A less mentioned reason for pollution curb is that China wants to attract their top talents back home, as well as global up-and-comers who wish for more accommodative research funding. Most top Chinese students who studied abroad are currently residing in the US, working in major tech companies and academia.
They created the Thousand Talents program for promising and distinguished researchers, Chinese or otherwise, to work and stay in the country with salary comparable to the West, in nominal terms, and many extra privileges. [1]
Pollution is a major concern among those who are interested and this gives additional urgency to the government.
Basically, they understand very well that top talents are essential for developing advanced technologies they need, and they are pushing very hard to develop native talents and attract promising ones from other countries. This is the Singapore playbook that has propelled their two universities into major institutions in engineering and other fields within a few decades. (Engineering programs in both Singaporean universities are now ranked in the top 10 or 20 in the world. Also, both Tsinghua and Beijing are ranked in the world's top 10 in AI publications recently, but they plan for more universities to move up in more fields.)
> Basically, they understand very well that top talents are essential for developing advanced technology they need
Because companies around the world are now aware of the fact that Chinese government steals technologies. Also, Chinese government is too late trying to get talents back.
Most of the laowais (expats) that were in Guangzhou, that were in technology, have left in recent years. The only foreigners left are africans trying to eek out a living and English teachers who can't make it anywhere else. You can imagine the reasons why: poisonous air that will give you cancer, poisonous food that will give you cancer, dirty water that will give you cancer, horrendous traffic (and everyone driving around honking and disregarding rules), bad mannered locals (imagine jackhammering at 4am, spitting, elbowing, cutting in lines), censorship, foreigners getting arrested without a reason, expensive rent (compared to quality), no way to be connected to the western internet without VPN (and recently, VPN have been failing as well), no way to talk to families overseas. And this is in the top province in China. Imagine tier 88 or even tier 2 cities. (shudder)
There's no reason to be in China other than to make money, then get the hell out. And that seems to be even harder now with the economy stagnating and everyone blowing bubbles into the real estate.
Your story illustrates why they are focusing on pollution control and developing the Social Credit System.
"..the Social Credit System will focus on four areas: "honesty in government affairs" (政务诚信), "commercial integrity" (商务诚信), "societal integrity" (社会诚信), and "judicial credibility" (司法公信). Media coverage has thus far focused mostly on the rating of individual citizens (which falls under "societal integrity"). However, the Chinese government‘s plans go beyond that and also include plans for credit scores for all businesses operating in China."
So no money.....and recently it prevented South Korean companies from withdrawing assets from China. Now companies around the world knows. Who's gonna invest in China now?
FDI is a pretty imperfect measure for a short period of time. If a Chinese company buys foreign assets, say mines in Africa or forests in South America, that counts as a net outflow. In the long run though, those investments may well pay off handsomely. For a rapidly developing country with a high savings rate, there's no inherent reason why Chinese companies investing abroad should be an indication of doom for China.
As someone who regularly does business with Chinese companies, it has been my experience that it has never been harder to remove currency from China. It is true that capital controls have become increasingly tight.
Edit:
Additionally, given the regulatory difficulties of foreign companies investing in China, it's not surprising that outflows of investment by Chinese companies outsize incoming foreign investment into China.
That 833% figure is for financial assets and gives the UK's figure at 1008%. It just indicates that banks are doing loan swaps and the like.
The semi communist system actually makes China quite stable. In the west if the mortgage holders can't repay the bank kind of goes bust, in China the government would just lend it more money. Well... I guess the west bails out too but more so in China I think.
These four areas are quite interesting. Each defines a specific role a person holds in society. If nothing other than adopting formalized views and conversations along these roles, the West would benefit. The US appears to be failing in all of them, in aggregate.
This is inevitable in any fast developing economy. There is chaos and there is growth. You will see the exact same conditions in western economies when they developed.
Its because they offer opportunity that people flock there. And China has 1.3 billion to deal with, this will challenge any government to an extent that cannot be underestimated or brushed aside.
Not many people on this thread are thinking or have a basic Empathy like you do, China is still not 'stable'.It's still on a fast track. There are problems need to be addressed. But If you look it via History scope. It's has mainly done well.
Yea I think we in the West are too quick to forget our rampant corruption and pollution directly after our industrial revolutions. It'll take China awhile to catch up in livability, but they'll get there once they get richer.
I really dislike this the west got to pollute while developing so other countries should be able to also mentality.
