This is absolutely going to fall on deaf ears here, but I moved with my wife and 1 year old to China for 4 months and became the most productive in more than a decade.
Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.
There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
I've thought about moving to Asia. Then I read about the racism there and realize I'd be right back at home, but now with a language barrier to boot. Oh well.
Everything else sounds great, or tolerable at worst. Public transportation, a more respectful culture, actual 3rd places, housing that isn't treated as an asset to preserve.
I'll still get back to my Japanese learning once things stabilize. Just in case.
Mh. Would like to hear the full story. My initial mental reflex is one of „es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen“, that is, „there is no right life in the wrong one“, as Adorno put it.
I think it's simpler to just appeal to every entrepreneur's spider sense - go where the great people are. It really does feel a bit like how Silicon Valley and San Francisco felt in 2000s-2010s. Caveat of course, which is even before 2008, aware insiders of SV were trying to warn that the Goodness of the internet was being squeezed too hard, that VC was turning to rent seeking too soon, the cart is way too far ahead of the basic research pipeline, etc. And of course, there's corruptible people, terrible overwork, insane competition, bad stuff etc in China too.
But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
This is literally my first time hearing this. All the stuff I see from china is about lying flat, giving up because no matter how hard you work it won't make a difference? Is this a Shenzhen attitude?
There is probably something to be said about living someplace that is actually investing in itself. Seeing new development actually rise to meet the demands of the population. Seeing new transit expanded. People uplifted out of rural poverty. New technological developments. The whole bit.
The US probably felt a little like that in the immediate post war period. The enthusiasm coming out of a terrible war and a terrible depression and seeing actual changes take place in the scale of weeks before your eyes must have been something else.
But today, most cities seem to have been content with solidifying into amber over the last 50 or so years. No investments into society. The poor are still poor and objectively have worse opportunities given the buying power of the jobs available to them. Development isn't happening on a scale to actually meet the population's needs. Transit and most public good efforts are an afterthought because of no direct business profitability angle. It becomes hard to get excited about medical advances when you understand the realities of our healthcare system and that many who need these medicines or treatments won't ever get them. No enthusiasm for anything. A large population of people against anything changing. Young people and young ideas stonewalled out of positions of power in favor of people who ought to have retired by now maintaining the status quo. Technological advances seemingly solely focused on establishing new ways to rent seek, gouge, police, control thoughts, versus things that are simply beneficial to others. "no brainer" ideas facing pushback. Common sense not being valued. The optimism coming out of the civil rights era dashed away against the realities that hate towards your fellow human is a position that will carry popularity in this country. Profit above all. Control above all. Blatant corruption and cronyism by the ruling elite. Awareness that we haven't taken off the shackles of feudalism.
Read as "anyone connected flees to the US, anyone deemed political gets a free relocation to a Xinjiang re-education camp, and lots of new mainland 'mothers' live with those allowed to remain".
Why would anyone voluntarily sign up to have Winnie the Pooh's boot on their face?
It's wild to me that so many skeptical westerners who want to nitpick certain unproven technicalities, when the entire world only gets bits and pieces of the on the ground reality of China's progress, like the original Reuters article which was clearly fed information by insiders.
You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision making off of that.
I also cant understand people being in denial about, or claiming other imagined moats or whatever. They're whipping the pants of us right now industrially, if the west has any advantages left its that we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial.
Also this stuff was figured out and built once before, other than the effort and resources involved (which China has lots of), why wouldn't someone else be able to figure it out again?
The west is still underestimating China. There is a great anecdote, I think it's from the book 'Apple in China', about their engineers visiting a Chinese production plant. Some changes needed to be made to the place. The Apple people estimated that that would take two weeks.
They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.
Because in Western Europe, nobody serious is underestimating China, quite the contrary.
We know that there's no going back, and quality is no longer a criteria to choose local over imported.
Only bigotted people are still viewing China as a country mass-producing cheap crap.
I think that's the EVs that definitely sealed the deal in lots of people's minds.
I often wonder what is it that's driving the Chinese to work themselves to death to get this stuff done? Surely there must be some limit. I guess we can see it in the low birth rates, the youth unemployment, and I guess the desire to just survive because there's just so many people there. But still, I just don't get how Chinese just keep going and going. What is their end goal on a person to person level? Are they just going to keep killing themselves for the rest of their lives? What happened to the lie flat movement?
