Interesting idea. I know how to get his videos and even remember watching one. Wasn't impressed.
Someone (Eric?) downthread mentioned him bloviating about Xi's "incompetent" sycophants, which sounds like Zeihan, who I doubt knows a thing about how competent they are.
I think we as Americans largely fail to appreciate the strength of our local organizations and governance, and the tremendous advantage that represents.
I’m guessing the standard response from this board would be that our local institutions are at risk due to lowered trust levels because of diversity. But I find most American municipalities quite nice. It’s only when the number of idle persons rises to a too high level you get problems.
I'm no China expert, but I was just up in Shenzhen today, and I've lived next door to the PRC for the past 35 years, and have been there many many times, so I'll make a couple of comments.
First, I'd say you're on the right track, Steve. Perceptions of China in the USA and other western countries seem to vacillate wildly, between a grim 1980s greyscape with everyone in Mao jackets, to an invincible futuristic surveillance state run by impossibly prescient and cunning planners who know exactly how many times everybody in the country has tried to watch Apple TV using a VPN.
The truth seems to be way more complicated, and maybe more boring. China has a lot of the same problems as other industrial to (increasingly) post-industrial countries. And they're maybe not quite the juggernaut of totalitarianism they're portrayed as in surprisingly bipartisan circles in the USA.
What China does have is a lot of really impressive new infrastructure. How much it's all going to pay off, with a population that's now falling, is an interesting question. More on this later; I've got to get some sleep now.
> "The truth seems to be way more complicated, and maybe more boring."
Best summation of this and many other epochal questions!
> "For example, I recommend this DM article, which is unusually well-written and informative."
Also emblematic of the Current Year: punchy popular tabloid is more accurate than the serried ranks of the prestige press.
> "with a population that's now falling"
That's what I keep hearing, but in my own visit there, I saw children and families everywhere: schools, tourist spots, on the streets of unfashionable cities. Far more children—proportionally—than I would see in the equivalent Western places, even places with supposedly higher fertility. And these children were all native Chinese, unlike the West where half the children you do see are the children of third world imports of some stripe.
Whatever supposed demographic problems China has, they pale (heh) next to what the West has set itself up for.
"That's what I keep hearing, but in my own visit there, I saw children and families everywhere: schools, tourist spots, on the streets of unfashionable cities."
Perhaps a modern day Grigory Potemkin was staging them? In Future they may be known as the Almost Missouri children.
I was recently in Shanghai (not an unfashionable city) and children are common in the public parks. I don't really see reason to be surprised that you see children in schools.
I don't know how much I'd read into that, though; the parks are there in part to be destination for children. They're surrounded by huge multi-story residential complexes, but it's not like the ground-level park is overcrowded. Within my own residential complex, I saw a few children. I'm sure there were more than I saw. But I didn't get the impression that they were all over.
> "I don't really see reason to be surprised that you see children in schools."
Fair point. It was meant to be a compressed way of saying, "I saw groups of schoolchildren out and about everywhere, as well as children coming and going from school."
In other words, the schoolchildren portion of pedestrian traffic was higher than I was accustomed to in the West.
Thanks. Indeed, the new infrastructure is beyond belief. Look up Wikipedia's list of the tallest bridges in the world and it's dominated by incredible bridges built in the mountains of Southern China in this century.
Western media often runs “Chinese GDP figures are made up “.
I’m sure there is some massaging of the figures to keep them even from year to year.
But this century China has built 2/3 of all high-speed rail ever built in the world, has put a rover on the moon, can drop-ship ten items for $50 to your house on another continent in ten days.
I could go on but anyone who thinks China will not achieve first-world living standards very soon is deluded.
I got a feel for modern China when I read the book "The Girl With Seven Names" by North Korean Hyeonseo Lee. She slipped over the Yalu River and worked in a variety of businesses in China. She used seven different names to cover her tracks. The book is very interesting and I highly recommend it. I got the idea from Miss Lee's book that China has a plethora of small businesses working alongside a corrupt government. Maybe China is a bit like Mexico.
I have read a lot about modern, conservative market-economy China, and it has its problems and its strengths. I also read a very interesting book called Wild Ginger by Anchee Min, that takes place under Mao's Cultural Revolution. Note, he launched that craze to take power from other leaders in the party by creating supporters to threaten them with, so not even then was it a top-down rule. (Before that, of course, he had killed tens of millions, and wrecked the economy, so they had good reason to take power from him.)
The book ends with the end of the cultural revolution, when no one is called "Maoist" anymore as everyone despises that word. The Maoists were the worst students in any school, typically children born of illiterate peasants who now got to feel like they were an elite, without studying. Even threatening and reporting on teachers. Everyone who is old enough to remember that period hates it. After that, and after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping set things right.
What people don't like today isn't that the party is "communist," but things like bureaucrats ignoring obvious health problems in a corporation's office buildings, because the bureaucrats are easily bribed by the businesses. And vitamin pills are sold with no quality checks - the lower price appeals to the masses, so they outcompete the better pills. After a while people catch on, but the business then disappears and comes back, same people with a new name. It's the same for clothes, etc. In a way, it's the libertarian paradise: Just a few bribes and you can create whatever shoddy product you want with no quality control. So thanks to the party's corrupt government officials, there's too LITTLE government influence, not too much.
But try to explain that to people and their heads explode. "But-but-but how am I going to fit that into my domestic U.S. propaganda? If I'm a leftist, that sounds racist against Chinese. If I'm right-wing, I have to roleplay against Communist China."
Also: Every now and then you read about a fireworks factory exploding in China, killing workers. Or a mine caving in, killing the workers. Or buildings falling down in earthquakes when they should have been built sturdier. Once, a school collapsed this way and killed many children.
In all these cases it's because bureaucrats are bribed to look the other way. Safety concerns are jettisoned, the school building was built with shoddy materials. The mines and fireworks factories are private businesses, note. Also, they pour out toxic waste on the factory floor, and the workers step in it and breathe it in. I know this from a first-hand source. The workers are peasants from the countryside who don't know how to complain. Government inspectors are bribed to stay away from these businesses.