It's apple and oranges. People then didn't have technologies to choose like we do, didn't realise the impact of pollution, nor did things on the scale we are today.
Its cherry picking the bits the want for an economic advantage. If countries want to use the 'they polluted before' argument then they should go back to steam trains and gas lighting etc. Otherwise maybe the west will say look at what they did to get economic growth, now its our turn...
Sorry for the rant but I find this such a poor excuse. All countries should be held to better standards. We seem to forget a key component of capitalism is for the government to create a level playing field. And ability to pollute (or not) the enviroment should be a global tenant for all who engage in the open market.
There weren't over three billion people living in the west during the time you speak of as there currently are in Asia. There aren't even that many people in the west now.
China, India, Indonesia, etc "catching up" is a great goal to work towards but not at the cost of ecosystem collapse and permanently wreaking the oceans.
I know many Chinese that manage to live in America with minimal knowledge of English. There are many sizeable Chinatowns and "bubble" communities in America where a Chinese/Taiwanese person could immerse himself/herself in and never really have to deal with English.
Taiwan is lovely but still suffers from air pollution. Much of it is local pollution, but some also that drifts over from China. I found it quite challenging when I was there.
> Also, both Tsinghua and Beijing are ranked in the world's top 10 in AI publications recently, but they plan for more universities to move up in more fields
Sure they moved up in number of publications, but as with so many things in China, what's with the quality of this research? Only a few days ago we had a post here on fraud in China scientific work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15473719
Are you in academics? If you see some Chinese is cheating on his paper. You cannot effectively prove that the whole academic people are cheating. Given the basic ratio out there. Top-schools rarely cheat(https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2017/institution/a...), Tsinghua is top tier. And its graduates are welcomed by top tier schools in Europe/US or tech companies. As for cheating, there are metric-system problems in China. For instance, to be a physician in China, you will be buried in day-to-day operations, however, if you want to climb up, you will need to have essays. I am not saying those cheaters are right, they are definitely wrong, but the system need to reconfigure itself as well.
Interesting. When I toured several companies in Singapore, including Google, most of the staff were from Europe or the States. If Singaporeans are indeed doing well in their own schools, my guess is many are still leaving to work elsewhere. I frequently attended programming meetups where about 90% of the attendees were non-Singaporean.
But then, most of the Singaporeans I've known were quite happy to live and work in a Western country; I lived there briefly and was frequently asked by locals, "why would you want to live here, it's so small."
Regarding pollution, it was actually Singapore's air pollution that caused me to leave. I think I'm not alone with that sentiment.
As a Singaporean born and raised there and then left, you are spot on. Most Singaporeans, esp talented tech workers, do not wish to stay there. It's a gilded birdcage - if your moral values and behavior align with the government's, Singapore is a very clean, safe and prosperous environment for you. If you even have the notion to disagree with the government on anything, go somewhere else.
Because of such authoritarian attitudes in society, Singaporeans are raised to be subservient and fearful of authority (whether they know it or not). This means no creativity - the prevailing mentality in Singapore is "don't try to be clever - do what the authorities say and you won't go wrong", sort of like the local version of nobody gets fired for buying IBM. this is the reason why there is no innovation coming out of singapore despite the govt trying to offer all sorts of grants and schemes to "support local entrepreneurs" - because singaporeans have been psychologically beaten to subservience and are crippled when it comes to thinking out of the box because they have been conditioned by society to believe when you fail, you will be ridiculed and mocked and maybe even punished.
You are completely correct. This is exactly what I've noticed among people when I lived there. A lot of it is subconscious. Singapore really has this strange and pessimistic psychological effect on its citizens.
This is a good example of why public policy should, in principle, just do the right thing for the people merely for the sake of doing the right thing--most of the time it works out in your group's self interest.
Sometimes in public policy it seems like we forget that we evolved to care about right and wrong for our own survival.
And yes, there are contentious topics which reasonable people can disagree on, but many are essentially the people vs special interest groups (pollution, healthcare, military expansion, etc)
I don't think those extra privileges would be a very strong enticement - it would be too clear how fragile my freedoms are when no one else is experiencing them, and from what I've seen, academics tend to prize freedom.
That said, I'm sure the draw of the idea of living in their native culture is strong.
It's shrewd. Can't always rope-in top talent by force, so commercial and residential centers must be organized/redeveloped to be more attractive than competing global options.
