"And there’s no obvious leader in the southeast, but it is between Shenzhen, the richest city in the region, and Guangzhou, the political capital ..."
An incredible statement - made even more so by possibly being true.
It was less than ten years ago that Hong Kong might have been considered the leading city in all of China and certainly the most dynamic on the axes that he is considering.
FWIW, I think the CCP has made a tactical error in their handling of Hong Kong:
As a business owner in Hong Kong I was, previously, only peripherally and philosophically concerned with the behavior of the party throughout the rest of the country - it was possible to compartmentalize the "two systems".
But if Hong Kong is just another Chinese city and if there is only one "system" then I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are.
This makes me very sad - Hong Kong has for my entire adult life been my favorite city and the city I thought was the most interesting and exciting.
It has been at least 5 years, possibly 10, since going from Shenzhen to Hong Kong meant going back in time and not the other way around. I would liked to have seen a different development but I am not surprised by it.
I find the letter fascinating. I haven't followed China's economic progress closely, but one question I have that wasn't answered by the letter is:
Who shapes the CCP's ideology? It seems to be shifting all the time, Is it one person?
The clarity, conviction, speed, and alignment in which they execute the ideology is breathtaking. I can't imagine a group being able to do this over what seems to be a long period.
> I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are.
You can take as hard a negotiating stance as you like, in most/all situations the leverage resides with them. Even being Apple won't get them to leave you alone, that should tell you something.
In general you make a fair point but GPs business is cloud storage [1] and, as far as I know, they have one datacenter in SEA and it's in Hong Kong [2]. Presumably GP could open a datacenter in e.g. Singapore/Taipei/Tokyo instead and close the HK one—no negotiation with CCP authorities required.
If you a "business owner in Hong Kong" then you should be able to see with your own eyes whether Hong Kong is "just another Chinese city" or not, rather than believing the anti-China propaganda that western media regurgitates repetitively and predictably, paying only the most basic level of lip-service to actual events.
You will know then that Apple Daily and Stand News were pushing "freedom of the press" into territory that no western media dares to push in their own countries, including actively calling for foreign military intervention in Hong Kong.
"the only solution to bad speech is more free speech"
"the only solution to a bad market is more free market"
"the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"
edit: Hacker News that bastion of "free speech" where all opinions not conforming to the "western liberal" doctrine gets downvote-censored because the readers are too fragile to read different opinions
> US media personalities calling for military invasion of Australia
(1) That's not the same thing as calling for military invasion of the US. (2) No government cares about random small articles that only random internet commentators know about to make a "irrelevant counterexample fallacy"; what matters is large-scale media exhibiting a long-term pattern of behaviour and trying to organise large numbers of people (which they failed at in HK; most people stopped going to the protests after a small group started extreme violence).
> You will know then that Apple Daily and Stand News were pushing "freedom of the press" into territory that no western media dares to push in their own countries, including actively calling for foreign military intervention in Hong Kong.
I recall very recently some US media personalities calling for military invasion of Australia; doesn't seem very different.
"If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States"
Are you for real? The suffering of Assange, Manning, Peltier, and many others demonstrates that this is not true. Heck, you can even throw right-wing loons associated with Jan 6 in there. Washington simply does not tolerate challenges to its authority.
Evidence-free invocation of "demonstrably true" is an oxymoron.
It would be more like if Trump or Q crazies took over power on Jan 6, then the NyTimes called for Canada and Britain to come to our rescue and restore Democracy.
"Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance. Personally, I think it has been a tragedy for the US that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley."
"The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports. Decades of American deindustrialization as well as an aversion against idle capacity has eroded domestic manufacturing."
"In the face of this challenge against a new peer competitor, the US has demonstrated a superb capacity for self-harm."
"For someone in the middle class, there has never been a better year to live in China. That comes down to the entrepreneurs, who are creating businesses to please people."
All, absolutely true as I've commented previously in other posts. The decline of America is primarily a story about misallocation of talent and the demise of the American middle class as a result.
I wish modern-day economists would be more aware of local maximums, which is the economic strategy the US seems to have adopted in the last 2-3 decades. Looks like China is targeting things beyond the local maximums, much like the US used to do back in the '50s and '60s, maybe also in the '70s.
Not sure things like the ARPANET would have been possible in today's world when the strategy of "looking for the local maximum" is the only one made use of.
We need an enemy. The Soviets made the US better. We have identified both Global Warming and China as our current external enemies(terrorism seems to have fallen off the radar for now), but we're not fighting them like we did the Soviets. There is a lack of national purpose and a seriousness which is needed to focus our efforts on survival. Right now we're more focused on fighting each other and while some of our efforts to clean up our political and justice systems may bear fruit they may be irrelevant if we don't survive as a nation.