--------------
But of course, majority-Chinese Taiwan and Singapore don't have this problem. It's in communism that the lack of concern for human life begins, and it remains now in the Chinese market economy. I remember reading about a Western reporter visiting Cambodia after communism. A little boy fell down from a tree and cracked his head against the street. Only this reporter rushed to help him, everyone else kept walking by. Homeless children were seen everywhere in the city.
Or look at the USSR, where Yuri Gagarin wasn't the first man in space in 1961. He was just the first to survive. Before that Italian amateur radio enthusiasts picked up the desperate pleas of Soviet kosmonauts dying in space when they couldn't get down to Earth.
After Gagarin's flight his close friend Komarov died in another rocket, which they knew had 203 quality flaws. They had written a detailed report that was ignored. Anyone who passed on the report was demoted or transferred. Komarov went up because if he refused, his friend Gagarin, the reserve pilot, would be sent up instead. (This was in 1967, in the attempts to make a rocket for a moon landing. Yuri Gagarin died in a MiG plane crash the next year, one year before the Americans landed on the moon. It's quite tragic. But I digress.)
A cursory examination of the unfettered capitalism of the early Industrial Revolution will reveal a complete lack of regard for human life, especially non-aristocratic life.
Children worked in mines and factories and on farms and died in their hundreds and thousands.
I despise communism with every fiber of my being, but it can’t be called unique in its inhumanity.
It's not "unfettered capitalism," people had it bad in all of history before that. It's just that thanks to the market economy and trade and innovation we now have it better.
The communist states came after that, when treatment of citizens had improved. So they had no excuse. And the "capitalist" Taiwanese, as I already wrote, never treated workers the way the communists did. Nor did the South Koreans treat workers like the North Korean slave owners did.
Yes, communism can be called unique in its inhumanity. They banned people from leaving - hundreds of millions of people forced to stay in communist countries. Then they forced them all to work for the small clique of people that owned everything. That has never happened before. Hundreds of millions of people enslaved. And communist nations, primarily the Soviet Union and China, killed in total more than 100 million of their own citizens.
In Cambodia run by the Red Khmers they slaughtered around a quarter of the entire nation - they killed people for knowing how to play classical music on the piano, or for owning a watch, or for knowing how to say something in a Western language. They took away people's money so they had no way of moving around and had to report to the food stations where their names were written down. Yes, communism is unique in its inhumanity.
The Soviet commissars who came to advice the Chinese were brutal monsters who had sought to exterminate the Baltic peoples before WWII stopped them, and then slaughtered Chechnyans after the war. But at least they had some logic in what they did. They were horrified when seeing the Chinese killing people for completely crazy reasons. The Chinese didn't kill as many millions as the Soviets did, but they were more insane in how they went about it.
Thousands of child workers absolutely died in the coal mines of Wales and northern England. (Edit: Let me amend this to say hundreds of child workers. I think thousands is too high to state credibly.) And in the coal mines of the Appalachians as well. That’s not at all controversial.
Feudalism wasn’t capitalism as we understand it, but serfs and peasants weren’t free to leave their feudal lords. The feudal system in pre-revolutionary Russia wasn’t very far removed from chattel slavery at all and it lasted almost to the end of Imperial Russia.
Again, I’m anti- Communist to the bone, but unfettered greed has a lot to answer for when it comes to appalling treatment of our fellow humans. Look at the Sacklers and the billions they earned from pushing opiates to their countrymen for a recent example.
> Feudalism wasn’t capitalism as we understand it, but serfs and peasants weren’t free to leave their feudal lords.
That is true as a matter of law.
In the wake of the bubonic plague, there was an epidemic of serfs leaving for better conditions elsewhere, and the nobles responded by making the laws forbidding serfs to leave their land much stricter.
But the tightening of the legal regime had no effect at all. This suggests that legal barriers were not a major contributor to the serfs' lack of mobility beforehand.
I've often wondered if when Mao started his Cultural Revolution by riling up China's youth into frenzies as giant rallies so he could take back power from his colleagues, if Mao had heard of The Beatles and the excitement they were generating among young people.
After the Great Leap Forward flopped so badly, Mao feared losing power so he came up with the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was also a way Mao used to get rid of rivals and critics.
I’ve been in and out of China frequently since the early 1990s and a consistent message I’ve received is that there is more frustration with local petty tyrants meddling in their lives than fear of an omniscient Beijing.
Considering China has a population of 1 billion more than the US, hard to imagine how a centralized bureaucracy could govern. Think a lot has to do with shared culture and common heritage (even with language differences).
When I lived in China I traveled out to the hinterlands on one occasion to visit some of the interesting parts of the interior and west of the country.
Just flying out there was amazing because of the view. The evidence of human habitation was everywhere but the infrastructure at the time (late 90s) was very primitive. It's the opposite of the western US where we have nice highways and Interstates cutting through uninhabited wilderness.
This is why central control is tenuous, and also explains the enormous investment in infrastructure since then.
But it goes beyond roads and railways. Culturally China is much less homogeneous than Americans realize. I came across lots of people who were speaking languages that were not any form of Chinese, and even local dialects of Chinese differ from town to town (the difference between Beijing and Tianjin Chinese was immediately noticeable).
Even in neighborhoods there are always myriad little schemes going on, plots, intrigues, scams, ad-hoc commercial enterprises -- you name it. The idea that Beijing exercises total control has always seemed ludicrous to me having seen how little control they exercise a few streets down from Zhongnanhai.
But the ability to navigate this chaos is a great advantage vis-à-vis the West, especially in terms of intelligence, influence and infiltration. The Chinese "spy," for example, is likely some guy who fled China to the US due to some local scheme gone wrong, then through random opportunistic connections a higher-up hears he's working at Long Beach and puts him to work in *his* scheme in return for paying off his debt.
The USSR was originally envisioned as a union of 15 national republics, all naturally working together because they each represented the workers. Soon, Germany and France would have their own revolutions and then the whole world, too, so the USSR would then function more like the UN as a coordinating body.
