I made less than $2000 a year in China, and I was better off than most people I knew. Knowing what people live like in Shanghai is like knowing what people live like in Disneyland. That $7,200 figure is a distant dream for the vast majority of China.
I am generally opposed to all manned space programs, which I consider fanboy wanking by men who read too many sci-fi novels as kids and want to throw useful money at the boyhood dreams of what is actually a pretty small demographic (if women were in power, the equivelent would by a state purple pony breeding program or a national department of pretty princessess), but I do not really care what China burns its money on beyond vague sympathy for their truly poor.
I do want to combat this idea of “happy effective authoritarianism.” For every Singapore, there is a Turkmenistan. China has reaped the benefits of good macroeconomic policy- which is a good thing to export. But I do not think their structurally Stalinist political system does anyone any favors, and I will work to bring reality in to what is essentially their marketing campaign to the third world.
I don’t think you understand statistics. $7500 is their 2010 GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity. That means that actually quite a lot of the population have wealth close to that figure.
As for your solo fight to counter their “marketing campaign”, you have as much chance as trying to turn the ocean to fresh water by pissing in it. I went on a 3 hour boat cruise today from Shanghai to the mouth of the Yangtze river. The entire way for 32 kms is nothing but ports, cranes, ship building yards, power stations and factories. I’ve seen the port areas in Singapore / Bangkok / Hong Kong and Los Angeles, this is a lot bigger. Then when you get to the mouth of the Yangtze you can see nothing but cranes and shipyards as far as the horizon up the Yangtze as well. It’s rather impressively frightening it it’s sheer magnitude.
Some people on this board seem to be trying to give the impression that China has gone straight from barefoot peasants in rice paddies to high speed rail and a space program and that this is dangerous and irresponsible. Actually they’ve spent the last 30 years building factories, power stations, a highway network, dams etc and now only in the last five years are they building high speed rail and starting a manned space program.
Except for in Kunming, where they havn’t bothered building traffic lights and the barefoot peasants on the outskirts of town are happy they finally got a fridge, but otherwise fairly nonplussed about the amazing opportunties of modern China.
I’ve been to Shanghai. It is quite impressive and a really nice livable city.
I spent two years teaching the children of migrant laborers and peasant farmers in a medium-small city set in rural Sichuan. I have travelled all over China, but it is Sichuan and Guizhou that I know by heart. And it can be heartbreaking-I had two students who shared one pair of cracked glasses, taking turns copying from the board. I know the ins and outs of how much you have to pay to cheat or bribe out of the TEM 4, the Business English exam, even the gaocao. My friends have shown me the tiny rice-grain radios…rented at the cost of months of their parent’s work in Guangzhou…that they use to have a future. And I’ve comforted crying kids who couldn’t put together enough of a bribe to keep them off the dead-end farms. I have friends who spent childhood escaping the birth police and friends who have watched their family members put to death.
Did you know that in China, disabled people can’t go to university? There are a handful of “special” schools for the disabled, but for the most part if you are in a wheelchair, you will never have a chance? Hell, if you don’t get into university by, I think, 23 you can’t go. Ever.
A lot of good has happened. Standards of living have raised aross the board, even in rural areas. But China builds its wealth in hundreds of millios of have-nots. And while social mobility has gone from “zero” to “something,” it is still the most rigid place I have ever seen.
Sitting now in one of the officially “poorest of the poor” villages in South Africa, I can say I hope China’s system never comes here. The hope and energy even in the backwaters is a striking contrast to the despair of rural China, even if somewhere, far far away, the Chinese poor know there are a lot of cranes.
Yo do go on and on about those traffic lights don’t you? When did you leave Kunming? I suspect they might have built some since you left. First picture at top on this page. http://hessey.org/asia/chinalijiang.html
A quick google search finds images of traffic lights in Kunming, can we drop that now?
Sven, none of the “horrors” you mention are unique to China and most are not caused by China’s political system. India is a democracy with freedom of religion and freedom of speech, except if you are born into the wrong caste then you are “free” to live a life of crushing poverty, even though prejudice on the basis of caste is officially banned.
Thailand is a democracy most of the time, except when the military takes control (until the King makes them stop ), yet if you born into one of the hill tribe ethnic groups in border areas your choices are to spend a life being gawked at by tourists or being recruited into growing heroin by a warlord. Again prejudice against hill tribes ethnic minorities is rampant among the Thai ehtnic majority.
And that wealth that China is generating is trickling down, their policy was to deliberately develop coastal areas and river valleys first, which makes sense considering the easy access to shipping. For the 2011-2015 five year plan the CCP is explicitly emphasizing development in rural and inland areas.
I go on about Kunming because every time I went there from 2008-2010 I sat staring at very nice malls and hotels at the same stupid two hour traffic jam on the road out to the intercity bus station, caused by one key intersection without a much needed light. Also the cab drivers there won’t pick up foreigners, but that is another story.
Of course the stories aren’t unique to China- there are a few posters on this board who can beat me in a “who knows poverty” contest and plenty who know China better than I do, but they arn’t you. My point is these stories generally happen more in places like India, Brazil and South Africa that are building a consumer culture and working on their social problems, and less often in countries that are ready to take over the planet with their superadvanced magic technotopia government. China is a middle income newly industrialized country with a large population, good macroeconomic policy, and a relatively fragile legacy government relient on authoritarianism- no more, no less. It’s a fascinating place, but it’s hardly some entirely unique OMG-the-future country.
I’ve said my piece, and I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. I suspect, though, that a more nuanced view of your new home will emerge after some time there.
You can’t lump China in with other developing countries, it’s already the world’s second largest economy, and it already does dominates Asia. As I mentioned it’s been Australia’s largest two way trade partner for a while now.