There's more profit scamming middleclass Americans (and their government) than there is in competing on the global stage. The idea of the rising tide lifting all ships is no longer followed within the country (or Mexico, UK, etc) as it is in other countries.
> "For someone in the middle class, there has never been a better year to live in China. That comes down to the entrepreneurs, who are creating businesses to please people."
Every rich Chinese I know is trying to leave China now. This includes even very well placed regime insiders.
A PLA 2 star general almost forcefully sent his daughter to live in Canada at the peak of COVID travel restrictions. I knew her from my days in a Canadian college.
A grandson of some revolutionary hero whom I took misfortune to acquaintance with by helping his daughter practice English, started recently asking me how immigration to Canada works, and if he can get along there without knowing English.
Even most zombiefied, hardcore pinkos who were going flag waving at West Georgia have shut up for good, and got in line for Canadian passports.
From the middle class you mention, factory owners I knew who were the most staunch, and stalwart when it came to hostile business environment, are now shutting down, selling at n-times discount, and pretty much running from the country.
Yea you’re exactly right. The elite of every non first world country are busy trying to immigrate to the US or one of the Anglo nations. It doesn’t say much about whether a country will continue to rise or not.
But you know what PRC rich don't do? Use their wealth to get richer in Canada. Apart from parking money in unproductive real estate. Their productive economic efforts stay in PRC where the opportunities still are. Ditto with first wave of wealthy HKers who fled post handover.
Majority of rich Chinese I know in Canada who aren't retired are essentially enjoying Canadian social services while contributing to PRC development. Their big spending improves niche BC economy while driving up housing prices. At end of day, Canada/West are just cheap retirement plans. Apart from capital flight which CCP can clamp down on, rich Chinese bailing to Canada aren't substantively detracting away from productivity in PRC.
>are now shutting down, selling at n-times discount, and pretty much running from the country.
And they'll get replaced by other PRC upstarts. Cycles of entrepreneur getting wealthy and then burn out in PRC only to retire abroad / in Canada has been happening since opening up. I saw first gen of new wealth capital flight in 2000s. It's nothing new. What is new is the number of PRC students who want to return and diaspora who went back to PRC to live in covid0. Reality is PRC is more enticing than ever, not enough for rich to ditch back up plans, but enough to keep growing.
>I read a lot of your previous posts. It feels you have zero idea how China works.
>You are too young, too simple.
I've read a lot of your China posts. You do good comment on manufacturing and industry post 2000s. Otherwise, from what I remember about your background, Russia / east Europe, schooling in Canada then work in SZ. It feels like you think your experiences when Russia was failing somehow explains a failing PRC that is mostly succeeding. You may have too much ex-soviet trauma like other east-european diaspora I talk to who try to extrapolate their experiences growing up in broken post soviet states to PRC because "commies bad".
I'm pretty sure I'm older than you, lived/worked in PRC before you (90s-10s) and stayed in touch with developments (beijing/shanghai) longer than you. Hardcore commies / regime insiders have been bailing China for comfy life in west since forever. Not the same industries will rejuvenate, things come/go according to industrial policy, but the cycle will continue. Xi killed industry my family was in dead for a few years, it's booming now. While other sectors stay dead. I've hanged with PLA generals, with more stars, and did all the "eye opening" experiences expats brag/allege gives real understanding of PRC. Except it doesn't. I also have family / relationships with PRC nationals who were part of elite patronage networks. Which is every bit as much of a shitshow as you allege, except I also recognize the broader political system largely works and read enough academic literature to have a sense of why. Whereas your recommended literature on understanding PRC at bottom of thread:
>The few people remaining brave enough to open their mouth are either from religious cults on one side, or former regime insiders themselves on another.
If this is cheek in tongue endorsement of FLG / Guo / other dissident media, then it explains a lot.
>diaspora decided to stay in the COVID ridden West, than to return to China.
Not for a lack of trying. Flights into PRC was extremely limited on top of quarantine. Most people with means I knew tried to go back, but couldn't due to hassle. Eventually they just waited out for vax.
Remember comparative value, which is a real thing.
China had very cheap labour that the US could never compete with.
China made outrageous amounts of stuff, and stocks Wallmart and Amazon shelves with it.
In my own lifetime, I have seen a seismic shift in material consumption of Americans, mostly for the better: the quantity, variety, quality of goods and even foodstuffs in a Wallmart today - cheap and accessible to most Americans - would blow someone from 1975 away.
The giant piece missing from the economic equations is 'consumer surplus' which is the 'profit' that consumers derive. When consumers get more choice, more quality and lower prices, they are making huge 'profits' that we simply don't put in the equations. Consumer Surpluses have been massive for the West.