I suspect that kind of naive thinking didn't survive the Russian Civil War, when the Bolsheviks learned the military advantages of top-down centralization fighting their dispersed enemies. And then the proto-Cold War of the 1920s-30s, when the USSR built up its national military for the coming war.
Their internal passport system did a lot to keep them balkanized. When things suck in the US, you can always leave and try your luck somewhere else. If you lived in Turkmenistan or some other such notably backward shithole republic, you're shit outta luck, cause for most everybody, that's where you stayed.
Imagine if in the Postbellum South the Free Negroes still had to use internal passports. Best case scenario, they'd be at least ten times poorer today than now, and there'd be far greater racial resentment on all sides: with blacks hating whites for their being poor, whites hating blacks for the parasitic and destructive underclass behavior which poverty exacerbates, northern whites hating southern whites for keeping blacks under such an immiserating system, and southern whites hating themselves for forcing such a hideous fate on so many undeserving people; but being too afraid of giving an inch to a mass of low-IQ, violently-tempered serfs to loosen their reins, lest they be rewarded for their show of mercy with a horseshoe kick to the testicles.
For all our present-day troubles, we could've done a lot worse. We should do our best to take advantage of our good fortune.
Also, the late Tsarist period had seen enough industrial development that the Soviets were in a position to electrify the countryside. But Moscow and Petersburg dominated the empire so completely that, even if they had sincerely wanted to build a decentralized state, they would have had nothing to work with.
US is in direct war with China, and creating its own US trading block which will be separate from the China block. Not sure if anyone has realised that China block is already several times larger, but still.
Hence the propaganda for the last decade. Oppressed Ujghrus in Xingjiang for example (remember when they said 1 millin Ujghur prisoners but only ever found one confirmed prison?). Yet oddly only non-Muslim foreign governments have been able to find oppressed Ujghurs.
Truth is China totally dominates in the world already. Leads in almost all the key technologies, GDP at PPP 25% greater than USA (and much more in terms of production as opposed to FIRE). Much higher IQ, and given how AI will influence the importance of IQ, far far more of those with IQ over 130 or 140. And much much less of the wage differentiation that is killing US society. (60% of GDP goes to wages in China, 40% in USA).
Thucydides - can US lose to China gracefully enough not to start a nuclear WW3?
Likewise, SARS broke out in 2003 in Wuhan's wet market, in the mix of melted ice and blood from various wild animals from far and near that should never have been mixed. The government tried to shut down the wet market, but the Wuhan PEOPLE refused, and the government backed down. And then they got a second outbreak later that same year.
Not exactly an all-powerful government. The bureaucrats are better at taking bribes to avoid looking closely at building materials.
The Wuhan wet market has caused several pandemic flus, but still it can't be closed down. The WHO and others all said it was just a matter of time before it happened again, and again. So then we got a second SARS some years later, called SARS-CoV-2, also known as Corona or Covid. 27 of the first 41 patients had been to the Wuhan wet market, and the others were their friends and relatives. SARS-Cov-2 traces were found in 6% of the samples from the market.
But many people - read, Americans - don't want to hear that. It's "racist" to blame the Chinese PEOPLE for anything. Better to pretend China is still communist. They can grandstand about a new Cold War, against the safe kind of old-style Marxism while ignoring the actual cultural Marxism in U.S. media. It's also safe for Breitbarters to roleplay about that, instead of sounding "racist" about the racial threats on the border and in the streets.
China's ruling party won't change the party name, because they have to "save face" by pretending they were never wrong, and they can simply pretend that "actually communism means whatever is good for people and that happens to be private business and investment, yo." But the dissenter Deng Xiaoping was brought back from exile in the western provinces after Mao's death and ditched the Marxist economy. He did this together with other dissenters. So they didn't collapse like the USSR did. China is a conservative country where you won't see any "pride" parades or pussyhats on campus - a group of students were warned by their university when they left "pride flags" on some tables, U.S.-style. Ask any Chinese students; they don't like the party, but they don't claim it's communist. China won't talk about how Black, Arab and Latino immigrants must be brought in because "diversity is our strength and makes us richer." That's for Marxist Washington. While they trick the rubes into thinking that China is the communist country.
Look up Shanghai's stock market in Google Images. It's a beautiful sight. As James Clavell wrote in the 1981 novel Noble House, when a character comments on how Chinese families invest together in Hong Kong, "the Chinese are the best capitalists in the world."
There is strong evidence of Covid existing in the western US in early autumn of 2019. Patient zero occurred long before the wet market outbreak you’re referencing.
> "homeowners who refuse government buyouts and force the government to build highways around them, something you seldom see in America due to the perceived legitimacy of government power"
Is "perceived legitimacy" in American really the reason? Or is it more likely that your property rights are actually less secure in America and more secure in China than you've been told?
After all doesn't a legitimate government protect your household property right against a giant developer unto the last (China), rather than just eminent domaining everything the highest bidder asks it to (America)?
Why do you write that? Because of property taxes? The government can take your property for many reasons but I don't think that means we are renting it from them. Unless the rental agreement includes rent control and eternal rights to leave it to heirs
> "how often is eminent domain used on behalf of a private developer building for his own profit?"
If you look at Steve's photos of "nail houses", you can see that even homeowners who stand in the way of public works projects like highways are able to assert their rights successfully against the developers, including the government itself. You rarely see that in the US. So who really has more secure property rights?
> "I’m curious as to how land is titled in China."
It is nominally leased from the government, but since Chinese properties nearing the end of their lease trade at the same values as comparable properties early in their lease, the verdict of the market is that the "leases" will extend indefinitely, so effectively your Chinese "leasehold" is equivalent to US "ownership".
> "Here in the US, we’re really just renting our property from the government."
True. In fact, it's arguably worse in the US. US property taxes are typically 2%-3%, and in places as high as 9% of value, which means that you effectively have to re-buy your property from the government every 11-50 years.
Chinese property from the government is a one-time payment at the beginning of a 70-year lease. Amortizing it out, you could call that a 1.4% property "tax" (there is no actual property tax in China), but since that is also the purchase price, that means the property price would be effectively zero.
