problems. It probably has to do with pensioners being a large voter demographic, thus the reason is some form of political self-preservation on behalf of the traditionally large parties.

So, instead of changing things to the better, a broken system must be maintained. Since the system is not only broken, it's essentially untouchable, therefore political decision-taking has to accept possibly sub-optimal decisions in related areas to avoid disturbing anything. In a way, the brokenness leaks.

Then, a shrinking population only exacerbates the problems of the pension system, spreading the brokenness further into other societal systems and decisions. And that's a bad path to be in.

[*] In an example of a better-working alternative system, any pension contributions would be personal, kept in an account managed by the state. The money is (low risk) invested by the state, profits/dividends reinvested, etc. Once one becomes a pensioner, the money can be withdrawn in whole or parts. Add taxes somewhere, such as when withdrawing the money. The state guarantees the lowest level of pension, something like today. Simple enough, and not tied to "children pay for parents".

Edit: formatting

Might aswell outsource the responsibility of fund management to highly regulated third parties and you're basically describing Australia's superannuation scheme.

Issue is due to the same politics as everyone else, Australia is having trouble reigning in the state pension (ideally in this scheme meant as a fallback to provide a minimum subsistence level).

An inverted population pyramid is a huge problem. What does China do when it has far too few workers and far too many elderly? This is coming for them in the next few decades, a slow moving crisis in demographics.

robots

Optimistically: Advancement in gerontology and improvements in problems that the elderly face.

Pessimistically: A society that doesn't support it's elderly, well it's a self correcting problem.

China’s economy is transitioning to one of taking care of the elderly.

With a shrinking workforce and more robots, maybe that productivity gain is good enough to stall the inevitable.

Their crazy bad policy decisions resulting in 20% youth unemployment is a risk.

India’s problems have nothing to do with population and everything to do with complete collapse of all government institutions.

My thought was that we should develop a good DSL to design pensions. You obviously cant have a formula with more money coming out than going in. Pensions can gradually scale up and down depending on all factors.

It isn't even hard to create. Things currently work like that children's game where each participant has to write the next word in the sentence. No amount of effort or coordination will produce a good novel.

I would really respect the hell out of the nation of China if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.

Imperialism? Expand.

The most charitable interpretation I can think of, if OP didn't misuse the word, would be, the generic "China bad" narrative being applied to things like equating the Belt and Road (loans, infrastructure projects) to centuries of old-fashioned exploitation of Africa. After all, it takes one to know one.

To be fair China challenging white people rule is kinda bad if you are white. I suppose us Westerners can now kinda feel how the Ming must have felt in the 19th century?

It’s not that hard to find examples. Chinese incursions in the south China sea and the development of artificial islands to project power and control over the region. Their plans for Taiwan. The annexation of Tibet. Xinjiang ethnic cleansing. Erosion of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong SAR. And yes the entire Belt and Road initiative which is basically loan sharking.

No. That list shows coercive or authoritarian behavior, not classical imperialism. Imperialism means establishing colonies or directly ruling foreign territories for economic extraction. China today doesn’t occupy or govern other sovereign states. The South China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan are all disputes within--except Taiwan + the South China Sea--undisputed national boundaries.[1] Belt and Road loans, while allegedly predatory, are contractual and do not create colonial rule. So it’s perhaps aggressive nationalism and coercive influence, but not imperialism.

1. Yes, looking way back, the occupying Qing dynasty established said boundaries through quite a lot of imperialism about a century before the US got busy manifesting its destiny.*

Tibet was a self governing entity until Chinese invasion. Though China would disagree. Tibet's leaders are still in exile and one of the key issues of China with India.

If the argument is that Tibet was not a country, then the same applies to Taiwan. Taiwan is not internationally recognized as a country, except for a few nations.

Autonomy is not sovereignty. Tibet wasn’t “invaded” like a foreign country, it had been de facto autonomous after the chaotic Qing collapse, but no one recognized it as sovereign. If I were to guess at China's narrative, the PLA’s 1950 entry is probably seen as a reconsolidation of territory long claimed by China, not new imperial conquest. And Taiwan’s status only survived because US intervention froze the Chinese civil war’s outcome, not because it was ever outside China’s historical frame. Again, indeed, Qing imperialist actions 300 years ago led to the current map, and you might see me as pedantic here but calling China (or modern US/Japan/Britain for that matter) imperialist might feel satisfying, but analytically it dampens the real and harmful empire-building sense of the term used in history.

I think one issue is when do we start drawing the line that an autonomous entity is recognized as a sovereign country. Do we start with the UN? Because before nation states formed, it was a bit ambiguous. British empire's colonies were not a formally recognized countries in the modern sense. But we do agree that British were imperialistic.

You can use whatever word you want for naked ambition to conquer people who don't want to be part of your country. I'm still not going to respect it.

They're plainly trying to expand their territory in Taiwan and the South China Sea. Building invasion barges that can only be used for invading Taiwan, harassing Phillipine ships. It's not subtle.

And oppression of Tibet and the Uyghur people and other human rights violations…

A mean not to go too deep into whataboutism… but at least they only persecute their own Muslims rather than picking random countries on a map and persecuting them.

Ohhh so they aren't like selling weapon to Russia? Right. Keep going.

I see your point but, they're really not selling much more than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling their actual military hardware (which they have a large stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without increasing support from the west.

It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the western powers have been colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)

Everybody makes mistakes.

The US is able to mention its past mistakes.

China still can't talk about students it murdered over 30 years ago.

Yet, recent American presidents have no problem admitting that Afghanistan and Iraq wars weren't the best of ideas.

> The US is able to mention its past mistakes.

The entire point of being able to mention past mistakes is for future generations to be able to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes. It seems, in recent times, that while this liberty is "afforded" to US/Europe, they're not able to use it effectively, if at all. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese might not be able to talk about their mistakes publicly, it seems evident from their progress and events that they have not forgotten them, and that it is in their minds, at the very least.

Edit: Not to mention, looking at how your current president is going after Canada just because of an ad, don't keep your hopes up on US citizens being able to "mention" things either.

Okay and how many years is George Bush Jr and his entire administration serving currently?

What good is mentioning past mistakes if there's strictly zero consequences

Is that better or worse than aiding/supporting genocide?

I would rather live in a country that points the guns outward, rather than inward

Sounds like you’re comparing it to the United States or something? I’m not from there

Have you heard of this thing called the new Jim Crow?

Is that an American thing? If your point is “America is also bad!” - I don’t disagree, I’m not from there, so why bring it up? Why don’t we start listing all countries with bad things?

This isn’t some gotcha. This article is about china, so chinas issues are relevant.

As long as the cat catches the mice... :-)

They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.

It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track.

A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.

Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation, local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.

I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.

It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional sabotage of the government by conservatives.

> I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.

>*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal"

I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such.

1. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

I agree. Of the two major US political parties today, one is primarily radical right with a small conservative branch that is struggling to stay in their party. The other is conservative to moderate with a small liberal branch that is fighting to make their party stand for something.

That liberals are the left wing in US is quite telling. In Europe and Latin America liberals are (center-)right.

The word "liberal" means different things in different places.

Maybe, although many policies by European liberal center-right parties are to the left of US liberals.

The main reason is probably that US never had the major socialist movements of 20th century Europe. Before those liberals were the left in Europe too.

For me it happened when I was growing up and I watched my family bankrupted and pushed to near homelessness with zero legal recourse due to a corrupt local government. There are countless others that have found themselves at the mercy of a large government, with unlimited money and resources.

....so you prefer a "small" government, which history has shown time and time again leads to corporations doing evil en masse, ruining all sorts of lives around them?

It's not that people turned against the government just randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one signature away from execution? And that'll probably look benign as the actions from more recent decades are declassified in the future.

And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

LBJ made more progress on social issues than any President with the possible exception of FDR. Certainly dramatically more progress per year in office. Jimmy Carter was also socially motivated.

Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed cooperation, and now we're living in the world they created.

Modern politicians are really good at framing everything as being the most socially motivated thing in the world. And I think LBJ is the grandfather of this stuff. When you read of his private discussions, socially motivated is just about the last thing he was. He wanted absolute political power and understood that he could create systems of dependency to achieve it.

It just so happens that systems of dependency can also be framed positively as 'solving hunger' or whatever. The fact that 60 years later 'solving hunger' has translated to having more than 41 million people completely unable to feed themselves without government assistance is not a coincidence. It a third stanza of that old saying 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. Give a man a fish every day and he'll do whatever you want to keep getting that fish.'

