I guess in China, which has multiple mega cities, that is indeed a bit unremarkable. It's all relative.
I've traveled in China, and sometimes we just stop at some convenient roadside "village" for lunch, the kind of place that would have a Denny's and a gas station in the US. Except in China, the restaurant has five stories and it's bumper to bumper traffic outside. The population difference is really hard to get used to.
However, Wuxi's central Liangxi Qu (72 km²) had a density of 13000/km² in 02010, when Wuxi had a population of only 3.5 million. This was 944k people, 83% of the population of Birmingham proper in 02019. If that had increased proportionally, which seems unlikely, it would be almost 19000/km² today. Birmingham proper averages 4300/km².
I conclude that there is no plausible sense in which Wuxi is less "necessarily a big population center" than Birmingham.
See my longer comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408
I have no idea what your point is, because I got stuck every time at "why write years like that?".
It even looks like a postcode, in a sentence about city populations and areas.
1. interpreted as octal in various contexts
2. leading zero stripped off when dealing with it as a number and not a string.
handling dates is already hard as it is, I'll leave the solution to y10k to much more able hands in ~7-8 thousand years :)
On the other hand, 64k of RAM ought to be enough for everyone :-D
(16-bit years, hmm...)
Look, if you and I are talking about the population of Birmingham, but instead of speaking normally you are signing your comments to the tune of "Never gonna give you up", I'm not going to reply to anything about Birmingham. I'm going to go "Uh, what's with the singing, are you OK?"
I think you got what you wanted, which was to show to everybody how cool you are with your long now dates, and the conversation is exactly where you wanted it. You're welcome, happy to serve!
I couldn't resist the bait, I'm just a man.
What, you mean like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892923? Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ25-U3jNWM, about the other Birmingham? Or https://youtu.be/WQ0y-vO9QLE?t=60?
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Do you really think "What's with the singing?" would be a positive contribution as a response to any of those? More generally, is mindless conformism ever a positive contribution anywhere? Where could it be more unworthy than on a site named "Hacker News", founded to celebrate the achievements of nonconformists? Who appointed you to the Committee to Suppress Playfulness? Have you never heard that "hacking" is "the playful application of ingenuity"?
> show to everybody how cool you are
Using silly date formats is not a good measure of being "cool". Helping people understand things they didn't understand before—for example, by making substantive contributions to a discussion—is a good measure of being "cool".
> the conversation is exactly where you wanted it
Obviously enough, your comments are motivated by your internal motivations, not mine.
20:1 would be "Wuxi City" (i.e. prefecture where the 6.5 million comes from) as a whole to Birmingham the traditional "city proper" westerners would think. Looking at the actual data on that... 4628/268=17.2x - not bad for a swag :).
Again my point isn't "Birmingham is big stronk western city put puny Asian city shame" it's probably 3 fold at this point:
1) If you put Birmingham the city proper in urban China people would be saying it's a small city.
2) What people call a "city" in the west is usually vastly smaller than some of the places with "city" in the name in China, as such googling "population of <x> city" and comparing it to familiar "population of <y> city" is just going to confuse people more than help them understand how big these places are.
3) Wuxi is going to be a lot smaller in 2000 when the story was taking place than today, western cities don't have that kind of powerhouse growth anymore where you have to think when the event happened not just where.
.
Maybe you still disagree with my conclusion, and that's fine, mostly I wanted to get these 3 concepts out there regardless where the reader ends up on the matter.
I think we agree on the central point: that rags like the Grauniad systematically understate the sizes of urbanizations in China, in a variety of ways. We might disagree on why, and what the effect is.
As for #2, the question of what to call a "city" is sort of more about the cultural practices of translators than about patterns of urban growth. People in China mostly don't call Wuxi a "city"; I think they call it a 市 (the administrative unit), a 地级市 (the larger administrative unit Wuxi Prefecture), a 城市 (the social phenomenon), a 都市, or a 城. How the Guardian chooses to describe Wuxi for their English-speaking readers, mostly outside China, is really the question here.
