They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation ages all they built will be used and maintained by fewer people
I've never been to china so it's interesting perspective from people with family there and go back 2-3 times a year
The “West” had the same problem many times during the first Cold War, where things in the Soviet Union seemed really great from the outside. Only after the collapse did the truth become clear.
Now, I don’t think China is even remotely similar, but never forget that it is not a free society.
In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
Well, unless ICE murders you at a protest for expressing your hate of the government's actions.
>In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
That's very much not true. China isn't North Korea like Westerners imagine. Unless you riot, take to the streets, or become a big agitator or dissident, Chinese government and media actually does allow some controlled escape valves for regular people to vent about problems, no issue with that. This isn't Stalin's reign of terror.
You'll only get disappeared if you end up becoming a big fish to threaten the CCP, like Jack Ma, but otherwise the CCP don't end disappearing every schmuck who complains about the government.
You might not know this, but as a nation, you don't get very far economically, academically and technologically in the long run by consonantly oppressing your people under a culture of permanent fear of their government. You can't bleed a stone.
And China got where it is, due to its successful policies from the last half-century that brought prosperity and lifted millions of of poverty, it's government has earned a certain level of "buy-in" from the majority of the population, meaning the people are more likely to be cooperative and work with the totalitarian government towards a common set of mutually beneficial goals, rather than wasting their energy trying to mass emigrate out of the country or to fight for democracy.
And that's what so dangerous about this, because unlike the USSR who served in the west as THE model of inevitable failure for such systems, China found a successful form of totalitarian governance, that some western governments are now trying to copy when they saw how effective it is.
They are certainly trying to copy some elements, but also some parts might be inevitable in the age of decentralised social media which are much harder to control using the old tools. China just enacted that first and the West had to go through all the turmoil to arrive in a similar place much later.
Not because of the West giving China its industry, because - greed and China's blatant IP theft? Who cares if the communists make everything we consume, right? Stock price, yo.
"Apple in China" by Patrick McGee is a good read.
I like Chinese food, the arts, the folklore, they make my favorite bows (archery), but I don't want my grandkids have to learn Mandarin unless they want to.
Tangent, I always do a double take when I see CCP, as "USSR" is spelled "CCCP" in Cyrillic, it's charming (I am from a former USSR republic).
If I'm voluntarily giving you my IP with no contractual assurance for protection, is it my fault or yours?
Never stop your enemy when he's making mistakes.
>because - greed Stock price, yo.
Why wouldn't you weaponize their greed against them? "Forget about pedophiles, the DOW is over 50,000."
People often point to the take down of Winnie the Pooh memes as censorship but I don't think people realize there's a long history of racist groups using Pooh as a slur about Asian people and Tigger about black people. The meme exploded in popularity from a picture of Obama and Xi being compared to Tigger and Pooh.
You can have whatever opinion you want about taking down racist content but I don't it's any different from Western platforms. But spending any time on Chinese social media will quickly dispel the idea of harsh consequences for speech (an especially silly idea coming from members of the nation that contains 25% of the world's prisoners)
Among the problems is not being able to look in the mirror. There are those that don't realize, "when you point one finger, there are three fingers point back at you".
For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.
And that's why we are unlikely to see mass immigration allowed in China. They know that and can see what has happened and is happening in Europe and are thus likely to protect themselves. That's not my opinion but what Chinese think if you can discuss openly with people there.
This is a puzzling badly-received point of view here, but I think Europe and its official narrative that are actually the odd ones out globally.
China is investing a lot in automation and they already have state of the art automated factories. I think this will be the way forward for them and everyone (birth rates are dropping everywhere).
As a European - what has happened to us, exactly? I'm curious what kind of thing you think is happening to Europe that is such disaster that even China should be afraid of it.
You do realize that most of European migration is internal, right? Polish workers going to Germany, that kind of thing? It would be like complaining that American migration is crazy because of all the people moving from Kansas to take jobs in California.
>> house prices increases due to supply and demand and crime rate is not equal among groups
As compared to....?
>>It is not like the US where you have a massive startup scene and get an Elon Musk from South Africa to create jobs and add meaningful value.
I'm like, honestly not sure what to say to that. I could maybe start listing successful businesses started and/or ran by immigrants in the EU if that helps? Or is the fact that none of them are as famous as Elon Musk a dealbreaker?
America and countries that engaged in worldwide colonisation are the exception not the rule.
The coming decades will be interesting.
Sadly, big business wants cheap labor so we can't have nice things.
And there is also the demographic disparity at play here.
The US is attracting migrants mainly from Latin America, that's a population basin of 650M people, roughly 2 times the US population.
In China's case, the surrounding countries susceptible to provide migrants is what? a third of China's population?
I'm not knowledgeable nearly enough about the area but I also feel there are also significant cultural and historical elements limiting large scale immigration (for example, the complex Sino-Vietnamese relations).