At least for low-end manufacturing, it's been a massive neoliberal win-win.
Obviously, the storyline is changing, and for more advanced products it's a different issue. But for most things so far, it's 'good' trade.
Average mfg. wages in China are still short of Mexico, and US salaries include all sorts of overhead, especially healthcare.
"Skilled assembly line workers cost more in South China than in cheaper US states." - for some things, not for most things.
"Amazons, Googles, Facebooks still keep pouring into China like there is no tomorrow." - Yes, and?
Without 'cheap labour' China would not exist, even today, the economic machine depends on it.
The surpluses wrought by the American/Western consumer are massive.
Walmart would have 1/2 of the goods, and they would be more expensive.
Americans consume considerably more goods than they would otherwise, and that's a measure of the enormous surplus being created by comparative value trade between the two nations.
The 'anti comparative value' argument made in the article is just hot air and speculation without a lot of data to pack it up.
Adam Smith is as correct as Isaac Newton, you can't just say 'gravity doesn't exist anymore'.
Poor logic. How can U.S. PhDs work in manufacturing when factories moved to China? Beijing didn't make PhDs work in manufacturing either. It's just the manufacturing job market is there. The government has nothing to do with this.
The west self-harm is contradicting itself by allowing both heavy labor-regulations in their own countries and trade with countries with basically no labor-regulations. It's just like they hate their own low skill workers so much that the politicians intentionally destroyed the factory job market.
> The west self-harm is contradicting itself by allowing both heavy labor-regulations in their own countries and trade with countries with basically no labor-regulations. It's just like they hate their own low skill workers so much that the politicians intentionally destroyed the factory job market.
This is the problem but you have the motive wrong. It wasn't intentionally destroyed, it was a complete lack of concern about whether or not it was destroyed.
You have, on the one hand, unions and others who lobby for more regulations. They have perverse incentives. If they get a new regulation that increases US manufacturing costs by 2%, they get credit for protecting workers. But they don't get credit for regulations passed in the 1970s, so they're always asking for more, so the cost of US manufacturing is always going up.
Manufacturing companies would have the incentive to counterbalance this by lobbying against them, if they didn't have the alternative to offshore manufacturing to countries without this. But they do, so they do that instead.
So regulations that can't pass a cost benefit analysis, or that no longer make sense because things have changed or we know more now than we did then, are still on the books and have no obvious path to being removed.
Politicians have no incentive to fix this because their incentives are to make the lobbyists happy. The unions are happy that they get to take credit for passing more regulations all the time and the corporations are happy that they get to avoid all the regulations by manufacturing in other countries, so who is the lobby to fix it?
I think the whole fiasco about labor regulation is as misinformed as most other issues about other countries are presented in the US. China's labor protection isn't ideal. However, the US has its own share of failures when it comes to labor protection.
China arguable has better protection when it comes to mandatory severence pay and most workers don't work by the hours, or depend on the tips to survive. On the other hand, China don't have hyper-active unions, overtime limits are not strictly enforced. However, I remember reading a piece about a janitor in San Francisco who worked so many hours he's getting paid more than a regular programmer. So when it comes to that, regulations can't do much when someone's determined to get that overtime .
The core thing is, however, a lot more Chinese workers are willing to work that overtime and get that extra pay without complains, and the cost of living is simply way lower.
For an outsider, $15 per hour in the bay may seem high, but even if you work the full hours, you can save very little after housing and food. However, those workers in China are housed, fed, and they get to save all that they get.
> China arguable has better protection when it comes to mandatory severence pay and most workers don't work by the hours, or depend on the tips to survive.
The US has mandatory unemployment insurance which serves the same purpose, and none of the jobs that get paid in tips are in manufacturing.
Also, waitstaff in the US in practice generally get paid more than minimum wage, because the ones whose service is so poor they can't get more than that in tips will quit and take a job where tips aren't part of the compensation.
> The core thing is, however, a lot more Chinese workers are willing to work that overtime and get that extra pay without complains, and the cost of living is simply way lower.
The cost of living, especially the cost of housing, is certainly a major factor. But that's still a regulatory failure, because in that case the cause is zoning regulations.
There are tons of US PhDs working in manufacturing. Most of the interesting and high-leverage problems in manufacturing are in Chemical/Biochemical Engineering, Robotics, Controls, ...
When it comes to "stuff phds do in the manufacturing sector", the US is still a leader.
> The west self-harm is contradicting itself by allowing both heavy labor-regulations in their own countries and trade with countries with basically no labor-regulations.
This is accurate. If you want manufacturing capacity in the US, the correct thing to do is to raise the bar globally. Want to import? Great. Meet a minimum standard of labor and environmental regulations, perhaps different than the US labor regs, and even possibly lower in some dimensions, but qualitatively similar.