PS: If it were SimCity, tear up roads, bulldoze industrial areas and build some parks. Sadly, PRC often does exactly that. :'( It was insane to see this empty new highway in Shanghai c. 2002 that had hedges, trees and flowers all the way down its length to the horizon. Oh, and a shiny, brand-new airport.
We are seeing increased action on environmental compliance in China. Our SaaS company offers tools to help businesses comply to environmental (and safety and quality laws). We recently bought a company in China that is in the same business and I can tell you that the citizens are very happy with government initiatives and companies are taking this seriously. (Separate post coming about SaaS in China).
I have lived in China for 1.5 years in 2005, 2010 and returning a lot now and I have travelled pretty much everywhere in the country, in my humble opinion, China is on a very interesting path that will make it hard for the US and EU to compete in a variety of sectors. We shall see. https://www.nimonik.com and http://www.envitool.com are the companies in question.
It took only about 10 years after the Clean Air Act in the US before the big cities such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh had clear skies. China should be able to do it faster, since the technology already exists and cars already come with pollution controls.
China's biggest problem in doing this is not technological, but based on the fact the party doesn't believe in rule of law, so their are nonmechanisms to enforce regulation beyond official fiat and periodic crackdowns, neither of which are sustainable in the long term.
They have crackdowned before, many times actually, but without real continuous enforcement of rules, factory owners are caught in a horrible prisoners dilemma given how hyper competitive production is (if your competitor cheats and you don't, you'll be out of business quickly). In this case, political reform is directly related to the environment.
Yes. Some inspector who was trying to get a sample of Diesel fuel from a distributor to test for sulfur and such was told "you have the obligation to do that, but not the authority."
Here are the rules for Diesel fuel in China.[1] The official standard for sulfur has been been slowly lowered from 0.2% to 10 ppm, but enforcement is weak. There's a weaker standard for "nonroad Diesel" for tractors and such. It's observed that at night, when the blue trucks roll into Shenzhen, the pollution level goes way up, because they're using "nonroad Diesel".
The US is now <15ppm sulfur for all Diesel uses except ships. It took 25 years to get there. The EPA is (was?) trying to get ships down to 1000ppm within 200 miles of the US.
It's not that hard to enforce this, because there aren't that many refineries. China has only 75 refineries. The US has about 125. Not that many places need to be inspected.
> The US is now <15ppm sulfur for all Diesel uses except ships. It took 25 years to get there. The EPA is (was?) trying to get ships down to 1000ppm within 200 miles of shore.
Already done (knowledge only due to personal interest), but it only applies within 200 miles of shore. It's also the IMO (International Maritime Organization, a UN agency) rather than the EPA. Currently the limit on open waters is at 35,000 ppm (3.5%), which will tighten to 5000 ppm in January of 2020.
Sulfur aerosols are just as bad as NOx and create just as much smog. They also turn into acid rain. They have a noted anti-geenhouse effect, but again... acid rain.
It should also be noted that there is basically zero technical or economic justification for sulfur pollution. It requires no significant inputs: a catalytic step that results in hydrogen sulfide, then a regenerating amine reaction (effectively solvent distillation), and finally the hydrogen sulfide is burnt (as in energy-producing) to produce elemental sulfur, which is sold. This is how the majority of sulfur is made.
I think you might be overemphasizing that relationship (or underestimating its consequence).
As a counter example, we can say China can't possibly enforce things like seat belt or drunk driving without political reform but those are largely non-problems now because they were easy politically costless solutions.
The problem is here is prioritization/will rather than mechanism/implementation since China likely believes the environment is a problem with a known solution and wants to milk dirty production for a new more years.
Gorbachev wanted to follow the simultaneous political and economic reform route and that definitely didn't turn out well for anyone.
An anecdote, but I know of a factory that's had severely limited production for about a year due to pollution. The enforcement is ongoing. They do get away it breaking the rules a bit because the inspectors are corrupt, and there's some warning before they come but it's not a complete free-for-all.
What you are saying is true, but Xi seems to be using the great power he has accumulated to really crack down in some areas, like corruption. Maybe he will do the same for pollution.
Xi used corruption crackdowns to amas power by going after all his enemies and getting more of his loyal friends in power. In china, all about of those officials are corrupt, you just have to dig a little to get rid of anyone you don't like.
So in that sense nothing has really changed at all.
