In China, we call "gig workers" "flexable workers" (灵活就业), which are very similar to the unemployed. The reason is that the low, zero, or even negative walfare imposed by the Chinese goverment on all tax payers makes neither of them a viable option for a living.
Want some evidence? "Marriage market" (婚恋市场) in China is a gruesme battlefield for at least 20 years. Chinese people can fake their political stance, financial stance, or even marriage status. However, when it comes to the standard of choosing partners for life, they cannot fake it because it means so much to them. Ask them what they think about both "gig workers" and "the umeployed", and try to find any difference, if any. The "chain of contempt" (歧视链) in the "Marriage market" is a relatively good measure of what people really think in China.
China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again.
I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc)
The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
That's not to say that data reported by other countries is completely accurate or free of political manipulation. But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.
> The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
This has not been really true for at least a decade.
Well they might attempt to play with statistics, there are definitely foreign investigative reports that are able to verify most numbers, especially when it comes to exports.
And most of those foreign numbers are very close to what China reports.
The Chinese government’s rising life expectancy story is corroborated by estimates by independent organizations such as the WHO: https://data.who.int/countries/156
> The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.
> But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.
"Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.
You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again.
"None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah".
I'm old enough to remember when supposedly Japan was going to overtake us. Their economy was growing rapidly under MITI control while ours was stagnating. At the peak in 1991 the nominal value of real estate in Japan was higher than all of North America.
Then the bubble popped in 1992 and Japan has been struggling ever since. The same thing will inevitably happen to China although it may take a while. Central planning is great at creating the illusion of growth but when you probe deeper you find the actual fair market value generated is much less.
Theres the little matter of the US imposed Plaza Accords that have been skipped in the timeline there , which are widely acknowledged to have precipitated Japan's lost decades.
> Theres the little matter of the US imposed Plaza Accords that have been skipped in the timeline there , which are widely acknowledged to have precipitated Japan's lost decades.
Actually, no. The CPC generally argues this is the case, but it is largely incorrect. Japan responded to the Plaza accords by attempting to massively increase stimulus and preserve the structure (significant industrial, limited service/consumption economy) they started.
In contrast, (West) Germany kept the stimulus relatively low and rotated into higher productivity enterprises and R&D and had a substantially lessened impact. See this (https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125961733.pdf)
The whole "US destroyed Japan with the Plaza accords" is basically CPC propaganda.
China will have its own issues, but I would guess they look more like the 1992 sterling crisis where China cannot hold its yuan peg as it continues to have trade expansion without corresponding foreign exchange growth.
China has collapsed multiple times: in 1967, 1960, 1937, 1916, 1856, and so on. Another collapse probably isn't imminent but based on historical patterns it's entirely possible in our lifetimes. There could be an external shock in terms of a severe disruption in food or energy imports, or an internal power struggle between CCP factions. And even if China doesn't exactly collapse, a slow stagnation like what happened to Japan after 1992 is quite possible.
The main difference I'd say with China is population. They have 5x the people of the US and that just gives them a massive advantage. They also have the authoritarian government that's able to have a consistent focus on a mercanalist vision. They also have a large enough domestic market to develop technology.
The US is in serious trouble. If you don't believe trump has already done irreversible damage, he will soon.
Yes it is. Unless you’re saying it’s not “old democratic” any more. Which is true since Mao Zedong Thought contains what he calls and enacted as “new democracy”.
I’d be curious what your definition of democracy is. Mine is the will of the people is happening and it’s systematic and institutional. That for example doesn’t happen in America and never has as evidenced by the constitution
Not hanging a portrait of an insane murderous tyrant in the middle of your capital city? Has there been any other person who was directly responsible for a higher number of deaths in China than him?
Mao Zedong was an idiot who badly damaged China. Democracy requires the freedom to create new political parties and for anyone to run in honest elections. The fact that the CCP is the only political party allowed in China proves it isn't democratic by definition.
The US is absolutely not the gold standard for democracy. In fact the GOP's goal seems to be to become a single party dictatorship much like the CCP is.
I don't think there are many democracies in the world. Republics are not démocraties as you elect a master instead of giving power to the people. Corruption sets in and rot everything in due time.
Democracy mean that all citizen inherently have equal legitimacy and capacity to exert political power.
For true démocraties you either need random choice of citizens who decide, or votes by all citizen.
We currently have a bunch of oligarchies around the world bending the laws in ridiculous manners to answer to those with power (currently mostly, but not necessarily, the very rich).
You only need to study the past of our "démocraties" when violent and deadly répression of popular upheaval to the benefit of industry barons was a regular thing.
Nowadays you get more of these things in slightly indirect ways, ergonomic social and cultural violence. Also, a brief mention of the Epstein files make it pretty obvious that the people's will does not really matter.
And do not think one second this is unique to America. A few years ago in France you had the Europe referendum, a rare moment of democracy, where the people voted "the wrong way" according to the néolibérals in power, and thus they proceeded to simply ignore said vote.
The founders of our various political systems made it pretty clear they despised democracy in the first place. The word became popular relatively recently...
Democracy is a radical idea. I don't even think many people in this forum actually want democracy. They will think plumbers, or nurses, of people of the "opposite party" are subhumans unfit to decide for the good of the people.
Standard communist playbook: as soon as something is embarrassing (like the youth unemployment rate in China), declare it a state secret. The fact that it's getting hard to find something they're not hiding is not a good sign.
The list of things they're hiding is getting pretty damn long: internal trade statistics, housing sales, population numbers (first in the "ghost cities", then border regions, now all of China), disease statistics (they suddenly classified COVID statistics, now everything), unemployment rate (started with unemployed miners, then youth, now everything), immigration/emigration policies, economic growth, how they're treating various ethnic groups (Nepalese, Uyghurs, ...)
A big question a lot of people are starting to ask: is the data the government itself is operating on still accurate? Because, of course, in Soviet Russia and other communist states it wasn't. Such states made very large, often disastrous, decisions based on fictitious data, so odds seem good the same is unfolding in China.
It’s clear you didn’t read your links because this one concludes with:
> "Scholars in China and at the UN have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has 'discovered' such a huge discrepancy." ... "China has had at least three censuses since the start of the millennium, and there has been no evidence that more than 100 million people are overreported in China," Wang said.
> If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.
not very tied, actually, precisely because of heavy government interventions
> "Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.
I think that we can agree that democratic countries are countries where there is a choice and you see changes of government caused by free elections. That's not the case for Russia or Venezuela but it is (still) the case for most of the Western world
> You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again.
> "None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah".
> Make up your mind.
There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
There's also a bizarre need to simultaneously downplay them and fear them in other Americans. If they're so weak, why the fear?
They have high speed rail connecting the whole country, and lots of other stuff which is real and not a number in a spreadsheet. They crashed their housing sector by building too much.
The very reason that China can bulldoze thousands of homes for a new highway or train, are the very things that would make an American scream “fascism” at an authoritarian government
> Moses's critics charge that he preferred automobiles over people. They point out that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City and destroyed traditional neighborhoods by building multiple expressways through them. The projects contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League Baseball teams to relocate to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively, and precipitated the decline of public transport from disinvestment and neglect.
There used to be an entire road and tenement houses in Seattle where I5 is now. They’ve also taken all or part of many properties abutting the new rail project.
For us Westerners our highway system was already pretty much complete by the 1980s so none of us actually remember how it went.
But when we see pictures in historybooks you will see sprawling construction sites with bulldozers...
There have been several posts on HN in my recollection about the building of highways in urban areas in the USA over the objections of local residents, it's just if they are poor or minorities they historically do not have the political power to stop these projects, and the private sector makes a bundle, which is the recipe for a lot of things that go wrong in the USA.
Exept that in reality the US bulldosed cities as agrssivly as China and still does many idiotic projects. The reason it doesnt happen as often today is that less is invest and the lesser amount that is invested doesnt go as far as it did before.
The differnece today in the US is not that they dont bulldoze its that before they bulldoze there is years of political battle.
I follow various groups around the US that try to fight highway expansions and the almost always lose in the end.
I don’t think I have any illusions. I’d never want to live under Chinese censorship, lack of civil rights, the weird errors caused by centralized economic control.
But I can also acknowledge some of the things they do well.
Having a nuanced view of a complex topic is probably essential for proper understanding.
Also, if many western countries don’t get their shit together, their lives will be greatly influenced by China at current trajectory. Which particularly involves the negatives. China's success should be motivation to many western ex-empires, excellence nostalgia hubs and industrial graveyards.
And yeah, credit where credit is due, I think no observer seriously doubts the great feat China pulled off in such a short period of time, even if the stats are not reliable. People travel there, Jobs warned about this years ago.
And between US, Russia and Israel, China is the least obnoxious villain in my news feed. They somehow conquer the world without cringe overdrive and the undignified post-pretending social media executive memefare. China does not make me wanna drive a dining fork into my frontal lobe, it’s more like the cough that doesn’t go away.
I've been talking so much shit on China over the years I decided I'd come over when the opportunity presented itself to visit. I'm in Shanghai and mostly it feels the same as any capitalist city except it's super clean. Everyone is shopping, living their lives. All of the Chinese I've interacted with are super pleasant. What really struck me was the decency and patience of the border control and security control folks coming over. In western countries I'd typically get exasperated annoyed calls to do this or that.
Anyway, it got me thinking that mostly the freedoms we are afforded, which are very precious to me, seem to come at great cost. A cost people under countries like China would rather bear when the affordances are clean streets, no or little homelessness and the freedom to consume luxury assets.
Every time I visit the US (frequently) I'm just assaulted by its continual, very visible rot. Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles are just fundamentally unsafe places to walk around in. The huge climb of school shootings over the last decade should have everyone alarmed. Americans appear to be stuck in the race to the bottom of who can be the greatest victim and the truly extreme painting of the Left or Right depending on which side you're on because people would rather obsess and come into conflict over what gender they can identify as or race guilt (or its opposite if you're a minority) rather than unite over common class struggles that are eating the country alive.
I think most people would rather pick comfort and safety over the freedom to say what you want and a right to privacy. I'm not sure I blame them when the alternative is getting sexually assaulted trying to walk to your car in LA (speaking from many many second-hand stories of American friends) or having your kid shot and killed in school.
It's a lot easier for China to limit the homeless problem in Shanghai when they have the hukou system to keep them out. But it is a shame that we have allowed failed progressive policies to wreck some of our cities.
There is much to love about authoritarian states. Clean, safe cities, and a suppression of news and other information to keep (naive) people comfortable. Draconian law and migration enforcement (eg, the hukou and propiska systems, and external borders) have their advantages, and looking at Singapore and Japan you don't necessarily need the rest.
I’ve lived in the USA, China (Beijing), a Switzerland (Lausanne), and I’m not sure what your point is. Guess the only place where riot police stormed my apartment because I wasn’t registered correctly?
Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
I have a feeling however, that since the leftist priorities these days are so ridiculous to the regular voter that you'll just get another republican president
> Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
You are weirdly naive about thinking Trump has any respect for democracy and that his camp isn't going to do everything possible to maintain power at all cost.
American relationship to China is frankly weird on every sides.
Between the ones who apparently can’t fathom a world where other countries are as economically successful as the USA and see it as a threat and the ones who are fascinated by its authoritarian policies, it’s really hard to have a dispassionate conversation involving China.
90% of Chinese own their own properties vs 65% of Americans, so there's that. Regarding property rights, I'm not sure how it works there but we've all seen the malls and highways that diverted around homes where owners were unwilling to sell out. Also, they actually have functional public infrastructure and have brought something like 800 million out of abject poverty. Are ahead of us in several spaces and about to pass us or at least equal us in others. Obviously I'm not arguing for that type of top down authoritarian system, but this is the objective reality. What's bizarre actually is all the denialism and copium over China - should we not be glad that they are doing better than they were 30 years ago and much more liberal than before?
By "own" you mean 70 year leases with ??? renewal conditions?
> Urban land use rights in Mainland China were typically granted for fixed terms: 70 years for residential, 50 years for office or industrial, and 40 years for commercial purposes. As these terms approach expiration, the question of renewal becomes paramount. The legal framework, primarily the Property Law and the Urban Real Estate Administration Law, provides a general outline but leaves specific implementation to local governments.
> Mainland China’s Property Law (Article 149) and The Civil Code of Mainland China (Article 359) guarantee automatic residential land use right renewals but provides no specific arrangement in respect of non-residential terms. Currently, without detailed implementation guidelines, local governments devise varied approaches, skewing valuations and unsettling investors. This uncertainty hinders market efficiency.
If you follow the public policy discussions in China, you’ll likely notice more complication surrounding the 70-year leases. Basically everyone already feel they own the property, the government’s forceful attempt to reclaim property would be counterproductive and unlikely to succeed. Additionally, many government officials are not particularly fond of this policy. They prefer property tax like US. Individuals currently do not pay property tax in China, they are reluctant to pay property tax and argue that they have indirectly paid them when purchasing property. Consequently, the property tax and ownership restructuring are essentially stuck in a stalemate.
I agree that that is a meaningful difference, but since I expect to be be on my last legs at best 70 years from now, it really doesn't make much of a difference to me, especially when contrasted to here where my home owning plans amount to little more than "hopefully the housing market will collapse"
Give the average person in china the opportunity to move to America, and vice versa, there is no comparison. China has done some things right but to pretend it is some model for America is absurd
I would absolutely take a chance to live in China, but I wouldn’t expect to be welcomed there. Their tech, disposable income, food costs, etc are so superior to what we have today in US.
The average person in America is living paycheck to paycheck and has negative equity.
20 years ago you couldn’t see in Shanghai. Trump pulled back the clean air act, it’s not hard to see a trend. It’s also not hard to buy a ticket and see it yourself.
Great point, I almost wrote that they’ve cleaned up pollution (of all types) by a lot and also are accomplish some impressive feats by regreening and pushing back desertification. Amazing things can happen when you get your peoples basic needs met (ie, they can focus on higher level stuff).
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It depends on which Americans you are looking at if you want to understand who capitalist ownership is benefiting.
> There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans.
No. There isn't. It's just that we've gotten sick of the bullshit and lies from the anti-china propagandists like you.
> Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics? If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
When you and your kind spout such nonsense over and over again, people tend to get sick of it.
> If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics?
A lot to unpack here. You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village, no eminent domain payments necessary.
> If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
My great-grandmother’s home, those of her neighbors, and their church was bulldozed for the US75/I45 rebuild/connection in Dallas in the 1950s. They were given the choice of new public housing built nearby in an industrial area (around Fair Park where State Fair of Texas is held) or figuring it out on their own. Being Black and low-income meant whatever rights they “had” were hard to come by.
I guess my point is rights and freedoms are unequally held, regardless of a nation’s stated values and laws. What makes/made the US great is not that things happening in China couldn’t happen here. It’s that we (used to?) aspire to greater ideals about individual freedom even if it isn’t present for all. CCP and I think Chinese citizens are under no such illusion, and in some cases reject the individual for the collective. (I’m hedging a bit since my understanding is limited second-hand anecdotes from Chinese American friends).
> You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village
Better than exterminating the natives to build railroads? Using your logic we don't have property rights in the US either.
> If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
Yes. 1.4 billion people live in half-finished concrete shells.
Come up with something better. You guys are getting boring repeating the same nonsense over and over again.
Yes owning appartments is propery. I know that people in the US have an absurd glorification of the single family home but things other the single family homes are a thing in most of the world.
LoL what the actual fuck are you going on about? China is extremely particular about market rate eminent domain payments. The only difference being it's often a take it or leave it offer, but they make prompt payments nonetheless.
