Have you actually been to China in the 80s/90s and can compare it to how it is now?
Even Sven is confusing urban elites with the Chinese population in general. The majority of her population still lives in rural settings and is poor. Like throughout history, Chinas political system will be her downfall. The system is too corrupt and too unresponsive. China can never be wealthy like the western democracies under its current government.
China was kicked around by other countries in the 1800’s and 1900’s and I feel they want to have their turn at being a muscleman.
Exactly. Plus with the rise of capitalism the Chinese especially rural Chinese have lost a lot of the perks of socialism. You can’t forget about that when comparing how their standard of living has changed.
I read that one of the problems with Chinese companies is that they are so full of nepotism (meaning only hiring family) that it makes it hard for the comapany to grow since one can only have so many relatives and it messes up the chain of command and who can or cannot move up in the company.
Another problem China has is food and space. This is why they are pushing to buy up land in Africa and why they might want to push out on their frontiers either in the south China sea or their land borders.
No, I am not.
I spent two years teaching on a local salary at a third-tier university in a small factory city in Sichuan province. My students were first generation college students and primary school teachers from remote rural villages. During my time in China, I travelled widely in Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan, spending no small amount of time staying with local families in rural villages.
My area was none to fond of the political situation. My student’s grandparents had been tortured and killed in the cultural revolution. In the famine years, corpses lay open at the side of the road in my city, and one and six in Sichuan perished. Today, the pollution is critical, and political oppression is very real. One of my closest colleagues was affiliated with an opposition party, which basically ruined his career. There was a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction in town, and to my surprise my students would sometimes engage in very raw, very critical politically oriented conversation.
But the change is undeniable. There were major, life-changing improvements on a near daily basis. Even in the scant two years I was there, the city changed significantly.
I remember they had just opened a tunnel through a mountain near town, turning a set of inaccessible villages into prosperous suburbs overnight. In my time, I saw many move from Communist area factory housing blocks- places where the toilet and kitchen was out on a back porch (like my own apartment)- to modern apartments. A WalMart opened up on my city, along with the first KFC in the region. The last in paved roads in town were paved. The refrigerator is a life-changing appliance for women, and households would showcase their shiny new fridges in a place of honor in the living room. Just a few years ago my town was full of bicycles. Now, there are too many cars on the road to bike for transportation, but euro-style bike touring became a popular weekend pass time.
Even in rural areas, people were getting roads, refrigerators, motorcycles, and the ability to send their kids to college. For farmers and factory workers to be sending their kids to college is remarkable. Two generations ago, only the most favored elites stood a chance. And these aren’t empty educations. My students had technically been marked for training as rural elementary school teachers-- a job marked by poverty and limited opportunity. In school they were outright depressed about their fates.
To my surprise, most of them are now doing much more. Some are working abroad in Dubai or Malaysia, experiencing a world unimaginable a generation ago. Some have moved to big cities and stated in business. Some have started their own businesses. And these are the kids that were supposed to be the losers- the “left behind” kids raised by grandparents and hidden to the population policy police, the kids that failed the college entrance exams, the kids without enough connections to keep them out of our joke of a college. And they are still making it.
Question: There has been talk about the lack of females in China due to the one-child policy and favoring boy heirs. Did you see much of that?
China’s business ventures in Africa are not a nefarious plot. They are business ventures designed to make money (like most business ventures). Africa is a high-risk market that most developed countries haven’t bothered to make much of an investment in. We just haven’t seen much opportunity there. But China has a much higher tolerance of that risk, their workers are willing to live without he inflated expat salaries western companies have to pay, and China doesn’t have as many alternatives to invest in- most of the prime investment areas were claimed long ago by more prosperous nations.
China isn’t planning to put its population on rocks in the ocean. Their involvement in the seas is about asserting Itself as the dominant military in the region. Seems shady, but the alternative is that it’s the US, which makes no sense (even if we like it that way).
I’m not sure what land borders you expect China to cross. They have plenty of underpopulated land around most of them.
I think many Americans forget just how big China’s population is. A few years ago the “middle class” in China was only 300 million people, maybe 20% of their population. That is about the size of the total population of the United States. Upper, Middle, and Lower economic class and all. China is just so big that small changes there equal huge changes for the rest of the world. Remember this map? 
So China will have a major influence on the rest of the world, just by being there. At the same time, size doesn’t guarantee success. The US and Europe may well continue to dominate world events in spite of their relatively small size.
Yup. Heard some pretty disturbing first hand stories of female infanticide, and many of my students knew quite well that their birth was seen as misfortune. The good news is that this is changing rapidly. Lots of my friends preferred girls because they are “cute.” I think the economic forces favoring sons are fading. For example, more and more aging parents prefer to live independently than with their kids.