China also has lower income taxes, social security taxes, and health care costs than the US.
By every technical measure, living is arguably cheaper and freer in China.
"If you look at Steve's photos of "nail houses", you can see that even homeowners who stand in the way of public works projects like highways are able to assert their rights successfully against the developers, including the government itself. You rarely see that in the US. So who really has more secure property rights?"
I dunno. Those best positioned to know who has more secure property rights would probably the Chinese propertied classes. Revealed preference would indicate that the Chinese propertied classes take great pains to buy real estate, move funds, etc to the USA/Canada etc.. Is there some great unknown tide running in the other direction of USA propertied persons buying real estate/apartments in China? Color me skeptical.
One legacy of communism is that rich and powerful people in China are sometimes at severe risk from the state. This is not so true in the US, but you don't want to generalize blindly. Independently wealthy people in the US get better treatment from the government than commoners do. In China, they may get much worse treatment. You have to be prominent before you can disappear.
> [Land] is nominally leased from the government, but since Chinese properties nearing the end of their lease trade at the same values as comparable properties early in their lease, the verdict of the market is that the "leases" will extend indefinitely, so effectively your Chinese "leasehold" is equivalent to US "ownership".
This isn't an entirely theoretical question. Some of those 70-year leases have already expired. What happened to them?
Eminent Domain, as with most things legal, works for the government as long as they don't take it too far. The perception among most people who have never been eminent domained is that it is a fair thing to do for the general public good. OTOH if the government made a habit of using it to enrich real estate developers...well, they can get away with a little of that but at some point trust is lost. Just hasn't happened in the US yet.
The Kelo case was the famous recent Supreme Court case. It was decided in 2005. Hard to believe it was twenty years ago. It resulted in an enormous pushback in which many states changed their eminent domain laws to prevent use in cases of private takings.
Marxist-Leninist regimes usually have a small elite exercising collective leadership under a paramount leader. In this system local elites can hold a lot of power. The Soviet Union under Stalin is somewhat of an exception because he purged everybody who could challenge him.
After Stalin Soviet leaders had far less power over the nomenclatura be it in the Politburo or in the far-flung republics so the situation was more like how you describe China.
Stalin's successor Khrushchev was systematically opposed and eventually overthrown by the nomenclatura. Same thing happened to Mao's heir Hua Guofeng who was outmaneuvered and ousted by Deng Xiaoping.
Even with authoritarian modern bureaucracies is impossible to micromanage vast and populous countries. Xi can solve every particular problem how he wants but he can't take all decisions in a country of 1.4 Billion people.
I think I recall John Derbyshire saying something like, “the dream of the Chinese people is to be free of Chinese rule.” I could be mistaken, though, but it gives me a chance to recommend Zhang Yimou’s 1994 movie To Live. An all-time great film.
For everyone else, note that To Live is a tragedy which follows the life of one man as every part of it is systematically destroyed. It's a good movie, in a sense. You might not enjoy watching it.
It’s 15 years since I went to China but I saw four separate parts in three weeks.
Things are visibly different from place to place but the fact that there has been so much building in the 21st century gives it a very same-y feel.
What is striking is that it has not only that it has huge population centres but many, many of them. Purely from a surveillance perspective I’d say it’s very hard to keep track of everything. In the way San Francisco and San Antonio have quirks in how they are run I suspect it’s the same in China.
Han Chinese look homogeneous to outsiders, but when I went from Shanghai to Beijing the average height was about 2 inches more.
When I was there there weren’t many products that seemed national in scale and lots of very local enterprise. Maybe that’s changed.
So China is probably about as diverse as Western Europe but less so than India.
One idle fantasy of mine is a stint teaching English there once my kids are raised and if I can retire early. Quality of life is pretty good in a small Chinese city. Perfectly safe, friendly people, good food, and if the Chinese keep making good EVs the air quality will improve too.
If someone wants to understand the Chinese government, they should begin by meditating on the number 1.4 billion.
Chinese enjoy outwitting bureaucracies. Compared to Westerners, Chinese take far more risks with their government. For example, many Chinese feel perfectly safe traveling to China on outdated passports. Ask them if afraid of being caught and they'll scoff. "Airport security sees 200,000 people a day. Why would they bother looking closely at me?"
The people at the top steer society like a rider steers an elephant: via suggestion. The typical pattern goes something like this. Xi makes a cryptic observation to his closest advisors, something like "The youth deserve better education." His advisor's minds begin whirring. How can they turn Xi's musing into concrete action (ideally while enriching themselves)? These second layer guys give slightly more concrete commands to THEIR guys. "The youth are being underserved by universities." Another layer of minds whir about concrete action and personal enrichment. "The youth need better professors." Whirring. "Local governments should create teachers colleges." Whir, "My buddy knows a guy who sells classroom materials - I'll call him." By the time you get to the street level, everyone's orders have been followed and everyone's made money.
You have to wrap your head around 1.4 billion people networking with each other, ignoring each other, and ordering each other around.
Check out Peter Zeihan for interesting ideas about China and his videos.
Name one.
Idea or video?
Interesting idea. I know how to get his videos and even remember watching one. Wasn't impressed.
Someone (Eric?) downthread mentioned him bloviating about Xi's "incompetent" sycophants, which sounds like Zeihan, who I doubt knows a thing about how competent they are.
Because he’s wrong or obvious?
Because he's making it up.
Making up the demographic problems or the purges that Xi has done? What information do you have that doesn’t match what he’s saying?
I think we as Americans largely fail to appreciate the strength of our local organizations and governance, and the tremendous advantage that represents.
I’m guessing the standard response from this board would be that our local institutions are at risk due to lowered trust levels because of diversity. But I find most American municipalities quite nice. It’s only when the number of idle persons rises to a too high level you get problems.
I'm no China expert, but I was just up in Shenzhen today, and I've lived next door to the PRC for the past 35 years, and have been there many many times, so I'll make a couple of comments.