There's countless ways we could have spent that war money (no different during LBJ times with Vietnam) to help create ways for people to be able to genuinely provide for themselves. But I don't think this was ever the goal.

>Give a man a fish every day and he'll do whatever you want to keep getting that fish

This is complete nonsense. Certain demographics that depend the most on welfare oppose it the most. Mitch McConnell responded to concerns about the political impact of Medicaid cuts saying that voters would "get over it".

LBJ was certainly motivated by power, but he also genuinely cared about social issues as well. He knew that the Civil Rights Acts would overall cost him far more politically than he gained in terms of support from newly enfranchised black voters.

In the 60s the black population was rapidly increasing and groups like the NAACP were working to politically organize them into a cohesive force. There's endless quotations from the time about LBJ being concerned about them and fearing that they could become a major political force. From his exact quotes he was worried about losing the filibuster, so I assume that translates to him thinking they might be able to start winning Senate seats in states with high black populations.

So then he passes the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, then the Food Stamps Act on August 31st 1964, and then there's the election. The black turnout for the election ended up being 58% with something like 94% of their vote going to him, giving him a landslide of an election victory. So what he was saying wasn't just trying to convince people, as it's often been reframed - he was simply being a realist and was 100% correct.

The guy was a massive racist and segregationist for most of his entire political career. But more than anything he was a professional politician who wanted power. And he did what he thought could get that power. This [1] Snopes article includes many of his 'greatest hits' and tries to conclude with an argument claiming that he wasn't mostly fixated on claiming the black vote, but it makes no sense. Apparently in reading the headlines about the Civil Rights Act he was found in a melancholy state and when asked why he said, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come." That was obviously him being worried that his calculations might been wrong, but they weren't - he won 44 states in the election.

[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/

> The fact that 60 years later 'solving hunger' has translated to having more than 41 million people completely unable to feed themselves without government assistance is not a coincidence

Yeah it is a coincidence. The last 60 years also coincided with massive deindustrialization, job losses and reducing labor power, and multiple drug epidemics. I'm much more inclined to believe it was those factors, and not "welfarism".

>When you read of his private discussions, socially motivated is just about the last thing he was.

This isn't true. I cannot recommend Robert Caro's works on LBJ enough. Johnson had plenty of flaws, but he cared deeply about people, especially the poor. He taught immigrant schoolchildren and saw their plight. He grew up before the Hill Country had electricity and saw the reality of true poverty, and when he had power he used every bit of his skills and connections to get things like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Medicare, and Medicaid - and so many more.

You can't (and shouldn't) separate LBJ and his administration from atrocities in Vietnam, but if he had been able and willing to extract America from Vietnam, he would be without dispute the greatest president in history and it's not close.

And we're back to framing. LBJ didn't teach. He was immediately assigned as principal, with no relevant experience at all, as a gig to earn some cash for school. In other words - connections. And he was so moved that he quit after his first year never to return to anything education related ever again.

There's been a large effort to reimagine LBJ because having an exploitative racist as the progenitor of many of these things (which you mentioned) is kind of awkward, but reality is always so much more interesting than fiction, precisely because of such things.

---

In the future you'll see something similar with the Amish. There's about 400k Amish in America growing at about 2.5% per year, thanks to healthy fertility rates. And they do, when they see it as necessary, vote (as they did for Trump). As their population continues to swell, and election margins continue to narrow, they're going to be capable of deciding elections in the US in the foreseeable future.

And so you're going to see a Republican suddenly become a hero for everything the Amish care about. Is it because he cares about the Amish? No, but that's certainly how it'll be framed. As an aside, I find the idea of the Amish as kingmakers hilariously appropriate. I guess the meek truly will inherit the Earth!

FDR was not generally socially motivated. He was responsive to labor pressure and other organizing.

> literally less than nothing to show for it

That’s not true! Some guys got really really rich with it. So, working as indented.

There’s a good argument for America having been able to do all it did despite being a democracy without a strong central government, not because of it. Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles? Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system. I would love to see a good counter argument that’s convincing since I find this realization extremely sad as for all my life I believed the propaganda about democracy and liberalism being the route to success just to see most countries that tried to emulate that fail miserably.

> Most of Europe became rich under imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current system

Europe prospered under democratic governments after the second world war. My particular region of Germany was rural, agrarian and piss poor before the war. Now it is an industry hub and one of the richest regions in Germany, all thanks to a democratic government, which prioritised development of rural areas.

The wealth we now enjoy is incomparable to what we had under authoritarian rule before.

Let's also not forget, that the Cold war divided Europe in two halves, one with democratic governments and one under authoritarian rule, an A/B test so to say. The end result was, that they needed a wall in Berlin to keep the people from fleeing to the west.

> Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles

Beside the whole of Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Uruguay and Taiwan come to mind. Taiwan has a per capita GDP 2.5x that of mainland China.

Sorry but I have to mention that Nazi Germany became incredibly prosperous, but it decided to use its wealth to obtain military power.

Also, Europe dominated the world for a couple of hundred years before the Great War. Some parts of Europe may have been poor during that time, but compared to the rest of the world I do think it was a whole lot better.

Japan was incredibly rich in the beginning of the 20th century - and it was definitely not a democracy. Australia, Canada and NZ are all part of the ex-British Empire and I would say that's what made them prosperous, not their political system.

South Korea rode on the back of US support, like Japan after the war, but I do agree they did that while being mostly democratic.

Uruguay has just very recently become a nice place due to basically a single guy! That president, Jose Mujica, was such a legend! And a big critic of capitalism , by the way.

Taiwan was what we used to call the "Asian Tigers" that became rich in an incredibly fast manner... I don't know that you can attribute that to a political system at all: Singapore was and is a dictatorship and is perhaps the best example of Asian Tiger - it became richer than Australia in like 20 years!

All in all: you do not convince me. You do not seem to understand what made those countries rich in my opinion and you haven't really reflected on it if you really think that democracy was the common theme.

EDIT: Taiwan is a tiny island, China is a huge country. The GDP percapita of Shanghai and Beijing is about the same as Taiwan... Hong Kong and Macau, also part of China, have much larger GDP/pc still.

> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

that is what it means to have property rights.

It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.

If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).

If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.

America's elevation of individuality and property rights above everything else, its inability to work together collectively to achieve a goal, and its citizen's infighting, distrust of and belligerence toward each other, are the main reasons it is incapable of doing big things anymore.

The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have united the population, it was immediately politicized such that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.

We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country against each other over literally every issue.

More and more I think the mistake is seeing it as a tradeoff between "property rights" and "government authoritarianism". First, because authoritarianism is not much better when it happens to be non-government authoritarianism (i.e., when corporations become more powerful than government). And second, because it treats "property rights" as a single fixed notion, rather than recognizing that we can have property rights that are not independent of the amount of property owned. Just because "property rights" means that Paul the Peon has absolute dominion over his hovel, there's no particular reason it also has to mean that Oliver the Oligarch has absolute dominion over his dozens of mansions, factories, private security forces, etc. We can have a system where your rights over property decrease the more of it you have, so that in the limit there is effectively a maximum on how much property can be owned or controlled by a single individual (and therefore by a group of individuals).

The interstate was for the military. The new deal was in part thanks to left wing communists/unionists voicing for the gov to do more for the people. Then came McCarthyism.

Presumably many of the people who currently attribute China’s ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism would also attribute America’s past ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism. They would presumably also decry any future attempts to build ambitious infrastructure in America as authoritarianism.

Actually, the US didn’t have a famine, it had the opposite. Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became the norm.

The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.

Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).

So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.

Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).

PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.

I'm a yimby but to be fair the welfare system is so broken in the US that it's kind of a de facto ongoing famine

Yeah lets talk about them tax rates at the time of these accomplished generational projects (comment is in support of them)

> They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects...

Lack of free press makes it easy to look successful.

It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?

China is plainly and obviously many times more successful than the Soviet Union ever was, even if you ignore all the propaganda and just rely on yourself as a primary source - I.e., “hop on a plane and see for yourself.”

China's success has come _after_ they economically liberalized in a way that resembles the west's free markets.

Soviets never did any of this. They "stubbornly" kept to a command economy. While china does have their 5-year plans and command economy, they have loosened that up for private individual's enterprises, and allowed special economic zones for which free market capitalism thrives.