Their parent's generation toiled really hard and lifted the entire country out of poverty and everyone was pretty well rewarded for it.
They feel working hard brings benefits.
In America, working hard brings your manager benefits. We are multiple generations into this. Most people have learned to not work hard because it is just free benefit to your employer.
Sure, we could pressure Americans to work harder by making the entire country even more afraid of losing their jobs and terrified of not overworking themselves, but even then, all that hard work will just be captured by a spoiled managerial class playing bonus games and extracting all that wealth for themselves, not for American advancement.
Even in the shithole that is American managerial culture, you can still find young Americans working hard, often in spite of themselves, because they get into some project. In the past, projects were small and your team had substantial agency, so this sort of "The team really gets into the project" outcomes paid huge dividends, and resulted in a lot of success. Things like the IBM PC, lots of stuff at Bell Labs.
I don't know. You are correct that the Japanese/Korea has this mentality to spend time at work just to spend time but there is a noticeable delta in effective results between those countries and modern China.
It's more like the genocide in Gaza is the uncommon case where western propaganda was openly rejected by the population, at least by younger people, despite a concerted top-down effort to try to convince people that genocide is actually concordant with western values. Though it did take some time.
It's the propaganda that nobody questions that is most insidious.
We can't dismiss the role TikTok played in breaking the standard media narrative in the west. I grew up following this issue since I am in a group that is on the receiving end of this conflict.
I occasionally think about software that has truly transformed the trajectory of humanity. So much software is just disposable or is only useful for a small group of people. But the folks at TikTok should be commended in some ways for the drastic changes their algorithm made to the views of worldwide youth. Was it altruistic or nefarious? I suspect we won't know for sure until its written in the history books but man did it have an impact. Even though TikTok is probably gone now that its been taken over by the same people who used to shape the narrative its impact wont be easily forgotten.
How many of us developers get a chance to write software that really changes the direction the world takes?
A better question here is, would china be doing this, if "the west" wasn't threathening (and implementing) all kinds of sanctions on them, giving them no choice but to go "the bender way", by making their own chips (with blackjack, and hookers!).
Yes? The replication of the foreign capability domestically has been a driving force of China's economy for the last 20 - 30 years. No major R&D program in which china is catching up or even exceeding the western capability was started there, even the quite recent AI boom is mostly based on the work of American companies and labs.
If anything the constant underestimation of Chinese capabilities caused "the west" to react way to late.
It's wild that every comment section about China these days must paint the picture of these rabid anti-Chinese Westerners who are saying that China is an eternal backwater, yet one never sees actual comments like this, and how all of Western media is pushing anti-China propaganda, when the submitted article is just a neutral bit.
It's an overcorrection for years of western arrogance being expressed in the past decade+. I think most people have woken up by now to the reality of Chinese manufacturing dominance and what that implies, at least those in power and journalists.
It is always like that. Most people just don't have the attitude of getting things done, and they can barely believe it is possible when they watch what the people who do accomplish.
A lot of things require sacrifice beyond reasonable means. I see these books on how Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla developed their innovations, its groups of people that are extremely talented and became that talented due to sacrifices from their families/communities that go and sacrifice everything themselves to achieve amazing goals. Some of that resultant wealth goes to them but most goes to the shareholders/tech bros.
Eventually less and less people want to go down this route so we get "people just not having the attitude of getting things done".
The real question is will Chinese people go down that same road or will the fact that there is so much cutthroat competition there keep people in line?
Reunification in Taiwan has nothing to do with chips, and militarily PRC was able to do so a long time ago. The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.
> The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.
Counts for nothing, these narratives are built on sand. Russians also saw Ukrainians as "brothers", as did South/North Koreans before the war, among countless other examples.
Their is always a political will in China to kill other Chinese since thousands of years ago. This works vastly different from the western humanitarian philosophy.
Sun Wukong is the original "normal guy who grinds to greatness", which was the original plot of Dragonball before it turned more into Harry Potter (you are the chosen one).
I thought it was pretty well known that Gundam is a commentary on class and the effects of imperialist wars on normal people. The OG series didn't glorify violence and instead showed a lot of gratuitous civilian deaths, and most of the main characters are the poor-orphan-becoming-a-knight archetype.