Of course, this is far easier said than done.
> It's just like they hate their own low skill workers so much that the politicians intentionally destroyed the factory job market.
WRT environmental regulations, it's much easier to turn a blind eye to something happening half-way around the world than something happening in your own town. Especially when that "something" is "Pittsburgh's skies blacker than night at noon due to cancerous smog".
WRT labor regulations & cost, you seem to claiming that the workers rights movement hated workers? Again, it's easy to say "make jobs safer and pay people more". It's much harder to so "and also we're going to accept permanent double-digit inflation."
I think, instead of malice, we can attribute the US's current situation to the fact that policies which make manufacturing more expensive are largely popular even among manufacturing laborers and policies which make imported goods more expensive are (a) horrendously difficult to "get right" and (b) largely unpopular.
This isn't poor logic, the whole climate and lack of factories is the U.S. problem. Those factories didn't magically disappear in the US, and reappear in China overnight or made the move on their own. This is the result of decisions made by both the business and political leaders of the country.
The factories moved overseas because that was perceived as the route to more payback for the investor class,(true in the short term) ignoring the expense against the people actually producing "stuff" in the US (the longer term result). This effectively moved research and development away from the US because it was more expensive to continue there, and money was the only object.
Thanks. According to Rand[0], the % of households in the middle class has shrunk, primarily because they are moving into the upper class. While technically, yes, the middle class is shrinking, it's not for a negative reason (from the perspective of the middle class themselves).
Overall, American households are increasingly wealthy, class divisions notwithstanding.
I don’t think that’s really a fair summary of the article and it elides many of the nuances, such as the fact that the “increase in wealth” you cherry-pick is due to demographic changes (workers getting older and thus having higher salaries) whereas the other measures in the article all point to declines. But more to the point: does this summary reflect your actual experience?
The word that caught my attention was demise. It doesn’t square if you believe that the US is seeing record employment and record stock market returns, as more than 50% of US households have stock-based investments.
I was asking, and still hoping to see, the metrics and data that point to demise of the US middle class.
My unironic recommendation for any nation state is to block American social media companies and then proceed to restrict or outright ban R&D work on 'ads' and other such trinkets. Exactly because of: ".. a tragedy for ... that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley." Just looking at the sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking is insane.
Perhaps a less heavy-handed approach would be to actually enforce existing anti-trust laws against Big Tech so that they're not able to monopolize America's best and brightest?
Also, as a Physics PhD holder myself, I dislike that Physics PhDs are held up as the archetypal smart people to be allocated in society's best interest. My opinion is that most of them, myself included, were foolish to go that far in their education and would have better served themselves, and society, if they had stopped at a BS. We could unlock a large economic gain if we went back to fairly matching job responsibilities with the minimum required education.
> Just looking at the sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking is insane.
It's circular -- while I think ads are absurd and am actively trying to remove as many of them from my life as possible, it's not like technologies that have been subsidized by optimizing ad clicking haven't come back around to help science out.
I hear this kind of thing repeated here a lot, but I have to ask - what percentage of the engineering staff at Google and Facebook directly work on advertising? I would be shocked if it was as high as 10%. "The sheer amount of work gone to optimize ad clicking" is pretty damn small compared to the tech economy, let alone the whole economy.
It may be funded by advertising, but Search is incredibly useful. And Facebook keeps me in touch with my extended friend circle, which as far as I'm concerned is an unconditional social good. Most of the people working on those products aren't working on the advertising part. And if a small percentage are, well, you can't fully optimize every system of humans.
Why does the distinction of direct vs indirect matter when the question is about opportunity costs of deploying talent to potentially more fruitful endeavors?
Because a search engine that almost always finds what you are looking for is a fruitful endeavor. A website that lets me keep up with my extended friend circle is a fruitful endeavor. A website full of educational videos (and yes, a lot of mindless entertainment) is a fruitful endeavor.
By focusing on how they are funded, you're losing track of the fact that these companies provide incredibly valuable services.
Chinese may be the world's best manufacturers but it just creates pollution and little profit. SV maybe create pointless apps but it makes loads more money.
I think that is a stretch beyond snapping point for Hong Kong. Most days in Hong Kong I could see the air pollution obscuring buildings in the distance. It's AQI is terrible https://aqicn.org/city/hongkong/ . There are nice mountain walks and nearby islands but it is extremely dense and urban. It's one of the places Ghost in the Shell used for reference!