With a bit of state help in infrastructure etc, this enabled china to leverage their enormous human capital to simply out-muscle their way into industrial dominance. Now with such a dominant position, they can call shots in a way that irks the US. Compounding the problem is that the authoritarian style of gov't in china enables long term strategic planning and execution - something that seems sorely lacking from the US for the past 3 decades.

Why does the added qualifier in your first paragraph matter?

You’re literally just explaining why the Soviet Union was less successful.

Nothing stopped the Soviet Union from liberalizing their economy and running it better like China. They just didn’t do it. Which loops us back to my original comment.

I didn’t bring my point up as some kind of communism versus capitalism thing, I’m just plainly stating that as far as single-party mostly-authoritarian governments go, China is far more accomplished than the USSR was.

> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?

America had to go to all the way to the moon to win a "first" against the Soviet Union in space.

> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?

yes. the soviet union was wildly successful for most of its history. it went from a backwater poor agrarian country to an industrial superpower near peer with the US in a single generation, while simultaneously going through multiple brutal wars and crushing nazi germany at immense cost. despite all that, the soviet union had the fastest and greatest economic and quality of life rise of any country in the 20th century.

of course it had problems that led to its collapse but you cannot be serious and say it was never successful at any point

You can go to China and see it for yourself. The USSR made itself inaccessible to foreigners for the most part, but you can hop on a train and visit nearly any place in China freely. It's pretty easy with their extensive train system.

I see a lot of cope with "c-China is lying! It's not really that good!" But lots of tourists such as myself have been all over the country, and tbh, I think the "propaganda" undersells it a bit. I thought there was no way it could be as nice as the travel videos I saw, but it was even better.

You don't need press for everyone to see that China is straight killing it in almost every sector. Manufacturing, compute, you name it. Sure, they aren't without problems.

And as for free press, look at where freedom of press took United States. You have companies like Fox news that "aren't actually news, just entertainment", who blatantly lie about election fraud. You have podcasters like Joe Rogan who are at the same time "just bullshitting", while also pushing ideological narratives. And most republicans still believe election was stolen in 2024.

And overall, the party that was all about free speech, free trade, and small federal government power is pretty much doing the exact opposite in every single aspect, and people voted for them.

Im glad China has reigns on all of that. It allows them to pass laws like this https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/chinas-new-influencer-law-wan...

And yes, from a pure statistical standpoint, having centralized power isn't optimal since you don't want someone crazy having lots of centralized power, but at the same time, you also don't want what US has, where on the average 7/10 people simply just don't give a fuck about US being destroyed financially and socially.

This is a wild comment.

It claims free speech is being taken away, then gets upset people use it (Fox News).

Then it celebrates a law that actually curtails free speech.

What's wilder is the fact that my generation was told that rock music, rap music, video games, etc would be lead to the decline of our society. But it turns out that Fox News was far more destructive than all of those things combined.

In the US, organized religion and Fox News are the two most destructive forces in our society.

If your theory was logically sound it would be interesting to hear more.

>Then it celebrates a law that actually curtails free speech.

Yes. There are already laws that curtail free speech - i.e yelling fire in a crowded theater as the popular example. Its not hard to extend this to the act of lying about information on air.

The optimal solution is that the government should have the power to enforce a ban on certain individuals on social media, which should be done through a court procedure where facts are presented and if the person is deemed to be spreading misinformation, the ban applies.

And the famous right wing argument of "don't give government power because it will use it to oppress you" doesn't work anymore.

Yelling fire in a crowded theatre actually isn’t illegal.

And your idea of court ordered ban on speech? What is a good example? That Covid absolutely 100% didn’t originate from a lab in China? How about the fact that Covid vaccines stop transmission of the virus?

Both of those were actually banned on major social media sites, then turned out to be true.

So what you’re suggesting is banning speech that isn’t untrue. Just inconvenient to those in power.

Sounds horrible.

>Yelling fire in a crowded theatre actually isn’t illegal.

The act of it is not, but you can be charged with other things like inciting panic, and so on, especially if someone gets hurt.

Same laws would apply to broadcasting.

>And your idea of court ordered ban on speech? What is a good example?

* Saying that vaccines are causing mass issues, and government is hiding it.

* Lying about what officials said in relation to vaccine. Nobody said that vaccine stop transmission or that vaccines even mean you don't get covid. The whole goal of mandates was to overall reduce the risk of the complications, which were the primary cause of death.

* Claiming that MRNA is untested, or the whole vaccine is untested or can alter the genes

E.t.c and so on

Discussion should not be banned. You can talk about available evidence. You can talk about things that are unclear. But when you straight up lie to promote a political narrative and make stuff up, that should be prosecutable. All of this is easily discoverable in courts.

> The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.

Other countries were able to successfully develop with less authoritarianism than China (Japan did it twice: Meiji Restoration and post-WW2), and were able to move to more democratic systems.

See the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell for various case studies on what works and what doesn't:

* https://profilebooks.com/work/how-asia-works/

* https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-asia-works-success-and-fail...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144575-how-asia-works

>"if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism"

Oops, my hypocrisy meter just broke.

You may be making assumptions about me.

Really? I always thought people made a massive deal about an incredibly poor country that become... middle income, and seems to be stuck there.

I'm glad they don't have self-induced famines anymore I guess, but it's not exactly japan in the 80s.

I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life.

From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get things fixed. Their local government representative is held accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could be off because I don’t know anyone personally there.

> I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life.

For tech workers in particular, the structure of the economy would prevent high equity-based compensation. I also distinctly recall China's heavy-handed enforcement of COVID lockdowns, and the sudden about-face when discontent reached a boiling point. Then there's the censorship too - disagreeing on low-stakes local issues is one thing, but if you disagree with national policy, you cannot exactly discuss it in the open the way that we do here.

I have known a few Chinese people, and they downplay this stuff. Some of them are even political refugees from the purges following Mao's death, and they downplay the level of authoritarianism in the country. As bad as the US has gotten recently, we're still not at that level.

It really does seem like both nations are slowly converging on similar systems of government, but hopefully this authoritarian swing in the US can be limited.

I'm not sure where you are reading, but people are not free to rant in China. Many of my friends would lose privileges because they were foolish enough to openly speak poorly regarding certain topics, and suddenly they were banned from Wechat, which is equivalent to being banned from the internet, and from using money in noncash form. My sister was visiting and was dumb enough to get herself banned from way more services and she was scared she wouldn't be able to get back home. In a very few places, they check your social score to ensure that you aren't low-life enough to be barred from there too. I only spoke freely after checking an area for no cameras, so I always had all of my privileges, but me and a Chinese friend, after coming to the USA (I am not Chinese, only went there for school), hope we never end up back in China. Regarding day to day life in the USA, I am unaffected by China.

I can answer this question. I’m a native-born Chinese, and I’ve never studied abroad. This year I just completed my first trip overseas, visiting the UAE. First of all, I don’t think China is a fully democratic system, but it’s not an outright dictatorship either. At the same time, I don’t think the two-party voting system in the U.S. qualifies as democracy either. One of the biggest drawbacks of Western criticism of China for being “undemocratic” is that many Chinese people travel abroad and are exposed to the outside world. If the West had a better system, we would definitely be willing to follow it, but their proposals are worse than ours—especially after Trump took office, things have only gotten more chaotic.

In China, the only real restriction is that you cannot severely criticize the Party and its leaders. I mean, minor criticism is acceptable—for example, pointing out areas that aren’t working well—but you cannot completely reject them. For instance, you cannot post offensive memes about leaders. This is different from the U.S., but I think the comparison is interesting. By sacrificing this particular freedom, we actually gain many other freedoms.

The most typical case this year was a food poisoning incident at a kindergarten. The staff, ignoring safety regulations, added toxic chemical elements to the food. This incident went viral on the Chinese internet, and the public criticism was focused on the government and relevant medical authorities, but people did not(dared not)—blame the Party itself. In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.

Many people don’t realize China’s major advantages, and I only understood them by observing foreigners who run businesses in China( i mean this video if anyone is intreseted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ozoOKhUO4&t=329s) . China has a system of accountability. If anyone travels in China, I highly recommend observing rivers, streets, and even trees—they all have markers indicating who is responsible. This means that if something goes wrong in that area, someone is accountable. Of course, corruption can undermine this, but the system is still operational. China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.