"China" isn't "China". Like everywhere else, there's a maze of conflictiong incentives. The CCP measures regional governments on their stats. Gaming there. Regional governments measure administrative areas, ditto. More gaming. No stats can be trusted in a society that does not prize allegiance to the truth above all else.
Let’s say it how it is, this is the cost of freedom. Yes, China can build more quickly and has advanced more technologically, but it came at the cost of freedom. The degree of freedom is not something I’m fit to argue.
Now, there are those they believe the difference in freedom is worth that technological advancement. I’m not so sure.
COVID was a great example of this. China was able to slow the virus spreading faster than the US since they were literally locking people into their homes. In the US, this didn’t happen because of the rights we have.
Strange to me that the US has fallen behind is supposedly due to its commitment to freedom. The ownership class sold out the industrial base for profit, beginning with Reagan. They’re the ones who have driven policy - and continue to do so in the current turn to naked authoritarianism. The freedom the US supposedly stands for is the freedom of the capitalist class. Is it any wonder we haven’t seen investment in public infrastructure that prioritizes public good over private profits? That would have be financed by taxing the private interests that determine our policies. Instead we finance wars and a police state.
The problem is that people use all kinds of alternative methods to measure GDP. Stuff like light emissions. Import and export volumes and so on. And broadly speaking those are not that different from the offical stats. So just claiming its all lies doesnt really work.
How is that relevant to the accuracy of their economic data?
Finalnd's long border with Russian and recent joining into NATO means they are actually relatively geopolitically important.
It’s easier for small countries to do certain things that’s much more difficult for large countries to do. And by your logic, North Korea is relevant too, and it is and Finland is too, but in very narrow areas; and not really relevant when talking about economics of big countries.
Okay…but I’m not going to say North Korea’s economic data is fraudulent, therefore implications for the economic data for large countries. Also, read the thread before replying to random phrases you see.
China doesn't report false numbers the way some democracies like India and the US are trying to do (upheaving the statistical agencies), or most autocracies do (outright fraud about the numbers). What they do is a different kind of reporting that I've seen typical for similar countries. Language twisting, different interpretation, different naming even. Slowing GDP growth? They'll take the GDP PPP and use that for news bites. Construction bust and crash? Nah, splendid increase in affordable housing supply. Korean War? LoL no, War of American Aggression in the Korean Peninsula.
I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved.
(I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
The history of China going back millennia is chock full of violent revolutions and civil wars. They don't seem to learn anything from mistakes. I fully expect another one in our lifetimes.
Civilization has been maintained in other places such as Egypt for just as long. You can argue about the degree of continuity but the modern nation state of China bears almost no resemblance to what existed on the same territory 5K years ago. So I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
"Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?"
Surely, but how much? 1 per cent or 40 per cent? We don't know. As you say, nothing is a closed system.
For example, by 1949, China imported Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist school of thought, a totally culturally alien system constructed by (mostly long dead) Europeans, which was the root cause of the horrors of the Maoist era - none of which were imposed by external empires by force. For all its faults, the US never forced the Chinese to exterminate the sparrows or attempt to build a steel mill in every village, resulting in a massive economic collapse and death toll.
China had many famines before that during the century of humiliation. Maoism was itself a reaction to the dire social conditions of the time.
This doesn’t absolve Maoism of its policies which led to millions dying. (And yet we shouldn’t absolve the global capitalist system either which leads to millions of preventable deaths each year.)
Colonialist exploitation has been major historic driver over this timeframe (shifting to neo-colonialism in the world system post WW2). Admittedly it hasn’t been the only one. But our understanding of world history loses nuance if we gloss over colonialism and neo-colonialism over this period and treat historic events as due to the supposedly essential traits of this or that nation.
Political system may be one of the reasons (feudalism doesn't have a great record in preventing famines either), but the most salient explanation might be that a pre-modern economy with high density of population is inherently prone to famines - a bad drought will easily topple the precarious balance between demand and supply towards lack of food, and without a railway network it is nearly impossible to move food easily among places that don't have good ports.
I thought we were talking about the role of colonization in violence in China over the past 250 years. Most events you listed (Taiping rebellion, Boxer rebellion, CCP-KMT civil war) were the result of weakening of the Qing dynasty by foreign powers, its downfall, the chaos this produced during the Warlord era. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (again I’m not exonerating them) were themselves in large part reactions to the legacy of imperialism on China.
Generally under colonialism, the colonial power actively prevented any development of native capitalism in the colonies, even if the colonial power was capitalist in their home country. The goal was to prevent the colony from developing its own economy and rather to have the colony supply basic resources (food, minerals, oil, etc.) to the colonizer and force the colony to rely on goods from the colonizer.
It’s worth considering the famine in India at the end of the 19th century. The British integrated India into the world capitalist system in a way that directly led to famine: promotion of cash crops which led to vulnerability when drought struck; speculators hoarding food during famine (some stores of food even rotting while people starved); building of railways and ports (which were used to export food out of famine stricken areas for profit); and laissez faire relief policies. The death toll was in the millions. I found Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts to be a good resource on this subject.
While the famines were real, and a result of British rule, that wasn't because India was part of a "world capitalist system". Capitalism doesn't just mean "people doing things for profit" but rather the use of capital to build up industry, which Britain had no intention of doing in India.
Capitalism is a system where one class of people (workers) sell their labor for the profit of another class (owners/capitalists). So feudalism was neither capitalist nor industrialist. Colonial capitalism - not typically industrial but still capitalist. Industrial capitalism - both industrialist and capitalist. The modern American economy - service based not industry based - but still capitalist.
Compared to Europe the US has turbo speed of self-correction. EU is not doing well and it will do worse over the next decade and there seems to be no political will to put the economy back on course. Just add more regulations, costs and spending and hope for the best seems the current mantra.
Right now corporate bonds are sold at lower rates and have better credit than the public bonds for a country like France. Combination of no faith in political stability and no faith in the ability to get spending under control.
I think a lot of EU countries are going to just keep stumbling into a financial crisis that will force cuts in pensions and wealth-fare at a scale not seen post ww2. The pyramid scheme is coming due.
Unclear why Europe's capabilities are a relevant come-back to a comparison between the US and China.
May be correct, the EU as an organisation isn't very powerful compared to member states, may be false, EU member states are much more diverse than American states.
The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981).
The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate.
The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.
You are to captured by your ideology. It does not really matter what you personally think about. The thing is that the EU has completely failed as a union to provide the economic growth we need and has no plan on how to address this. We are completely export dependent (about 50% of GDP, meaning any world economic crisis will cause massive unemployment and fiscal crisis) and our internal market has withered and the purchasing power is plummeting.
China is going to do what China does but it's economy is in tatters something you would probably know if you actually looked at what is happening with their economy. Combine that with the same demographic crisis as EU and you have another country that might have already hit it's economical peak. The leadership is showing no ability to create an internal market and is busy stomping out any dissent internally as economical reality sets in and people loose jobs and their future. Unless their turn their economy around creating an internal market any international economic crisis will collapse their export oriented economy.
I don't know why you think everything is so bleak. Yes, Europe is inter-connected to the world. We export a lot and we import a lot. Unemployment in Europe has been not been terrible for a long time.
Of course there is room for improvement and there are political challenges, for instance to enact the pension reforms needed for the demographic changes but Europe has achieved also a lot we can be proud of. Without Europe and without the single market, we would be facing the same issues Britain is facing: Being too small, unable to regulate anything on their own, dependent on foreign trade partners, etc.
Perception is what creates value. Nothing is unconnected. When perception is about resonance and interdependence as it is in the East, the economy functions as an arm of the state. The state is all that counts, which is how in China, the idea of ownership bows to the state. The West driven by individualism has an altogether different idea of what ownership is.
That's just meaningless word salad. If I have a bushel of wheat that's actual value, not "perception". On average over the long term, individualism has always created more value than collectivism.
By 2023, most private social credit initiatives had been shut down by the People's Bank of China, and regulations had cracked down on most local scoring pilot programs.[16]: 12
Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).
Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.
They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process.
If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.
Not to detract from the fact that China did indeed do a lot of things right, but I wonder how much of this was not going to happen anyway since the country was the most populated in the world and had low wages compared to the west.
The US, for the record, also steered it's economy well enough during Covid. But that was a 2016 Trump administration, which still had adults in the room, and a 2020 Biden one.
The value of free speech, democracy, capitalism, *is* making pivoting faster.
The first world didn't win the cold war despite doing these things, but because those things actually helped us (all of us, not just the US) course-correct in ways the USSR didn't.
If China has a different way to be flexible, or if the USA looses its flexibility, the USA will fail to keep up with China in the same way and for the same reason the USSR couldn't keep up with the USA.
The US problem is they are going from a global brutal empire to a shrinking empire. But the debt and lifestyle of the US is still that of a global empire. That is what has broken many past empires and will break the US empire.
Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you many times not to.
I’m no fan of the CCP, but watching what’s going on over there vs. what’s going on over here (the US, but also Europe, and to some lesser degree, even other Western aligned Asian countries), I can’t help China is doing more things right than us in the goal of raw progress. Or at least, less things wrong.
Now, you can argue whether sacrificing various things for the sake of raw progress is worth it. But what if that question becomes no longer askable in the future in a planet dominated by China and the CCP system?
That day might come sooner for some of China’s neighbors. It may come later, or even not at all, for the US or Europe. But the age where the West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model, and by extension, arguably the general direction of the human race, may no longer be taken for granted.
What happens then to some of your precious “freedoms”?
> West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model
This model only ever applied to Europe. Fruit companies and oil companies were more important than democracy elsewhere. South Korea and Taiwan were both autocracies for decades while we sponsored them in the name of freedom.
What we did have was a foreign policy that mostly encouraged peace and prosperity via trade, which was nice while it lasted.
If by progress do you mean rental housing, roads/bridges, computers, food, and gig work? Do we have a shortage of them? I keep hearing about everyday life we've had for generations like it's an earnings report.
I personally understand people wish they were better off, and I do understand the sentiment myself as a middle class, tax paying citizen with a family but in my opinion, people were just told America is bad and horrible and needs fixing, I don't think America is a bad place at all. Those who wanted to get elected just told a lot of people it was horrible and a lot of people bought it.
Whatever issues existed economically, I think the "rip the country apart and tear down the government" approach was the most stupid path we could've taken,,,and here we are.
The USA and other western countries have their issues, but to pretend like western countries are bad places to live... IDK anymore.
“I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy … What I’m afraid of is, with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don’t share the hope of my liberal friends – give them ten years [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration – no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.”
1. Mass employment via light and low skilled manufacturing will not help provide mass prosperity in 2025. Automation is the name of the game (can confirm in Vietnamese and Indian high value manufacturing as well as Chinese)
2. Work to build a social safety net that complements gig work. An export driven economy is increasingly tenuous in the current climate. Expanding a domestic consumer market by ensuring prosperity reaches the bottom half is what will allow you to build a resilient economy.
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I've ranted about this for over a decade now. Concentrating only on export and industry development while ignoring the need to expand a domestic consumer market either by leveraging higher incomes (highly unlikely) OR a stronger social safety net is the solution to over-production in most cases.
It's an increasingly mainstream view in Chinese economic academia as well, but the Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism" ("福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱"*) [0].
Li Keqiang was a major proponent of expanding the social safety net due to his early experiences in childhood, but he sadly passed away.
Countries like Vietnam are following a similar approach, and it is not going to end well.
* - "In a welfare state, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarized, society is torn apart, and populism is clamoring. This is a warning to avoid falling into the trap of "welfarism" that breeds laziness."
As Germany and Japan can attest, export-led growth works great until it doesn't, because you are stuck to suppress wages across the economy to maintain your export edge. You need to also build the internal market and carefully manage the housing market as the central instrument for wealth accumulation of your citizens.
I think the US is unique to realize that they can achieve more by being a consumer spending economy and using run-away housing prices to inflate their citizens wealth (using immigration to increase demand).
The US can do this because the dollar's global reserve currency status. This works on a longer cycle but will be far more painful and difficult to address when it reaches a tipping point.
I can see the point re internal market vs export orientation. But why make the housing market the focal point of wealth creation? Wouldn't the stock market be a much more overall beneficial place to let your population accumulate wealth (which the US also does quite successfully, through 401k, cheap and trustworthy financial products like ETFs, a strong SEC,...)?
Pushing house prices ever higher comes with so many societal problems, and also with serious financial risks. The start of Japan's lost decades, which you mentioned, wasn't weak domestic demand. It was a housing price bubble so extreme that small areas of central Tokio were worth more than all of California. Domestic demand was actually very strong in Japan up until that bubble burst. The biggest financial crisis in the US in recent memory (2008) was also due to the housing market, its consequences eclipsing that of the dotcom bubble or the 1987 crash. That being said, stock market bubbles are no fun either - the Great Depression of the 1930's was caused by a stock market crash. But at least stocks don't tend to push people into homelessness already while they're booming.
>Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism"
The joke I heard that Xi welfare mindset is much closer to Reagan than other welfare states. However I say it's not entirely wrong. Freebies and welfare including very generous pension is really addictive policy and no electorates would be willing to sap them out much less going cold turkey.
The chicken will come home to roost when it's time to upgrade your tech, industry or infrastructure but you don't have adequate capital to do that.
While there are issues with populism induced freebies, China's social welfare spent is anemic for the size of economy it is.
Almost all social welfare has been devolved to the state level, but state level spend and incentives are overwhelmingly spent on large capex projects that align with larger initiatives (eg. the EV price wars with dozens of SoEs jumping into the fray despite the overwhelming majority of the Chinese EV industry being won over by private sector BYD).
That's tens of billions of dollars of capex per province just on one initiative that has turned into a price war that is forcing central level intervention. It's the same misaligned incentive structures that lead to the construction boom and bust in during the 2015-20 period, the overzealous Zero COVID enforcement, and the subsequently haphazard end to Zero COVID.
Most provinces are heavily indebted and lack a robust enough capital market to raise from in the way you can get local and state bonds in the US, or municipal bonds in much of the EU.
The Xi admin's policies is the equivalent of America having Reaganism during the 1950s-80s. Reaganism was bad for the US, but at least the US had a higher human capital by the 1980s thanks to New Deal (1930s-1950s) and Great Deal (1960s-70s) policies for a generation.
The kinds of people who had sympathy for solving spatial inequality in China are no longer represented after Li's passing, and this kind of petulant opposition to welfare expansion with no data to show otherwise is what will trip up China longterm if something does not change in the next 3-5 years.
The kinds of policies being pushed by the Xi admin currently are similar to those from a decade ago, yet China is a much older society than it was 10 years ago, and as I pointed out elsewhere, a society where the median household is much poorer than it's peers at GDP per capita (and even significantly below in the case of Thailand).
This is the same point the Economist article is getting at - a country where 10-20 million people are earning European and American level salaries but with almost half a billion people with Indian or Vietnamese levels of household incomes is an underperforming society if spending cannot be unlocked because the bottom half of society is saving heavily for a rainy day due to a limited to nonexistent social safety net.
And now that most of China is at Thailand level ages, there just isn't much room for convergent development using an export model.
If a social safety net expansion comparable to the Great Deal isn't initiated by 2029-30, I truly cannot see how a 4-5% GDP growth rate can be sustained over a long enough time period to converge with a Japan, Korea, or Western Europe, let alone the US.
They do provide a safety net but you have to move into the cities. They can't afford to build a comparable one for the rural areas too as rural productivity is too low and they can't realistically induce skilled people to move into impoverished rural areas.
Even the urban safety net is gated behind getting an urban hukou which has income requirements and stable residency requirements - both of which are difficult for the bottom half of society becuase of the chicken-and-egg situation. But the added issue is migrants on a rural hukou do not want to give up their rural hukou because oftentimes this means losing the right to any rural landholdings they may have - which for someone earning Yuan 2,000 to 4,000 a month doing gig work on Meituan is basically their only appreciating asset if the local prefecture decides to say expand a road or create an LGFV and thus entitling them to some (relatively) decent compensation.