Also the narrative here feels mostly from the mainland China point of view; having to go and deal with "problematic" Hong Kong. But problems between Hong Kong and the mainland began when Beijing used its influence to restrict Hong Kong's traditional democracy, so only "approved" candidates could be voted into office. And since then it's increasingly clamped down on the freedoms Hong Kong previously enjoyed, most recently doing things such as removing the Tiananmen Square memorials (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-59764029). At this point the writing is on the wall and bit by bit Hong Kong will brought in step with the rest of mainland China.
Unlike the author I found the Hong Kong bureaucracy fast and effective. Enforcers "sometimes able to look the other way" sounds like corruption to me and people with better guanxi being able to bend the rules. I'd rather have the laws fair, clear and applied to all equally (though that's always going to be a gradient).
Despite all that, it's undeniable China is on the rise and that's going to be the dominant story of this century. There's potential for that to be a great boon to the world and I hope that's the reality that comes to be.
> Despite all that, it's undeniable China is on the rise and that's going to be the dominant story of this century.
I think that remains to be seen, for two major reasons:
1. Countries whose primary political system devolves into "cult of personality" tend to fare very poorly in the long run when it comes to global leadership (note, I think this warning applies to other countries besides China).
2. China has an undeniable demographic crisis on the horizon. Of course, so do many countries, so my hypothesis is that countries that are able to accept and integrate immigrants will do the best. It's an open question which country that is, but it definitely doesn't look like China.
If by 2030, first kids are born in "factories", governments will plan for the future in a different way than if they know that there are no alternatives to natural births.
Who would raise the artificial kids? Who would pay for it in the first place?
Maybe government. Or scarier some company.
It would be awesome if we could fully support children and education. It would be gross if the only way to do that was capitalistic incentives.
Maybe that's a sick sci-fi startup idea to pitch (more like write a book about).
Raise kids from scratch, long term 50 year roi horizon returned from the increased earning potential from having raised the kids and educated them better! I doubt VC money would go for something unless you could speed up development to get your unicorn in 5 years lol
Joking aside it seems to me the answer is way simpler and doesn't require magic tech. We still have working bodies. We just have to support them with free childcare, great education, healthcare, and other social support for parents. But we can't seem to get enough votes for that. Immigration is an easy solution too but same thing...
Given how specialization works in other areas of life, I would expect "professional parents" to emerge, adopting 5-10 artificial kids over their lifetime. Possibly even more. That could actually be a reasonable job for people who are otherwise less qualified.
In more authoritarian countries, I would expect government-run boarding schools to emerge, preparing boys for future careers in military or the Party, girls ... well, that would depend on local culture, probably.
"Joking aside it seems to me the answer is way simpler and doesn't require magic tech. We still have working bodies."
If it were so simple, some countries would be able to solve it. I would, on the other hand, say, that it is as "simple" as solving the obesity crisis: a problem that looks straightforward from a distance, but turns into a maze of nightmarish "devil's details" up close.
We do not really have working bodies. Peak fertility is in late teenage years and early twenties, but societies which highly value education must shift childbearing to much later age. And after 30, a lot of people who want to have kids are no longer capable to do so without medical help, and this process is so tedious and stressful that you will wind up with smaller families than wished for.
Already about 5 per cent of kids are born out of IVF, which indicates that the cohort of people struggling with fertility is significant.
Oh that's a scary thought. Authoritarian countries growing children for war and might. Sprinkle in some genetic engineering!
Interesting thought about gender separation in authoritarian countries too. A lot of outdated concept of gender is rooted in the role of motherhood, which in this scenario wouldn't really be a thing. More a specialized career.
Yeah I guess my meta point was a lot of people wait to have kids because of their careers and the ginormous cost of raising kids. But that's a good point about education; even with all the resources in the world it's hard to raise kids and attain grad school or higher education. But graduating college by 21 still leaves a lot of time.
I disagree with you on Hong Kong (I m now a voting citizen, for what it's worth - not much).
The problems in Hong Kong didnt start 2 years ago, they started when the UK came in, and we inherit a difficulty I know well where I come from (Europe, full of Corsica, Basque Country, Northern Ireland, Brittany, Catalonia and so on).
Beijing reacts like we all reacted 2 centuries ago, and will slowly learn to deal with it, especially if they invade Taiwan and have to stop killing because unlike Xinjiang there's nothing to mine there and only cost cost cost to maintain an aggressive colony that builds processors as only output of value.
I think the CCP is no more evil than Napoleon, and ask a Frenchman today and he'll rave about what he did that transformed eventually the country, at the cost of 200k+ young people's lives to invade Russia, if you can believe it.
Things progress and China has to experience it for themselves, sadly. There's no shortcuts that I know of for such a big place.
> ... only cost cost cost to maintain an aggressive colony that builds processors as only output of value.
Just to correct you here, the only aggressive country between these two is the Chinese side, which is "buzzing" Taiwanese airspace daily to keep them mobilized and exhausted and has built a full scale replica of central Taipei [1] in which the PLA does drills simulating its capture.