You seem to be suggesting that writers draw the English-language line between "town" and "city" at a larger population level when they're talking about Chinese cities than when they're talking about cities in, say, England. I think you're correct. I picked three smaller "cities" in Jiangsu from Wikipedia to see how the English-speaking press describes them: Pizhou (population 163k; nytimes: "a village in Jiangsu Province in eastern China"), Yangzhong (pop. 344k; Grauniad: "a county-level city in Jiangsu province", "Yangzhong city"), and Jintan (564k; BBC: "the town of Jintan").
Wuxi has probably more than doubled since 02000, as you say, and Birmingham surely hasn't. However, even in 02000 I don't know if it was a "small city" in any absolute sense (rather than compared to Suzhou and Shanghai). Its population was surely already larger and denser than Birmingham's.
Some Western cities do have that kind of powerhouse growth; a bit of searching turns up Toluca, The Woodlands (arguably still too small to be a "city"), Brasilia, and Las Vegas. Their growth rates are in the same neighborhood as Wuxi's over the last 20 years. Brasilia, for example, has grown from 2.0 million in 02000 to 3.0 million today, 4.3 million in the metro area.
However, I'm not sure I understand your concern about how making these comparisons is "just going to confuse people." What kind of information do you think would be more useful for understanding how big Wuxi is than knowing that its population exceeds that of, for example, Mongolia, Puerto Rico, or any metropolitan area in Germany, and that the population density in its center is half that of Manhattan but three times that of Birmingham? If someone is led by the "small city" terminology to think that Wuxi is similar in size to Johnstown, PA (pop. 25000), or Wiesbaden (pop. 291000, metro area over half a million), they're already confused; wouldn't "googling population of Wuxi and comparing it to familiar population of <y> city" clear that right up?
At least after you cut through the terminological ambiguity of whether "Wuxi" means Liangxi Qu, the five districts of Wuxi City, or the whole Wuxi prefecture, and the analogous ambiguity of where to draw the limits of "London" (the Square Mile?) or "Sydney" or whatever familiar city you're comparing to, it seems like you'd be less confused after making those comparisons, rather than more confused.
Compared to Shuzhou and its other neighbors it's tiny. Small city is ok.
You can also interpret it as meaning "insignificant". A poor city with the same population as London has a much lower profile.
Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to have founded Rome, where the Etruscan kings still ruled. At that time, when Meili was half a millennium old —a century before Plato would found the Academy from which academia takes its name— Sun Tzu led the Wu army of King Helü to victory against Chu, making Wu one of the most important kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn Period, and making himself one of the best-selling and most influential writers in the 20th century, 2500 years later. Temples dating from the Wu period are still popular tourist attractions in Wuxi. It has been a major commercial center since before Charlemagne was born. In 1830, before two thirds of the population died in the Taiping Rebellion, Wuxi was half a million people, 4% of the population of the United States at the time.
Today, five million people live in Wuxi. It's one of the 100 biggest cities in the world, and 25% of China's microelectronics industry is in Wuxi; probably every electronic device in your house contains chips made in Wuxi.
Perhaps people think of Wuxi as "small" because it is part of the Shanghai metropolitan area. Shanghai proper has 24.5 million people, and has been one of the biggest seaports in the world for thousands of years — when Stonehenge was built, Shanghai was already at least a thousand years old. Wuxi is only half as old and five times smaller than Shanghai, and there are many ancient and enormous cities in the region, so by comparison Wuxi might seem small.
But most countries in the world do not even have one city as big as Wuxi. Wuxi is bigger than Berlin, Madrid, or Rome, or indeed any city in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, or New Zealand. It's bigger than Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, or Philadelphia. In Turkey, only Istanbul and possibly Ankara are bigger than Wuxi; in Australia, only (greater) Sydney and (greater) Melbourne are Wuxi-sized. It's three times the size of Dallas, San Diego, Birmingham (England), or Munich. More people live in Wuxi than in Oregon, Uruguay, the country of Mongolia, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Kentucky, Botswana, Iowa, Kazakhstan, Utah, or Qatar. Wuxi's population is triple Estonia's.
If you look at the first photo in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029, the big black area in the middle is Lake Tai. As the label tells you, Suzhou is the cluster of light on its right (east) shore; Wuxi is the cluster of light on its north (top) shore.