This is the crux of the issue. There are very table stakes reforms that the central and provincial can conduct to help alleviate inequality, yet the bulk of spending is essentially expended on capex investments or subsidizes, which while great for building high value industries aren't generating a significant number of jobs because those industries require a college education.
No provincial government will work on expanding a social safety net without it becoming a priority at the Central level because everyone wants to climb the ladder, and there just isn't much fiscal leeway to expand that without central intervention.
> They can't afford to build a comparable one for the rural areas too as rural productivity is too low
That didn't stop Thailand or Malaysia. They might not have the same GDP per capita as China, but the median household disposable income of both is significantly higher (1.5x in the case of Thailand and 2.5x in the case of Malaysia).
Unlike both Thailand and Malaysia, the central government in China has much more leeway to expand the welfare net if it was a priority.
Trans. by Firefox (w/ a little bit of G. Translate edits): "Which is more important: dividing the cake or making the cake? On the surface, the cake is directly related to fairness, but fundamentally speaking, the cake and making the cake are not one of the two, making the cake is the premise, the fair distribution of the cake is the result, the development is the premise and the key, any distribution system must first be based on the big cake, the cake can be divided." ... "On the other hand, dividing the cake well and carrying out distribution system reform is to promote economic and social development, not just to complete consumption."
It works, and its a reasonable comparison, it's also just amusing to read some some Chinese position paper and then he starts wandering into cake discussions after a bunch of very formal propaganda stuff "superiority of socialism is ultimately to be reflected in its development of productive forces", ect...
Honestly, it's sad and frustrating. It's literally a "let them eat cake" kind of statement.
China is at the point where a social safety net is needed to ensure long term prosperity, and concentrating on an export first model isn't going to cut it long term, because high value industries are heavily automated and skilled, and simply don't demand or need that many employees.
China has reached a point where the mean years of education amongst working age people (~8 years) has caught up with countries that used to be much richer than China 15 years ago like Brazil, Thailand, Turkiye, and Malaysia and it's mean life expectancy has outpaced all those countries except Turkiye and Thailand, which it is for all intents and purposes tied [0]. This is a MASSIVE win for global poverty eradication.
Yet the median age is significantly higher than all of them except Thailand [1], and median disposable household income remains around $400/mo [2] - lower than Thailand [3], Malaysia [4], or Türkiye's [5] despite having a GDP per capita (~13.3k in 2024) that is comparable to the latter 2 and above Thailand's.
Now is the time for China to expand its welfare system in order to make that leap into being a truly developed country, just like South Korea did in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Expanding the welfare state would help hundreds of millions of Chinese gain the ability to purchase higher value goods thus reducing the specter of "overproduction" leading to the current global trade war, while truly ensuring common prosperity.
Otherwise, it will flounder like Malaysia and Thailand did, both of which used to be South Korea's peer until the Asian Financial Crisis, or Turkiye after it's peak in 2014.
People mention "course correction" but what course correction can you do when disdain for a welfare system is so engrained in the upper echelons of leadership.
This is not a statement on the "collapse of China" (that's dumb), but if this problem around domestic consumption and a lack of a safety net is not nipped in the bud in the next 3-5 years, it will be much harder for China to take full advantage of the capabilities it has and ensure common prosperity.
Thanks for all the work finding the local national reporting on those statistics.
Turkey's numbers look crazy though. Almost doubling every year? Is that just the exchange ratio's runaway hyperinflation? https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/currency Almost linearly upward for the last half decade.
2021 2022 2023
98,416 181,200 374,899 household available income
48,642 90,116 187,728 household available individual income
> Is that just the exchange ratio's runaway hyperinflation
Yep. Turkiye is in a weird position where there is hyperinflation but also economic expansion. It's the hallmarks of an overheating economy.
A lot of this was due to the run-up Russia-Ukraine War, which saw significant capital outflow from Russia to all over the CEE, Balkans, and Turkiye (as is reflected in their GDPs per capita), along with Turkiye's then abnormally low interest rates in order to subsidize the construction industry, because Turkiye had it's own Evergrande 10-15 years ago.
Turkiye - just like leadership in China who were in their 20s to early 30s in the 1980s - was influenced by the development of Malaysia and Singapore. Mahatir Mohammad was the original Erdogan (infrastructure driven growth mixed with a large welfare state mixed with a heavy dose of Pan-Islamism), and both he and LKY used the same economic model and had a love-hate relationship with each other as they were in the same circles in their early career, but it's easier to develop a 4 million person city state like Singapore instead of a 15-20 million country like Malaysia under Mahatir.
Additionally, much of the Chinese economy in the 1990s and 2000s was developed thanks to the Chinese Malaysian diaspora heavily investing in China. The ethnolinguistic group (Hokkien) in the province Xi spent most of his career in (Fujian) itself represents the majority of the Malaysian Chinese business class, and they heavily invested in Fujian (along with Guangdong) during Xi's time there, and were a major reason why China's economy opened up in the 1980s-2000s.
Consumption habit is much more dependent on personal experience and has little to do with the safety net. Older retired people with state pensions still have little desire to spend or don't even know how to spend in the new online economy, while young people who never experienced hardship are happy to spend every penny. If you want to increase spending you need to steer income to young people (child credit e.g.). Healthcare is mostly accessed by old folks. Generous pension and healthcare benefits are not going to lift spending.
Personal view on the healthcare side, at least in America, while the old spend 36% compared to 10-15% in every other age category, 10-15% spend is still relatively significant. [1]
In America, the average age of medical bankruptcy is 45 years old, that's not really that old. [2] 17% had to declare bankruptcy or lose their home and 45% of Americans worry a major health event will bankrupt them.
I might personally spend more money if I had a difficult health condition and reasonable healthcare, vs being uninsured and crippled by financial costs. If I live every day in fear of bankruptcy, I'm not very willing to spend money on much of anything I don't "really" need.
Having worked in the government, the pension thing is difficult. They exhibit a J-shaped accrual pattern, where young workers don't get much, and long term workers are difficult to pay for. So the motivation is to burn people out and then get rid of them before the pension costs get to be too much.
They're "supposed" to be funded to an adequate amount to pay for the benefits, yet political pressures and less rigorous accounting standards result in excessive commitments to employees and retirees, but inadequate contributions. In the American gov that has resulted in a lot of attempts at buy-outs, early retirement schemes, and almost anything to get people off the pension payrolls.
Personally, an acceptable result was the employee matched retirement contribution. That worked acceptably from my own experience in the government. Generous ceiling on how much we'll match, and employees who actually use the program are effectively getting a 3-5% pay raise because of contributing. IE: "I put in 5%, and my employer matches my contribution with 5%"
> Consumption habit is much more dependent on personal experience and has little to do with the safety net
The per capita (not median, so skewed upward) yearly expenditure of a Chinese household in 2024 was Yuan 28,227 [0]. The per capita urban household in China had around Yuan 34,000 a year in expenditures in 2024, and the per capita rural household in China had around Yuan 20,000 a year in expenditures in 2024.
61% of a per capita Chinese household's expenditures are just on food, residence, and healthcare. And that becomes 75% when factoring transit and telephone/internet bills.
Only 11% of a per capita household spend was on recreation, 5% on clothing, and around 3% on miscellaneous services.
This means the mean household in China only had aroud Yuan 7,000/$1,000 in all of 2024 on anything that is a non-essential or discretionary purchase. This is abnormally low for a country with China's GDP per capita and highlights a very real problem for the bottom half of Chinese households.
Heck, in Thailand in 2022, the median household only spends 1.4% of their income on medical care [1] and with a significantly higher household disposable income ($600/mo) and significantly better health indicators.
Literally reducing the per capita Chinese household's healthcare spend to the same ratio as Thailand's would unlock an additional Yuan 2,200 a year that can be used on discretionary spend. That itself could unlock (back of napkin math) almost $161 billion in potential discretionary spending or an additional 0.7%-0.8% of GDP growth, thus allowing China to hit the 5% GDP growth target while also reducing overproduction and increasing health standards.
And that's just healthcare.
This is why China needs a LBJ and FDR style Great Deal and New Deal reform. China is growing much slower than it should be because of pigheadedness at the upper echelons of leadership preventing this kind of development.
China's median age is now 40. 20 years ago the college enrollment and urbanization rates were much lower. That's why the numbers alone don't tell the whole story for a fast changing economy like China's. You need to look at disaggregated numbers if you want to make predictions.
Also the number you quoted lumped housing together with other costs.
China has very high home ownership and home prices are very elevated. Much public services and transport infrastructure builds are funded through government land sales and therefore through home sales. That could also skew the data.
Another problem with the national median data is the great variations in development levels and therefore cost of livings across geographic regions.
It's not easy to change the spending habits of the older adults. Consumption is also work. It's about increasing utility, not just spending. Consider the time after the Fukushima when misinformed consumers hoarded salt. It would be hard to argue that consumption increased utility. You want consumers to be informed, you want spending to discriminate against incompetent manufacturers and bad services. If older adults get more utility from watching their bank accounts grow than doing the work to consume without regrets, just shoveling more money indiscriminately isn't going to stimulate consumption much.
Not a single thing you have said justifies not expanding the social safety net in China. I have literally provided data from 国家统计局, and all you have provided are anecdotes about why expanding the social safety net will not have an impact.
Show me the data that justifies not expanding the social safety net in China. I have provided a moral, economic, and developmental reason all showing the net benefit for China to expand the social safety net - and this is a fairly common view in Chinese academia as well.
To continue using my healthcare example, only the top 20% of households in China even have a disposable household income (Yuan 95,000 [0]) comparable to China.
In fact, the bottom 60% of Chinese households have a lower disposable household income than that in Thailand. For these households, an additional Yuan 2000 a year would be have a significant positive impact.
If you think trickle down economics work and expanding the social safety net is unnecessary, just come out and say it - just like the Xi administration did.
But you cannot deny the wealth gap that China has - and it is a severe one compared to it's peers at it's GDP per capita. The only other country amongst China's developmental peers with a similar disparity is Brazil.
If this disparity is not resolved, then best case a plateau similar to Malaysia's occurs.
Your arguments are not supported by what is actually happening. They just rolled out child payments and I support that. Pensions grew very fast for 体制内 people and there is scant evidence that stimulates spending other than burdening local finances. 大病保险 reimbursement rate is also up a lot while office visit costs are kept very low and while I think that is good there's little evidence that it stimulates consumption.
Your attack on my analysis as annecdotes is ridiculous. For one to induce change one needs differential data to get the derivatives on proposed changes and your citation of national bulk statistics at a point does nothing of that sort. Secondly on the ground experience can provide directions that inform experimentations. Government finance is tight. You don't want to get another 100% GDP in debt with little to show (as in Japan). Thirdly this is not an academic forum and I am not an expert. If you feel like you are one you can write papers on your ideas. Attacking me isn't going to achieve anything.
> They just rolled out child payments and I support that
Absolutely, and it's a good start, but more can be done. This is literally the bare minimum.
> Pensions grew very fast for 体制内 people and there is scant evidence that stimulates spending other than burdening local finances. 大病保险 reimbursement rate is also up a lot while office visit costs are kept very low and while I think that is good there's little evidence that it stimulates consumption
体制内 only represent around 4% of Chinese according to the 2018 census [0], but I would be shocked if the number in 2025 has broken 5%. Most Chinese are not 体制内, and any impact of 体制内 social spending expansion has no bearing on China as a whole.
> Pensions grew very fast for 体制内 people and there is scant evidence that stimulates spending other than burdening local finances
Most Chinese - and especially elderly Chinese - are not 体制内. The majority of social safety spend it basically gated for 体制内.
> 大病保险 reimbursement rate is also up a lot
Show me the data and show the the trendline. What is the rate of change. Is it statistically significant?
While the rate of catastrophic health emergencies (ie. those health emergencies that can bankrupt a household) has reduced from ~16% in the early 2010s to ~13.8% in 2022 [1], this is still an elevated rate.
In both studies, severe spatial inequality was found. An acquaintance who was an alum of the same research group as mine who returned to China to work in healthcare investment banking and then a C9 research and lecturer position worked on a similar study, and they had to return to the US because their grant was pulled because it ruffled some feathers at their department.
> Your attack on my analysis as annecdotes (sic) is ridiculous
Anecdotal evidence is evidence that is unsourced. As I mentioned before, show me the data if you are giving assertions.
> You don't want to get another 100% GDP in debt with little to show (as in Japan).
Absolutely, and this is what makes me annoyed. Industrial policy is good, but the manner in which it was approached from 2017 onwards was reckless. Look at EVs as an example.
Billions of dollars were burnt by provincial owned SOEs to build EV brands yet none of them aside from SAIC has even come close to competing with private sector BYD (which had a comparative advantage of being a leader in battery chemistry for decades that pivoted into automotive around 2008-09). Nor did EV manufacturing provide a significant amount of jobs for a large number of provinces.
The comparative advantage that Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and arguably Anhui had in automotive manufacturing should have meant the rest of the provinces in China and some of the central SOEs should have have even touched EV production, and could have reallocated capital to either building industries that these provinces had a comparative advantage in or spend on social welfare. Yet mid-level functionaries incentivized this kind of spending to climb up the ladder as well as induce demand on LGFVs during the real estate crisis.
And that's just EVs. This is a common problem across Chinese industry, and it is discussed at C9s and amongst diaspora academics as well, but the upper echelons of leadership response very very slowly. Heck, I was warning on HN that there was going to be central intervention into the EV price war years before the recent actions by the central government.
> this is not an academic forum
It is commonly accepted on HN to give sources to assertions, as a large subset of us were ex-academics.
> If you feel like you are one you can write papers on your ideas
Been there, done that. The research group I was affiliated with back when US-China relations were more optimistic advised on what became 精准扶贫 because of 李克强's backing.
> Attacking me isn't going to achieve anything
Asking for sources to assertions is not an attack. Asking for basic data analysis (which is a table stakes skill in the tech industry in 2025) is not an attack.
It is a society where power is strictly organized into a clear pyramid. This model predates capitalism by a lot. If anything, true capitalism is more chaotic and probably churns the layers of the society more. This is more akin to a feudalism with capitalist characteristics, with the Party instead of the bluebloods.
Actually the idea is to assimilate as many elites as possible into the party and then allow certain infighting. The rest of the people are simply Human Resources.
> In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements.
What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".
A thing that could be interesting particularly for hn folks: in China, you can sue entities for open source license violation citing American-origin licenses like GPL, and win. There are many such cases. So one can potentially sue e.g. Onyx over their Linux kernel usage and stop their violation. This hasn't happened probably simply because no one cared enough.
IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.
Using this definition, identities are only copied, and not stolen.
Learning from the Chinese is entirely different than using operatives to take the corporate secrets from lets say the biggest steel company in the world, and then driving them out of business within a few years.
If this is the world you want to live in, fine. Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal oprecourse.
> Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal recourse.
To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.
Tesla's first purpose built car factory was built in China using mostly local expertise. Their Berlin factory is basically a copy of their Chinese factory. Grohmann Automation was to super automate their factories, which is why the Model 3 roll out was such a disaster and which they abandoned in favour of conventional car manufacturing techniques.
All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related.
Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist)
A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"
I know little about China, but every so often I meet someone who's rather fond of it (usually a passionate hardcore leftie¹), and says stuff like "in China nobody is unemployed, in China nobody is homeless" because apparently somehow the state provides (bad, but existing) work and housing for everyone. This seems to directly oppose your comment that China has no welfare state. Who is right?