Plus Jane Austen at the time was a sharp critique of English nobility and high class, but presenting it in a stylized and popular way.
As a subculture dedicated to being in the know on certain things, HN commenters purposely showing theyre being out of touch on this specific subculture is pretty funny.
It's not that serious, I promise. When you were a kid you probably also had beany babies, furbies, crazy bones, magic cards, tamagotchis, tech decks, steel bearing yo-yos, or whatever else thing was a fad. Guess what, those were all made in China too.
I was just in Hangzhou two days ago, and went through the Hangzhouxi train station. Needless to say it's utterly massive, straight out of a Star Trek scene, extremely efficient and clean. Construction was started in 2019, and finished in 2022. It cost $2.25bn. Hangzhou has 5 of these train stations, let alone one.
I'm convinced that every SV founder or neolib politician who writes these hit/think-pieces is getting their enemy entirely mixed up. China is massively bureaucratic and regulation heavy, and just by the scale of these projects, it's simply impossible to think that if you just loosen some rules and fly by your seat pants, you can build a 11 platform train station in 3 years. Again, this station is mind bogglingly massive.
The real answer is that China's regulatory loop is extremely short and small, where the government works very closely and reacts very quickly. You can talk to your regulator, even if you're a small startup working on a small hardware problem. Because every single community district has a CPC office, with representatives that can escalate things all the way up to the top. There's a clear chain of command, and throw in some guanxi to keep the gears greased up, things (problems, questions, hurdles) get to where they need to go. In the US, politicians don't work for their constituents, and even in the rare cases where they do (or have good intentions), they are up against other politicians who have ulterior agendas and their own goals. The machine thrashes against itself, not in a single direction. This is exactly the image of "democracy" in the the minds of the Chinese general public.
The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
> The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
China does a lot of stuff right, and your points may be entirely valid, but calling that system “democratic” nullifies everything else said. It’s a one party state.
By this logic US is two-halves-party state. You are no less dictatorial than China, just better at hiding it at the cost of how performant it is. Democracy is an European thing that rarely ever got successfully exported.
The US is a one-party state because of elite capture.
The interests of the mainstream political parties in the US are disconnected from the material conditions of the people. And what passes for debate is the narcissism of small differences that leaves the super-structure untouched.
China found a system that works for them after a century of trying every system.
> The US is a one-party state because of elite capture.
This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.
> China found a system that works for them after a century of trying every system.
Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.
> This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.
And then he governed in a reactionary way that favored the elites with whom he transacted. One man cannot change the superstructure through electoral means, as Lenin pointed out. All the undemocratic, unilateral powers that Trump has taken advantage of didn't start with him; they began with his predecessors and the larger national security state, who expanded executive power without oversight.
>Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.
Propaganda is how you control public opinion and sentiment in a democracy. See the work of Edward Bernays and Chomsky. Propaganda is an integral part of modern liberal democracies to arrive at a consensus that is largely disconnected from the needs or will of the electorate.
China doesn't need us to tell them how to run their country or their provinces.
This is incorrect. There are 9 parties. You are likely saying "well it's functionally a singe party system" yet you can't even read Chinese to understand what the policy positions of the different factions within the committees are.
I'm not sure why you think I can't read Chinese, but Xi has been in power for 12 years and as far as I am aware cannot be removed by anyone other than the CCP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If the people whom he governs can remove him by some kind of democratic process, then perhaps your points are valid. My understanding is that they cannot.
> Socialist democracy must, therefore, be seen as a historic, multi-generational and dialectical process by which conditions that enable increasing parts of society to play an active role in governance are created, nurtured, and defended. China has advanced on this path further than most societies in modern history. From early experiments in village-level organization to building a nationwide process for 1.4 billion people from 56 ethnic groups across a country spanning over nine million square kilometers, this process has come to be contained in a concept called “whole-process people’s democracy” — a practice of democratic governance built on over a century of organizational experience.
This (and the rest of this article) is nonsense propaganda if the above is correct.