Yeah but a fair chunk of America's polluting industries just moved their operations to China. If China wants to embark upon an epic undertaking of technological pollution reduction, wonderful. But it's either that or move the problem somewhere else.
It's possible, but that doesn't match up with previous history. You can find articles about them trying to reduce the sulfur content of fuel going back longer than that, and that's a relatively straight-forward change.
Thanks for pointing out that site. That is an awesome map. I find it very interesting / telling that the US has bright red areas for CO2 as well but all of them are at major shipping ports and in the ocean. Not surprising seeing how much pollution shipping creates.
Why does the Grand Canyon have such a huge pocket of CO? It's over 1200ppbv. Is there currently a forest fire there? The air quality there looks as bad as over Staten Island or some Chinese cities.
That pocket looks rather like an anomaly in the data. There is a very large coal-fired power plant (Navajo Generating Station) near Page, Arizona, though.
At least someone is... it's a sad, sad day when the supposed "leaders of the free world" insist on burying their heads in the sand WRT: global warming. Even if we ARE wrong, acting as if reducing pollution is a bad thing is just silly.
Remember that the Chinese government doesn't have to deal with a lot of what the United States' government does have to: things like local governments and our election system. Our government is not set up to move quickly (by design!): our government can't decide to shut down thousands of businesses for a day without consequences, and for good reason.
Americans have set up their government so that it more or less reflects the will of the people, and the relatively educated American public is not OK with the government taking drastic steps very quickly. For better or for worse, the Chinese government can move extremely quickly because they essentially answer to no one; if the government wants to raze a neighborhood for something, they do it. If they want to build a road, they move whatever's in the way and build it. In some ways it's incredibly efficient. But that's something the US government is not optimized for, and I'm personally glad for that.
>Americans have set up their government so that it more or less reflects the will of the people
I patently disagree with this opinion. Between lobbyist money and "news" agencies blatantly lying to groups of people not educated enough to fact check what they're hearing on the news, the government very much does NOT reflect the will of the people. It reflects the will of a handful of extremely wealthy people, and large corporations seeking profits at the expense of *.
That's part of the will of the people. Their will is influenced by those parties you identified but it's still their will. It's like saying Christians go to church against their will because because their parents brainwashed them when they were children, and them in turn back many generations to a time when it was done for the political power of extremely wealthy people.
If Americans didn't want lobbyists or dishonest news, they would vote to ban lobbyists and not watch the dishonest news. But they choose to keep those things in a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop.
>It's like saying Christians go to church against their will because because their parents brainwashed them when they were children, and them in turn back many generations to a time when it was done for the political power of extremely wealthy people.
You realize that's actually a provable thing, right? That it's significantly harder to break that cycle when it's introduced at a young age because it forces children to remove their parents from the pedestal they're naturally placed on.
You say that as though you think it's just something people make up, when there's actual provable science behind it.
The Chinese very much have local government, and they lack many of the tools we have to centrally manage those local governments, in part because their central government is not at all transparent. The other issue is that only 6% of their government employees are at the central level. The US? 12%. EU? 14%.
The Chinese have a saying for this: the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away.
Xi actually comes predominantly from the reformer branch of the Chinese political house. I think his biggest challenge is that his precedessors grew China too quickly.
The US has seen its CO2 emissions consistently falling for years, while generating ever greater economic output from its falling CO2 emissions output, a trend that is set to continue regardless of what the White House does.
The US is presently a leader at reducing its CO2 output and CO2 output per unit of economic growth. Its CO2 emissions from energy production is at a 26 year low, a time when the economy was half its present size in real terms.
Per capita CO2 emissions in the US have declined by nearly 30% since their peak, per the Department of Energy. They're back to where they were in 1960. The trend-line is persistently down.
Several major economies of Europe are seeing similar aggressive trends in general CO2 emissions and per capita emissions.
China's CO2 emissions are still rapidly increasingly by contrast. They have no plans to actually reduce CO2 emissions, their plan is to maybe slow the increase in the next two decades. They also have no plans to reduce their extreme consumption of coal, rather they plan to try to have more renewable energy as a share. Currently China is producing at least 2x the CO2 output of the US with growing CO2 emissions, while the US has an economy 60% larger with a trend of falling CO2 emissions (set to continue as natural gas & renewables replace coal).
