By pretty much every imaginable metric China has improved for nearly everyone (in China) for the past 50 years. Is this also true in the USA?
I don't think China is superior to the USA, but to say China is in a "irreversible decline" is ridiculous.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/celt/eng/jmgx/jjxs/t124869.htm
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/china-economic-growth-histo...
Maybe decline is the wrong word, and collision course is a better one.
As China globalizes and becomes more exposed to the outside world, they will start to wonder why they can't vote on things like environmental regulation, or why the local factory pollutes their river but they have little say in that process.
In this sense, this is the decline. It's the CCP being undermined by their own economic liberalization.
Meanwhile I have access to delicious spring water from Alps.
China has achieved only superficial changes that will bite them in the ass in the future.
I dislike China but the US also has those issues, people are just unware of them.
Chinese has a booming middle class as well as a lot of poor people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not going to ban you right now because you've posted other comments that are within the intended use of the site, but you've been seriously abusing it also. Comments like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697627 are not ok.
Also the "lifting out of poverty" is standard propaganda spread by CCP https://www.firstpost.com/world/china-claims-to-have-ended-e...
What's nationalistic about that?
As for your GP post, if you read the site guidelines you'll see immediately why that wasn't acceptable as an HN comment.
And the so-called top dog of the west have cities where people for years had to get bottled water because the whole city were poisoned and whole states are drying out. Not everyone in the west are as lucky as those of us with clean water. Definitely not the US.
The point remains. Tap water is by default not drinkable, whereas water in the US is (barring some exceptions).
And how did it look in the US in the 70's when it were booming like China is now? Children in plastic cocoons because the air were toxic with lead, drinking water full of crap, dead fish everywhere from dumping of chemicals in lakes and sea, radioactive waste leaking, etc.
My in-laws are all Mainland Chinese. They have access to safe and good tap water, either back in their home town literally in the mountains or in a big city like Wuhan.
Air quality is not great, I'll give you that. But it's also not the worst, at least not in every measure. E.g. many big cities in China had lower NO2 levels than other big cities in other country, in 2016, and those numbers come from NASA: https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/no2/world/east-asia/wuhan
The majority of the people in China don't care about the kind of freedom you talk about. As a nation, they seem to have a very singular goal: follow the Party, make progress, and beat the rest of the world.
China is also attracting lots of young people from other parts of the world. There are quite a few twitter accounts of Laowais who seem to enjoy life in China because they've seen past the values of the West.
Sure. The people of Russia didn't care about freedom and just wanted to follow the Party, too. Until they were given the chance, and it turned out that they actually wanted freedom and didn't give a rip about following the Party, because the Party was denying them the freedom they wanted, and was feeding them a perpetual diet of lies in the process. And despite all the lies, they could tell that it was lies, and that it wasn't freedom.
Now, it didn't work out in Russia. They didn't wind up at freedom. They wound up back with lies. But the point is, however much it looked in Soviet years as though everyone wanted to follow the Party, that was just a facade.
Are the Chinese so different? Do they really not care about freedom? Do they really in their hearts want to follow the Party? Or can they tell that it's all propaganda, and they just are going along on the surface?
The one difference is that China has delivered a fair amount of prosperity to a lot of people, which the Soviet system didn't. That might buy the Party in China another generation. But then the next generation sees that as the baseline. Can the Party continue to deliver improved prosperity? And will that be enough to keep people from wanting actual freedom?
Interesting. What would you consider are the values of the West? And, in your opinion, what are the values of the Chinese society? And don't you think there are overlaps and so, which one?
No retorical questions, I am truly interesting in your answer.
I think that, as civilisations, we all aspire to mostly the same values. We just have very different priorities. For the Chinese, it's economic progress over freedom. (In fact, they are mostly free to say whatever they want as long as they don't try to rally and secede or topple the government. As a point of anecdatum, I discuss politics with my brother-in-law over WeChat. We don't always agree with the official narrative. Neither of us has been censored or arrested.)
And do you think that this is the case because of some sort of permanence in chinese culture or is it just a transient artefact of the economic situation?
Is Chinese middle class really a known variable?
If you look at the west, the current doxa was not always focused on human rights and individual freedom. The same drive to economic progress has actually dominated much of its history since the renaissance and it can be argued that it was the main engine to political progress. My grand parent main political goal was mainly to ensure they would have enough to go by once they get old.
Don't you think that, as chinese middle class's economic situation evolves, its priority might not also change?
I think what's going to happen in china in the next 20 years are going to have as much impact on the world than the colonization of the new world by europeans 500 years ago. And chinese middle class will be at the center of it.
> We don't always agree with the official narrative. Neither of us has been censored or arrested.)
And if the chinese government were to do something that you consider truly horrible, would you consider that expressing your opinion openly and publicly would be considered "to rally and secede"?
Again I am not trying to trigger you, I am just trying to understand a collective state of mind on which, I believed, we are poorly informed in the west.
... As a frequent visitor to China I can tell you its a mixed bag. Many areas enjoy western levels of water and air quality. Many areas do not. What is lost in environmental quality is offset by an unprecedented ability to escape poverty, an academic meritocracy (albeit testing based), and rising income and wealth levels the West cannot presently match.