The one-child policy is not monolithic. There are many, many exceptions, especially in rural areas, and in many places it’s easy to dodge. It primarily affects well-employed city dwellers. Most of the people I knew were not from one-child families.
I’ve found it confusing that, in spite of the huge body of knowledge concerning clean air & the environmental impact of industry & cars, over the past 50 years they have developed some of the more heavily smog-ridden cities. This is progress?
A majority of Chinese live in cities now. If you visit the countryside or small towns you will notice a lack of young adults. It’s common to see grandparents raising their young grandkids while the parents are away most of the year for work. They’ve moved to the bigger and wealthier cities, especially on the coasts. Of the 10 or so people I knew in Hunan, about half have ended up in Shenzhen.
My father feels the Chinese have a huge advantage over other countries in having a largely capitalist economy but a political dictatorship. His point is that they have the same modern tools for managing their economy as developed countries do, but have the huge advantage of being less subsceptible to public pressure and thus able to take a much longer term view.
Just a bit of an overstatement, do you think?
That’s basically it in a nutshell. A dictatorship doesn’t get forced into sacrificing long-term benefit for short-term gain, the way democratically elected politicians do.
I think your father is correct about much of that.
However, if we have learned anything from the Holocaust, I think we need to try to put a stop to the stealing of organs from prisoners in China.
China may be out pacing us in economic terms. But that provides us with a real good weapon we can use to pressure them. We can stop buying their goods until they stop this practice. Seems like an important way to honor the victims of the Holocaust. Seems very important that we (the Western consumers of Chinese goods) try to take a stand about this.
On the other hand, if capitalists with political connections or government officials make money building cities no one wants to move to nothing will happen to the officials enabling this waste - until they lose a power struggle, that is. Builders screw up in the US also, but they aren’t protecting from the consequences of their mistakes.
You also are assuming that dictators care about what is good in the long term. That works in Ankh-Moorpork, not so much here.
The problem is that there’s a fundamental divide between the goals of the capitalists and the politicians - more so than exists in the west, where there’s a general ideological consensus. This divide can be papered over as long as times are going well. But at some point there will be an unreconcilable dispute.
And that’s when China will discover the benefits of democracy. Democracy allows disputes to be settled at a lower level of conflict. Which means conflict is a lot more common - but it’s not as serious. Dictatorships can appear more stable as they go along for decades with no apparent unrest - and then suddenly there’s a violent revolution.
Yes, but also a dictatorship doesn’t get forced into sacrificing short term gain for long-term benefit. The dictator/oligarchy doesn’t have an identity of interests with the populace. Authoritarian rule sometimes works OK, if the leadership has a personal stake in the country and the choices that need to be made are obvious. Copying successful foreign practices is an example. But authoritarian leaders often make foolish, selfish, and short-sighted decisions.
And how does the authoritarian leadership stay in power? If they are regarded as legitimate and competent by the populace they can stay in power just by throwing a few journalists in jail and beating up a few troublemakers. Having lots of extra cash to spend on buying off dissent works wonders, and so if you’re lucky enough to have oil or valuable export goods you’ve got a built-in source of power. But you might find yourself facing rebellion, your underlings might prove self-interested, the people for some reason hide their goods from your tax collectors, and on and on. The life of a dictator isn’t all palaces and parades and having your opponents shot in the face. There’s a lot of work too. And why are you helping out the citizens, don’t they exist to glorify you?
Perhaps you can elaborate on this.
Here’s where I think China being nominally communist is an advantage.
In the West, people like to think that citizens in communist countries widely despise the system and are only kept in line by oppression. But this is incorrect. There are a lot of of people who believe in the system.
And - what’s important here - there are a lot of people in the power structure who believe in it. This itself has a positive influence on the politicians, who are kept in check to some extent by other politicians who are also True Believers.
It’s not at all the same as some tinpot dictator whose only ideology is “more money and power for me”, an ideology which tends to be replicated by everyone else in the power structure.
Be careful China might just create a market for organs, got a spare kidney? Here take $10k…
Don’t connect the holocaust to China, that’s a long bow. I could connect China’s subservient lower classes to US slaves, see does nothing for your argument except introduce emotion. You need hard logic to deal with China.
The issue in Australia is if we stop buying their cheap stuff they will stop buying our cheap raw materials and education.
My biggest concern is China one day says OK let’s slow down and the world goes into a major recession/depression and then with their massive war chest of US dollars they go out and purchase lots of distressed assets cheaply.
Think that’s out there? It’s not much different to what happens today with major investment houses.