It's often said that the blame should be on the developed world because they're outsourcing pollution to China. At this point that's blatantly incorrect. China has made a choice about how it manufactures, to keep its costs artificially low so as to remain competitive. The US has doubled its substantial manufacturing output in roughly 30 years, without any corresponding output spike in CO2. China is cutting environmental corners, because if they don't the cost of their manufacturing would go up significantly.
> It really is a matter of how you look at it, and which timespans you observe.
No it's not. China is producing 2x the CO2 of the US, while the US has an economy 60% larger. China's emissions are still rapidly climbing and are set to continue to do so.
> The current downward trend is just a blip in the general trend across all recorded data since ~1900
So you're predicting that the US is going to dramatically reverse course and begin producing a lot more energy with coal, soon? That's the only way the US CO2 decline trend is going to reverse course and consistently move higher. You must also be predicting that the US is going to entirely skip the inbound electric car change-over. As it looks now, the US is seeing the slow death of coal, with increasing electricity from natural gas and renewables, while simultaneously the US is about to adopt electric cars (like much of the developed world). Would you mind supporting your counter premise with some kind of data?
> US per capita output is still higher than China's.
It should be. US GDP per capita is five to six times that of China. China's CO2 output is 2x that of the US. That means the US is radically more efficient than China when it comes to economic output vs CO2 output.
China's CO2 output has been climbing rapidly the last five and ten years. The US added $4 trillion to its economy while reducing its CO2 output. China is such an immense polluter when it comes to CO2, that within perhaps just 15 years that per capita CO2 imbalance will decline to near zero - with the US still possessing 3x to 4x the GDP per capita of China.
You may have a differing opinion, but to me "per capita" is the only fair metric there is, unless you can make a convincing argument Chinese are somehow worth less than Americans.
And "per capita" still places the US solidly at the top of global polluters.
"per GDP" is an useless metric to me. You don't get to have more of the pie just because you managed to figure out how to get fatter eating it.
> unless you can make a convincing argument Chinese are somehow worth less than Americans
At the moment, if we are viewing people as a resource, in terms of economic production per individual, they are.
That aside, I agree with you in general, but the point can also be made that It is not fair to compare the US and China per capita because in theory China is still a developing country, and only when the standards of living are similar between the two countries would the comparison be fair.
This assumes that improving standard of living is more important to China than controlling emissions though.
> They have no plans to actually reduce CO2 emissions, their plan is to maybe slow the increase in the next two decades. They also have no plans to reduce their extreme consumption of coal, rather they plan to try to have more renewable energy as a share.
Not true. They have been stopping most coal plants that were in the planning stage.
So you are saying that China is going to do nothing to stop its horrendous air pollution problems from coal, and is in fact going to allow them to get a lot worse? I find that hard to believe.
I don't think you've been following the developments in this area. The Netherlands is aiming for half of all car sales by 2025 to be electric. Norway is already at one-third all electric.
I think it boils down to short term vs long term thinking, and my friends and I have thrown around all sorts of crazy theories around this.
In the context of the USA, could just be that republicans (the anti-climate change prevention party) are simply speaking to their conservative values in some way and want the USA to remain coal-powered with gasoline cars. All change is bad change?
Another less tenable theory is that typically conservatives/republicans cater to religious groups, and a tenant of christianity is the only thing that matters on earth is your own works - earth is irrelevant in the face of eternal paradise. I don't buy this one as much but it's fun to chew on.
I do feel very strongly though that not taking climate change seriously represents a fundamental inability to comprehend the term "long term investment."
As a former pastor of a main stream denomination church, and who hung around with those of much more conservative denominations, I think the second theory assumes way more thought about one’s chosen religious/philosophical framework than happens in practice. Generally speaking, those less “into it” at best would use religion as an excuse to drive their Suburban. Those that are actually amateur theologians tend to see the Earth as something God expects us to be good stewards of.
In summary, people don’t give religion enough thought to let it influence their actions WRT climate change, except out of convenience.
But according to Jim Inhofe, former head of the senate environmental committee, the climate can't be getting warmer because God is beneficent and would never allow that sort of harm to happen to the human race.
I agree, the resistance is so strong, it's arguably rooted in biology.
However, I'd argue that it's more wide-ranging deficit than simply long-term thinking. I'd argue that it's about empathy deficits, all around - not just with in regards to the future.