That's not peaceful, those are the heights of aggression.
If the CCP wants peace, they need to start showing it with action.
I think the GP was perfectly in line with what you're saying. They seemed to me to suggest that China will eventually invade Taiwan, and learn the hard way how bad that works out in the long run, and how costly this type of aggression is - just like the European empires learned for themselves from their own experience some few hundreds of years ago.
Yes, ofc I meant the aggressivity would come after they invade Taiwan and transform it into a colony. My English is sometimes awkward but the British could have switched to French when we invaded them. Sadly we all learned the hard way France couldnt maintain... an "aggressive colony" in England either hehehe
As a half-related aside, I think the solution is what we eventually did with the EU, a mutually assured dependency that would force everyone to keep the peace we longed for millenia, and I think the British forgot a bit too fast the vain inter massacres our ancestors rushed into at each disagreement when they yelled for Brexit to give them back their "independence".
Wish China could see it but afraid they have to try every other stupid way first :( Praying for the British and us our fishing disagreements and submarines rifraf dont escalate. Could Taiwan compromise with a soft border economic Union called the Greater China Union that would make everyone cool down ? Meh.
The CCP is not like Napoleon, bringing order out of chaos.
Hong Kong and Taiwan are way ahead of China.
Common prosperity would mean literally just leaving them alone - or even promoting and supporting their independence (!).
Healthy, free, mostly democratic and sovereign Hong Kong and Taiwan would probably be in China's best interest in every way but their nationalist view of identity. It's their choice - but let's not pretend that Hong Kong and Taiwan are gaining Napolonic bureaucracy wherein there was none before.
"leaving them alone" is straight-up naivete, especially when you consider the US military presence. I cannot imagine anyone who has seen a world map seriously advancing the idea of HK independence, it's not even what HK itself wants. Their current methods seem shortsighted and heavy-handed but China's objective of national security is eminently rational. To say it's in their best interest to leave them alone is simply absurd and clearly only accounts for Western perspectives
There is zero US military - or any other military threat related to Taiwan or Hong Kong.
While there might be some possibility of US defence of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, there is no material threat to Chinese territorial integrity otherwise - from anybody.
There's no airbases, no missiles, no naval base, no ballistic missile launch points for US forces on Taiwan.
There is zero military justification for China to invade Hong Kong or Taiwan.
The capture of Taiwan and Hong Kong is 100% a Nationalist Imperialist objective of Han Supremacy and their version of identity, history etc.
Militarily, the invasion of Taiwan is going to be extremely expensive, hugely disruptive, and will risk giant swaths of Chinese trade, their international standing and participation in so many things. In fact - it already is. China faces a great deal of pushback for their moves on both HK and Taiwan.
...
"I cannot imagine anyone who has seen a world map seriously advancing the idea of HK independence,"
There is a 100% chance, that if a choice were given to Hong Kong citizens today to either continue on the path to integrating with China - or - to be independent - they would chose independence.
Why don't we find out and give them the choice?
Hong Kong would dump China the instant they had the opportunity.
If the CCP had not moved towards controlling the political apparatus, Hong Kong would have been independent in 1997 whereupon China used the threat of violence to stop anyone from considering otherwise, as they do now: violence as the only instrument of power.
...
"way ahead? On what metrics?"
Hong Kong and Taiwan are ahead of the mainland on all metrics.
2020 GDP/capita in USD:
HK $46K
Taiwan $33K
China $10K
In terms of quality of life, education, healthcare, political freedoms - Hong Kong and Taiwan provide immensely better for their citizens than China ever will.
The capture of Hong Kong by China is already resulting in it's decline, the same would happen to Taiwan.
Hong Kong serves as an important financial gateway for China into the 'real world' - the only reason that financial opportunity exists is because the historical independence of Hong Kong.
No more independence - no more special financial status - and so both China and Hong Kong lose.
Really? So a deep friendship between China and Mexico would be something that the US would have no problems with? The hypocrisy is amusing. The US-Taiwan relationship is perceived as a threat, which makes complete sense from the Chinese perspective.
China has no plans of invading Hong Kong, where in the world is this nonsense from.. As for the consequences of invading Taiwan, of course. Which is why I am very certain it will not happen.
> There is a 100% chance, that if a choice were given to Hong Kong citizens today to either continue on the path to integrating with China - or - to be independent - they would chose independence.
There is no other way to describe this other than complete bullshit. There are polls. Hong Kong citizens can be communicated with. I suggest you find them and do that. And while you're at it, explain how Hong Kong will survive economically and resource-wise in this fantasy scenario. There's no point in continuing any discussion when these basic facts cannot be agreed on. This is a laughably naive idea that is only feasible through Western delusion.