As for why I chose the UAE: honestly, Europe has disappointed me too much these days. Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia. They’re basically at the same level of insecurity. Even in the UAE, which is considered a relatively safe country, I was still worried about my credit card being lost or fraudulently charged. In China, I never have to worry about such things. Of course, Japan, South Korea, or Singapore might also be safe, but those countries are just too boring for me.

Do I care about politics? Of course I do. The more sensitive topics can always be navigated with wordplay—everyone is familiar with these strategies. For more serious matters, a VPN works perfectly.

(My English writing isn’t very good, so I often write in Chinese and use ChatGPT to help me translate.)

What do you think of Naomi Wu's case?

To be honest, I roughly searched around, including asking AI, but I couldn’t really figure out what happened. I hardly have any impression of her; her videos can be found on Chinese internet, but the recommendation algorithms have never suggested them to me. From what I’ve found so far, she seems quite controversial. She might have been limited in reach on Chinese internet. Maybe the government found a suitable reason, or maybe not — I really haven’t clarified that part.

Also, Linux is invovled?

It seems she was silenced for publicly advocating for LGBT and visited by agents multiple times about it. But there are a lot more details I'm sure.

It’s possible. LGBT issues and religion in China fall into a category of “you can exist, but don’t promote it.” There are cities, bars, and celebrities known for being LGBT, but the government never officially acknowledges them and doesn’t allow public advocacy. Discussion among ordinary people is fine. Some other places might not agree with this approach, but for me and most Chinese people, we really like it. In China, transitioning isn’t actually difficult: once you complete the psychological evaluation and surgery, the government will verify it and issue a new ID. But you’ll never see it publicly promoted because, in the eyes of the authorities, it doesn’t exist.

You like that people are caged for publicly acknowledging LGBT? It’s hard to understand that, because it’s not just that it’s lowkey there, it’s something people are under threat of caging for.

(Yes it is coming under threat of caging in the US too now.)

I totally support LGBT rights, but china is not the only country in the world and US is very good at color revolution. Many of the programs related to feminists and LGBT rights turn outs to involved with people and founds connect to USA. So until USA is collapsed, NO.

This seems more reasonable than most other countries where LGBT advocacy / propaganda / public exposure and circus draws negative opinions and more discrimination and aggression.

He is saying that LGBT advocacy/public exposure (what LGBT "propaganda" have you seen?) results in caging. Isn't that worse? How is caging better than negative opinions?

What caging? He didn't say anything about any caging. Did you reply to the correct comment?

> the government never officially acknowledges them and doesn’t allow public advocacy

Do you think this is a polite suggestion from the government?

I wouldn't call any police action "polite", but the worst I remember reading about was a 24h detention of a crossdresser that was caught on security cameras by building administration while doing self-bondage videos. The security camera feeds were shared live with the other residents until the police arrived. That person described the policemen as "polite" in the uploaded video.

I trust it more than other internet posts, as it's a first-hand description. It also mostly matches what @yanhangyhy wrote here.

I think she got in trouble for exposing multiple companies that were violating GPL. They came after her by threatening her GF's family with deportation to the camps (allegedly)

There's more than that. She was on the verge of exposing Chinese intelligence surveillance methods/technologies. The Shenzhen authorities know her well and were relatively lenient, but the moment she touched upon the intelligence area, she attracted the attention of much more paranoid security officials. Those officials then found out she had a Uyghur girlfriend and became even more paranoid due to suspected links with terrorism; those officials, after all, spent the 80s/90s taking bullets from Uyghur terrorists, so they are quick to jump to conclusions that Naomi is compromised and sends intelligence secrets to Turkistan Islamic Party.

I suspect these are much more of a reason to offboard her from social media than all the LGBT stuff, which she had already done for years.

Source: The Daily Mao on Twitter, who said he physically spoke with her half a year ago. Naomi said she's fine, she's just not allowed to have a public social media presence. She's very lucky not to have been thrown in jail for national security/terrorism reasons, especially given how paranoid the security officials are. Perhaps the Shenzhen authorities put in a good word for her.

Don’t you think you’ve been influenced by propaganda? You have admitted yourself that you couldn’t even find information on Naomi Wu.

I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe. It’s also a very diverse region so it’s hard to generalize. But the supposed “decay of the west” is mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration right wingers.

But regardless, I’d take having a 0.001% chance of my wallet (which contains zero valuables) being stolen versus being silenced by the government for criticizing the regime or being unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation. Let alone all the history rewriting and censorship.

In general Europe is quite safe, but tourists scammed in some more popular destinations does happen quite a bit.

But Europe is also quite heterogeneous. E.g. in Scandinavia getting scammed or pickpocketed is really rare, but in say Barcelona or Rome the chance is a lot higher. Violent crime like robbery is in general very rare everywhere.

> But the supposed “decay of the west” is mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration right wingers.

it's not propaganda, i am talking some thing like 'yelp', real people share real experience after travel to EU. sure there are many good ones, but lots of bad ones.

> unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation

you can. but not in the public media. people share LGBT content on the Internet all the time. Right now the most popular influencer on chinese tiktok is a crossdresser

not intent to change your view, just some clarification.

Thank you for your clarifications. I don’t really know what to make of these experiences, I know for sure that it can’t be much more than a small percentage of tourists getting pickpocketed. Plausibly, the people with negative experiences are a loud minority.

I also now realize that my original comment may seem harsher than I intended. I fully understand your point of view since I was also born in a comparatively poor place, and I realize how uplifting it is to see everything around you improve at a rapid pace. But despite this, cases like that of Naomi Wu are egregious. Nobody can say for sure how much each “inconvenient” aspect of her online presence (accusing companies, being openly gay, having an Uyghur partner) has contributed to her shutdown, but the fact is that this person can’t publish her videos on tech anymore. This is very hard to justify for me.

Nonetheless, thank you for sharing your opinion. It is very valuable to get your perspective here.

I was also somewhat emotional, after all, relations between China and the EU are more hostile than before, and that naturally affects how people view each other. As for Naomi Wu, she was never that popular in China to begin with—after all, ordinary people don’t really know much about things like open-source licenses. As for her disappearance, well, she disappeared, and not many people really care. Other comments have already pointed out that she was involved in many issues, including violations related to open-source, and possibly some interactions with Linux; it’s hard for me to sort out exactly why she was “banned” on the Chinese internet. Her videos are still there; I don’t know if she still updates them, but indeed, no one really talks about her anymore.

Personally, I don’t quite agree with this kind of action, unless there’s a clear law that she violated. But China isn’t very transparent about such matters, so sometimes what the government does is right, sometimes it isn’t. Each case needs to be studied specifically. However, this lack of transparency is indeed a weakness.

I mean, the reasons for her shutdown are pretty clear: she walked into national security terroritory and attracted attention from paranoid security officials. The reasons came out of her own mouth, as reported by The Dailo Mao. See my other comment on this topic.

> I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe.

Really, where?

I have been robbed in Belgium and in France, have had a knife on my throat on a Sunday morning, and have had burglars twice (once in Antwerp, once in Leuven). About five of my bikes were stolen, and I've been conned by construction workers several times.

Southern Italy. We’ve had burglars once actually, but that’s about it. I’ve since then also lived in Switzerland and Sweden, which are obviously much safer. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t see the point in worrying about this. I take my precautions like anyone else and that’s about it.

Anyhow, sorry to hear about your experience. That’s how statistics work I guess. For any particularly unlucky person there’s a correspondingly lucky person that averages them out.

Conning is definitely more of a thing, but I wouldn’t place it in the same league as pickpocketing of tourists. Which of course is a thing, I don’t want to deny it. Just that using it as a reason to avoid Europe is absolutely blowing it out of proportion.

I think you're severely underestimating how safe China has become. Nowadays people don't even lock their motorbikes, and can leave their laptops in coffeeshops unattended for half an hour. You definitely can't do either of that in Netherlands. Maybe in some small village where everybody knows everybody else it's still possible.

That is the baseline that Chinese are comparing to nowadays. That's why even many what we call safe places feel unsafe to them.

Also consider that just 15 years ago, China was definitely way unsafer than many European countries. China upgraded from a low public trust to high public trust society in front of people's living memories. This is what you have to consider when considering why Chinese people are happy with their government. All this voting stuff is just theoretical benefit. In Netherlands, our politics have been a mess for more than a decade. Voting certainly didn't solve the problems.