First, I'd say you're on the right track, Steve. Perceptions of China in the USA and other western countries seem to vacillate wildly, between a grim 1980s greyscape with everyone in Mao jackets, to an invincible futuristic surveillance state run by impossibly prescient and cunning planners who know exactly how many times everybody in the country has tried to watch Apple TV using a VPN.
The truth seems to be way more complicated, and maybe more boring. China has a lot of the same problems as other industrial to (increasingly) post-industrial countries. And they're maybe not quite the juggernaut of totalitarianism they're portrayed as in surprisingly bipartisan circles in the USA.
For example, I recommend this DM article, which is unusually well-written and informative. It suggests that the PRC's social credit system is really quite different -- mostly far less powerful and extensive -- than most people assume: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14312543/china-social-credit-score-incorrect-behaviour.html
It rings true to me.
What China does have is a lot of really impressive new infrastructure. How much it's all going to pay off, with a population that's now falling, is an interesting question. More on this later; I've got to get some sleep now.
Thanks, your comments on China are worth reading and much-appreciated.
> "The truth seems to be way more complicated, and maybe more boring."
Best summation of this and many other epochal questions!
> "For example, I recommend this DM article, which is unusually well-written and informative."
Also emblematic of the Current Year: punchy popular tabloid is more accurate than the serried ranks of the prestige press.
> "with a population that's now falling"
That's what I keep hearing, but in my own visit there, I saw children and families everywhere: schools, tourist spots, on the streets of unfashionable cities. Far more children—proportionally—than I would see in the equivalent Western places, even places with supposedly higher fertility. And these children were all native Chinese, unlike the West where half the children you do see are the children of third world imports of some stripe.
Whatever supposed demographic problems China has, they pale (heh) next to what the West has set itself up for.
"That's what I keep hearing, but in my own visit there, I saw children and families everywhere: schools, tourist spots, on the streets of unfashionable cities."
Perhaps a modern day Grigory Potemkin was staging them? In Future they may be known as the Almost Missouri children.
I was recently in Shanghai (not an unfashionable city) and children are common in the public parks. I don't really see reason to be surprised that you see children in schools.
I don't know how much I'd read into that, though; the parks are there in part to be destination for children. They're surrounded by huge multi-story residential complexes, but it's not like the ground-level park is overcrowded. Within my own residential complex, I saw a few children. I'm sure there were more than I saw. But I didn't get the impression that they were all over.
> "I don't really see reason to be surprised that you see children in schools."
Fair point. It was meant to be a compressed way of saying, "I saw groups of schoolchildren out and about everywhere, as well as children coming and going from school."
In other words, the schoolchildren portion of pedestrian traffic was higher than I was accustomed to in the West.
Lol.
I can confidently say that my visit was of far less import than Catherine the Great's.
Thanks. Indeed, the new infrastructure is beyond belief. Look up Wikipedia's list of the tallest bridges in the world and it's dominated by incredible bridges built in the mountains of Southern China in this century.
Western media often runs “Chinese GDP figures are made up “.
I’m sure there is some massaging of the figures to keep them even from year to year.
But this century China has built 2/3 of all high-speed rail ever built in the world, has put a rover on the moon, can drop-ship ten items for $50 to your house on another continent in ten days.
I could go on but anyone who thinks China will not achieve first-world living standards very soon is deluded.
I got a feel for modern China when I read the book "The Girl With Seven Names" by North Korean Hyeonseo Lee. She slipped over the Yalu River and worked in a variety of businesses in China. She used seven different names to cover her tracks. The book is very interesting and I highly recommend it. I got the idea from Miss Lee's book that China has a plethora of small businesses working alongside a corrupt government. Maybe China is a bit like Mexico.
I have read a lot about modern, conservative market-economy China, and it has its problems and its strengths. I also read a very interesting book called Wild Ginger by Anchee Min, that takes place under Mao's Cultural Revolution. Note, he launched that craze to take power from other leaders in the party by creating supporters to threaten them with, so not even then was it a top-down rule. (Before that, of course, he had killed tens of millions, and wrecked the economy, so they had good reason to take power from him.)
The book ends with the end of the cultural revolution, when no one is called "Maoist" anymore as everyone despises that word. The Maoists were the worst students in any school, typically children born of illiterate peasants who now got to feel like they were an elite, without studying. Even threatening and reporting on teachers. Everyone who is old enough to remember that period hates it. After that, and after Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping set things right.
What people don't like today isn't that the party is "communist," but things like bureaucrats ignoring obvious health problems in a corporation's office buildings, because the bureaucrats are easily bribed by the businesses. And vitamin pills are sold with no quality checks - the lower price appeals to the masses, so they outcompete the better pills. After a while people catch on, but the business then disappears and comes back, same people with a new name. It's the same for clothes, etc. In a way, it's the libertarian paradise: Just a few bribes and you can create whatever shoddy product you want with no quality control. So thanks to the party's corrupt government officials, there's too LITTLE government influence, not too much.
But try to explain that to people and their heads explode. "But-but-but how am I going to fit that into my domestic U.S. propaganda? If I'm a leftist, that sounds racist against Chinese. If I'm right-wing, I have to roleplay against Communist China."
Also: Every now and then you read about a fireworks factory exploding in China, killing workers. Or a mine caving in, killing the workers. Or buildings falling down in earthquakes when they should have been built sturdier. Once, a school collapsed this way and killed many children.
In all these cases it's because bureaucrats are bribed to look the other way. Safety concerns are jettisoned, the school building was built with shoddy materials. The mines and fireworks factories are private businesses, note. Also, they pour out toxic waste on the factory floor, and the workers step in it and breathe it in. I know this from a first-hand source. The workers are peasants from the countryside who don't know how to complain. Government inspectors are bribed to stay away from these businesses.
--------------
But of course, majority-Chinese Taiwan and Singapore don't have this problem. It's in communism that the lack of concern for human life begins, and it remains now in the Chinese market economy. I remember reading about a Western reporter visiting Cambodia after communism. A little boy fell down from a tree and cracked his head against the street. Only this reporter rushed to help him, everyone else kept walking by. Homeless children were seen everywhere in the city.