It's more likely PRC will have migrant labourers do low value work like Mexican fruit pickers. They're going to have ample high skill / tertiary workers for 50+ years, this baked into existing births... i.e. half the reason they have youth "unemployment" problem is they're generating so much tertiary talent vs opportunities, so there's no use for western based talent immigration to augment highend demographics.
The real shortfall is going to be low end blue collar - people willing to move dirt do shit jobs for peanuts, previously that's 100s of millions of undereducated who are aging out, so that leaves robots and south east asians and maybe africa because 1.4B PRC will require more remittance workers than poor asia can provide... unless they figure out automation. Even in west these cohorts are not immigration material, they're seasonal workers.
Are the bullet trains making enough to pay down construction debt yet? My understanding is that that has been a struggle, which is going to be a problem when they get past being new and start having more and more maintenance expense on top of paying back construction debt.
Public services generally provide public good that outweighs their cost. Trying to quantify and charge for that cost is a useless exercise.
I hate the current bs going on in the US against China. It reminds me of the Japan scare crap pushed in the US when I was a kid.
Chongqing too!
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3254680/c...
Funnily enough it may turn out that those nations that just muddled along could have the best long term out comes. Yes, they never got the really good stuff but they also won't have a harder decline.
"You cannot fall out of bed if you sleep on the floor" - Turkish proverb
Building infrastructure for a civilized society is never bad and when I say that nothing is perfect. There are downsides. I would rather have the infrastructure and I wished the United States still had that can-do attitude. The rail system across the country needs to be upgraded desperately.
The Chinese have even taken the lessons of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they have built two Thorium reactors and refueled one without turning it off, and they appear to be right on schedule to have that larger second reactor online by 2030.
Take a 100 mile strip down the east coast and the west coast. Add Chicago. That's pretty much everyone.
The population of the NYC metro area exceeds that of the entire US Mountain _timezone_.
If only. Everybody loves cutting the ribbon on shiny new infrastructure, but the cost of maintenance is very real and never ending.
As a simple example, rezone some agricultural land as residential and sell it to developers. Yay, free money! But only once, and now you have a bunch of roads and plumbing etc etc that you need to upkeep forever. If there's people living in the houses and paying taxes, that's fine, but if there aren't or they go away, you now have a very big, very expensive problem. Japan is deep into feeling the pain of this and demographically China is only a decade or two behind.
You have all of that (huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills) also in Europe MINUS the Chinese progress, your co-workers are clearly biased
but for other perspective - I lived in China 5+ years, left in 2016, I returned for 3 weeks vacation/family visit last summer and honestly I didn't see that many changes as you would expect, in China in 9 years you would expect pretty much different country by previous standards, but I was like "meh", hardly any changes beside few more EVs on the road (even there I was disappointed, Beijing clearly ain't Shenzhen, maybe 25-35% cars on the road and I am including hybrids as well), bunch of new subway lines and skyscrapers, but nothing mindblowing, it was actually quite underwhelming, people still smoke in restaurants (and policemen in police station right under No smoking sign), still noise and mess on (some) streets, even more street markets (gentrification) closed, on the positive note thanks to crappy economy and zero inflation or maybe even deflation salaries are same and prices remained same (you can rent apartment for like 200EUR in Beijing suburbs), I can't imagine having pretty much same price for meal after 9 years in European restaurant
I’ve been visiting China since 1999 (and lived there for around 10 years). Rapid progress, lots of investments, over investment (ghost districts and ghost cities) are inevitable, but after its all over they will still have an advanced economy with lots of opportunities.
China was a growing country that clearly knew how to build infrastructure. In Wuhan, they built an entire development intended to employ 100,000 engineers (Huawei + our US company's 50). They built a subway system in a decade that's bigger than New York City's. I took the high-speed rail to Beijing and it was superb. They replaced an old, shabby international airport terminal with a new one with the widest concourse I've ever seen. They subsidized regular flights between Wuhan and San Francisco on China Southern airlines. The Hyatt Regency there was one of my favorite hotels I've ever stayed in (cheap and high quality). In a big commerical district, they had the largest screen I've ever seen that had a Blue Screen of Death :-)
Dazzling yet I'm not bullish on China due to its demographics, among many other reasons.
This was originally a side effect of the One child policy, but now it is continued due to difficult living situations. This is not a uniquely China issue.
But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.
To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.
Gentrification is when existing communities that used to have decent if basic living situations get gradually priced out of an area as richer people and their expensive amenities move in. Gradually, as house prices go up and food gets more expensive, people sell and move. It's a slow, mostly voluntary thing, or at least, driven by market forces rather than official mandates.
Tearing down a slum is a much more disruptive thing that instantly displaces a entire community. Although it's unclear what happened to that community in this case and I can't find anything clear about it online (lots of clearly biased articles for one side or the other though).
This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.
Posting the map in case anyone hasn’t seen it.
You get what you incentivize.
I mean we have the Nullarbor plain. The name literally means 'No Trees', and it is very fitting.
If you ever end up there... I hope you don't.
You are projecting a fantasy.