There are 100 million members of the party, and these people vote directly for their local representatives, who then go onto vote for the village, town, city, province, etc representatives, all the way up to the Standing Committee which includes Xi. There are 3000 members of the National People's Congress that directly selects the Standing Committee. In rural areas or special administrative provinces, often anyone can vote, including union members who aren't officially party members. Comparatively, in the 2024 US election, 150 million people voted. So there's roughly the same amount of votes happening.
Maybe you don't agree that not being able to pick the head of state is not a valid definition of democracy. In that case I'd argue that having a twice-indicted convicted felon is not valid democracy either. In any case, feel free to keep your version.
This is the main issue with tankies, not that they go bizarrely out of their way to defend the PRC (and weirdly sometimes the Soviet Union or even North Korea), but, as Westerners, every geopolitical analysis they have is Americentric. Every news article for them is framed as, "How does this affect, or, is influenced by, American hegemony?"
It often results in them completely disregarding the opinions, motivations, and agency of anyone that isn't American or a citizen of the PRC.
The argument you will hear from Americans and Europeans is that in order for it to be a "democracy" that anybody has to be able to vote. This is, of course, hypocritical because not a single one of those countries allows everyone to vote. And, just like China, every one of those countries has powerful government officials that are appointed by other government officials rather than elected by the public. And in many of them there is a parliamentary system where the public does not get to vote on the head of state, but rather the head of state is elected by the parliament.
In fact, the US republic at its beginning was more similar to China. The president and Senate were elected by the state legislatures, not the public.
There are other things that are critical to democracy to actually function in the spirit of democracy - universal suffrage obviously, and the USA fails in this insomuch as it removed the right to vote from felons and engages in gerrymandering and disenchantment.
However other countries don't suffer the issue to quite the same degree, and the PRC is happy to restrict the right of some people to representation such as the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. You might say they don't deserve it, I say that's just a justification for disenfranchisement, and a bad one.
You also need to let citizens have the ability to converse and discuss and try to influence each other and who they vote for, and to learn facts about politicians outside of channels that are supportive of the politician. By that I of course mean that mostly free speech and free press are a requirement for a functional democracy, else you could call North Korea a democracy which is of course absurd.
The PRC may get many things right, and hell maybe we are entering The Chinese Century, but regardless it's not immune to criticism, and pretending otherwise just to oppose American hegemony simply hurts one's ability to do so as everyone will just accuse you of being a Little Pink.
Yes, democracy includes the right for the people to elect a convicted felon. We do not agree on a definition of the democracy. Your usage continues to undermine your original valid point.
These statements about numbers are meaningless to make the case that democracy exists in the PRC. There's 1 billion people there, comparison of vote counts to smaller countries doesn't make sense.
Party membership comes with 關係. It's not really about having the right to vote. Some people just join during school.
The PRC gets many things right but we should be honest about its flaws. The truth is the CPC, and especially now Xi (you HAVE seen the updated textbooks about father/brother xi, right?), are single points of failure and unchallengeable authority. What happened to the left communists in the PRC? What happened to the smaller unions that didn't toe the party line, and not in the direction of capitalism but deeper into leftism? Where are the Chinese anarchists? Hell, where are the Chinese communists?
The only path forward to a communist PRC is a split into province level states or better yet smaller entities. It's only a matter of time before Xi goes senile or has a big birthday he wants to celebrate by escalating imperialism into military intervention and tanks the entire PRC economy in doing so, or simply dies and kicks off a shitstorm power struggle that cripples the CPC and the country along with it.
Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.
But by what definition do you say that is bureaucratic and regulation heavy? It sounds like the opposite to me. The decision to build was made by a single authority and then executed. In the US there would have been at least 3 different levels of government involved, and possibly multiple agencies at each level. And then after they have made their decision, which would take years, they would be sued by many different private organizations that are against the project. All those lawsuits would have to be resolved before work could start, which would take even more years and require modifications to be made to the plan to appease these organizations. To me it sounds like your system is very light on bureaucracy and regulation compared to ours.
Unless, wait, is criticism of the CPC racist? Well, that would only be true if the PRC was an ethnostate, after all, that's what makes criticism of Israel anti-Semitic, right? So, is the PRC an ethnostate?
I hate the expiring photos/videos in message threads too. Overall the UX is clunky. I also use Wechat everyday, and even though their UX is also pretty clunky, it's still somehow efficient, and doesn't it bother me as much as having to use Line.
Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.
There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.