So just to quell this wealth distribution myth, I did some digging. Waddaya know the US has a for worse wealth inequality distribution than China. Not surprising considering it China IS still a socialist country.
The source is Credit Suisse, and you can clearly see the massive lump in the very top of US wealth distribution vs China’s relatively larger middle classes. Of course China’s middle classes are still poor by US standards, but give them time.
What are the economic effects here of democracy vs. not-democracy? I.e., if the PRC had fallen more-or-less peacefully to the Tianmen Square protests, as happened in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, and set up a real democracy (I know that’s not quite how it went in Russia, bear with me), would China be any better-developed or more prosperous now? Or less?
Brain Glutton, it’s not like we can set up perfect A-B-A double blind experiments is it? However look at the record of Russia’s economic growth since they became a democracy (in theory) vs China since 1990 and democracy doesn’t really come out looking that great.
One huge difference between the two is that Russia/Soviet Union was already a “developed” nation by the 1980s, in the sense that the steel mills and railroads and other physical infrastructure was there. What happened was that with the collapse of the command economy that had kept the system running on life support, the former USSR became a sort of continent-sized Rust Belt. Most of what the former Soviet Union could produce was shoddy garbage that no one who had a choice would buy. What was still worth having became the fiefs of former party functionaries and the rest was left to rot. I’m not sure they’ve coined a political/economic term for what Russia is today. By contrast, China had room to grow and the growth that has taken place has been mostly in the quasi-free market. It’s hardly the case that authoritarism “works” and democracy fails. It’s more like comparing an up-and-coming third world city with Detroit.
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You need to update your right wing soundbites.
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Nuff said. You don’t want to discuss the subject, you just want sunshine blown up your skirt, and you just want to accuse anyone who doesn’t drink the kool aide of being a ‘right winger’. Let me know how that works out for you, chief…
Okay, I worked for a billionaire. When I asked about what cheapskates our customers were, following every dime while the dollars poured out, he said, “There’s nobody cheaper than rich people.”
ETA: They’re just not very good at it, explaining my career the past 11 years.
Same as the motivation behind anything China does nowadays – to take over the world, Pinky!
But actually, it’s more likely a long term propaganda tool for maintaining national pride. Communist party anniversaries, affected reenactments of conflicts past and oil paintings of despots can only indoctrinate so much, after all.
Let’s see how liberal you are with your effusive Sino fawning when they’re not your beneficiary but your Laogai prison camp ‘screw’, Lizzie!
Believe you-me, from someone who has more than one Chinese friend / associate, ex-pat and local, that the ‘harmonious’ veneer the Politburo present isn’t nearly representational of what goes on outside the peripheral view of the Chinese secret police. Even their famed and integral production hubs like Guangdong have real, tangible cultural malaise that’s only kept at bay on pain of bullet.
Don’t be blind to facts for sake of the all-mighty Renminbi. Sure, there’s money to be made there; but at what price? How much of your irreplaceable resources do you dig up and ship to them and how much farmland do you turn over to govt controlled miners before you step back and take stock of what really matters? Remember: it’s the avarice of the capitalist that’s made this Communist regime as strong as it is today. Trick us once, shame on them. Trick us twice and…
Communism: in a nutshell.
I’m kinda curious what adding matter to the Earth’s aggregate weight does to its axis. Apparently even the shipping to and fro of mineral resources we already have on the planet affects (albeit negligibly) the Earth’s tilt. [citation need and to lazy to be gotten]
Can’t imagine what copious ‘alien’ matter would do…
QFT.
The idea of projected power and how it concerns America’s allies of the region in question really is lost on barrel-chested Yanks, isn’t it? :rolleyes:
And, yeah; American’s do tend to quiver at the knees whenever the issue of China and anything that intimates their technological, particularly military, ascendancy. I guess when Jack’s put his last few beans on a 100:1 turbin-donned fillie, he’s really hoping it wins.
What puzzles me is that for people who are so unconcerned about China edging the U.S. into the “also rans”, that they are so vehement and persistent in telling us how unconcerned they really are because its not going to happen.
It makes you think of someone who hasn’t got a date for the Prom explaining in great detail how Proms are old hat, and anyway they’re juvenile, and anyway they could have had any amount of partners but they didn’t fancy anyone at their school, and anyway they’ve got 'flu, and anyway they don’t want to go, plus they’re going to a much better social event that night, and anyway they’ve got to stay home and look after their sick granny.
If the U.S. really doesn’t want to explore space , why are you so concerned that someone else is going to do so ?
And that said, why are you so concerned about an event that although already decided, according to you is a bad idea and anyway it isn’t going to happen.
Are you concerned about the cost to the Chinese taxpayer ?
Are you concerned about the loss of face by China when it doesn’t happen ?
Just a little bit of rationalisation here methinks.
“If God wanted us to live in outer space, we wouldn’t have balancing systems in our inner ears.”
MICHAEL LIND
No, not too convincing to me. Besides, as far as the US is concerned, we’ve always been living in the penny-pinching US, whether we’re actually pinching pennies or not. There’s nothing all that different about our spending habits now than there was over the last 100 years. It’s a convenient excuse for not coughing up dough for things you’re not interested in, though.
Okay, not to “sum up” so much as key phrase so I can “dismiss.”
Nothing new there I could see. The north pole and the Marianas Trench are not parallels to space exploration; once we’ve been there, no reason to go back or stay awhile.
), yet if you born into one of the hill tribe ethnic groups in border areas your choices are to spend a life being gawked at by tourists or being recruited into growing heroin by a warlord. Again prejudice against hill tribes ethnic minorities is rampant among the Thai ehtnic majority.