Re: economic comparisons, fair enough, I let myself be dunked on by framing the question in that way. It's skewed by the long tail of rural Chinese - _especially_ in the case of Hong Kong, which cannot be fairly compared to China as a whole, but I wasn't clear.
I'd just suggest looking at growth metrics instead. Taiwan and HK economic stagnation is an old story.
While this is an excellent article (admittedly I stopped around half its too long) that refreshes most of my obsolete memory of China, I do think the author is a bit too optimistic. From what I heard from my startup founder friends, it’s becoming increasingly hard to innovate without government relationships (many founders do though, some from family some from bribery). The “national team” is coming to many consumer segment as well so the space is squeezing.
Let’s see where this trend goes, I think the golden age of entrepreneurs are ticking
Anybody living and working in China and writing about it has to conform to certain viewpoints, or they'll be unable to continue as they are. This letter is interesting in several ways, but you'd be wise to approach it from the angle of it having been approved by the government. Anything remotely negative has to be balanced by big positives (or negatives about Hong Kong).
I am sure that the author, given that he is living in China, has to be careful about what he says. But there's a lot of criticism of the Chinese government in this piece, more than I was expecting, particularly about the negative effects of the ideological crackdown, along with the praise for things that are going well.
Perhaps he knows that to get away with it, he has to include lots of praise. But both the praise and the criticism seem authentic. It's a valuable piece, I learned a good deal from it.
Exactly. Any Chinese citizen writing on the same topics would need a high degree of formal education outside of China, English proficiency, and the ability to publish anonymously on the real Internet. It's a high bar.
> This letter is interesting in several ways, but you'd be wise to approach it from the angle of it having been approved by the government.
Which government? Beijing would absolutely not allow the publication of a piece that uncritically regurgitates Washington's narrative about "mass detention of minorities". It's Saddam-has-WMDs-and-is-allied-with-al-Qaeda all over again. Fool me once.
It's best read as a letter for Western/liberal audiences. That is clearly the intended audience.
>"mass detention of minorities". It's Saddam-has-WMDs-and-is-allied-with-al-Qaeda
These aren't equivalent. We have plenty of evidence of the Uyghur genocide from 3rd party journalists and satellite imagery. The only evidence for WMDs came directly from a new government agency (named "Office of Special Plans") created by Dick Cheney and not independently verified by any 3rd parties.
> We have plenty of evidence of the Uyghur genocide from 3rd party journalists and satellite imagery.
No, we don't. The vast majority of primary "evidence" comes out of the ETIM lobby (WUC, Adrian Zenz, et al.) and war lobby (ASPI, etc). All of it massively signal-boosted by the mainstream corporate media. Both sources have a very, very clear (conflict of) interest in manufacturing anti-China sentiment.
Grainy satellite imagery of ordinary schools and prisons is only admissible as "concentration camps" if you're a shameless propagandist.
It's quite literally the same playbook as "Saddam's WMDs", with similarly cynical goals. Because it worked. And it's been similarly effective at duping the average media consumer.
Linking a heavily manipulated Wikipedia article is the definition of fallacious book-throwing.
Do you have any primary evidence that isn't blatant hearsay, Google Earth speculation, or bad-faith mistranslations? In my extensive research, virtually 100% of "the evidence" falls into these 3 easily manipulated categories.
The year is 2022. There should be convincing photo and video evidence of the supposed atrocities. Western intelligence community has high-resolution aerial cameras. China has a billion people on social media, some using VPNs. There would certainly be whistleblowers. Smoking guns of this alleged Holocaust should be everywhere, on a daily basis. But they're suspiciously absent.
If you are genuinely interested you can look through that page yourself to see if you can find evidence matching your stringent criteria :) I am not able to read your mind to guess what you’ll find convincing and am sure you can do your own research provided the starting point.
I can't believe I'm replying to you it's so pointless but I can't help myself.
There are tons of sources showing that the facilities you can see plainly in satellites are internment centers. And schools which you can see barbed wire etc.
BUT how about looking at the opposite. What you can see erased.
One can view a cultural genocide from the air plain as day. The erasure of Uighyer cultural and religious spaces. Just a couple sources below.
Let me save you your reply, that's fake or some US government plot planted BS, that's not a primary source (even though the articles give the primary), etc.
I read through your profile and I'm pretty surprised by the huge volume of consistent comments so I guess good for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I specifically asked you to not rely on grainy satellite image speculation, yet you proceed to rely on grainy satellite image speculation.