¹) for context, here in NL "America good China bad" is a bit less clear-cut than in the US, where I assume most people read this comment from. That said at least the "China bad" part is still the majority opinion by far.
I’m a moderate American who lived in China for 9 years. China is a mixed bag, they do some things right (their transit build out, their investments in green energy/tech, healthcare, employment) and some things bad (real estate bubble that makes 1980s Japan blush, environment was in tatters until recently, autocratic, youth job opportunities kind of suck right now, 996, welfare doesn’t really exist).
As far as the simplistic “X good Y bad”, those are never right anyways.
I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. YOu can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.
To be clear China certainly has homeless people. There actually is some form of welfare state, but often it is not sufficient, especially if you're not party related, and you can only get it in your assigned city/home town. If it's not enough to pay for housing and there aren't any jobs available in your region you're shit out of luck.
> I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. You can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.
I'm not sure what you're on about. I was referring to specific unnamed people. I never suggested that their opinion is representative of the left, just that some lefties somehow, to my surprise, seem to think that today's China is a dream state that we should strive to emulate.
FWIW, I consider myself to be on the left as well, and I do not think that the China model is widely celebrated on the left (or anywhere in Dutch politics really).
They also have the hukou system, and migrant workers often do not have the same benefits as native residents.
I think that much of the misunderstanding comes from the perception that China has a highly centralized authoritarian government which is all powerful within the state, which is true to some degree, but the regional governments are what effectively "run" most of the state, including things like infrastructure initiatives that most people would assume are state controlled. The big bold State planning also is in fact implemented in different ways by different provinces.
Then people put that framework into a western context of states and national government, which isn't right either. There is a lot of power balancing and interplay between the provincial and national governments, and the binding force is the CCP itself which doesn't have a clear western parallel either.
You can move to a new state or city to look for services. If you become homeless anywhere in the USA, you are more likely to wind up in a west coast city eventually looking for fair weather and services. In contrast, in China you can’t just move from your poor village to Shanghai and expect help and to not be harassed by police. They at best will just put you on a bus back to your poor village. Even worse, you could have been born in Shanghai but are still considered an illegal immigrant because your parents didn’t have Shanghai hukou. You can be deported to a poor village that you’ve never been to before.
Living in Seattle, I have to admit that I’ve thought of wanting hukou before. We will never solve our homeless problem if the more local resources we apply to it and the better we do, the worse the problem gets (because who doesn’t want to show up to get that free housing).
Appreciate your response, thanks for the clarity. I think whoever downvoted me thought I was being insincere but I really wasn't - it's not a weird idea to expect a country that calls itself communist to have something resembling a welfare state!
During the rule of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia, not working was a crime, so "nobody is unemployed, nobody is homeless" was trivially ensured by chucking such people into prison.
OTOH you had a lot of state-sponsored jobs where you just had to show up, but not necessarily work.
The Chinese State hasn't provided jobs and housing for decades. Their own statistics shows youth unemployment at 19% (August 2025). The struggles of migrants in the cities is well-known. I personally witnessed homeless people in Beijing. Your leftish interlocutors haven't updated their information since Mao Zedong died; Deng Xiaoping starting undoing Communism in 1979 [1].
Where in an equilibrium where gig wages are too low, because the precarity means the gig worker is desperate.
With enough welfare state, the gig worker wouldn't be so desperate, and gig rates would go up. Of course they would push some employers back to permenant employment, but this is fine. It would be like spot market vs longer term deals for everything else.
I'm convinced the length of the workweek is totally exogenous. I don't think there is a feedback mechanism within capitalism to adjust it. This is actually a bummer.
Jobs like food delivery for Deliveroo, etc. are very low productivity and consumers are not willing to pay a lot for delivery.
This type of jobs can only be paid at the low end. Rates don't go up, they can't. What's happening s is that those jobs and services disappear. That's good if that leads to higher productivity, better paid jobs, but not if that leads to unemployment.
This has an impact on the length of the workweek, too. But in any case all self-employed must decide whether they can afford to cut their hours or if they can commercially.
The "welfare state" must be paid for somehow, too.
Doesn't gig work sidestep the mandated work week and other hard won employer obligations like holiday pay, health insurance, workers' safety, retirement benefits, etc? Or is your point that with adequate welfare there would be no gig workers?
If someone is working but still needs welfare then the state is just subsiding company payrolls by indirect means. Strongly disagree that gig work is fine as long as there is welfare.
If a given person's labor is of poor enough quality such that its value is not enough to provide whatever is considered a reasonable quality of life in a given circumstance, adding a UBI or other welfare payment is not just subsidizing employers
> And though their algorithms can be cruel taskmasters, pushing drivers to drive recklessly fast, they are an improvement on gangmasters who used to match workers and employers.
> The final lesson, therefore, is that governments should rethink the social contract to make gig work as beneficial as possible
The sentiment reminds me of this old 19th century labor movement song "The Dollar Alarm Clock" (although in that song, they were making fun of it)
What a blessing it was when the thing was invented;
It beats the slave-driver who came with a stick;
It rests on the shelf in the shack that I rented;
It never gets hungry; it never gets sick.
I think the problem is the middleman'ness of it. There has to be a better way where the software in the middle is more of a cheap service fee just connecting negotiating parties, instead of extracting as much value as possible from both sides.
Sadly this world has no concept of open source altruistic software to fix big problems like this. Linux is amazing, but nothing like it may ever happen again on its scale, and as its oldest and beardiest die off... it will fall
I’ve not driven Uber Eats but a friend of mine had. The app doesn’t push you. YOU push yourself if you have a certain personality and want to maximize earnings.
Back in the day, and it is still true to this day in many places in the world, one way to keep worker "motivated" was to have an abysmal low wage, with barely possible targets to reach to unlock a bonus that would make it possible to eat at the end of the month.
The gig economy is just an extension of this, but instead of low wage, you now have no wage.
From a capitalist point of view, it is very efficient for low-skill job. Almost anyone can join, increasing the supply of worker and therefor lowering the amount you have to pay them, until the point where you just can't make a living out of the gig. The perfect "balance point". It also get rid of the unproductive (old, handicapped, injured, or just people who have a family to take care of) worker rapidly and with no fuss (no costly firing procedure), and only keep the ones who can make the required grind to be able to live.
It is truly the end goal of capitalism, finally turning human into just another resource to be used and discarded when it has been used.
Not just that, HN normally avoids political topics; anything related to Israel is quickly flagged to oblivion. But as soon as China is mentioned suddenly it's all about Mao.
Do you disagree that China regularly censors speech? Retaliates against dissent? Locks masses up people up for being the wrong race or religion?
Don’t get me wrong there are some amazing things about China. Freedom isn’t one of them.
For someone criticizing commentators here let’s hear your credentials regarding knowledge of China. Or are you just a bot reflexively criticizing anyone who questions China?
I think their point is many americans are simply not capable of having an honest debate about the pros / cons of living in both countries. It’s OK to not like a country and give them credit where credit is due.
They just say china has NO FREEDOM and CANT TRUST THE CCP, and shut down the conversation, as if the debate has been won? As if no other metric matters in a society. There is nuance - which 90% of the comments on this post have missed.
Most importantly, most commenters are not entering the discussion with an open mind. In which case there’s not point in debating anything. It’s a waste of time.
I think china just is a big problem for the west, their even development on such a massive scale is hard to deny, raising 800 million out of poverty in 40 years, that's 3/4 of all poor people in the world raised out of poverty. In contrast western liberalism prescribed shock doctrine and endless austerity. People are inundated by propaganda, there is no independent thought, but the collective psyche is left in a bad place which makes us vulnerable. I think that's why psychotic right-wing cults like maga are on the rise everywhere, it's capitalizing on the vulnerable state liberalism has left us in.
The article came across as alarmist while completely failing to provide the bigger picture of whether this is actually a bad thing or not. We instantly assume it's bad because it would indeed be awful for us in the US to live like that.
I'd be interested in knowing how these workers get by, is housing and other important things cheaper there?
Flexible employment is not a bad thing, in fact, it's great. What would be bad here is not being able to afford basic necessities in a system like that and this article completely ignore that side of the equation.
Housing is cheaper, and pretty much everything else is cheaper also. For example the meals these workers deliver are very affordable.
You will only pay more for imports.
Gig work is a warning sign but I honestly think China is far better equipped to deal with this than the West.
In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically.
Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.
China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.
Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy.
China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough.
The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.
>China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.
How do you come to that conclusion? As far as I understand it it's the complete opposite, housing is basically the only way the Chinese can invest. Hoarding is rampant, those who got in early have several properties, the rest nothing.
Because China has a dual housing system to ensure availability of affordable housing, something almost nonexistent in the West (other than Vienna).
Yes people invest in housing. That's not the point. The point is China has a policy goal of making sure people have access to housing, something again almost nonexistent in the West.
All of the West has social housing subsidised by the government. A quick Google tells me most of Western Europe has a much higher percentage of people living in social housing than China.
This is very untrue. A lot of richer Chinese owners a bunch of apartments that they are holding for speculation, maybe they rent it out (and often not), but it’s still very much hoarding. You got a lot of sweetheart deals that happened 20+ years ago where many connected Chinese were able to acquire apartments, villas, and so on as opportunities.
Also, since the stock market is a hot mess, real estate acquisition was seen as the only real way to hold wealth in China.
> China considers housing to be a public right, which it is
You have more options for substandard housing in the cities (like sub basement room rentals aka “the ant tribe” in Beijing), but I also have no idea where you got this from. Rural hukou have the right to their land, but because they can’t sell it they can’t use it as collaterals in loans and such, making their life even harder.
> At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.
I'd completely agree here. It's difficult to blame democratic governments for this though -- throughout the west nobody wants to build enough supply to deal with the problem.
Your second part of landed vs unlanded. Implement a land value tax and distribute it as a universal basic income, and that solves that problem. Nobody wants that either, they think they like it and then come out "oh of course $favoured_group shouldn't pay it"
You won't see a land value tax for the same reason there are constraints on housing supply: because existing homeowners are essentially single-issue voters when it comes to do with anything about housing. Aesthetically progressive people turn into raging fascists the second you propose building slightly higher density housing near a train station that they're nowhere near.
In my ideal world I would:
1. Massively hike property taxes on non-income generating housing;
2. Make anyone owning housing subject to state, local and federal taxes on their worldwide income;
3. Get rid of preferential property tax rates and caps on property tax increases (eg Prop 13 in California). If you want to not force old people to sell immediately, defer their property taxes until death. This is exactly what Texas does;
4. Build for transit; and
5. Have the government be a massive supplier of social housing.
https://archive.ph/Jxlp3
In China, we call "gig workers" "flexable workers" (灵活就业), which are very similar to the unemployed. The reason is that the low, zero, or even negative walfare imposed by the Chinese goverment on all tax payers makes neither of them a viable option for a living.
Want some evidence? "Marriage market" (婚恋市场) in China is a gruesme battlefield for at least 20 years. Chinese people can fake their political stance, financial stance, or even marriage status. However, when it comes to the standard of choosing partners for life, they cannot fake it because it means so much to them. Ask them what they think about both "gig workers" and "the umeployed", and try to find any difference, if any. The "chain of contempt" (歧视链) in the "Marriage market" is a relatively good measure of what people really think in China.
What about "gig workers" and "the unemployed" elsewhere? Is there any difference?
China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again.
I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc)
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.
The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
That's not to say that data reported by other countries is completely accurate or free of political manipulation. But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.
> The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
This has not been really true for at least a decade.
Well they might attempt to play with statistics, there are definitely foreign investigative reports that are able to verify most numbers, especially when it comes to exports.
And most of those foreign numbers are very close to what China reports.
The specific statistic in this discussion is life expectancy not export volumes. This seems like a statistic that is easily manipulated.
The Chinese government’s rising life expectancy story is corroborated by estimates by independent organizations such as the WHO: https://data.who.int/countries/156
The WHO can be easily influenced, like shutting down Taiwanese reporting on their COVID response back in 2020.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-31/who-accused-of-suppre...
there isn’t, especially not in america (though you said democratic… :) )
> The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.
> But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.
"Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.
You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again.
"None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah".
Make up your mind.
I'm old enough to remember when supposedly Japan was going to overtake us. Their economy was growing rapidly under MITI control while ours was stagnating. At the peak in 1991 the nominal value of real estate in Japan was higher than all of North America.
Then the bubble popped in 1992 and Japan has been struggling ever since. The same thing will inevitably happen to China although it may take a while. Central planning is great at creating the illusion of growth but when you probe deeper you find the actual fair market value generated is much less.
Theres the little matter of the US imposed Plaza Accords that have been skipped in the timeline there , which are widely acknowledged to have precipitated Japan's lost decades.
> Theres the little matter of the US imposed Plaza Accords that have been skipped in the timeline there , which are widely acknowledged to have precipitated Japan's lost decades.
Actually, no. The CPC generally argues this is the case, but it is largely incorrect. Japan responded to the Plaza accords by attempting to massively increase stimulus and preserve the structure (significant industrial, limited service/consumption economy) they started.
In contrast, (West) Germany kept the stimulus relatively low and rotated into higher productivity enterprises and R&D and had a substantially lessened impact. See this (https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125961733.pdf)
The whole "US destroyed Japan with the Plaza accords" is basically CPC propaganda.
China will have its own issues, but I would guess they look more like the 1992 sterling crisis where China cannot hold its yuan peg as it continues to have trade expansion without corresponding foreign exchange growth.
Not old enough, but am hearing about imminent collapse of China for 20 years and it is growing during this period in every measurable way.
China has collapsed multiple times: in 1967, 1960, 1937, 1916, 1856, and so on. Another collapse probably isn't imminent but based on historical patterns it's entirely possible in our lifetimes. There could be an external shock in terms of a severe disruption in food or energy imports, or an internal power struggle between CCP factions. And even if China doesn't exactly collapse, a slow stagnation like what happened to Japan after 1992 is quite possible.
The main difference I'd say with China is population. They have 5x the people of the US and that just gives them a massive advantage. They also have the authoritarian government that's able to have a consistent focus on a mercanalist vision. They also have a large enough domestic market to develop technology.
The US is in serious trouble. If you don't believe trump has already done irreversible damage, he will soon.
> They have 5x the people
For now. China is on a timer, though. Demographic collapse will be pretty extreme.
Americans are both having more children and large numbers of immigrants.
China is New Democracy. Democracy for these people’s chauvinism just means whatever the state dept wants them to believe.
China isn't democratic at all.
Yes it is. Unless you’re saying it’s not “old democratic” any more. Which is true since Mao Zedong Thought contains what he calls and enacted as “new democracy”.
I’d be curious what your definition of democracy is. Mine is the will of the people is happening and it’s systematic and institutional. That for example doesn’t happen in America and never has as evidenced by the constitution
> definition of democracy is
Not hanging a portrait of an insane murderous tyrant in the middle of your capital city? Has there been any other person who was directly responsible for a higher number of deaths in China than him?
Mao Zedong was an idiot who badly damaged China. Democracy requires the freedom to create new political parties and for anyone to run in honest elections. The fact that the CCP is the only political party allowed in China proves it isn't democratic by definition.
The US is absolutely not the gold standard for democracy. In fact the GOP's goal seems to be to become a single party dictatorship much like the CCP is.
I don't think there are many democracies in the world. Republics are not démocraties as you elect a master instead of giving power to the people. Corruption sets in and rot everything in due time.
Democracy mean that all citizen inherently have equal legitimacy and capacity to exert political power.
For true démocraties you either need random choice of citizens who decide, or votes by all citizen.
We currently have a bunch of oligarchies around the world bending the laws in ridiculous manners to answer to those with power (currently mostly, but not necessarily, the very rich).