3) Most people in the west get to enjoy freedoms chinese cant even talk about
... In absolute terms a large number of Chinese ethnicities and religions are seriously repressed and abused. In aggregate however, the Chinese system catapulted so many of its citizens out of poverty and into the middle class you will find as much (if not more) national pride at China's rise than you will contempt. I sadly observe that certain freedoms may prove to be overrated compared to others, along the lines of Maslow.
4) West is attracting young people from all around the world.
... The West needs a reversal of the balance of payments. The West needs good paying middle class jobs. The West needs to re-domesticate much of its supply chain. The West needs to prepare for high intensity war in order to deter/prevent it. This laundry list of Western needs is incompatible with the expectations of today's 'young people' who are oblivious to these existential threats, great power decline and the relative unimportance of their priorities to their actual survival.
2. Air quality is improving fast.
3. The the right to unaffordable health care?
4) Obviously you have never lived in China. Sorry to break the news to you. Yes, China is attracting young people from all over the world too.
3. They have clinics that would make most western clinics cry. Yes, they charge like western clinics too. But I have been for a minor thing in a normal Chinese hospital, a friend of mine had his appendix removed and another US friend of mine got a major surgery in a Chinese military hospital.
4. Don't know where you have been. Shanghai and Beijing is full of young and ambitious people from all over the world. They look for the future, not for the past. I was an immigrant in the US myself (also have an US passport now). The US was always closed for me. Zero opportunities. In China it is a brand new world. Opportunities, ambition, money. I consider it my home.
>4. Don't know where you have been. Shanghai and Beijing is full of young and ambitious people from all over the world. They look for the future, not for the past. I was an immigrant in the US myself (also have an US passport now). The US was always closed for me. Zero opportunities. In China it is a brand new world. Opportunities, ambition, money. I consider it my home.
How much does CCP pay these days? Do you get sponsored tours to Chongqing ?
"The Gobi Desert is expanding through desertification, most rapidly on the southern edge into China, which is seeing 3,600 km2 (1,390 sq mi) of grassland overtaken every year. Dust storms have increased in frequency in the past 20 years, causing further damage to China's agriculture economy. However in some areas desertification has been slowed or reversed.[15]
The expansion of the Gobi is attributed mostly to human activities, locally driven by deforestation, overgrazing, and depletion of water resources, as well as to climate change.[15]
China has tried various plans to slow the expansion of the desert, which have met with some success.[17] The Three-North Shelter Forest Program (or "Green Great Wall") was a Chinese government tree-planting project begun in 1978 and set to continue through 2050. The goal of the program is to reverse desertification by planting aspen and other fast-growing trees on some 36.5 million hectares across some 551 counties in 12 provinces of northern China.[18][19]"
"How much does CCP pay these days? Do you get sponsored tours to Chongqing ?"
No idea. They pay nothing to me. But I would happily take a passport. I going to get permanent residence rights through marriage. Otherwise I would attempt to become a HK citizen, since you cant get a mainland passport and the green card option is not very tempting on current legislation.
We've had numerous examples of third world style infrastructure failures (Flint water, Texas power outages) within the US that will likely continue. We have under invested in infrastructure for decades, while China has done quite the opposite.
Freedoms are increasingly becoming an illusion in the West. Saying something unpopular or taboo on the internet (even if it were years ago) is likely to cut you off from both your income and healthcare (as healthcare is tied to your employment).
All not to mention the simmering social unrest caused by insane income inequality, the levels of both private and public debt, and the likelihood of the dollar losing its reserve status in the next few decades. Things do not look good for the US.
Like look, I'll give you that there exist an incredibly small fraction of people that actually embody the spectre you are trying to conjure here. We have so so many more pressing issues in this country than fear of wokeness--like the rise of domestic white-supremacist terrorism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-gro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
One of the quotes from the most recent study which seems to contradict there's a rise in violence:
"White supremacists, extremist militia members, and other violent far-right extremists were responsible for 66 percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in 2020—roughly consistent with their share in other recent years. For example, on June 7, Harry H. Rogers—a self-proclaimed leader of the Ku Klux Klan—intentionally drove his pick-up truck into a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Henrico, Virginia. One protester was injured, and Rogers received a six-year prison sentence. In addition, anarchists, anti-fascists, violent environmentalists, and other violent far-left extremists conducted 23 percent of terrorist attacks and plots in 2020—an increase from the previous three years, in which violent far-left incidents comprised between 5 and 11 percent of all domestic terrorist attacks and plots. For example, on August 29 in Portland, Oregon, Michael Reinoehl—an Antifa extremist—followed two members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer and then shot and killed one of them, Aaron “Jay” Danielson."
These are important trends and I pay close attention to them as I believe we're going to be facing a sharply decreasing quality of life for the average American in the coming years which will provoke anger and unrest. These are going to be ingredients to serious problems, some of which will trigger a broad increase in violence. Unfortunately I have little faith in our current leadership or system to deal with these challenges.
Will they? As far as I know censorship has been amazingly successful
Most people in the West get to enjoy freedom and access to utilities money cant buy in China.
1) For once most people in the west have access to safe and good tap water.Chinese urban dwellers dont.
2) Most people in the west live in places with significantly better air quality than chinese.
3) Most people in the west get to enjoy freedoms chinese cant even talk about
4) West is attracting young people from all around the world.
Chinese middle class will demand the same standard of living like people in the West and CCP will be unable to give it to them.