I actually forgot to mention something related to my travels. When I was in the UAE, I suddenly realized I had lost my keys. I called several hotels, but they all said they hadn’t found them. It was a difficult situation because I had to figure out a way to get a spare key from my company or have a new one made. The company has strict access control, so I couldn’t be 100% sure I’d be able to get in. In the end, after quite a bit of hassle, I managed to get the spare key from the company. When I finally got home, I found that my original keys had been hanging on my door—for eight full days. Countless delivery drivers, couriers, and possibly other people had passed through the building and seen it, but no one stole anything.

What you said is absolutely right. We’ve gotten used to this kind of society, so our expectations for safety when traveling are much higher than those of people from other countries. Credit cards are, of course, convenient, but in China we’re used to going out with just a phone—no wallet, no cards. No risk of fraud, no risk of robbery, convenient, fast, and safe.

>For instance, you cannot post offensive memes about leaders. This is different from the U.S.

Well...

> This year I just completed my first trip overseas, visiting the UAE

So you have only ever visited a country that is very definitely NOT a democracy, and you have never lived in a democratic country.

> In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.

How is that "gaming many other freedoms". If the party was not to lame fine, but what happens when they are to blame?

> China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.

You said you cannot criticise the party and its leaders. So if something like HS2's cost overruns happen would you even know about it? Does everything get done at the planned cost?

> Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia

That is not the reality of living in Europe. I lived most of my life in the UK and those sorts of crimes are rare.

> So you have only ever visited a country that is very definitely NOT a democracy, and you have never lived in a democratic country.

i belive no country is democratic. its would be a fool to believe the two-party-voting-system=democratic.

> How is that "gaming many other freedoms". If the party was not to lame fine, but what happens when they are to blame?

its the freedom of accountability, people do wrong things, they get punished or sentence to death. most country dont have.

> So if something like HS2's cost overruns happen would you even know about it? Does everything get done at the planned cost?

yes. no, but things like HS2 would never happen in China. its just too Absurd. In China, at most the leaders might embezzle some money, but they still get the project done.

> That is not the reality of living in Europe. I lived most of my life in the UK and those sorts of crimes are rare.

Compared to China, it is still a very unsafe place. if i have travel to most of the relative-safe countries, i might go to EU. After all ,i read so many books about it, it's still a must-to-go place

I mean, here are the obvious for this minority member:

- My marriage is invalid in China

- There are multiple clinics that can prescribe me gender-affirming care with little gatekeeping in my city (for now at least). My understanding is that there is significantly more gatekeeping in gender-affirming care in China

- The government actively censors discourse related to my sexual orientation and gender identity

While it appears the US is looking to become more like China in this regard, for now life under the Chinese government would be comparatively untenable for me.

> for now at least

So much in such few words. It sucks immensely.

I am a trans lesbian and thus I am ineligible for a legal gender change in china. The UK is bad about trans people, sure, but at least it is legally possible for me (for now)

This is false information. Gender transition is legal in China. There are many cases on Chinese social media. We even have a celebrity who is transgender.

On Chinese internet there is even a joke. Because women retire earlier than men in China, people discuss whether they can exploit a loophole by changing their legal gender to female in the year before the female retirement age to retire earlier.

I'm sorry, I got my information from The Economist, which says that you have to be unmarried, heterosexual and get permission from your family to change your gender, and you have to have surgery before you are recognised

In China, the process requires passing a strict psychological evaluation and surgery before one can change their legal identity and be recognized by the state. Since I used to be know some people from the community, so I have some understanding. I don’t know the policies of other countries, but for those who truly want to transition, I think this is necessary. The requirement to be unmarried is reasonable, since China does not recognize same-sex marriage. I’m not entirely sure about the family consent requirement, but China has the household registration system (hukou), which records family members, so it seems somewhat reasonable. As for being heterosexual, I don’t think that should be a standard requirement, since the main requirements are the hospital’s psychological evaluation and surgery. At least I know of many cases where people successfully changed their legal identity. Of course, these requirements might seem a bit strict in other countries.

This is horrible and only seems to show that voidUpdate was in fact right.

> I think this is necessary

Are you trans?

Keeping it strictly medical and requiring a surgical procedure that only the most dedicated would choose seems a lot more reasonable than the western idea of basing it off identity and having basically no gatekeeping.

Sounds like a gross violation of human rights, along with eugenics. https://tgeu.org/human-rights-victory-european-court-of-huma...

Depends on if one agrees with that ECtHR judgment.

Considering that Article 8 of the ECHR is framed as a negative right (as in freedom from coercion and interference):

> Right to respect for private and family life

> 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

> 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Then it seems odd that the ECtHR decided, at some point, to start interpreting it as a positive right (as in obliging specific actions to be taken), in this case the argument that anyone should be free to instruct the state to change their sex marker on state-issued identity documentation, with minimal restrictions attached.

Also they seem to have disregarded that permitting this may have significant repercussions on the rights and freedoms of others, depending on what exactly this sex marker permits an individual to do in any particular jurisdiction, i.e. accessing services and facilities restricted to those of that sex.

Is this yet another alt of the person who keeps making new accounts every few days for the past 2 years in order to post antitrans/terf stuff?

I’m not, but I know quite a few people who are. I’ve seen too many people regret it after surgery. Sometimes I even think the evaluation requirements aren’t strict enough.

People that you know personally or propaganda that you saw online? And what perventage of these cases was due to bad surgical outcomes? (Potentially due to surgeon incompetence)

Because I really doubt that you personally know many trans people in this category.

> Sometimes I even think the evaluation requirements aren’t strict enough.

Leave it to trans people to judge that.

According to the NIH, the regret rates for transgender surgeries are somewhere in the region of 1%. Regret rates for knee surgery are somewhere in the region of 10%. The evaluation requirements for knee surgeries should be way higher then, surely, if even 1% is too much?

It's worth reading this critique of the paper that 1% figure comes from. Very unlikely that it is an accurate representation of regret:

https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/2021/11000/letter_to...

I asked you a question before but you forgot to respond :)

People in europe were making the same joke. It wasn't done with respect of trans people.

Have visited China often. My major gripe to living there would be digital freedom and surveillance - unlocking bootloader,etc are heavily restricted there. Plus the GFW, which does prevent the population being psyop'd by foreign social media, but is a small pain if you need to use outside services.

That doesn't really affect my daily life though, especially for someone born there. If it's the tradeoff for the other aspects (high public safety, developed infrastructure...) then I would consider accepting it.

I don't think any super power looks fantastic, and we definitely should not idolize China.

But also, we should let that be an excuse for western powers. We have corporations forcing most of the decisions in our country for extremely short term gains.

In the US we have... decrypt public transit, horrible healthcare, halting progress on renewable energies, we're probably going to make less than our parents while billionaires make more.

Like it sucks, and if anyone tells you well at least you don't live in China you should roll your eyes, why does where we live have to suck. Oh, and we even have awful imperialism too.

Have you not been paying attention to what's going on this country?

We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in countries they have no connection to for protesting America's material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position.

I think about all these things when people bring up so-called "authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is not only in the US but basically all of the developed world? France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win their next elections due to these economic crises that governments absolutely refuse to address.

And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit those same war crimes.

Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction to Western companies. "Peace".

We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.

Don't know why you're downvoted, this seems a pretty accurate take to me.

It seems most of us in the West are mostly incapable of self-criticism and have been fed so much propaganda that we forgot how to see through all the bull**.

What makes you think I disagree with any of that? These are dark times. Honestly, the West is so profoundly stupid right now that a part of me wishes China could be a beacon of respectability. It's just a shame about their being ahead of the curve on the malicious government.

hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times

Not to be coy, but what do you mean by that? The reason I ask is because I think many of us use these terms, but without ever thinking about exactly which behaviors we're critiquing, or how they relate to what we truly value. For instance both the Roman and Greek Empires deserve immense respect, yet they were both often imperial empires ruled by dictators. The same is no less true of many societies that played key roles during The Renaissance, and patrons of the talents of the era.

I hold immense respect for China, because I think they're achieving great things. I also think there is a high probability that they will be the first society to start creating permanent off-planet colonizations, which is what will probably signal the birth of the next era of humanity, so that in the future a name like Wang Yie might lie right alongside Neil Armstrong.

On the other hand I certainly don't think the US should emulate them. It's important for the world to be multipolar, not only in alliances, but also in ideology, perspective, and behavior. What will happen to China once they inevitably find themselves with a leader who is not socially motivated, or who is incompetent? In such a centralized system outright collapse is not out of the question. Or perhaps they'll be just fine? Who knows? By maintaining a wide diversity of systems across the world, I think we maximize our chances of collective success and minimize our chances of collective failure.