Another significant aspect of the situation is that China has just been through 200 years of absolute hell — including the worst civil war in history, multiple foreign invasions and occupations (including 14 years of World War II), by far the worst famine in history (one with the dubious distinction of being self-inflicted, unlike the famines in India and Ireland), the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the Qing dynasty. China is now recovering. Chinese electrical production has doubled during the last decade. Wuxi 10 or 20 years ago is not the same as Wuxi today.
— ⁂ —
Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialize anything they can about China. Consider the subtitle: "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen, and no one saw it coming." But in fact, although people many countries contributed smarts to the problem, Chinese smarts are by far the most relevant here.
Also, some people did see it coming; https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html are my notes on the subject from 13 years ago, where I wasn't entirely sure what form cheap solar energy would take, but concluded that there were so many promising alternatives that one would surely be successful. I looked hard to find a cost factor that kept the prices of PV cells so high, and couldn't find one, and noted that the internal economics of the situation seemed to mandate rapid cost decreases. Though I didn't know it, Swanson had been presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law at conferences sponsored by NREL and the like since at least 02004, so it wasn't just some eccentric in Buenos Aires taking notes on SEC reports and doing calculations—it was a credible calculation being presented at conferences.
A correction: Kazakhstan has 18.9 million people, which is a lot more than Wuxi, though less than Shanghai. Not sure how I made that error. However, Mongolia, the country, really does have only 3.4 million people.
A quasi-correction: though Dallas is only about 1.1 million people, the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area is 7.5 million people, which is bigger than the Wuxi prefecture (though not the Wuxi–Suzhou metropolis, which adds 10.5 million to the 6.5 million in the Wuxi prefecture, even without adding in Shanghai too). Similarly, the Chicago–Naperville–Elgin area is 9.5 million people, and the Houston metro is 7 million. These, plus LA and NYC, are the only metros in the US more populous than Wuxi prefecture.
And at any rate... it's pretty obvious he was referring to Wuxi today. I don't think anybody's about to have an issue referring to the Sparta of today as insignificant, its historical significance being whatever it might be.
I do think I made reasonable arguments that Wuxi today is far from insignificant, didn't I?
My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the center of civilization while you were backwards tribals", that sort of rhetoric.
Not saying that's what you meant, mind you.
I started with Wuxi's history mostly because I find it fascinating but partly because, without that paragraph, I thought someone might respond, "Well, sure, Wuxi is a big city now, but it doesn't have the depth of culture and tradition of a place like London—it's just a soulless consumerist metropolis!" or argue, "Sure, London's population is only twice Wuxi's, but it's a very high profile city because for centuries it ruled an Empire on which the Sun Never Set!", maybe mixed with some deniably racist remarks about "imitation" or "IP theft" or "sweatshops" (of which I think the Guardian's "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might" is a mild version).
I didn't want to leave an opening for that kind of silly nonsense. It misinforms people.
Tell me who in the West doesn't trivialise anything China related? Those people prefer to violently lash out over admitting things unpleasant to them.
The West needs to admit that "$name_of_western_country smarts and Chinese industrial might," usually means both Chinese smarts and Chinese industrial might, with a Western partner just appropriating the credit.
The crowd dominating intellectual discourse in the West make their countries a giant disservice by closing peoples eyes on this.
The loss of intellectual potential in Western economies came dangerously fast following the deindustrialisation.
With how thins go, the West will soon have nothing to show for its inability to make things, but also no brains to design it, and soon no money to buy it.
The famous "Designed in California, made in China" is not a statement of proves, but insecurity.
Look at, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... and in particular the recent works cited in the bibliography. Lots of Chinese research groups, a Korean one, some Arabic, some Indian, an Iranian/UK team, a team from Brazil, a few teams from the US (made up of foreign graduate students, of course).
Look at the citations to one of the Brazilian team's influential review papers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9038016761746238692... — what do the surnames of the authors tell you? On the first page, I see Indian, Spanish, Chinese, Hungarian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and English research teams, and from the US, Sajjad Ahmad's team at UNLV — first author, assistant professor Saria Bukhary of Pakistan.
It's far from an all-Chinese-research field.
But it certainly isn't just "Australian smarts" either.
Agreed about "Designed in California, made in China." That's an absurdity.
