China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix.

The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.

Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.

This reads like vague posturing instead of accepting (or even just looking at...) the reality on the ground.

I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.

The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.

> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China

I don't think this is the case at all.

People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.

Maybe you've missed the things happening in the last year or two, but already most of the world is pivoting to China for stability, and there is presently a sharp and historic decline in US immigration now.

The sad situation is that neither is stable. China could be the new hegemon, but they would have to make decisions leading to the creation of a domestic consumer middle class that is not directly or perhaps even indirectly dependent on the goodwill of the party. Not to mention it would make some ridiculously wealthy people less so. They will not do that. So we are going to have no hegemon. No deep safe sink to store value. If you want stability you will have to pay a premium for gold or Swiss francs because neither can handle the volume demanded. The world will get messy and who knows how long it will last.

I follow your line of thinking and mostly agree... however, would like to also point out that barring apocalyptic scenarios - there are always deep safe value sinks if you consider your needs from first principles.

Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live. All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).

So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.

Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?

Yes on a personal level you are right, and that is a good idea.

Less true now that we've made several attempts to deport our own citizens.

The Middle East wars were a reputational hit. The current issues are personal risks. Wildly different.

Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?

Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).

> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.

As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.

Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.

It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.

This isn't reddit. I saw this first hand.

> It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc.

This discussion thread is very specifically about the US vs China, however.

And his point is that's a false dichotomy.

> As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation.

I find that hard to believe. Applications to top U.S. colleges and graduate schools are at an all-time high and acceptance rates keep falling.

No one that has an Ivy League offer or even a state school like UCLA or Michigan would go to Canada or Europe, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge.

> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.

Whatever makes you sleep at night.

> no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.

Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter.

On both counts, you're too stuck in your ways. Times have changed, gotta keep up.

This is untrue: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/reddit-us...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook-...

Reddit has far fewer users in most countries outside the US than facebook.

Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.

No, it is true. You missed the "under 30s" qualifier. Facebook indeed remains incredibly popular in the 40+ category, which is dominant given demographics in most countries of the subset I mentioned: "youth speaks good English".

> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.

Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".

We're close to the tenth year of the era of Trump, so a decade of reputational loss has already taken place. It's the tenth year of leadership by men who should be home yelling at televisions and cheating on golf courses, not leading countries.

What nonsense. The "rest of the world" understands the message loud and clear: China shows up to do business. America shows up to bomb. It's a pretty reasonable choice. Anyways, people now ant a BYD, not a Chevy - because its a better car.

I can't think of any time in the last 50 years when anyone outside of the US actually wanted a Chevy, aside from a rare person who wanted a Corvette maybe.

The car that's actually been super-popular outside its own national borders for a long time now is the Toyota, not anything from the US. BYD is indeed changing this.

>The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.

Only if you ignore everything the US has done to the rest of the world.

Exactly. And what is the EU doing to attract American talent that doesn't want to live under the Trump regime with his ICE stormtroopers? Nothing really. Meanwhile, highly accomplished people in the US with Chinese ancestry are being wooed to China to do important R&D there.

Did you just compare Chinese immigration enforcement favorably against "ICE stormtroopers"? Foreigners in China have to tell the police where they live, even if it's just a stay in a hotel, and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes. There isn't a problem of illegal immigration in China because the police are so strict, nobody can get away with it!

Strict police does sound quite a bit less bad than fascist police...

You have to know very little about China to think that it is somehow more favorable to foreigners and minorities than the US.

What the US does is bad, but somehow Americans think that means everywhere else is better.

I don’t know but I and my friends still visit China regularly, but not the US anymore, because we have no clue what’s the expectation there to not be in a jail for weeks. I have quite clear idea what the expectation in China, but not the US. Maybe there is something to it.

China is great for visitors, especially lighter skinned visitors. You probably won’t go to jail in China unless you have a thing for drinking a lot in Chinese bars, even then you will probably be ok as long as you don’t pick any fights.

Illegal immigration really isn’t a thing in China beyond a few North Koreans in Dongbei and a few Laotians in Yunnan. So they just won’t assume you are an illegal immigrant.

I know that China is an authoritarian near-dictatorial country that oppresses minorities and commits cultural genocide. And I am not an American.

That does not seem to be all that related to the original post I was answering to. An average person / citizen / visitor has way less to worry about around (trained) Chinese police than they have to worry about around an (gangster) American ICE agent.

You should also know that China doesn't have as much rule of law as America and indeed average people have a lot to worry about around the police, and generally are very careful not to do things that will get them beaten up. But it happens nontheless - violent assaults on street sellers by police, for instance. In China, people are actually scared of the police because the policemen have so much arbitrary power. They're not strictly and fairly enforcing the law at all.

Seems a lot more humane than allowing such things and then one day sending armed masked men to kidnap people from the street.

The major point being is that China doesn't have sanctuary cities. This wouldn't happen if the cities didn't safe harbor the illegals.

Most replies at this point will shift the goal posts stating 'due process', again keeping on topic, not available in China either.

I'm just going appreciate the irony someone comparing Chinese civil liberties with relation to internal security forces favorably with the US.

Say what you want about ICE, but the reason they wear masks is that the US citizenry still holds power (explicitly with firearms, implicitly with voting, and legally via the judicial system).

In China, they don't have to wear masks.

Seems like everyone forgot that before locking down in early 2020, Beijing was trying to ship the view that healthy people wearing masks is immoral - because HK protesters needed those to protect themselves from persecution. Oh, and umbrellas too, because surveillance cameras :) Really shows you the people in PRC huh?

(And then a U-turn where anyone that doesn't wear a mask [even for participating volleyball matches or flute concerts] is an enemy of the state. And if you are a disabled elderly and lockdown yourself, refusing the state-mandated tests, you are an enemy of the state. And they knock down your apartment doors to gas your cats and dogs.)

I really hope the red necks tearing down the procedural system of justice, as well as the left network hosts that got bedazzeled just after a trip to china know what they're asking for. Beware the wishes you make.

>>and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes

As compared to that Irish guy who has been in the US concentration camp for 5 months now, the court ordered his release which ICE just ignored and they won't deport him either. Yeah, definitely sounds much better than what China is doing.

Godwin's law? It seems dismissive of the holocaust to call ICE facilities concentration camps.

Unless they installed gas rooms and work until death requirements recently?

> Godwin's law? It seems dismissive of the holocaust to call ICE facilities concentration camps.

Concentration camps have a long history (you can start with the Wikipedia article on the topic). Nazi concentration camps in 30s and 40s, and the holocaust that they are linked to, happened over a relatively short time period in that history that continued even after. So Godwin's law indeed, brought about by yourself.

Concentration camps, work camps and extermination camps are three different things. Concentration camps have already been used by US to house Japanese citizens during WW2 and no one objects to that naming. What ICE is running is exactly this.

For EU it's quite difficult since it's harder to outmuscle American money in the first place