Indeed, I think Rome, Greece and other conquering powers get more respect than they deserve. There's no actual reason so many people have to die for these countries' national ambitions. Feel free to generalize to the US, etc.

Didn't Rome save a lot of lives by pax romana? Perhaps it was actually better in terms of loss of life to be conquered by Rome than have endless wars among yourselves. Applies to the US too.

The conquest of Gaul was essentially genocide. Ceaser killed one third of the population, enslaved another, and left the rest to live under Roman rule. My suspicion is Gauls would have been better off having petty wars among themselves than this.

You can defend a lot of atrocities by arguing "for the greater good" and comparing to uchronic hypotheticals. I could as well argue that without Rome, the greek democracies would have been much more prevalent, and lead to modern democracies much sooner. Or that a world leader would have emerged, leading the ancient world to endless peace and prosperity.

> who is incompetent

I just hope we never go back to Mao-levels of incompetence

Must.. resist.. temptation..

Killing all sparrows, compared to defunding vaccine science in the wreckage of a pandemic..

Village Steel making compared to literally cancelling construction projects for advanced wind turbines

Maybe this is a surprise. Nowadays, young people are increasingly fond of Mao. He wasn’t a perfect person, but he spent his entire life exploring communism and trying to finally eliminate wealth inequality and privileged classes. Older people might not like him as much, because they were more influenced by the West and dislike China’s system more. But with China’s rise and Trump’s hypocrisy, I can predict that Mao will become increasingly popular in China.

It's worth acknowledging that Mao became increasingly erratic with age. Some of his early achievements are still very much seen in a positive light (eg. as a nation builder).

yes. in my earlier age, the offical statement from CCP of him is 70% achievement and 30% fault. but as the inequality increase in china, people has more positive view of him.

Yep, nationalism isn't something you can turn on and off at will.

For an example I'm reminded of the recent public backlash to the K visa scheme [1].

1. https://www.ft.com/content/01a0029c-9f7c-4b31-a120-d1652f198...

This question is actually quite interesting. It’s basically connected to almost every issue China faces today — the national confidence born out of a century of humiliation, population decline, the rise of Han nationalism, soaring unemployment, and so on. The overall domestic response has been quite negative, though I don’t have a clear personal view on it.

It’s somewhat like the Tang dynasty at its most prosperous — when envoys from all nations came to pay tribute, and many Japanese and Central Asians studied and worked in Chang’an. But interestingly, I’ve noticed that in recent years, public opinion toward the Tang dynasty has gradually become less positive, which might be related to this.

I have no idea from where I sit, but I wonder how much of this is down to the increasing demographic share of Guang Gun [1] vs the older conservatives.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Gun

Well, I actually know this issue quite well. China’s “bachelor problem” isn’t really that serious, although it is one of the reasons for the declining birth rate. While the main cause of China’s low fertility rate is the soaring cost of having children, it’s also strongly related to the rise of feminism and the growing hostility between men and women. In China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, this problem is among the worst in the world. Basically, men hate women and women hate men; the marriage system has managed to make both sides unhappy, so people just stop getting married.

As for the “bachelor problem,” it roughly falls into two categories. One group consists of older men — they’re actually quite fortunate, since they’re a key target of positive government assistance. In rural areas, for instance, the government often helps them build houses and provides them with monthly living stipends so they can survive without working. China’s living costs are relatively low, so this policy can be sustained.

The other group is younger men. Their solutions are either marrying foreign women or staying single and enjoying life. With modern technology, single life isn’t really difficult anymore. In recent years, the number of cross-border marriages has surged, mainly involving women from Southeast Asian countries. Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos’ red-light districts are also frequent destinations for these men. Currently, influencers who promote foreign marriages are very popular on Chinese websites.

The US is just starting it's Great Leap Backwards.

I wouldn't think the Roman empire was a good thing if we had it today. We can "respect" those older cultures in their context while still recognizing that they were in many ways horrifying by modern standards.

In what way would they be horrifying? The Romans advanced public works, infrastructure, and other such things on an absolutely monumental scale. Many roads built by the Roman Empire are still even in use today! And I think Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the best example in history of a genuinely socially motivated leader. And the lands under their rule were completely able to maintain their own unique identity so long as it did not lead to attempts at rebellion/revolution.

Of course one practical issue you run into is that while Aurelius was perhaps one of the greatest leaders of all time, his son and heir - Commodus, was perhaps one of the worst of all time. But at least if we speak of the eras prior to its decline, Pax Romana in particular, I don't really see how the Roman Empire would be horrifying. And in any case dramatic deterioration of the quality of public leadership, probably presaging a more broad decline, is clearly not limited to systems of minority rule.

Well 25-30% of the population was enslaved in the Roman empire so that's not ideal.

Did slavery not exist in the lands outside the Roman empire at the time?

Yeah, but apart from all that, what have the Romans ever done for us?

> In what way would they be horrifying?

When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul it was said he killed one million people and enslaved another million, and was celebrated for it. The actual numbers may not be accurate, but the sentiment probably was.

Moral relativism aside, would you like to live in a society where killing civilians during war and enslaving survivors were both acceptable?

Or how about the the abandoning of unwanted babies:

* https://academic.oup.com/book/6954/chapter-abstract/15122509...

* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15d74av/how_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columna_Lactaria

They didn't celebrate the means, they celebrated the result. The Gauls had brutally sacked Rome in 390BC, and then further humiliated them as they were paying a massive ransom to end the siege. This became a part of the Roman identity and led to an obsession with ending the Gallic threat. Centuries later, Caesar would unambiguously achieve exactly that. In modern times it's hard to understand this because what happened last year is already ancient news, but in ancient times it was not uncommon for feuds, even on just a family level, to last for centuries.

Post-industrialization (kind of assuming they'd have access to modern tech here), slavery makes very little sense - even completely ignoring the ethical issues. Pay a negligible hourly/monthly cost to hire a skilled worker that can be easily replaced or dismissed as desired, or pay a huge up-front cost to take on somebody who is probably low skill, may or may not work out, and then be 100% responsible for all of their needs and other costs going forward? They'd likely outlaw it just like every other country that's gone through industrialization has.

Similarly exposure (which began to be phased out and moving towards adoption once Christianity took hold in Rome) was once again largely a product of technology. Abortion was extremely dangerous in those times for the mother, and exposure was one way it was done relatively more safely. And children were often exposed because of various deformities or their sex which, again, can now be detected at a prenatal stage. Though the sex issue again gets back to a lack of technology. Son's worked and essentially were your pension, whereas daughters joined the house of whoever they married, to say nothing of dowry related issues.

Obviously we have to do a lot of speculation to imagine what a Roman Empire in modern times would look like, but I don't think many of the knee-jerk reactions to it are really justified.

>Moral relativism aside, would you like to live in a society where killing civilians during war and enslaving survivors were both acceptable?

we have yet to solve either problem, regardless of whatever new terms we come up with to describe the plight.

Apart from the mass enslavement, live human death sports, public corporal and capital punishment for petty crimes up to and including crucifixion you mean?

They were like isis nailing people to trees.

Don't give Trump any ideas or he brings back gladiators, and I wish this was a joke.

The Roman Empire was a ruthless slave state, and the poor were subject to constant exploitation with no recourse.

Also, it routinely interfered destructively in the market sector (e.g., price controls, e.g., overspending on showy public works); its taxation system was oppressive and often arbitrary; and it routinely debased its currency

this is the way - 'multi-polarity' is another word for 'diversity' which is another way to understand resiliency. We have seen in recent days what over dependence on single point of failure looks like (AWS outage), so from a species level perspective, it is better that we have many different forms of organisation and narrative. We just have to ensure that these narratives are not evangelical and intolerant!

I think hackernews might be the only place on the internet where a commenter uses an AWS outage as an example for why authoritarianism is a good thing.

That's not what multipolarity means, at least by those leading such propaganda.

By their standards multipolarity means control ove different circles of influence without interference.

That's what Russia wants for example, they want to secure the regime by controlling nearby countries (ideally turning them into Belarus, or by threat of destruction, like Georgia and Moldova, or by annexation, like Ukraine).

China wants to control territories surrounding them as well.

So don't be fooled by multipolarity, it's just a repacked imperialism and colonialism by right, not by earned influence.