Or look at the USSR, where Yuri Gagarin wasn't the first man in space in 1961. He was just the first to survive. Before that Italian amateur radio enthusiasts picked up the desperate pleas of Soviet kosmonauts dying in space when they couldn't get down to Earth.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage
After Gagarin's flight his close friend Komarov died in another rocket, which they knew had 203 quality flaws. They had written a detailed report that was ignored. Anyone who passed on the report was demoted or transferred. Komarov went up because if he refused, his friend Gagarin, the reserve pilot, would be sent up instead. (This was in 1967, in the attempts to make a rocket for a moon landing. Yuri Gagarin died in a MiG plane crash the next year, one year before the Americans landed on the moon. It's quite tragic. But I digress.)
A cursory examination of the unfettered capitalism of the early Industrial Revolution will reveal a complete lack of regard for human life, especially non-aristocratic life.
Children worked in mines and factories and on farms and died in their hundreds and thousands.
I despise communism with every fiber of my being, but it can’t be called unique in its inhumanity.
Died in their hundreds and thousands? Okay.
It's not "unfettered capitalism," people had it bad in all of history before that. It's just that thanks to the market economy and trade and innovation we now have it better.
The communist states came after that, when treatment of citizens had improved. So they had no excuse. And the "capitalist" Taiwanese, as I already wrote, never treated workers the way the communists did. Nor did the South Koreans treat workers like the North Korean slave owners did.
Yes, communism can be called unique in its inhumanity. They banned people from leaving - hundreds of millions of people forced to stay in communist countries. Then they forced them all to work for the small clique of people that owned everything. That has never happened before. Hundreds of millions of people enslaved. And communist nations, primarily the Soviet Union and China, killed in total more than 100 million of their own citizens.
In Cambodia run by the Red Khmers they slaughtered around a quarter of the entire nation - they killed people for knowing how to play classical music on the piano, or for owning a watch, or for knowing how to say something in a Western language. They took away people's money so they had no way of moving around and had to report to the food stations where their names were written down. Yes, communism is unique in its inhumanity.
The Soviet commissars who came to advice the Chinese were brutal monsters who had sought to exterminate the Baltic peoples before WWII stopped them, and then slaughtered Chechnyans after the war. But at least they had some logic in what they did. They were horrified when seeing the Chinese killing people for completely crazy reasons. The Chinese didn't kill as many millions as the Soviets did, but they were more insane in how they went about it.
Thousands of child workers absolutely died in the coal mines of Wales and northern England. (Edit: Let me amend this to say hundreds of child workers. I think thousands is too high to state credibly.) And in the coal mines of the Appalachians as well. That’s not at all controversial.
Feudalism wasn’t capitalism as we understand it, but serfs and peasants weren’t free to leave their feudal lords. The feudal system in pre-revolutionary Russia wasn’t very far removed from chattel slavery at all and it lasted almost to the end of Imperial Russia.
Again, I’m anti- Communist to the bone, but unfettered greed has a lot to answer for when it comes to appalling treatment of our fellow humans. Look at the Sacklers and the billions they earned from pushing opiates to their countrymen for a recent example.
> Feudalism wasn’t capitalism as we understand it, but serfs and peasants weren’t free to leave their feudal lords.
That is true as a matter of law.
In the wake of the bubonic plague, there was an epidemic of serfs leaving for better conditions elsewhere, and the nobles responded by making the laws forbidding serfs to leave their land much stricter.
But the tightening of the legal regime had no effect at all. This suggests that legal barriers were not a major contributor to the serfs' lack of mobility beforehand.
Been to China. Life is cheap. Terrible conditions for the majority of people.
I've often wondered if when Mao started his Cultural Revolution by riling up China's youth into frenzies as giant rallies so he could take back power from his colleagues, if Mao had heard of The Beatles and the excitement they were generating among young people.
After the Great Leap Forward flopped so badly, Mao feared losing power so he came up with the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was also a way Mao used to get rid of rivals and critics.
Thanks for the book tip. Ordered it.
I’ve been in and out of China frequently since the early 1990s and a consistent message I’ve received is that there is more frustration with local petty tyrants meddling in their lives than fear of an omniscient Beijing.
Considering China has a population of 1 billion more than the US, hard to imagine how a centralized bureaucracy could govern. Think a lot has to do with shared culture and common heritage (even with language differences).
When I lived in China I traveled out to the hinterlands on one occasion to visit some of the interesting parts of the interior and west of the country.
Just flying out there was amazing because of the view. The evidence of human habitation was everywhere but the infrastructure at the time (late 90s) was very primitive. It's the opposite of the western US where we have nice highways and Interstates cutting through uninhabited wilderness.
This is why central control is tenuous, and also explains the enormous investment in infrastructure since then.
But it goes beyond roads and railways. Culturally China is much less homogeneous than Americans realize. I came across lots of people who were speaking languages that were not any form of Chinese, and even local dialects of Chinese differ from town to town (the difference between Beijing and Tianjin Chinese was immediately noticeable).
Even in neighborhoods there are always myriad little schemes going on, plots, intrigues, scams, ad-hoc commercial enterprises -- you name it. The idea that Beijing exercises total control has always seemed ludicrous to me having seen how little control they exercise a few streets down from Zhongnanhai.
But the ability to navigate this chaos is a great advantage vis-à-vis the West, especially in terms of intelligence, influence and infiltration. The Chinese "spy," for example, is likely some guy who fled China to the US due to some local scheme gone wrong, then through random opportunistic connections a higher-up hears he's working at Long Beach and puts him to work in *his* scheme in return for paying off his debt.
Yes, China is Chinatown -- times a million.
I guess Stalinist centralization was less a feature of Communist ideology than it was part of the process of Russian history.
The USSR was originally envisioned as a union of 15 national republics, all naturally working together because they each represented the workers. Soon, Germany and France would have their own revolutions and then the whole world, too, so the USSR would then function more like the UN as a coordinating body.
I suspect that kind of naive thinking didn't survive the Russian Civil War, when the Bolsheviks learned the military advantages of top-down centralization fighting their dispersed enemies. And then the proto-Cold War of the 1920s-30s, when the USSR built up its national military for the coming war.