You only need to study the past of our "démocraties" when violent and deadly répression of popular upheaval to the benefit of industry barons was a regular thing.
Nowadays you get more of these things in slightly indirect ways, ergonomic social and cultural violence. Also, a brief mention of the Epstein files make it pretty obvious that the people's will does not really matter.
And do not think one second this is unique to America. A few years ago in France you had the Europe referendum, a rare moment of democracy, where the people voted "the wrong way" according to the néolibérals in power, and thus they proceeded to simply ignore said vote.
The founders of our various political systems made it pretty clear they despised democracy in the first place. The word became popular relatively recently...
Democracy is a radical idea. I don't even think many people in this forum actually want democracy. They will think plumbers, or nurses, of people of the "opposite party" are subhumans unfit to decide for the good of the people.
The rich have been oppressing everyone else since their have been rich people.
Is it different from American exceptionalism or Indian nationalism?
What is different or which part of my comment are you replying to?
> "Democratic countries". Like russia?
Do you think a country can be both fascist and democratic at the same time?
Proof? Okay:
https://merics.org/en/report/increasing-challenge-obtaining-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-16/china-is-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-16/china-is-...
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2025/05/censored-statistics-de...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10439...
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/china-is-hiding-mo...
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/09/05/the-chinese-au...
https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2024/2024-07-17-w...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/health/covid-origins-who....
Standard communist playbook: as soon as something is embarrassing (like the youth unemployment rate in China), declare it a state secret. The fact that it's getting hard to find something they're not hiding is not a good sign.
The list of things they're hiding is getting pretty damn long: internal trade statistics, housing sales, population numbers (first in the "ghost cities", then border regions, now all of China), disease statistics (they suddenly classified COVID statistics, now everything), unemployment rate (started with unemployed miners, then youth, now everything), immigration/emigration policies, economic growth, how they're treating various ethnic groups (Nepalese, Uyghurs, ...)
A big question a lot of people are starting to ask: is the data the government itself is operating on still accurate? Because, of course, in Soviet Russia and other communist states it wasn't. Such states made very large, often disastrous, decisions based on fictitious data, so odds seem good the same is unfolding in China.
> https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2024/2024-07-17-w...
It’s clear you didn’t read your links because this one concludes with:
> "Scholars in China and at the UN have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has 'discovered' such a huge discrepancy." ... "China has had at least three censuses since the start of the millennium, and there has been no evidence that more than 100 million people are overreported in China," Wang said.
[flagged]
> If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.
not very tied, actually, precisely because of heavy government interventions
> "Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.
I think that we can agree that democratic countries are countries where there is a choice and you see changes of government caused by free elections. That's not the case for Russia or Venezuela but it is (still) the case for most of the Western world
> You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again. > "None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah". > Make up your mind.
Who said that? Only you
There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
There's also a bizarre need to simultaneously downplay them and fear them in other Americans. If they're so weak, why the fear?
They have high speed rail connecting the whole country, and lots of other stuff which is real and not a number in a spreadsheet. They crashed their housing sector by building too much.
We have roads connecting the whole country. (And the world.) And motor vehicles which a hundred years later we now call cars.
We like China's progress. But let's keep it real.
[dead]
I once heard someone say "China is the only country in the world who knows on Jan 1st what their GDP for the year is going to be."
You’re simply mistaking the acknowledgment of their successes as reverence. I don’t have to agree with someone or something to give them credit.
The very reason that China can bulldoze thousands of homes for a new highway or train, are the very things that would make an American scream “fascism” at an authoritarian government
Bulldozing homes to make room for a highway or train is an American tradition, even if we do it less often now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses#Criticism_and_The...
> Moses's critics charge that he preferred automobiles over people. They point out that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City and destroyed traditional neighborhoods by building multiple expressways through them. The projects contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League Baseball teams to relocate to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively, and precipitated the decline of public transport from disinvestment and neglect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_S...
There used to be an entire road and tenement houses in Seattle where I5 is now. They’ve also taken all or part of many properties abutting the new rail project.
For us Westerners our highway system was already pretty much complete by the 1980s so none of us actually remember how it went. But when we see pictures in historybooks you will see sprawling construction sites with bulldozers...
There have been several posts on HN in my recollection about the building of highways in urban areas in the USA over the objections of local residents, it's just if they are poor or minorities they historically do not have the political power to stop these projects, and the private sector makes a bundle, which is the recipe for a lot of things that go wrong in the USA.
Here's one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561895
There's a whole sector of articles about how racism fueled the highway boom in American cities, when those people affected had lot less right to vote. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-... It's still happening https://apnews.com/article/environment-houston-pollution-71c... But the average HN reader probably does not live in such a neighborhood nor know anyone who does.
Exept that in reality the US bulldosed cities as agrssivly as China and still does many idiotic projects. The reason it doesnt happen as often today is that less is invest and the lesser amount that is invested doesnt go as far as it did before.
The differnece today in the US is not that they dont bulldoze its that before they bulldoze there is years of political battle.
I follow various groups around the US that try to fight highway expansions and the almost always lose in the end.
So there really isnt much moral high ground here.
I don’t think I have any illusions. I’d never want to live under Chinese censorship, lack of civil rights, the weird errors caused by centralized economic control. But I can also acknowledge some of the things they do well.
Having a nuanced view of a complex topic is probably essential for proper understanding.
Also, if many western countries don’t get their shit together, their lives will be greatly influenced by China at current trajectory. Which particularly involves the negatives. China's success should be motivation to many western ex-empires, excellence nostalgia hubs and industrial graveyards.
And yeah, credit where credit is due, I think no observer seriously doubts the great feat China pulled off in such a short period of time, even if the stats are not reliable. People travel there, Jobs warned about this years ago.
And between US, Russia and Israel, China is the least obnoxious villain in my news feed. They somehow conquer the world without cringe overdrive and the undignified post-pretending social media executive memefare. China does not make me wanna drive a dining fork into my frontal lobe, it’s more like the cough that doesn’t go away.
A lot of the cringe from China is simply in Chian social media that is seperated from hours.
I've been talking so much shit on China over the years I decided I'd come over when the opportunity presented itself to visit. I'm in Shanghai and mostly it feels the same as any capitalist city except it's super clean. Everyone is shopping, living their lives. All of the Chinese I've interacted with are super pleasant. What really struck me was the decency and patience of the border control and security control folks coming over. In western countries I'd typically get exasperated annoyed calls to do this or that.
Anyway, it got me thinking that mostly the freedoms we are afforded, which are very precious to me, seem to come at great cost. A cost people under countries like China would rather bear when the affordances are clean streets, no or little homelessness and the freedom to consume luxury assets.
Every time I visit the US (frequently) I'm just assaulted by its continual, very visible rot. Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles are just fundamentally unsafe places to walk around in. The huge climb of school shootings over the last decade should have everyone alarmed. Americans appear to be stuck in the race to the bottom of who can be the greatest victim and the truly extreme painting of the Left or Right depending on which side you're on because people would rather obsess and come into conflict over what gender they can identify as or race guilt (or its opposite if you're a minority) rather than unite over common class struggles that are eating the country alive.
I think most people would rather pick comfort and safety over the freedom to say what you want and a right to privacy. I'm not sure I blame them when the alternative is getting sexually assaulted trying to walk to your car in LA (speaking from many many second-hand stories of American friends) or having your kid shot and killed in school.
It's a lot easier for China to limit the homeless problem in Shanghai when they have the hukou system to keep them out. But it is a shame that we have allowed failed progressive policies to wreck some of our cities.
There is much to love about authoritarian states. Clean, safe cities, and a suppression of news and other information to keep (naive) people comfortable. Draconian law and migration enforcement (eg, the hukou and propiska systems, and external borders) have their advantages, and looking at Singapore and Japan you don't necessarily need the rest.
China and the US are not the only option. If you go to Switzerland, Netherland, Sweden, Korea or Japan you can get some of the same things.
You dont need China dictatorship to not have dirty fucked up public places.
I’ve lived in the USA, China (Beijing), a Switzerland (Lausanne), and I’m not sure what your point is. Guess the only place where riot police stormed my apartment because I wasn’t registered correctly?
How about this:
I’d never want to live under Trump's censorship, lack of civil rights, the weird errors caused by centralized economic control
Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
I have a feeling however, that since the leftist priorities these days are so ridiculous to the regular voter that you'll just get another republican president
> Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
You are weirdly naive about thinking Trump has any respect for democracy and that his camp isn't going to do everything possible to maintain power at all cost.
American relationship to China is frankly weird on every sides.
Between the ones who apparently can’t fathom a world where other countries are as economically successful as the USA and see it as a threat and the ones who are fascinated by its authoritarian policies, it’s really hard to have a dispassionate conversation involving China.
90% of Chinese own their own properties vs 65% of Americans, so there's that. Regarding property rights, I'm not sure how it works there but we've all seen the malls and highways that diverted around homes where owners were unwilling to sell out. Also, they actually have functional public infrastructure and have brought something like 800 million out of abject poverty. Are ahead of us in several spaces and about to pass us or at least equal us in others. Obviously I'm not arguing for that type of top down authoritarian system, but this is the objective reality. What's bizarre actually is all the denialism and copium over China - should we not be glad that they are doing better than they were 30 years ago and much more liberal than before?
> 90% of Chinese own their own properties
By "own" you mean 70 year leases with ??? renewal conditions?
> Urban land use rights in Mainland China were typically granted for fixed terms: 70 years for residential, 50 years for office or industrial, and 40 years for commercial purposes. As these terms approach expiration, the question of renewal becomes paramount. The legal framework, primarily the Property Law and the Urban Real Estate Administration Law, provides a general outline but leaves specific implementation to local governments.
> Mainland China’s Property Law (Article 149) and The Civil Code of Mainland China (Article 359) guarantee automatic residential land use right renewals but provides no specific arrangement in respect of non-residential terms. Currently, without detailed implementation guidelines, local governments devise varied approaches, skewing valuations and unsettling investors. This uncertainty hinders market efficiency.
https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/greater-china/insights/b...
But yeah, you could argue that you have to pay property taxes in USA and if you don't, you'll eventually lose your land
If you follow the public policy discussions in China, you’ll likely notice more complication surrounding the 70-year leases. Basically everyone already feel they own the property, the government’s forceful attempt to reclaim property would be counterproductive and unlikely to succeed. Additionally, many government officials are not particularly fond of this policy. They prefer property tax like US. Individuals currently do not pay property tax in China, they are reluctant to pay property tax and argue that they have indirectly paid them when purchasing property. Consequently, the property tax and ownership restructuring are essentially stuck in a stalemate.
I agree that that is a meaningful difference, but since I expect to be be on my last legs at best 70 years from now, it really doesn't make much of a difference to me, especially when contrasted to here where my home owning plans amount to little more than "hopefully the housing market will collapse"
Give the average person in china the opportunity to move to America, and vice versa, there is no comparison. China has done some things right but to pretend it is some model for America is absurd
I would absolutely take a chance to live in China, but I wouldn’t expect to be welcomed there. Their tech, disposable income, food costs, etc are so superior to what we have today in US.
"Superior". 你不是认真人. Though you would probably be welcomed.
Many Americans live in China. Give it a shot.
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The average person in America is living paycheck to paycheck and has negative equity.
20 years ago you couldn’t see in Shanghai. Trump pulled back the clean air act, it’s not hard to see a trend. It’s also not hard to buy a ticket and see it yourself.
Great point, I almost wrote that they’ve cleaned up pollution (of all types) by a lot and also are accomplish some impressive feats by regreening and pushing back desertification. Amazing things can happen when you get your peoples basic needs met (ie, they can focus on higher level stuff).
Regarding "not owning anything", I think you need to look up communism and consider if that's better there.
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It depends on which Americans you are looking at if you want to understand who capitalist ownership is benefiting.
This is a pretty outdated view of things too. Majority of chinese students return to china after getting their degree in the US.
Yo, I literally pointed out that I’m not for this model. But thanks for the comment?
> There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans.
No. There isn't. It's just that we've gotten sick of the bullshit and lies from the anti-china propagandists like you.
> Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics? If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
When you and your kind spout such nonsense over and over again, people tend to get sick of it.
“ No. There isn't.”
Yes. There is. Obviously both are happening simultaneously because the world is complicated.
> If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics?
A lot to unpack here. You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village, no eminent domain payments necessary.
> If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
My great-grandmother’s home, those of her neighbors, and their church was bulldozed for the US75/I45 rebuild/connection in Dallas in the 1950s. They were given the choice of new public housing built nearby in an industrial area (around Fair Park where State Fair of Texas is held) or figuring it out on their own. Being Black and low-income meant whatever rights they “had” were hard to come by.
I guess my point is rights and freedoms are unequally held, regardless of a nation’s stated values and laws. What makes/made the US great is not that things happening in China couldn’t happen here. It’s that we (used to?) aspire to greater ideals about individual freedom even if it isn’t present for all. CCP and I think Chinese citizens are under no such illusion, and in some cases reject the individual for the collective. (I’m hedging a bit since my understanding is limited second-hand anecdotes from Chinese American friends).
> You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village
Better than exterminating the natives to build railroads? Using your logic we don't have property rights in the US either.
> no eminent domain payments necessary.
Doesn't explain nail houses though.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/19/asia/gallery/china-nail-house...
> If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
Yes. 1.4 billion people live in half-finished concrete shells.
Come up with something better. You guys are getting boring repeating the same nonsense over and over again.
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“You lost the debate a while back”.
If you are downvoted for political stuff especially when it relates to non-western things, that’s a great indicator you didn’t lose any discussion.
Where did you get the idea that they don't make eminent domain payments?
Yes owning appartments is propery. I know that people in the US have an absurd glorification of the single family home but things other the single family homes are a thing in most of the world.
LoL what the actual fuck are you going on about? China is extremely particular about market rate eminent domain payments. The only difference being it's often a take it or leave it offer, but they make prompt payments nonetheless.
That's why China ends up with cases like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FkePxUA6UE8
Ghost cities have been shown as western made up cope.
—
China is not individualist in a selfish way like the west. Collectivism is a good concept.
Thank god their property rights are not barbaric like the west.
"China" isn't "China". Like everywhere else, there's a maze of conflictiong incentives. The CCP measures regional governments on their stats. Gaming there. Regional governments measure administrative areas, ditto. More gaming. No stats can be trusted in a society that does not prize allegiance to the truth above all else.
Let’s say it how it is, this is the cost of freedom. Yes, China can build more quickly and has advanced more technologically, but it came at the cost of freedom. The degree of freedom is not something I’m fit to argue.
Now, there are those they believe the difference in freedom is worth that technological advancement. I’m not so sure.
COVID was a great example of this. China was able to slow the virus spreading faster than the US since they were literally locking people into their homes. In the US, this didn’t happen because of the rights we have.
Strange to me that the US has fallen behind is supposedly due to its commitment to freedom. The ownership class sold out the industrial base for profit, beginning with Reagan. They’re the ones who have driven policy - and continue to do so in the current turn to naked authoritarianism. The freedom the US supposedly stands for is the freedom of the capitalist class. Is it any wonder we haven’t seen investment in public infrastructure that prioritizes public good over private profits? That would have be financed by taxing the private interests that determine our policies. Instead we finance wars and a police state.
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The problem is that people use all kinds of alternative methods to measure GDP. Stuff like light emissions. Import and export volumes and so on. And broadly speaking those are not that different from the offical stats. So just claiming its all lies doesnt really work.
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I trust Finland's economic data far more than China's.
Yeah, from memory Finland scores very highly in global surveys of honesty.
No offense to Finland but Finland is basically an irrelevant country when it comes to geopolitics.
How is that relevant to the accuracy of their economic data? Finalnd's long border with Russian and recent joining into NATO means they are actually relatively geopolitically important.