We are 1000+ years from permanent off planet settlements. If its even possible for us to biologically live off earth. Which we don't actually know. China might not be a country by then.

China isn't imperialist.

How much is "freedom" worth to you? Do you think your average homeless person in San Francisco would be worse off with free healthcare, housing, and no right to vote?

We can argue and discuss the authoritarianism of China (and state control). But imperialism? Really?

I would really respect the hell out of the nation of America if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.

The fact that america can go to authoritarism this quickly and through democratic legal procedures itself is scary and I don't think that I can trust this in the same sense from now on.

Trust is brittle. I looked even more into the facade of america, and honestly, i am confused by both parties to a certain extent which are both controlled by billionaires etc.

The president I respect the most is teddy roosevelt, I have heard good things about kennedy too but I want to read so much more about the absolute chad known as teddy roosevelt.

I think that there is hope for america but that's only if people actually try to understand what's happening, which is what I am hoping, its a shame bernie sanders couldn't have been a president but I am hoping that a new wave of american politics could arise to tackle corruption/politcal lobbying/bribery.

Yeah, same honestly. Though I still don't think America is as bad yet. We did try to build actual nations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we just suck at it. Trump is unlikely to actually pick fights with Denmark or Canada. And our internal freedoms aren't gone yet. We can still criticize the president without immediately going to jail... Give it a year or two.

Imperialism? Please do divulge

> a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”

Why call it propaganda though ? That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.

It hasn't been thought through much which is universally common for some govt policies everywhere, but it results have been positive for the most part ?

> That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.

Propaganda doesn't imply any of these things; it just implies a polemic.

Not all propaganda is deceptive.

The best propaganda is 100% true and still achieves it's goal.

So, the term is mainly used to convey an author's opinion on the subject of the topic and not necessarily related to the topic itself ?

Propaganda is deceptive or misleading by definition.

You can deceive while telling the truth, like this ad from a Brazilian newspaper (dubbed in English) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PShbxd42JN8

Truth needs to be put in context. Truth needs to be interpreted. There is no such thing as objective truth.

Effective propaganda is like a filter that is everywhere you look. You don't know it's there because you never see the world without it.

What definition is that?

Merriam-Webster: "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person" and "ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause" [1]

Cambridge Dictionary: "information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions" [2]

Wikipedia (quoting Encyclopedia Britannica): "Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented." [3]

Wikipedia further quotes NATO's 2011 guidance for military public affairs definition: "information, ideas, doctrines, or special appeals disseminated to influence the opinion, emotions, attitudes, or behaviour of any specified group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly" [4]

I think that OP's use of the word is well in line with each of those definitions.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/propagan...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#Definitions

I stand corrected. I should have checked the definition before making that claim. Thanks for elucidating that for me. I've understood propaganda to be one thing for nearly 30 years somehow.

Even deceptive propaganda isn't necessarily bad. Objectively speaking, the best thing to do for yourself would have been to dodge the draft in WWII for example.

I probably often use that term in a neutral sense.

propaganda is not necessarily a lie, it's more a call to action (which can sometimes be a lie)

Not all cultures/countries/languages have a negative connotation of the word "propaganda". In Chinese, in most contexts, the word is usually much more neutral, closer to "publicity".

> “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”

Having fewer children followed "naturally" as child mortality dropped and women's education and workforce participation rose. You can quite clearly see China's birth rate dropping before the one-child policy was enacted:

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/11/20/will-the-...

* https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/06/chinas-changing-c...

Even India, which has also been growing in prosperity, has seen a declining fertility rate without a heavy handed government policy:

* https://archive.is/https://www.economist.com/china/2015/07/1...

Not to glaze unelected uniparty governments, but this is what you can actually achieve if you don't have to focus on your new election the moment you enter office.

This.

Also, China has always taken the long view, and has, historically, leveraged experience.

I’m no expert in their culture, and am rather worried about their influence, but I can’t but admire their incredible strategic vision.

Also, as a retiree, I’m rather saddened by some of the discussions, here.

Maybe this topic is too hot. I originally just wanted to mention it in passing, since these are all slogans ingrained in our minds. Everyone's discussion is about groups, not individuals. It's about government policies. Just like in China, our generation basically doesn't expect to have a pension, nor to retire before 70. Our elderly enjoy life in the parks, benefit from free public transport and cheap tickets to attractions, while we work day after day, until we die. Any normal person would be dissatisfied.

Well, one of the issues, is that younger folks look at retired older folks, and think “unproductive leech,” while ignoring wrecked hands, shattered spines, and cancers. I also know many veterans, and they provided a Service that I definitely benefit from, today.

Also, speaking only for myself, I live off of investments and savings, created from 40 years of living frugally and sensibly. Every few months, I have to chase off people that try to steal those savings. It’s not surprising, but is annoying. There’s a huge industry, based completely around stealing money from older folks (usually ones without the means to defend themselves).

Back when I was young, there was this rather silly movie, called Logan’s Run. Besides a brief flash of Jenny Agutter naked, it offered a vision of a culture that literally kills off anyone over 30. The interesting thing, was that the culture still had strategic vision, but that vision was supplied by a machine.

I find it hard not to suspect that some countries are using certain policies to subtly eliminate the elderly. Of course, I will also grow old, so the consensus is to rely on oneself—invest and save, just in case. Optimistically, household robots might change a lot. I often think of that example: in the past, people often imagined futuristic skyscrapers but could not imagine elevators. New technologies are always unpredictable. There is a Chinese saying: “Where the cart reaches the mountain, there will be a path,” so perhaps there’s no need to worry too much.

Eg. I'm pretty optimistic about some of the Chinese exoskeleton startups I've seen. If you can keep people mobile, living at home and avoid falls they will make a huge difference.

Not to mention self driving vehicles allowing for more independence in old age.

Sign me up.

Pensions are an insane ponzi scheme but I'm somewhat optimistic that dignified aged care is a problem that can be solved.

However there is no denying sacrifices will have to be made.

A lot of the retirees vs young discourse (and, tbh, wider politics) is just mirroring the conflict people have with their own parents or children. Especially the "why don't you just" for getting a job/a house/a partner, without acknowledging the very different conditions prevailing.

(sometimes it materializes more directly, in things like NIMBY planning conflicts or homophobia)

You can achieve a lot of bad things that way too, with nobody to stop you. It's the promise of every totalitarian: free you from all the messiness of having to deal with conflicting opinions.

It is remarkable how well the tradeoff of "you don't need political freedom if the economic growth rate is high enough" works for China, and also previously Korea and Singapore. Even, to a certain extent, Japan - fairly high levels of political freedom, but somehow it's still a one-and-a-half-party state.

I know it sounds insane but I wish Germany had such a stable government that actually DOES something. For as long as I can remember German govs have been absolute dogshit. Not to say the CN gov hasn't done no wrong. But they are moving with incredible speed in the right direction.

For our mindset, we love AFD. Not saying we have interests connected to them, but they seems at least have an action plan , not like Merz and the president of Franchise. The industry decline of German is a hot topic on Chinese internet these days

I really like a book by Foucault that discusses the origins of the modern state. He argued that the modern state could only originate in the West because only there did a balance of power among large states form, generating sufficient competition. In contrast, during China's Ming and Qing dynasties, it maintained an overwhelming advantage over its surroundings, thus lacking the impetus for reform. But now everything is different. The world is not a rational free-trade world. The EU has only two choices: either re-integrate into a unified empire, or disband and learn the survival strategies of smaller states—not taking sides and cooperating with both China and the US, or something like ASEAN. Its current loose alliance is the worst possible choice.

I agree that the EU needs to reform into something stronger, because the different nations of the EU are not really acting in union. However, while I sympathize with some stances of the AfD they are generally pretty anti EU. So I'm not sure I agree that they have a real action plan.

It’s possible that East Asian ways of thinking appear right-wing and conservative to Europeans. So we tend to understand European right-wing parties better — not just the AfD, but those in every country. For example, Belarus and Hungary are friendly toward China, yet most EU countries might want to kick Hungary out.

As for the AFD, it may simply be that we think the other parties are being ridiculous. The most important things for an industrial country—power and energy—are not being fixed, while liberals just talk empty talk about values. I recently read that quite a few sausage factories in Germany have already gone out of business, and some have been bought by Chinese companies (Wolf Essgenuss GmbH). If something like that happened in China, most Chinese people would probably feel that China should perish.