I wouldn't be surprised if a bit part of it was just contrarianism to the "arrogant liberal elite". If people stopped being so forceful (even to the point of dishonesty) in their global warming demands, maybe it woudln't have become a divisive issue and people would make up their minds more independely of their political position.
Is everything that comes out of a factory pollution? Many environmentalists would say so. Even the intended products are pollution. Pure H2O steam going up into the air. This is polluting the atmosphere with water. If there was too much steam going into the atmosphere, this would also be a problem, like CO2. Now I agree that too much C02 in the atmosphere is bad, but some can be emitted with no problem. How much is too much and who get to emit? This is the hard part. I think many people join the "climate change denial" crowd too push back against the "humans are evil and should go extinct, the quicker the better" environmentalist crowd.
>Is everything that comes out of a factory pollution? Many environmentalists would say so. Even the intended products are pollution. Pure H2O steam going up into the air.
No, pollution means something going into the environment that causes harm, and in the amounts being emitted. That is how every environmentalist I have ever heard of defines it.
But I bet you already knew that. You know, when someone uses bad arguments, I tend to assume it is because they lack good ones, and they lack good ones because the idea they are arguing for is mistaken.
>I think many people join the "climate change denial" crowd too push back against the "humans are evil and should go extinct, the quicker the better" environmentalist crowd.
No, not one in a thousand environmentalists believes that. You know, flat-out lies may work with the sort of people you identify with, but not people who know the truth.
Ok, you're right, I shouldn't have said that you identify with that crowd.
But I am still saying that the claim that any significant proportion of environmentalists think the human race is evil and should all be killed is simply false. Do you want to defend it?
"I think many people join the "climate change denial" crowd too push back against the "humans are evil and should go extinct, the quicker the better" environmentalist crowd."
Not completely obvious from this statement, but what I meant to convey was that the people who are committed and serious about "climate change denial" are people who believe many/most environmentalists are in the "humans are evil and should go extinct, the quicker the better" crowd. Not really sure about that, as I don't know any committed deniers well enough to have an honest conversation, but it doesn't seem unlikely.
When the USA exported it's manufacturing, it also exported the associated pollution.
That being said, just because the pollution is manufactured overseas doesn't mean the USA won't eventually breathe, drink or eat it. The USA might have cleaned up its own backyard but that doesn't mean net pollution from US consumption is down.
Read Hank Paulson's book, Dealing with China. That's a the former CEO of Goldman Sachs who opened the Chinese banking markets, and became Secretary of Treasury, overseeing the financial collapse here in 2008 (1). It's from 2015, goes up through October 2014.
That said, this doesn't seem to be a localized shutdown, of the kind we saw during the Olympics or G20 summit. I know of a number of Chinese factories in industries ranging from finished wood products to consumer electronics that have been shutdown nationwide for "environmental audits".
> This has temporarily stopped production from wide swaths of factories along China’s east coast and forced some factory owners to move supply chains to other countries.
What's the next country down in the environmental/cheap labor race to the bottom? Is India about to see huge manufacturing growth?
This year I assisted some displaced workers in SH whose jobs were being moved by a Fortune 1000 company from PRC to Malaysia. The exodus is real and companies have to diversify their risks.
I guess this is one example of an upside to authoritarianism. When the leadership decides something is important, you'd better get with the program or else...
That being said, it's a shame that the US is having difficulty demonstrating the upsides of democracy and capitalism on this front.
The funny thing about many US and EU enviroment protection supporters, that they drive an abandonement of almost pure nuclear energy use, while increasing the dependecy on coal and oil energy plants... And those produce not only chemical, but also a radiological pollution.
Totalitarianism always had its benefits but the population is left with no backup mechanism if the group in charge happens to be really bad at their jobs and/or their interests do not line up with those of the population. An efficient government can be a really bad thing when its goals does not align with the population's.
One advantage of democracy is that there is a mechanism for peaceful transition of power if the current leadership isn't working. Without this, a country has to resort to armed rebellion.
China has historically legitimized armed popular rebellion with the concept of the "mandate of heaven". When an armed popular rebellion topples a dynasty, the previous dynasty is said to have lost its mandate of heaven and the successful rebel leader is said to have gained it. This is why China has historically had dynastic cycles. Democracy is a possible solution for escaping the cycle of often disastrous and very bloody armed rebellions.
“If you remember nothing else about the superiority of democracies to other forms of government, remember the fact that in three years, we will have a change of leadership and almost no one is stocking up on canned goods to prepare for the inevitable civil war.” - http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa...