It’s easier for small countries to do certain things that’s much more difficult for large countries to do. And by your logic, North Korea is relevant too, and it is and Finland is too, but in very narrow areas; and not really relevant when talking about economics of big countries.
" North Korea is relevant too" It very much is.
Okay…but I’m not going to say North Korea’s economic data is fraudulent, therefore implications for the economic data for large countries. Also, read the thread before replying to random phrases you see.
> What society, government or political entity prizes allegiance to truth above all else?
Exactly.
Seems to be a lot of bizarre worship in the USA these days.
China doesn't report false numbers the way some democracies like India and the US are trying to do (upheaving the statistical agencies), or most autocracies do (outright fraud about the numbers). What they do is a different kind of reporting that I've seen typical for similar countries. Language twisting, different interpretation, different naming even. Slowing GDP growth? They'll take the GDP PPP and use that for news bites. Construction bust and crash? Nah, splendid increase in affordable housing supply. Korean War? LoL no, War of American Aggression in the Korean Peninsula.
You know I kinda like the idea of framing things in a more optimistic way.
I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved.
(I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
The history of China going back millennia is chock full of violent revolutions and civil wars. They don't seem to learn anything from mistakes. I fully expect another one in our lifetimes.
You should look at European history for comparison. I don't remember, what did they have, a 100 or 200-year war?
Yes, Europeans are equally unable to learn from their mistakes.
You should grasp that China has maintained a civilization through line for 5K years. No other state comes close. The question is how.
Civilization has been maintained in other places such as Egypt for just as long. You can argue about the degree of continuity but the modern nation state of China bears almost no resemblance to what existed on the same territory 5K years ago. So I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
What does that even mean and how does it compare to any other place that is inhabited by humans?
Almost as if countries were closed systems and imperialism never existed. As if the US has not acted a neo-imperialist superpower post-WW2.
Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?
"Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?"
Surely, but how much? 1 per cent or 40 per cent? We don't know. As you say, nothing is a closed system.
For example, by 1949, China imported Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist school of thought, a totally culturally alien system constructed by (mostly long dead) Europeans, which was the root cause of the horrors of the Maoist era - none of which were imposed by external empires by force. For all its faults, the US never forced the Chinese to exterminate the sparrows or attempt to build a steel mill in every village, resulting in a massive economic collapse and death toll.
China had many famines before that during the century of humiliation. Maoism was itself a reaction to the dire social conditions of the time.
This doesn’t absolve Maoism of its policies which led to millions dying. (And yet we shouldn’t absolve the global capitalist system either which leads to millions of preventable deaths each year.)
Colonialist exploitation has been major historic driver over this timeframe (shifting to neo-colonialism in the world system post WW2). Admittedly it hasn’t been the only one. But our understanding of world history loses nuance if we gloss over colonialism and neo-colonialism over this period and treat historic events as due to the supposedly essential traits of this or that nation.
It seems that famines in China were commonplace even pre-19th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
Political system may be one of the reasons (feudalism doesn't have a great record in preventing famines either), but the most salient explanation might be that a pre-modern economy with high density of population is inherently prone to famines - a bad drought will easily topple the precarious balance between demand and supply towards lack of food, and without a railway network it is nearly impossible to move food easily among places that don't have good ports.
I thought we were talking about the role of colonization in violence in China over the past 250 years. Most events you listed (Taiping rebellion, Boxer rebellion, CCP-KMT civil war) were the result of weakening of the Qing dynasty by foreign powers, its downfall, the chaos this produced during the Warlord era. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (again I’m not exonerating them) were themselves in large part reactions to the legacy of imperialism on China.
Flooding on either of the two big rivers also caused mass casualties by wrecking the farming infrastructure.
Starvation is caused by too little capitalism, not too much.
What is this, an article of faith? This ignores the many famines that have occurred under capitalism during colonialism and through the present day.
Generally under colonialism, the colonial power actively prevented any development of native capitalism in the colonies, even if the colonial power was capitalist in their home country. The goal was to prevent the colony from developing its own economy and rather to have the colony supply basic resources (food, minerals, oil, etc.) to the colonizer and force the colony to rely on goods from the colonizer.
It’s worth considering the famine in India at the end of the 19th century. The British integrated India into the world capitalist system in a way that directly led to famine: promotion of cash crops which led to vulnerability when drought struck; speculators hoarding food during famine (some stores of food even rotting while people starved); building of railways and ports (which were used to export food out of famine stricken areas for profit); and laissez faire relief policies. The death toll was in the millions. I found Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts to be a good resource on this subject.
While the famines were real, and a result of British rule, that wasn't because India was part of a "world capitalist system". Capitalism doesn't just mean "people doing things for profit" but rather the use of capital to build up industry, which Britain had no intention of doing in India.
Capitalism is a system where one class of people (workers) sell their labor for the profit of another class (owners/capitalists). So feudalism was neither capitalist nor industrialist. Colonial capitalism - not typically industrial but still capitalist. Industrial capitalism - both industrialist and capitalist. The modern American economy - service based not industry based - but still capitalist.
Compared to Europe the US has turbo speed of self-correction. EU is not doing well and it will do worse over the next decade and there seems to be no political will to put the economy back on course. Just add more regulations, costs and spending and hope for the best seems the current mantra.
Right now corporate bonds are sold at lower rates and have better credit than the public bonds for a country like France. Combination of no faith in political stability and no faith in the ability to get spending under control.
I think a lot of EU countries are going to just keep stumbling into a financial crisis that will force cuts in pensions and wealth-fare at a scale not seen post ww2. The pyramid scheme is coming due.
Unclear why Europe's capabilities are a relevant come-back to a comparison between the US and China.
May be correct, the EU as an organisation isn't very powerful compared to member states, may be false, EU member states are much more diverse than American states.
because it's about the ability to course-correct and I mentioned that compared to the EU it's operating at turbo-speed.
> because … and I mentioned
An action is not a justification for itself
When I read this, I immediately thought of the ouroborous
Side note but I just really like / appreciate ouroborous given how absolutey ridiculously powerful it was in the inscryption game (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1092790/Inscryption/)
The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981).
The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate.
The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.
You are to captured by your ideology. It does not really matter what you personally think about. The thing is that the EU has completely failed as a union to provide the economic growth we need and has no plan on how to address this. We are completely export dependent (about 50% of GDP, meaning any world economic crisis will cause massive unemployment and fiscal crisis) and our internal market has withered and the purchasing power is plummeting.
China is going to do what China does but it's economy is in tatters something you would probably know if you actually looked at what is happening with their economy. Combine that with the same demographic crisis as EU and you have another country that might have already hit it's economical peak. The leadership is showing no ability to create an internal market and is busy stomping out any dissent internally as economical reality sets in and people loose jobs and their future. Unless their turn their economy around creating an internal market any international economic crisis will collapse their export oriented economy.
I don't know why you think everything is so bleak. Yes, Europe is inter-connected to the world. We export a lot and we import a lot. Unemployment in Europe has been not been terrible for a long time.
Of course there is room for improvement and there are political challenges, for instance to enact the pension reforms needed for the demographic changes but Europe has achieved also a lot we can be proud of. Without Europe and without the single market, we would be facing the same issues Britain is facing: Being too small, unable to regulate anything on their own, dependent on foreign trade partners, etc.
That's a bizarre non sequitur. Language has nothing to do with economics.
Perception is what creates value. Nothing is unconnected. When perception is about resonance and interdependence as it is in the East, the economy functions as an arm of the state. The state is all that counts, which is how in China, the idea of ownership bows to the state. The West driven by individualism has an altogether different idea of what ownership is.
That's just meaningless word salad. If I have a bushel of wheat that's actual value, not "perception". On average over the long term, individualism has always created more value than collectivism.
Is this a LLM posting?
Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
Their course corrections can take centuries and many tens of millions of dead from killing birds and bugs.
保管国家机密。你的社交信用评分下降了。
By 2023, most private social credit initiatives had been shut down by the People's Bank of China, and regulations had cracked down on most local scoring pilot programs.[16]: 12
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
As opposed to…dictatorship?
That’s your point?
It’s not like China has ranked choice voting.
Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).
Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.
Did they steer the ship well during covid?
The gotcha's don't work on me, sorry.
They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process.
If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.
Not to detract from the fact that China did indeed do a lot of things right, but I wonder how much of this was not going to happen anyway since the country was the most populated in the world and had low wages compared to the west.
In many ways the US is just returning to the approach to governance from the time of Upton Sinclair.
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Better than most, if these stats are to be believed: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/covid?Metric=Excess+mor...
They steered it well enough.
The US, for the record, also steered it's economy well enough during Covid. But that was a 2016 Trump administration, which still had adults in the room, and a 2020 Biden one.
Post 2024-MAGA isn't able to steer a bicycle.
Hard to get reliable numbers, but if you go by reported deaths then yes better than the US.
The value of free speech, democracy, capitalism, *is* making pivoting faster.
The first world didn't win the cold war despite doing these things, but because those things actually helped us (all of us, not just the US) course-correct in ways the USSR didn't.
If China has a different way to be flexible, or if the USA looses its flexibility, the USA will fail to keep up with China in the same way and for the same reason the USSR couldn't keep up with the USA.
Americans will beat out China again in 20 years due to GLP-1 drugs fixing the colossal nerfing to our public health that widespread obesity cause.
Of course, China has another chance to beat us out when that happens if they do something about how common smoking is there!
The US problem is they are going from a global brutal empire to a shrinking empire. But the debt and lifestyle of the US is still that of a global empire. That is what has broken many past empires and will break the US empire.
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Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you many times not to.
I’m no fan of the CCP, but watching what’s going on over there vs. what’s going on over here (the US, but also Europe, and to some lesser degree, even other Western aligned Asian countries), I can’t help China is doing more things right than us in the goal of raw progress. Or at least, less things wrong.
Now, you can argue whether sacrificing various things for the sake of raw progress is worth it. But what if that question becomes no longer askable in the future in a planet dominated by China and the CCP system?
That day might come sooner for some of China’s neighbors. It may come later, or even not at all, for the US or Europe. But the age where the West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model, and by extension, arguably the general direction of the human race, may no longer be taken for granted.
What happens then to some of your precious “freedoms”?
> West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model
This model only ever applied to Europe. Fruit companies and oil companies were more important than democracy elsewhere. South Korea and Taiwan were both autocracies for decades while we sponsored them in the name of freedom.
What we did have was a foreign policy that mostly encouraged peace and prosperity via trade, which was nice while it lasted.
If by progress do you mean rental housing, roads/bridges, computers, food, and gig work? Do we have a shortage of them? I keep hearing about everyday life we've had for generations like it's an earnings report.
I personally understand people wish they were better off, and I do understand the sentiment myself as a middle class, tax paying citizen with a family but in my opinion, people were just told America is bad and horrible and needs fixing, I don't think America is a bad place at all. Those who wanted to get elected just told a lot of people it was horrible and a lot of people bought it.
Whatever issues existed economically, I think the "rip the country apart and tear down the government" approach was the most stupid path we could've taken,,,and here we are.
The USA and other western countries have their issues, but to pretend like western countries are bad places to live... IDK anymore.
"you say China bad. but what if China win? how China bad then?"
Spoken like a true non-fan.
Žižek in 2011:
“I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy … What I’m afraid of is, with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don’t share the hope of my liberal friends – give them ten years [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration – no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/11/11/slavoj-zizek-a...
There is no way to really watch what is going on over there with how amazingly effective the great firewall is.
Tl;dr -
1. Mass employment via light and low skilled manufacturing will not help provide mass prosperity in 2025. Automation is the name of the game (can confirm in Vietnamese and Indian high value manufacturing as well as Chinese)
2. Work to build a social safety net that complements gig work. An export driven economy is increasingly tenuous in the current climate. Expanding a domestic consumer market by ensuring prosperity reaches the bottom half is what will allow you to build a resilient economy.
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I've ranted about this for over a decade now. Concentrating only on export and industry development while ignoring the need to expand a domestic consumer market either by leveraging higher incomes (highly unlikely) OR a stronger social safety net is the solution to over-production in most cases.
It's an increasingly mainstream view in Chinese economic academia as well, but the Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism" ("福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱"*) [0].
Li Keqiang was a major proponent of expanding the social safety net due to his early experiences in childhood, but he sadly passed away.
Countries like Vietnam are following a similar approach, and it is not going to end well.
[0] - http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm...
* - "In a welfare state, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarized, society is torn apart, and populism is clamoring. This is a warning to avoid falling into the trap of "welfarism" that breeds laziness."
As Germany and Japan can attest, export-led growth works great until it doesn't, because you are stuck to suppress wages across the economy to maintain your export edge. You need to also build the internal market and carefully manage the housing market as the central instrument for wealth accumulation of your citizens.
I think the US is unique to realize that they can achieve more by being a consumer spending economy and using run-away housing prices to inflate their citizens wealth (using immigration to increase demand).
The US can do this because the dollar's global reserve currency status. This works on a longer cycle but will be far more painful and difficult to address when it reaches a tipping point.
I can see the point re internal market vs export orientation. But why make the housing market the focal point of wealth creation? Wouldn't the stock market be a much more overall beneficial place to let your population accumulate wealth (which the US also does quite successfully, through 401k, cheap and trustworthy financial products like ETFs, a strong SEC,...)?
Pushing house prices ever higher comes with so many societal problems, and also with serious financial risks. The start of Japan's lost decades, which you mentioned, wasn't weak domestic demand. It was a housing price bubble so extreme that small areas of central Tokio were worth more than all of California. Domestic demand was actually very strong in Japan up until that bubble burst. The biggest financial crisis in the US in recent memory (2008) was also due to the housing market, its consequences eclipsing that of the dotcom bubble or the 1987 crash. That being said, stock market bubbles are no fun either - the Great Depression of the 1930's was caused by a stock market crash. But at least stocks don't tend to push people into homelessness already while they're booming.
>Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism"
The joke I heard that Xi welfare mindset is much closer to Reagan than other welfare states. However I say it's not entirely wrong. Freebies and welfare including very generous pension is really addictive policy and no electorates would be willing to sap them out much less going cold turkey.
The chicken will come home to roost when it's time to upgrade your tech, industry or infrastructure but you don't have adequate capital to do that.
While there are issues with populism induced freebies, China's social welfare spent is anemic for the size of economy it is.
Almost all social welfare has been devolved to the state level, but state level spend and incentives are overwhelmingly spent on large capex projects that align with larger initiatives (eg. the EV price wars with dozens of SoEs jumping into the fray despite the overwhelming majority of the Chinese EV industry being won over by private sector BYD).
That's tens of billions of dollars of capex per province just on one initiative that has turned into a price war that is forcing central level intervention. It's the same misaligned incentive structures that lead to the construction boom and bust in during the 2015-20 period, the overzealous Zero COVID enforcement, and the subsequently haphazard end to Zero COVID.
Most provinces are heavily indebted and lack a robust enough capital market to raise from in the way you can get local and state bonds in the US, or municipal bonds in much of the EU.
The Xi admin's policies is the equivalent of America having Reaganism during the 1950s-80s. Reaganism was bad for the US, but at least the US had a higher human capital by the 1980s thanks to New Deal (1930s-1950s) and Great Deal (1960s-70s) policies for a generation.
The kinds of people who had sympathy for solving spatial inequality in China are no longer represented after Li's passing, and this kind of petulant opposition to welfare expansion with no data to show otherwise is what will trip up China longterm if something does not change in the next 3-5 years.
The kinds of policies being pushed by the Xi admin currently are similar to those from a decade ago, yet China is a much older society than it was 10 years ago, and as I pointed out elsewhere, a society where the median household is much poorer than it's peers at GDP per capita (and even significantly below in the case of Thailand).