I'm envious of China's ability to define long term goals and execute them somewhat competently... In democracies politicians only care about reelection, and most people's voting patterns do not take long term strategy into account. Quite the opposite: short term profits and benefits are favored above all else.

That's why democracy is wrong path. Crowd is stupid and easy to manipulate.

There should be hierarchy. 100 men should vote for one who will rule over them. 100 level one rulers should vote for one who will rule over 10 000 men. And so on.

Imagine all Amazon workers to vote for Amazon CEO. It does not happen.

Interesting idea. Trying to find an angle where it could all go wrong but it seems vastly better than crap we get now. More personal responsibility it seems.

I would add that rotate those every 2 years maybe. But then there needs to be mechanism for some long term efforts to sustain velocity.

This just sounds like middle managent hell.

China’s rare earth strategy was formulated roughly 40 years ago — this in itself is an advantage of a one-party system. Almost all nations that experienced rapid economic takeoff were built on one-party rule, strongman leadership, or authoritarian governance — such as South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore... Taiwan had Chiang Ching-kuo, South Korea had Park Chung-hee, and Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew. At least in Asia, this pattern seems to hold true.

> China’s rare earth strategy was formulated roughly 40 years ago

what a joke! Just 8 years ago, there were hundreds of rare earth companies all fight against each other by pushing prices to the very bottom destroying any possible profitability of the business.

as of today, Americans would end up in jail for working for some random Chinese companies in so called sensitive sectors, but American companies can freely hire Chinese rare earth engineers.

is that the strategy you mean? lol

Are low birth rates a problem? The job market keeps being published about lack of employment. Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements. The USA market is also bad with very limited economic mobility based on years past.

Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum knowledge transfer and upkeep? Not properly balancing older and newer labor. That is the reason for "low birth rate problem"?

ML is being pushed to condense the labor market even more. Along with growth of larger and more powerful businesses. Number of businesses are pushing to be an oligopoly and more to a duopoly or monopoly.

The current and future labor market with modern business ideology does not seem to match the statement _low birth rate problem_. The problem seems to be elsewhere.

The relationship between the job market and employment is not so straightforward as you presume. After all, fewer people means less demand for labor as much as it means more supply. In general a falling population is considered an economic risk.

Based on my understanding, that’s still the case. I think the problems you mentioned are currently beyond what any government can handle, even one with extremely strong control like China. China is now facing both rising unemployment and a low birth rate. In the past, when China’s birth rate was higher, unemployment was not this high. The fundamental problem is not that there are too many people, but that the economy lacks vitality. Moreover, a declining birth rate will cause systems like pensions and healthcare—which rely on the next generation to support the previous one—to collapse.

>Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum knowledge transfer and upkeep?

Victor Shih (China scholar) says that employers in China mostly don't care about profit margins nor do the banks that lend to them.

SOEs maybe, but not Chinese private companies.

Whether a private company can get a loan however depends more on whether it is in a sector that Beijing wants to encourage than on the company's expected profit margin or expected return on investment--according to Shih.

A bank loan sure, but most of the capital private companies are working on aren't coming from banks (especially state owned banks).

OK, but I think the banks do most of the Chinese economy's investing (and Beijing exerts a lot of influence on the nature of that investing by the banks).

> Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements

The UK is producing too many graduates, often doing low quality courses at low quality universities, who then cannot get the graduate level jobs they aspire to.

The UK does not have enough people to work in many other areas - tradespeople, care workers, doctors and nurses, archeologists, chefs....

In Midas World, The Servant of the People, by Frederik Pohl [1] robots gain voting rights and outnumber humans in elections.

Also, in the context of this thread there is a famous quote by Pohl: "Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

[2] https://pit.begghilos2.net/Sayings/Laws-Other.html

>If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees

That's funny, because the supposedly widely repeated quote that I heard in the past that stuck with me is the exact opposite message on demographics:

"We have a saying in China to describe this situation –“Wei Fu Xian Lao” that we will get old before we get rich."

"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.

But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier.

The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!

So most people believe it was a mistake. We were misled by some so-called experts at the time. Conspiracy theorists claim that many of those experts weren’t Han Chinese, since the one-child policy only applied to the Han population.

The policy last about 35 years and didn’t end till 2015. Even today there a limit on procreation as the cap was only increased to three children in 2021. At some point the CCP has to own its mistakes.

The problem isn’t that China instituted the policy (although its use of forced abortions to enforce was… problematic), it’s that its system of government prevented open discussion, reflection, and self-correction.

at least on this topic, i agree with you

There's only so much food people can grow on planet Earth, so it remains true, even if the number varies depending on the means available for producing that food. So yeah we can grow more food than people thought decades ago, but the Earth and the energy available to it, along with arable land are still finite.

Empirically, we now get more than 3x the yield per land area than 1960, and the trend is steadily rising (see graph link below).

Your argument is that it can't grow to infinity, which is probably true. But there is nothing indicting we're close to any hard boundaries.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/index-of-cereal-productio...

Probably neither "larger n is always better, for any value of n" nor "smaller n is always better, for any value of n" adequately captures the nuance involved in assessing whether having more or fewer children will increase wealth.

It also turns out that producing food requires some amount of both planet and people.

Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This ranks closely with “humans are not part of the ecosystem”.

You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.

why would you say xi jinping is dull ? I thought his works on xi jinping thought are enlightened, someone who is pragmatic. btw i'm not chinese so I read these things in english.

Compare to jiang. jiang is more open and funny. We like to make fun of him before.

Wild how slogans from school can stick with us for life

My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover…but my great-grandson is going to have to learn Mandarin.

LOL. Probably no longer needed. China currently has no real solution for the low birth rate. I guess they are 99% relying on industrial robots and household robots(in the future).So China will desperately invest in the robotics sector. (The recently released 15th Five-Year Plan likely includes this). By then, language likely won’t be an issue—AI can replace everything.

Enlighten me - hasn’t Xi and the government recently demanded 2-3 children from each woman? I imagine they’ll push heavily for births again.

the government is trying to encourage more births through subsidies and other measures. In fact, experience from developed countries has already shown that this approach doesn’t work. Moreover, the subsidies the Chinese government provides are far lower than in developed countries and far below the actual cost of raising a child.

The most common nationwide subsidy is 3,600 RMB per child per year, which is basically ineffective. For a woman on maternity leave, the government will subsidize her based on her salary, which can be substantial—in places like Shanghai it could reach 200,000–300,000 RMB—but still not enough to stimulate population growth.

To put it in a darker perspective: the only way to truly boost birth rates would be to reduce women’s rights or compensation, which is unlikely in any civilized country. A historical example is Romania.

So in my understanding, China has only two viable paths: solve the cost of raising children through household robots or by means of coercion, the government could require state-owned enterprise employees and Communist Party members to have children. China has 100 million Party members and roughly tens of millions of SOE employees. SOE employees usually have stable benefits and income, so childbirth could be tied to salary, benefits, or promotion opportunities. To some extent, this could be argued as reasonable—after all, they are supported by taxpayers and arguably should contribute to society. But it still counts as a rather dark idea, and I imagine it would be a last-resort option.

Immigration would be another option… but not sure how willing China is to adopt that

I’ve actually thought a lot about this issue. My conclusion is that it’s not feasible. China has never been good at integrating other ethnicities and races. Even managing the 56 recognized ethnic groups within mainland China hasn’t gone very well; it has copied many mistakes from the Soviet Union, which has now led to a certain degree of backlash.

So I’ve always felt that China’s ambition extends only to Taiwan, and Taiwan is the endpoint. After all, the people on Taiwan are Chinese too, sharing the same culture and ethnicity. Another point that people might overlook is that China’s approach to incorporating outsiders is based on cultural identity rather than racial identity, which is the opposite of the U.S. In the U.S., you can come in, bring your own culture, help reshape American culture, and still become an American. In China, you can only be considered Chinese if you adopt Chinese culture.

Of course, sometimes we discuss online hypotheticals like whether it would be good for China to annex Mongolia or Myanmar. From a purely military perspective, it would be very easy for China. But almost no one supports it, because our way of thinking dictates that it would require an enormous cost to transform those populations into Chinese culture, and that cost is simply not worth it. Trade and cooperation are the best approach.

>the government could require state-owned enterprise employees and Communist Party members to have children.

Or Beijing could ban birth control and rely on the natural human sex drive to increase the birth rate.

China is a country that does not prohibit abortion at all. Maybe this could be a starting point…

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