Their internal passport system did a lot to keep them balkanized. When things suck in the US, you can always leave and try your luck somewhere else. If you lived in Turkmenistan or some other such notably backward shithole republic, you're shit outta luck, cause for most everybody, that's where you stayed.
Imagine if in the Postbellum South the Free Negroes still had to use internal passports. Best case scenario, they'd be at least ten times poorer today than now, and there'd be far greater racial resentment on all sides: with blacks hating whites for their being poor, whites hating blacks for the parasitic and destructive underclass behavior which poverty exacerbates, northern whites hating southern whites for keeping blacks under such an immiserating system, and southern whites hating themselves for forcing such a hideous fate on so many undeserving people; but being too afraid of giving an inch to a mass of low-IQ, violently-tempered serfs to loosen their reins, lest they be rewarded for their show of mercy with a horseshoe kick to the testicles.
For all our present-day troubles, we could've done a lot worse. We should do our best to take advantage of our good fortune.
Also, the late Tsarist period had seen enough industrial development that the Soviets were in a position to electrify the countryside. But Moscow and Petersburg dominated the empire so completely that, even if they had sincerely wanted to build a decentralized state, they would have had nothing to work with.
US is in direct war with China, and creating its own US trading block which will be separate from the China block. Not sure if anyone has realised that China block is already several times larger, but still.
Hence the propaganda for the last decade. Oppressed Ujghrus in Xingjiang for example (remember when they said 1 millin Ujghur prisoners but only ever found one confirmed prison?). Yet oddly only non-Muslim foreign governments have been able to find oppressed Ujghurs.
Truth is China totally dominates in the world already. Leads in almost all the key technologies, GDP at PPP 25% greater than USA (and much more in terms of production as opposed to FIRE). Much higher IQ, and given how AI will influence the importance of IQ, far far more of those with IQ over 130 or 140. And much much less of the wage differentiation that is killing US society. (60% of GDP goes to wages in China, 40% in USA).
Thucydides - can US lose to China gracefully enough not to start a nuclear WW3?
Whenever they talked about Ujghrus, I'd picture Seth Green speaking ebonically.
Likewise, SARS broke out in 2003 in Wuhan's wet market, in the mix of melted ice and blood from various wild animals from far and near that should never have been mixed. The government tried to shut down the wet market, but the Wuhan PEOPLE refused, and the government backed down. And then they got a second outbreak later that same year.
Not exactly an all-powerful government. The bureaucrats are better at taking bribes to avoid looking closely at building materials.
The Wuhan wet market has caused several pandemic flus, but still it can't be closed down. The WHO and others all said it was just a matter of time before it happened again, and again. So then we got a second SARS some years later, called SARS-CoV-2, also known as Corona or Covid. 27 of the first 41 patients had been to the Wuhan wet market, and the others were their friends and relatives. SARS-Cov-2 traces were found in 6% of the samples from the market.
But many people - read, Americans - don't want to hear that. It's "racist" to blame the Chinese PEOPLE for anything. Better to pretend China is still communist. They can grandstand about a new Cold War, against the safe kind of old-style Marxism while ignoring the actual cultural Marxism in U.S. media. It's also safe for Breitbarters to roleplay about that, instead of sounding "racist" about the racial threats on the border and in the streets.
China's ruling party won't change the party name, because they have to "save face" by pretending they were never wrong, and they can simply pretend that "actually communism means whatever is good for people and that happens to be private business and investment, yo." But the dissenter Deng Xiaoping was brought back from exile in the western provinces after Mao's death and ditched the Marxist economy. He did this together with other dissenters. So they didn't collapse like the USSR did. China is a conservative country where you won't see any "pride" parades or pussyhats on campus - a group of students were warned by their university when they left "pride flags" on some tables, U.S.-style. Ask any Chinese students; they don't like the party, but they don't claim it's communist. China won't talk about how Black, Arab and Latino immigrants must be brought in because "diversity is our strength and makes us richer." That's for Marxist Washington. While they trick the rubes into thinking that China is the communist country.
Look up Shanghai's stock market in Google Images. It's a beautiful sight. As James Clavell wrote in the 1981 novel Noble House, when a character comments on how Chinese families invest together in Hong Kong, "the Chinese are the best capitalists in the world."
There is strong evidence of Covid existing in the western US in early autumn of 2019. Patient zero occurred long before the wet market outbreak you’re referencing.
> "homeowners who refuse government buyouts and force the government to build highways around them, something you seldom see in America due to the perceived legitimacy of government power"
Is "perceived legitimacy" in American really the reason? Or is it more likely that your property rights are actually less secure in America and more secure in China than you've been told?
After all doesn't a legitimate government protect your household property right against a giant developer unto the last (China), rather than just eminent domaining everything the highest bidder asks it to (America)?
I know there are examples, but how often is eminent domain used on behalf of a private developer building for his own profit?
I’m curious as to how land is titled in China. Here in the US, we’re really just renting our property from the government.
Why do you write that? Because of property taxes? The government can take your property for many reasons but I don't think that means we are renting it from them. Unless the rental agreement includes rent control and eternal rights to leave it to heirs
Yes, property taxes. We’re all a couple of payments away from a sheriff’s sale.
> "how often is eminent domain used on behalf of a private developer building for his own profit?"
If you look at Steve's photos of "nail houses", you can see that even homeowners who stand in the way of public works projects like highways are able to assert their rights successfully against the developers, including the government itself. You rarely see that in the US. So who really has more secure property rights?
> "I’m curious as to how land is titled in China."
It is nominally leased from the government, but since Chinese properties nearing the end of their lease trade at the same values as comparable properties early in their lease, the verdict of the market is that the "leases" will extend indefinitely, so effectively your Chinese "leasehold" is equivalent to US "ownership".
> "Here in the US, we’re really just renting our property from the government."
True. In fact, it's arguably worse in the US. US property taxes are typically 2%-3%, and in places as high as 9% of value, which means that you effectively have to re-buy your property from the government every 11-50 years.