This is the same point the Economist article is getting at - a country where 10-20 million people are earning European and American level salaries but with almost half a billion people with Indian or Vietnamese levels of household incomes is an underperforming society if spending cannot be unlocked because the bottom half of society is saving heavily for a rainy day due to a limited to nonexistent social safety net.
And now that most of China is at Thailand level ages, there just isn't much room for convergent development using an export model.
If a social safety net expansion comparable to the Great Deal isn't initiated by 2029-30, I truly cannot see how a 4-5% GDP growth rate can be sustained over a long enough time period to converge with a Japan, Korea, or Western Europe, let alone the US.
They do provide a safety net but you have to move into the cities. They can't afford to build a comparable one for the rural areas too as rural productivity is too low and they can't realistically induce skilled people to move into impoverished rural areas.
> you have to move into the cities
Even the urban safety net is gated behind getting an urban hukou which has income requirements and stable residency requirements - both of which are difficult for the bottom half of society becuase of the chicken-and-egg situation. But the added issue is migrants on a rural hukou do not want to give up their rural hukou because oftentimes this means losing the right to any rural landholdings they may have - which for someone earning Yuan 2,000 to 4,000 a month doing gig work on Meituan is basically their only appreciating asset if the local prefecture decides to say expand a road or create an LGFV and thus entitling them to some (relatively) decent compensation.
This is the crux of the issue. There are very table stakes reforms that the central and provincial can conduct to help alleviate inequality, yet the bulk of spending is essentially expended on capex investments or subsidizes, which while great for building high value industries aren't generating a significant number of jobs because those industries require a college education.
No provincial government will work on expanding a social safety net without it becoming a priority at the Central level because everyone wants to climb the ladder, and there just isn't much fiscal leeway to expand that without central intervention.
> They can't afford to build a comparable one for the rural areas too as rural productivity is too low
That didn't stop Thailand or Malaysia. They might not have the same GDP per capita as China, but the median household disposable income of both is significantly higher (1.5x in the case of Thailand and 2.5x in the case of Malaysia).
Unlike both Thailand and Malaysia, the central government in China has much more leeway to expand the welfare net if it was a priority.
I like his cake comparison. Obvious Portal joke.
分蛋糕和做蛋糕哪个更重要呢？表面上来看，分蛋糕直接关涉公平，但从根本上来看，分蛋糕和做蛋糕并不是二者取其一，做大蛋糕是前提，公平分配蛋糕是结果，发展则是前提和关键，任何分配制度必须首先建立在做大蛋糕、有蛋糕可分的基础上。(...) 另一方面，分好蛋糕，搞好分配制度改革是为了推进经济社会发展，而不只是为了完成消费。
Trans. by Firefox (w/ a little bit of G. Translate edits): "Which is more important: dividing the cake or making the cake? On the surface, the cake is directly related to fairness, but fundamentally speaking, the cake and making the cake are not one of the two, making the cake is the premise, the fair distribution of the cake is the result, the development is the premise and the key, any distribution system must first be based on the big cake, the cake can be divided." ... "On the other hand, dividing the cake well and carrying out distribution system reform is to promote economic and social development, not just to complete consumption."
It works, and its a reasonable comparison, it's also just amusing to read some some Chinese position paper and then he starts wandering into cake discussions after a bunch of very formal propaganda stuff "superiority of socialism is ultimately to be reflected in its development of productive forces", ect...
Honestly, it's sad and frustrating. It's literally a "let them eat cake" kind of statement.
China is at the point where a social safety net is needed to ensure long term prosperity, and concentrating on an export first model isn't going to cut it long term, because high value industries are heavily automated and skilled, and simply don't demand or need that many employees.
China has reached a point where the mean years of education amongst working age people (~8 years) has caught up with countries that used to be much richer than China 15 years ago like Brazil, Thailand, Turkiye, and Malaysia and it's mean life expectancy has outpaced all those countries except Turkiye and Thailand, which it is for all intents and purposes tied [0]. This is a MASSIVE win for global poverty eradication.
Yet the median age is significantly higher than all of them except Thailand [1], and median disposable household income remains around $400/mo [2] - lower than Thailand [3], Malaysia [4], or Türkiye's [5] despite having a GDP per capita (~13.3k in 2024) that is comparable to the latter 2 and above Thailand's.
Now is the time for China to expand its welfare system in order to make that leap into being a truly developed country, just like South Korea did in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Expanding the welfare state would help hundreds of millions of Chinese gain the ability to purchase higher value goods thus reducing the specter of "overproduction" leading to the current global trade war, while truly ensuring common prosperity.
Otherwise, it will flounder like Malaysia and Thailand did, both of which used to be South Korea's peer until the Asian Financial Crisis, or Turkiye after it's peak in 2014.
People mention "course correction" but what course correction can you do when disdain for a welfare system is so engrained in the upper echelons of leadership.
This is not a statement on the "collapse of China" (that's dumb), but if this problem around domestic consumption and a lack of a safety net is not nipped in the bud in the next 3-5 years, it will be much harder for China to take full advantage of the capabilities it has and ensure common prosperity.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/2022/lifexp+msch/BRA+CH...
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-age?tab=discrete-b...
[2] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501...
[3] - https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...
[4] - https://ekonomi.gov.my/sites/default/files/2023-12/Jadual4-P...
[5] - https://data.tuik.gov.tr/Bulten/Index?p=Gelir-Dagilimi-Istat...
Thanks for all the work finding the local national reporting on those statistics.
Turkey's numbers look crazy though. Almost doubling every year? Is that just the exchange ratio's runaway hyperinflation? https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/currency Almost linearly upward for the last half decade.
> Is that just the exchange ratio's runaway hyperinflation
Yep. Turkiye is in a weird position where there is hyperinflation but also economic expansion. It's the hallmarks of an overheating economy.
A lot of this was due to the run-up Russia-Ukraine War, which saw significant capital outflow from Russia to all over the CEE, Balkans, and Turkiye (as is reflected in their GDPs per capita), along with Turkiye's then abnormally low interest rates in order to subsidize the construction industry, because Turkiye had it's own Evergrande 10-15 years ago.
Turkiye - just like leadership in China who were in their 20s to early 30s in the 1980s - was influenced by the development of Malaysia and Singapore. Mahatir Mohammad was the original Erdogan (infrastructure driven growth mixed with a large welfare state mixed with a heavy dose of Pan-Islamism), and both he and LKY used the same economic model and had a love-hate relationship with each other as they were in the same circles in their early career, but it's easier to develop a 4 million person city state like Singapore instead of a 15-20 million country like Malaysia under Mahatir.
Additionally, much of the Chinese economy in the 1990s and 2000s was developed thanks to the Chinese Malaysian diaspora heavily investing in China. The ethnolinguistic group (Hokkien) in the province Xi spent most of his career in (Fujian) itself represents the majority of the Malaysian Chinese business class, and they heavily invested in Fujian (along with Guangdong) during Xi's time there, and were a major reason why China's economy opened up in the 1980s-2000s.
Consumption habit is much more dependent on personal experience and has little to do with the safety net. Older retired people with state pensions still have little desire to spend or don't even know how to spend in the new online economy, while young people who never experienced hardship are happy to spend every penny. If you want to increase spending you need to steer income to young people (child credit e.g.). Healthcare is mostly accessed by old folks. Generous pension and healthcare benefits are not going to lift spending.
Personal view on the healthcare side, at least in America, while the old spend 36% compared to 10-15% in every other age category, 10-15% spend is still relatively significant. [1]
[1] By age chart: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/indicator/spending/per-c...
In America, the average age of medical bankruptcy is 45 years old, that's not really that old. [2] 17% had to declare bankruptcy or lose their home and 45% of Americans worry a major health event will bankrupt them.
[2] https://www.retireguide.com/retirement-planning/risks/medica...
I might personally spend more money if I had a difficult health condition and reasonable healthcare, vs being uninsured and crippled by financial costs. If I live every day in fear of bankruptcy, I'm not very willing to spend money on much of anything I don't "really" need.
Having worked in the government, the pension thing is difficult. They exhibit a J-shaped accrual pattern, where young workers don't get much, and long term workers are difficult to pay for. So the motivation is to burn people out and then get rid of them before the pension costs get to be too much.
They're "supposed" to be funded to an adequate amount to pay for the benefits, yet political pressures and less rigorous accounting standards result in excessive commitments to employees and retirees, but inadequate contributions. In the American gov that has resulted in a lot of attempts at buy-outs, early retirement schemes, and almost anything to get people off the pension payrolls.
Personally, an acceptable result was the employee matched retirement contribution. That worked acceptably from my own experience in the government. Generous ceiling on how much we'll match, and employees who actually use the program are effectively getting a 3-5% pay raise because of contributing. IE: "I put in 5%, and my employer matches my contribution with 5%"
> Consumption habit is much more dependent on personal experience and has little to do with the safety net
The per capita (not median, so skewed upward) yearly expenditure of a Chinese household in 2024 was Yuan 28,227 [0]. The per capita urban household in China had around Yuan 34,000 a year in expenditures in 2024, and the per capita rural household in China had around Yuan 20,000 a year in expenditures in 2024.
61% of a per capita Chinese household's expenditures are just on food, residence, and healthcare. And that becomes 75% when factoring transit and telephone/internet bills.
Only 11% of a per capita household spend was on recreation, 5% on clothing, and around 3% on miscellaneous services.
This means the mean household in China only had aroud Yuan 7,000/$1,000 in all of 2024 on anything that is a non-essential or discretionary purchase. This is abnormally low for a country with China's GDP per capita and highlights a very real problem for the bottom half of Chinese households.
Heck, in Thailand in 2022, the median household only spends 1.4% of their income on medical care [1] and with a significantly higher household disposable income ($600/mo) and significantly better health indicators.
Literally reducing the per capita Chinese household's healthcare spend to the same ratio as Thailand's would unlock an additional Yuan 2,200 a year that can be used on discretionary spend. That itself could unlock (back of napkin math) almost $161 billion in potential discretionary spending or an additional 0.7%-0.8% of GDP growth, thus allowing China to hit the 5% GDP growth target while also reducing overproduction and increasing health standards.
And that's just healthcare.
This is why China needs a LBJ and FDR style Great Deal and New Deal reform. China is growing much slower than it should be because of pigheadedness at the upper echelons of leadership preventing this kind of development.
[0] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501...
[1] - https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...
China's median age is now 40. 20 years ago the college enrollment and urbanization rates were much lower. That's why the numbers alone don't tell the whole story for a fast changing economy like China's. You need to look at disaggregated numbers if you want to make predictions.
Also the number you quoted lumped housing together with other costs. China has very high home ownership and home prices are very elevated. Much public services and transport infrastructure builds are funded through government land sales and therefore through home sales. That could also skew the data.
Another problem with the national median data is the great variations in development levels and therefore cost of livings across geographic regions.
It's not easy to change the spending habits of the older adults. Consumption is also work. It's about increasing utility, not just spending. Consider the time after the Fukushima when misinformed consumers hoarded salt. It would be hard to argue that consumption increased utility. You want consumers to be informed, you want spending to discriminate against incompetent manufacturers and bad services. If older adults get more utility from watching their bank accounts grow than doing the work to consume without regrets, just shoveling more money indiscriminately isn't going to stimulate consumption much.
Not a single thing you have said justifies not expanding the social safety net in China. I have literally provided data from 国家统计局, and all you have provided are anecdotes about why expanding the social safety net will not have an impact.
Show me the data that justifies not expanding the social safety net in China. I have provided a moral, economic, and developmental reason all showing the net benefit for China to expand the social safety net - and this is a fairly common view in Chinese academia as well.
To continue using my healthcare example, only the top 20% of households in China even have a disposable household income (Yuan 95,000 [0]) comparable to China.
In fact, the bottom 60% of Chinese households have a lower disposable household income than that in Thailand. For these households, an additional Yuan 2000 a year would be have a significant positive impact.
If you think trickle down economics work and expanding the social safety net is unnecessary, just come out and say it - just like the Xi administration did.
But you cannot deny the wealth gap that China has - and it is a severe one compared to it's peers at it's GDP per capita. The only other country amongst China's developmental peers with a similar disparity is Brazil.
If this disparity is not resolved, then best case a plateau similar to Malaysia's occurs.
[0] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2024/indexeh.htm
Your arguments are not supported by what is actually happening. They just rolled out child payments and I support that. Pensions grew very fast for 体制内 people and there is scant evidence that stimulates spending other than burdening local finances. 大病保险 reimbursement rate is also up a lot while office visit costs are kept very low and while I think that is good there's little evidence that it stimulates consumption. Your attack on my analysis as annecdotes is ridiculous. For one to induce change one needs differential data to get the derivatives on proposed changes and your citation of national bulk statistics at a point does nothing of that sort. Secondly on the ground experience can provide directions that inform experimentations. Government finance is tight. You don't want to get another 100% GDP in debt with little to show (as in Japan). Thirdly this is not an academic forum and I am not an expert. If you feel like you are one you can write papers on your ideas. Attacking me isn't going to achieve anything.
> They just rolled out child payments and I support that
Absolutely, and it's a good start, but more can be done. This is literally the bare minimum.
> Pensions grew very fast for 体制内 people and there is scant evidence that stimulates spending other than burdening local finances. 大病保险 reimbursement rate is also up a lot while office visit costs are kept very low and while I think that is good there's little evidence that it stimulates consumption
体制内 only represent around 4% of Chinese according to the 2018 census [0], but I would be shocked if the number in 2025 has broken 5%. Most Chinese are not 体制内, and any impact of 体制内 social spending expansion has no bearing on China as a whole.
> Pensions grew very fast for 体制内 people and there is scant evidence that stimulates spending other than burdening local finances
Most Chinese - and especially elderly Chinese - are not 体制内. The majority of social safety spend it basically gated for 体制内.
> 大病保险 reimbursement rate is also up a lot
Show me the data and show the the trendline. What is the rate of change. Is it statistically significant?
While the rate of catastrophic health emergencies (ie. those health emergencies that can bankrupt a household) has reduced from ~16% in the early 2010s to ~13.8% in 2022 [1], this is still an elevated rate.
In both studies, severe spatial inequality was found. An acquaintance who was an alum of the same research group as mine who returned to China to work in healthcare investment banking and then a C9 research and lecturer position worked on a similar study, and they had to return to the US because their grant was pulled because it ruffled some feathers at their department.
> Your attack on my analysis as annecdotes (sic) is ridiculous
Anecdotal evidence is evidence that is unsourced. As I mentioned before, show me the data if you are giving assertions.
> You don't want to get another 100% GDP in debt with little to show (as in Japan).
Absolutely, and this is what makes me annoyed. Industrial policy is good, but the manner in which it was approached from 2017 onwards was reckless. Look at EVs as an example.
Billions of dollars were burnt by provincial owned SOEs to build EV brands yet none of them aside from SAIC has even come close to competing with private sector BYD (which had a comparative advantage of being a leader in battery chemistry for decades that pivoted into automotive around 2008-09). Nor did EV manufacturing provide a significant amount of jobs for a large number of provinces.
The comparative advantage that Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and arguably Anhui had in automotive manufacturing should have meant the rest of the provinces in China and some of the central SOEs should have have even touched EV production, and could have reallocated capital to either building industries that these provinces had a comparative advantage in or spend on social welfare. Yet mid-level functionaries incentivized this kind of spending to climb up the ladder as well as induce demand on LGFVs during the real estate crisis.
And that's just EVs. This is a common problem across Chinese industry, and it is discussed at C9s and amongst diaspora academics as well, but the upper echelons of leadership response very very slowly. Heck, I was warning on HN that there was going to be central intervention into the EV price war years before the recent actions by the central government.