I would go so far as to say that the peaceful transition of power is the defining advantage of democracy.
Democracy, or that standards of living are so high its not worth it to deviate from the status quo? With no political science knowledge, I'm willing to have my view challenged and changed. I think there are 2 elements that are more important than democracy in and of itself.
1. High standards of living that alter the risk-reward ratio for making a political change
2. The rise of Corporations - these days, people view the government as a bureaucratic, slow, and useless entity with decent, but low pay. People aspire to work and move up the ranks in private corporations. The role of the government has been greatly reduced in the ordinary lives of citizens. That means the necessity of making a grand political change is just not as important as it was historically.
I think high standards of living help a lot to prevent popular revolutions. But I don't think they do anything to stop violent infighting in a succession dispute. The people at the top are usually well off no matter what, and their goal is more power.
Totalitarian systems are quicker to come up with the rules (in this case for self-preservation). And when time matters, then it has obvious advantages.
Businesses can react quicker because internally they run like dictatorships. That's why I am always wary of people wanting to run government like a business.
Eventually they had /have to do it.
Looks like you need to poison your air to
industrialize but after a while you need clean up.
Part of the trend. After people achieve a few basic needs
they ask for cleaner air, less asthma and cancer.
Talking abut...efficiency.
Can we guess some many lawsuits will be filed in courts against this? I'm guessing, zero. Must have been illegal all the time, but tolerated, until it wasn't.
It isn't just an image problem: the massive pollution issue China has will, if it remains unchecked, have a significant effect on economic growth due to health issues in the urban population that is driving the industrial sectors. On a less altruistic note, it is also threatening the health of the powers-that-be.
Well, I'd want to see a source for this, but my personal experience doesn't make it hard to believe that they'd be pumping out externally-facing propaganda.
That being said, the changes can be felt on the ground level. Public dialog is changing about climate change.
Your point being? It's well known that China spends billions on overseas propaganda. The $10bn on propaganda has been reported in multiple outlets. Does the Nikkei Times article on it somehow make the figure untrue?
Also, your entire comment history is just pro-China comments. Why is that the only topic you think is worth discussing on the site?
USA, Russia, Japan, UK are all doing this kind of things, but the West would rephrase themselves as cultural exchange or blessedness transmitters just like they named their acts on Tahuantinsuyo, Congo etc as civilizing.
Whataboutism doesn't disprove the fact that China spends an unprecedented amount on overseas propaganda, more than any other country. The US, in comparison, spends about $666m per year on foreign public diplomacy. Why is China spending 15x more on overseas propaganda than any other country on earth?
China is not trying to change its image (at least not in a real way). It's trying to:
1) solve a real problem with pollution in its own country. Pretty sure its "image" or even the Paris treaty is secondary to that.
2) By pushing for renewable power in its own country, it's essentially funding its own renewable energy industry, which could end-up way ahead of everyone else in the long-term, in both prices and technology.
So it's not about the image, it's about getting ahead through renewable energy and for their elites not having to breathe coal day in and day out in China's largest cities.
How will this impact imports and the US economy? Are there any mid-Kickstarter businesses who are having to refund donations because the factory cancelled their work?
I believe the world is warming through man made causes. However, I think it is just a byproduct of overpopulation. Pollution cannot be stopped with a exponential population curve. So turn off plants, recycle, re-arrange chairs, and volunteer all you want - but, in, 2040 I am not sure how we will support 9billion - without lots of waste.
China's push to clean energy and advanced manufacturing to reduce pollution dated back at least to 2003, because I saw people investigating natural gas in an area that can produce high quality coals really cheap (Shanxi province).
They created the Thousand Talents program for promising and distinguished researchers, Chinese or otherwise, to work and stay in the country with salary comparable to the West, in nominal terms, and many extra privileges. [1]
Pollution is a major concern among those who are interested and this gives additional urgency to the government.
Basically, they understand very well that top talents are essential for developing advanced technologies they need, and they are pushing very hard to develop native talents and attract promising ones from other countries. This is the Singapore playbook that has propelled their two universities into major institutions in engineering and other fields within a few decades. (Engineering programs in both Singaporean universities are now ranked in the top 10 or 20 in the world. Also, both Tsinghua and Beijing are ranked in the world's top 10 in AI publications recently, but they plan for more universities to move up in more fields.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Program_(Ch...