Chinese property from the government is a one-time payment at the beginning of a 70-year lease. Amortizing it out, you could call that a 1.4% property "tax" (there is no actual property tax in China), but since that is also the purchase price, that means the property price would be effectively zero.
China also has lower income taxes, social security taxes, and health care costs than the US.
By every technical measure, living is arguably cheaper and freer in China.
Thank you, that’s really good information.
"If you look at Steve's photos of "nail houses", you can see that even homeowners who stand in the way of public works projects like highways are able to assert their rights successfully against the developers, including the government itself. You rarely see that in the US. So who really has more secure property rights?"
I dunno. Those best positioned to know who has more secure property rights would probably the Chinese propertied classes. Revealed preference would indicate that the Chinese propertied classes take great pains to buy real estate, move funds, etc to the USA/Canada etc.. Is there some great unknown tide running in the other direction of USA propertied persons buying real estate/apartments in China? Color me skeptical.
One legacy of communism is that rich and powerful people in China are sometimes at severe risk from the state. This is not so true in the US, but you don't want to generalize blindly. Independently wealthy people in the US get better treatment from the government than commoners do. In China, they may get much worse treatment. You have to be prominent before you can disappear.
> "Is there some great unknown tide running in the other direction of USA propertied persons buying real estate/apartments in China?"
Foreigners can't buy property in much of China and foreign ownership is tightly constrained in the rest.
The Chinese know they have a good thing going on and see no reason to let "USA propertied persons" snatch it out from under them.
Too bad we weren't so perspicacious about American property.
> [Land] is nominally leased from the government, but since Chinese properties nearing the end of their lease trade at the same values as comparable properties early in their lease, the verdict of the market is that the "leases" will extend indefinitely, so effectively your Chinese "leasehold" is equivalent to US "ownership".
This isn't an entirely theoretical question. Some of those 70-year leases have already expired. What happened to them?
Eminent Domain, as with most things legal, works for the government as long as they don't take it too far. The perception among most people who have never been eminent domained is that it is a fair thing to do for the general public good. OTOH if the government made a habit of using it to enrich real estate developers...well, they can get away with a little of that but at some point trust is lost. Just hasn't happened in the US yet.
The Kelo case was the famous recent Supreme Court case. It was decided in 2005. Hard to believe it was twenty years ago. It resulted in an enormous pushback in which many states changed their eminent domain laws to prevent use in cases of private takings.
> "as long as they don't take it too far."
"'Acceptable losses' are any losses that don't include you."
—old military joke
That's why politicians considered nuclear war unthinkable. Let's keep things conventional and, you know, civilized.
Marxist-Leninist regimes usually have a small elite exercising collective leadership under a paramount leader. In this system local elites can hold a lot of power. The Soviet Union under Stalin is somewhat of an exception because he purged everybody who could challenge him.
After Stalin Soviet leaders had far less power over the nomenclatura be it in the Politburo or in the far-flung republics so the situation was more like how you describe China.
Stalin's successor Khrushchev was systematically opposed and eventually overthrown by the nomenclatura. Same thing happened to Mao's heir Hua Guofeng who was outmaneuvered and ousted by Deng Xiaoping.
Even with authoritarian modern bureaucracies is impossible to micromanage vast and populous countries. Xi can solve every particular problem how he wants but he can't take all decisions in a country of 1.4 Billion people.
Peter Zeihan says that Xi has purged everyone competent around him and is now surrounded only be people afraid to tell the truth.
Sounds like he pulled that from his butt.
What does he know about who in China is "competent"?
I think I recall John Derbyshire saying something like, “the dream of the Chinese people is to be free of Chinese rule.” I could be mistaken, though, but it gives me a chance to recommend Zhang Yimou’s 1994 movie To Live. An all-time great film.
For everyone else, note that To Live is a tragedy which follows the life of one man as every part of it is systematically destroyed. It's a good movie, in a sense. You might not enjoy watching it.
Yes - but he’s our lens into the destruction of much, much more. Yet the movie manages to be beautiful at the same time.
It’s 15 years since I went to China but I saw four separate parts in three weeks.
Things are visibly different from place to place but the fact that there has been so much building in the 21st century gives it a very same-y feel.
What is striking is that it has not only that it has huge population centres but many, many of them. Purely from a surveillance perspective I’d say it’s very hard to keep track of everything. In the way San Francisco and San Antonio have quirks in how they are run I suspect it’s the same in China.
Han Chinese look homogeneous to outsiders, but when I went from Shanghai to Beijing the average height was about 2 inches more.
When I was there there weren’t many products that seemed national in scale and lots of very local enterprise. Maybe that’s changed.
So China is probably about as diverse as Western Europe but less so than India.
One idle fantasy of mine is a stint teaching English there once my kids are raised and if I can retire early. Quality of life is pretty good in a small Chinese city. Perfectly safe, friendly people, good food, and if the Chinese keep making good EVs the air quality will improve too.
If someone wants to understand the Chinese government, they should begin by meditating on the number 1.4 billion.
Chinese enjoy outwitting bureaucracies. Compared to Westerners, Chinese take far more risks with their government. For example, many Chinese feel perfectly safe traveling to China on outdated passports. Ask them if afraid of being caught and they'll scoff. "Airport security sees 200,000 people a day. Why would they bother looking closely at me?"
The people at the top steer society like a rider steers an elephant: via suggestion. The typical pattern goes something like this. Xi makes a cryptic observation to his closest advisors, something like "The youth deserve better education." His advisor's minds begin whirring. How can they turn Xi's musing into concrete action (ideally while enriching themselves)? These second layer guys give slightly more concrete commands to THEIR guys. "The youth are being underserved by universities." Another layer of minds whir about concrete action and personal enrichment. "The youth need better professors." Whirring. "Local governments should create teachers colleges." Whir, "My buddy knows a guy who sells classroom materials - I'll call him." By the time you get to the street level, everyone's orders have been followed and everyone's made money.
You have to wrap your head around 1.4 billion people networking with each other, ignoring each other, and ordering each other around.
China seems like a place where the government builds the most impressive bridges in the world and shopping mall escalators eat little children.