> this is not an academic forum
It is commonly accepted on HN to give sources to assertions, as a large subset of us were ex-academics.
> If you feel like you are one you can write papers on your ideas
Been there, done that. The research group I was affiliated with back when US-China relations were more optimistic advised on what became 精准扶贫 because of 李克强's backing.
> Attacking me isn't going to achieve anything
Asking for sources to assertions is not an attack. Asking for basic data analysis (which is a table stakes skill in the tech industry in 2025) is not an attack.
[0] - https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_29893197
[1] - https://www.zgggws.com/cn/article/pdf/preview/10.11847/zgggw...
Chinese leaders also: "gee, why aren't our people having more babies anymore?"
“Probably for the same reasons as Americans.”
As my mother once said during her time as a hospice nurse, “We’re all dying, some just faster than others.”
They really are going all-in on the capitalism over there.
It is a society where power is strictly organized into a clear pyramid. This model predates capitalism by a lot. If anything, true capitalism is more chaotic and probably churns the layers of the society more. This is more akin to a feudalism with capitalist characteristics, with the Party instead of the bluebloods.
Actually the idea is to assimilate as many elites as possible into the party and then allow certain infighting. The rest of the people are simply Human Resources.
Ironically, not too different from the US.
China has ownership in all major companies and influences all major decisions. This isn't really capitalism.
In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
> In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements.
What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".
A thing that could be interesting particularly for hn folks: in China, you can sue entities for open source license violation citing American-origin licenses like GPL, and win. There are many such cases. So one can potentially sue e.g. Onyx over their Linux kernel usage and stop their violation. This hasn't happened probably simply because no one cared enough.
This assumes that the Chinese have not been skilling up during that time of stolen IP. They have been.
IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.
Using this definition, identities are only copied, and not stolen.
Learning from the Chinese is entirely different than using operatives to take the corporate secrets from lets say the biggest steel company in the world, and then driving them out of business within a few years.
If this is the world you want to live in, fine. Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal oprecourse.
> Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal recourse.
To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.
Tesla bought a company called Grohmann Automation in 2017, factory automation company. I am not sure what Tesla learned from Chinese…
Tesla's first purpose built car factory was built in China using mostly local expertise. Their Berlin factory is basically a copy of their Chinese factory. Grohmann Automation was to super automate their factories, which is why the Model 3 roll out was such a disaster and which they abandoned in favour of conventional car manufacturing techniques.
All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related.
Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist)
A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"
I struggle to distinguish between what you’ve described as not really capitalism and the currently existing state of the U.S.
Googl Guy Standing.
Gig work is actually totally fine with an adequate welfare state and reduced work week.
Too bad China has neither of those things!
I know little about China, but every so often I meet someone who's rather fond of it (usually a passionate hardcore leftie¹), and says stuff like "in China nobody is unemployed, in China nobody is homeless" because apparently somehow the state provides (bad, but existing) work and housing for everyone. This seems to directly oppose your comment that China has no welfare state. Who is right?
¹) for context, here in NL "America good China bad" is a bit less clear-cut than in the US, where I assume most people read this comment from. That said at least the "China bad" part is still the majority opinion by far.
I’m a moderate American who lived in China for 9 years. China is a mixed bag, they do some things right (their transit build out, their investments in green energy/tech, healthcare, employment) and some things bad (real estate bubble that makes 1980s Japan blush, environment was in tatters until recently, autocratic, youth job opportunities kind of suck right now, 996, welfare doesn’t really exist).
As far as the simplistic “X good Y bad”, those are never right anyways.
I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. YOu can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.
To be clear China certainly has homeless people. There actually is some form of welfare state, but often it is not sufficient, especially if you're not party related, and you can only get it in your assigned city/home town. If it's not enough to pay for housing and there aren't any jobs available in your region you're shit out of luck.
> I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. You can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.
I'm not sure what you're on about. I was referring to specific unnamed people. I never suggested that their opinion is representative of the left, just that some lefties somehow, to my surprise, seem to think that today's China is a dream state that we should strive to emulate.
FWIW, I consider myself to be on the left as well, and I do not think that the China model is widely celebrated on the left (or anywhere in Dutch politics really).
>(usually a passionate hardcore leftie)
If you don't mean it, then don't say it. Your original comment can read as if you look down your nose at 'lefties' because they like the CCP.
As a "softcare leftie", my understanding is that China does in fact have a weak welfare state.
I think it's better for pensioners than working-age poor — typical gerontocracy. I think some healthcare stuff exists on paper but it sucks.
They also have the hukou system, and migrant workers often do not have the same benefits as native residents.
I think that much of the misunderstanding comes from the perception that China has a highly centralized authoritarian government which is all powerful within the state, which is true to some degree, but the regional governments are what effectively "run" most of the state, including things like infrastructure initiatives that most people would assume are state controlled. The big bold State planning also is in fact implemented in different ways by different provinces.
Then people put that framework into a western context of states and national government, which isn't right either. There is a lot of power balancing and interplay between the provincial and national governments, and the binding force is the CCP itself which doesn't have a clear western parallel either.
Devolving social services to provinces is indeed very American! More than European.
You can move to a new state or city to look for services. If you become homeless anywhere in the USA, you are more likely to wind up in a west coast city eventually looking for fair weather and services. In contrast, in China you can’t just move from your poor village to Shanghai and expect help and to not be harassed by police. They at best will just put you on a bus back to your poor village. Even worse, you could have been born in Shanghai but are still considered an illegal immigrant because your parents didn’t have Shanghai hukou. You can be deported to a poor village that you’ve never been to before.
Yeah agreed. I just meant having the provinces operator the services is like here. Hukuo is not like here.
(Though there is a funny internet joke that American NIMBYs want hukuo at home.)
Living in Seattle, I have to admit that I’ve thought of wanting hukou before. We will never solve our homeless problem if the more local resources we apply to it and the better we do, the worse the problem gets (because who doesn’t want to show up to get that free housing).
This is an advantage of pursuing cheap market rate over insatiable section 8 and LIHTC subsidies, yes.
The scale of a typical European "nation" (in population) is roughly the size of a Chinese province.
Appreciate your response, thanks for the clarity. I think whoever downvoted me thought I was being insincere but I really wasn't - it's not a weird idea to expect a country that calls itself communist to have something resembling a welfare state!
A lot of people like to say "China is actually a lot like America" with a big smirk
- plenty conservatism
- weak welfare state
- big
- diverse-ish, but with single dominant ethnic group
- aging gerontocracy (but that's everywhere)
- real estate fetish
95% Han China is way less diverse than 60% white America.
During the rule of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia, not working was a crime, so "nobody is unemployed, nobody is homeless" was trivially ensured by chucking such people into prison.
OTOH you had a lot of state-sponsored jobs where you just had to show up, but not necessarily work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)
The Czech offence was called "Příživnictví", which is just "Parasitism".
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C5%99%C3%AD%C5%BEivnictv%C3%...
China has very little to do with left except in the names maybe.
The Chinese State hasn't provided jobs and housing for decades. Their own statistics shows youth unemployment at 19% (August 2025). The struggles of migrants in the cities is well-known. I personally witnessed homeless people in Beijing. Your leftish interlocutors haven't updated their information since Mao Zedong died; Deng Xiaoping starting undoing Communism in 1979 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_relations_in_China
If you are self-employed and paid by the job/hour "reduced work week" is not really viable. This applies in Europe, too.
Where in an equilibrium where gig wages are too low, because the precarity means the gig worker is desperate.
With enough welfare state, the gig worker wouldn't be so desperate, and gig rates would go up. Of course they would push some employers back to permenant employment, but this is fine. It would be like spot market vs longer term deals for everything else.
I'm convinced the length of the workweek is totally exogenous. I don't think there is a feedback mechanism within capitalism to adjust it. This is actually a bummer.
Jobs like food delivery for Deliveroo, etc. are very low productivity and consumers are not willing to pay a lot for delivery.
This type of jobs can only be paid at the low end. Rates don't go up, they can't. What's happening s is that those jobs and services disappear. That's good if that leads to higher productivity, better paid jobs, but not if that leads to unemployment.
This has an impact on the length of the workweek, too. But in any case all self-employed must decide whether they can afford to cut their hours or if they can commercially.
The "welfare state" must be paid for somehow, too.
If it's too low productivity then it shouldn't exist. This is, mathematically speaking, orthogonal to gig vs non-gig.
This sounds like a value judgment or authoritarian edict. Luckily in a free society this is not for anyone to decide.
Doesn't gig work sidestep the mandated work week and other hard won employer obligations like holiday pay, health insurance, workers' safety, retirement benefits, etc? Or is your point that with adequate welfare there would be no gig workers?
If someone is working but still needs welfare then the state is just subsiding company payrolls by indirect means. Strongly disagree that gig work is fine as long as there is welfare.
If a given person's labor is of poor enough quality such that its value is not enough to provide whatever is considered a reasonable quality of life in a given circumstance, adding a UBI or other welfare payment is not just subsidizing employers
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Thinking lately how it mirrors "piece work" that, I think, countries like Japan used to have (still have?).
From this podcast - all clothing that is mass produced is still made this way - even in the USA.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-cl...
Piece work was one of the driving forces behind labor union movements.
"Piece work" is an English phrase because it was common in the UK and America.
I'm reacting to having seen it in "The Twilight Samurai" and perhaps other Japanese films depicting that era.
What revenue is that welfare state based on?
Labor income, just as before?
You had me at the first sentence. My fingers were itching to comment.
> And though their algorithms can be cruel taskmasters, pushing drivers to drive recklessly fast, they are an improvement on gangmasters who used to match workers and employers.
> The final lesson, therefore, is that governments should rethink the social contract to make gig work as beneficial as possible
Is this author trolling or am I dumb?
The sentiment reminds me of this old 19th century labor movement song "The Dollar Alarm Clock" (although in that song, they were making fun of it)
https://politicalfolkmusic.org/blog/john-healy/dollar-alarm-...You're reading The Economist.
I think the problem is the middleman'ness of it. There has to be a better way where the software in the middle is more of a cheap service fee just connecting negotiating parties, instead of extracting as much value as possible from both sides.
Sadly this world has no concept of open source altruistic software to fix big problems like this. Linux is amazing, but nothing like it may ever happen again on its scale, and as its oldest and beardiest die off... it will fall
I’ve not driven Uber Eats but a friend of mine had. The app doesn’t push you. YOU push yourself if you have a certain personality and want to maximize earnings.
Back in the day, and it is still true to this day in many places in the world, one way to keep worker "motivated" was to have an abysmal low wage, with barely possible targets to reach to unlock a bonus that would make it possible to eat at the end of the month.
The gig economy is just an extension of this, but instead of low wage, you now have no wage.
From a capitalist point of view, it is very efficient for low-skill job. Almost anyone can join, increasing the supply of worker and therefor lowering the amount you have to pay them, until the point where you just can't make a living out of the gig. The perfect "balance point". It also get rid of the unproductive (old, handicapped, injured, or just people who have a family to take care of) worker rapidly and with no fuss (no costly firing procedure), and only keep the ones who can make the required grind to be able to live.
It is truly the end goal of capitalism, finally turning human into just another resource to be used and discarded when it has been used.
You are both the exploited and the exploiter.
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Not just that, HN normally avoids political topics; anything related to Israel is quickly flagged to oblivion. But as soon as China is mentioned suddenly it's all about Mao.
Do you disagree that China regularly censors speech? Retaliates against dissent? Locks masses up people up for being the wrong race or religion?
Don’t get me wrong there are some amazing things about China. Freedom isn’t one of them.
For someone criticizing commentators here let’s hear your credentials regarding knowledge of China. Or are you just a bot reflexively criticizing anyone who questions China?
I think their point is many americans are simply not capable of having an honest debate about the pros / cons of living in both countries. It’s OK to not like a country and give them credit where credit is due.
They just say china has NO FREEDOM and CANT TRUST THE CCP, and shut down the conversation, as if the debate has been won? As if no other metric matters in a society. There is nuance - which 90% of the comments on this post have missed.
Most importantly, most commenters are not entering the discussion with an open mind. In which case there’s not point in debating anything. It’s a waste of time.
I think china just is a big problem for the west, their even development on such a massive scale is hard to deny, raising 800 million out of poverty in 40 years, that's 3/4 of all poor people in the world raised out of poverty. In contrast western liberalism prescribed shock doctrine and endless austerity. People are inundated by propaganda, there is no independent thought, but the collective psyche is left in a bad place which makes us vulnerable. I think that's why psychotic right-wing cults like maga are on the rise everywhere, it's capitalizing on the vulnerable state liberalism has left us in.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
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The article came across as alarmist while completely failing to provide the bigger picture of whether this is actually a bad thing or not. We instantly assume it's bad because it would indeed be awful for us in the US to live like that.
I'd be interested in knowing how these workers get by, is housing and other important things cheaper there?
Flexible employment is not a bad thing, in fact, it's great. What would be bad here is not being able to afford basic necessities in a system like that and this article completely ignore that side of the equation.
Housing is cheaper, and pretty much everything else is cheaper also. For example the meals these workers deliver are very affordable. You will only pay more for imports.
Gig work is a warning sign but I honestly think China is far better equipped to deal with this than the West.
In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically.
Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.
China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.
Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy.
China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough.
The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.
>China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.
How do you come to that conclusion? As far as I understand it it's the complete opposite, housing is basically the only way the Chinese can invest. Hoarding is rampant, those who got in early have several properties, the rest nothing.
Because China has a dual housing system to ensure availability of affordable housing, something almost nonexistent in the West (other than Vienna).
Yes people invest in housing. That's not the point. The point is China has a policy goal of making sure people have access to housing, something again almost nonexistent in the West.
All of the West has social housing subsidised by the government. A quick Google tells me most of Western Europe has a much higher percentage of people living in social housing than China.
> Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen
This is very untrue. A lot of richer Chinese owners a bunch of apartments that they are holding for speculation, maybe they rent it out (and often not), but it’s still very much hoarding. You got a lot of sweetheart deals that happened 20+ years ago where many connected Chinese were able to acquire apartments, villas, and so on as opportunities.
Also, since the stock market is a hot mess, real estate acquisition was seen as the only real way to hold wealth in China.
> China considers housing to be a public right, which it is
You have more options for substandard housing in the cities (like sub basement room rentals aka “the ant tribe” in Beijing), but I also have no idea where you got this from. Rural hukou have the right to their land, but because they can’t sell it they can’t use it as collaterals in loans and such, making their life even harder.
> There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen.
Even the most pro-China commentators don't make up such nonsense.
> At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.
I'd completely agree here. It's difficult to blame democratic governments for this though -- throughout the west nobody wants to build enough supply to deal with the problem.
Your second part of landed vs unlanded. Implement a land value tax and distribute it as a universal basic income, and that solves that problem. Nobody wants that either, they think they like it and then come out "oh of course $favoured_group shouldn't pay it"
You won't see a land value tax for the same reason there are constraints on housing supply: because existing homeowners are essentially single-issue voters when it comes to do with anything about housing. Aesthetically progressive people turn into raging fascists the second you propose building slightly higher density housing near a train station that they're nowhere near.
In my ideal world I would:
1. Massively hike property taxes on non-income generating housing;
2. Make anyone owning housing subject to state, local and federal taxes on their worldwide income;
3. Get rid of preferential property tax rates and caps on property tax increases (eg Prop 13 in California). If you want to not force old people to sell immediately, defer their property taxes until death. This is exactly what Texas does;
4. Build for transit; and
5. Have the government be a massive supplier of social housing.
So you rule out LVT because it can't be implemented. What makes you think your list is more likely to be implemented?
This does not match my understanding of China. Do you live in China?