People have no idea how little their electronics industries mean on the world stage.
I believe it would be no big stretch to say that PV cells research in the West is nearly inconsequential to the industry, when all what matters happens within 100m of the silicon furnace without much pomp, and published papers.
I believe it's similar to how semi industry turned to be. Process engineering is a giant research discipline, but everything below the "tip of the iceberg," which is academic research, happens on the fab floor, and stays a factory secret. That's why importing Taiwanese engineers is a prerequisite to setting up any serious high volume fab on 300mm.
Oh, yeah, even the CKS32 chip on my Blue Pill only has a Chinese datasheet. It's common. (Worse is when you can get the Chinese datasheet at all only if you know the right people, who invariably live in Shenzhen. Or Wuxi, or maaybe Taipei.) It's not a totally new problem. My aunt had to learn German for her chemistry degree back in the 01960s, and here in Argentina pretty much everybody who learns to program has to learn English. Gauss wrote his dissertation in Latin; Euler wrote most of his papers in Latin. As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.
But where was RISC-V designed? At Berkeley. By professors and grad students from China, Korea, Vietnam, Poland, the US, Greece, and Germany, I think. (Asanović is naturalized American.)
I agree that there's a lot of unpublished knowledge (PV is part of the semi industry), and a lot of that knowledge is being created in places like Wuxi. But I don't think it's true that the tip of the iceberg we can see is so inconsequential. That tip is what prevents things like the circa-2000 capacitor plague, and many new developments originate in basic research long before they make it to mass production, PERC being perhaps the latest.
Also, you can bet that the rulers of Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt are not enthusiastic about their countries' access to their own abundant solar energy being dependent on their foreign relations with China, or on China's internal industrial policy; nor do they want their solar power stations to ship with Chinese remote kill switches—not currently a thing, but certainly feasible if China's bargaining position improves sufficiently.
We've seen how that kind of thing plays out many times: the US backdoor in Crypto AG hardware, the US blockade of oil to Japan in WWII, the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, the constant struggles with US export controls in every country that isn't the US (Tianhe-2 being a recent salient example), China's rare-earth exportation clampdown 10 years ago, the US oil blockade that led Germany to spin up Fischer–Tropsch coal liquefaction, the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh, and so on. So quite reasonably they're investing in the possibility of developing autonomous national solar industries, a 21st-century Saudi Aramco and YPF, just without the oil.
Will they be successful? Maybe. Or maybe they'd have to do what China did for process engineering: get Chinese PV companies to open factories in Egypt and Jordan in order to transfer the necessary knowhow.
> As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.
Care to explain it further?
(By the way, I searched for the quote to try to read it in the context in which it was first made but couldn't find it. So I guess it's a paraphrase.)
If you use your computer only through Nautilus, Firefox, and Instagram, you will commonly encounter software problems that you cannot solve, or solve only through a lot of manual drudgery. But, with a deeper understanding of the layers behind the simplified interface—layers which, for historical reasons, commonly work through "command lines", such as the JS console in the browser, the GRUB command line for booting Linux, or of course the Linux bash prompt—you often need only minutes to solve problems that would have taken hours or days to solve by hand.
Similarly, today, if you want to solve hardware problems, you will often find yourself confronted with datasheets or forum threads that are written in Chinese. If you don't speak Chinese, you will either be unable to solve the problem, or you will have to reconstruct the information needed through experimentation, or by help from someone who does speak Chinese.
Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London.
If Birmingham – the 20th biggest urban agglomeration in Europe – is small, what should the many hundreds of smaller cities be termed?
(London is a megacity.)
The Los Angeles metro area is also one of the largest in the world. It is very obviously a city by the same standards that define sprawling Asian cities, and it's larger than Chicago.
A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indian cities with millions of residents as "small". Wuxi had >1 million people in 2000, and today has like 3.5 million (6.5 million in the prefecture). This article makes it sound like a minor town in a remote province, but Jiangsu has about the same population as Germany, twice as populous as California, and is an industrial powerhouse ~with~ [edit: adjacent to] the busiest port in the world (Shanghai).
Nobody ever writes about "the small city of Dallas" or "the small city of San Diego" or "the small city of Birmingham" or "the small city of Munich".