There are countless reasons why a building might be there one day and look differently a while later. Renovation, relocation, temporary decoration, disaster, weather, different time of day/year, different camera, different postprocessing, etc. Maybe a mosque even was used as a training site for violent extremists and was transformed/demolished for that reason. Maybe one photo is doctored. Maybe PRC is populated and ruled by comic book villains that do Wicked Evil Stuff for no discernable reason.
Scrutiny is required.
Yet ideologues act as if "genocide" is the only possible answer. Unspeakably deranged.
Ironically, this propaganda campaign makes it easy to understand how Nazi Germany could get to the point of industrial genocide. Because it turns out the people are eager to believe deranged, racist, hateful conspiracy theories about the "enemy", in this case the Chinese Communists, as long as the mass media plays along.
On an unrelated note, anti-Asian hate crimes are way up in America.
Yeah dude some of the linked satellite photos are pretty clear even for a layperson and as OP says there are direct on the ground photos as well. The investigative group Bellingcat also has a pretty good history of journalism, I'd suggest you check out their background and works.
For additional info, there are multiple books written on the topic as well, ex:
I am intimately familiar with Bellingcat's history of being funded by Western governments, laundering Western intelligence and outright fabricating "evidence" like the OPCW draft letter or the Navalny phone call. They are the furthest thing from a reliable, trustworthy source on geopolitical matters concerning Washington's opponents.
For the last time, if a literal genocide of millions of people is happening in 2022, and perpetrated by the public enemy #1 of the only media superpower on the planet, there would be primary evidence everywhere. Yet all you guys can do is point to a mountain of bullshit and say "go find the needle".
I did link to several books which provide primary accounts. But that aside, could you cite any of the info you quoted on Bellingcat, specifically its fabrication of evidence? I recently picked up a book on them, but have not read it yet, so would be curious to read your perspective as well.
There is tons of irrefutable evidence of an ethnic genocide and internment of minimally thousands and thousands, likely millions over the course of time.
There is indeed lots of "evidence" -- extremely dubious or easily refutable "evidence" that was clearly manufactured or mispresented.
There is also irrefutable evidence of a propaganda campaign orchestrated by Washington and various SIGs that have a vested interest in destroying the PRC. For example, the Countering Chinese Influence Fund signed into law which provides $300,000,000 per annum exclusively for the production of anti-China propaganda.
Connect the dots. Use your brain. Stop regurgitating headlines.
You’re clearly not arguing in good faith. The US government is full of snakes, but the media brought this issue to bear whereas with Iraq the government was running the narrative. But I’ll only point this out once as I can see your agenda plainly.
>The “national team” is coming to many consumer segment as well so the space is squeezing.
Can you expand on this? Are you talking about consumers wanting to buy chinese brands (eg. huawei instead of apple), or some sort of officially state sanctioned brand?
More on the to-C technical startup founded by overseas Chinese who returns to the country. The national team now is disguised as private owned companies and have unfair advantage to supply chains, even better pricing with cloud providers
This so called national team, is a myth. It never manifests itself. Apparently, national team backed national captical, executed by nationally-owned enterprises, are not agile and innovative enough when competing with private businesses. That's simply a human nature-driven market econmomy law. Chinese people are not living in an alternative universe where economy laws do not apply.
Meh not so fast.. it’s China, it has plenty of talents and execution is not a concern. Take ride sharing as an example, those stated owned enterprises CAN do tech!
> Other major state-owned automakers have rolled out their own ride-hailing brands: FAW Group established Yiqi Chuxing in 2019; Hong Kong-listed Dongfeng Motor launched Dongfeng Chuxing in 2018;
I didn’t read all the way through but what I got out of it is that socialism is destroying the traditional Chinese character of Beijing. Not exactly a glowing portrait of the central government!
"Shenzhen and Guangzhou are still attracting entrepreneurial types, producing an even more commercially-oriented culture than Shanghai. But while Shenzhen is pleasant, it is also a boring city with minimal culture. A friend relates an anecdote from a gallery artist, who said that clients in Shenzhen rarely comment on the art that they plan to buy. Instead they ask only its expected price in five years."
This is a bit dated (2015 ?) but I was wandering around Shenzhen very late at night. After midnight. I came across a Lamborghini dealership and I thought it was noteworthy.
> They care instead more about cultural issues, which is why people have fond views of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
Apart from anime Japan is pretty much a cultural desert for us, Westerners, right now. Compare that to the excellent movies they made back in the '50 to the '70s, back then they were on the vanguard of world cinema together with the French (la Nouvelle Vague) and the Italians (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini), as Hollywood was on its dying bed.
Taiwan is even more a cultural wasteland, I can only name you Tsai Ming-liang (who apparently has just filmed his last ever feature film) and Hou Hsiao-hsien, other than that it's only the idea of money and of making money that comes out of Taiwan.
South Korea is a little bit more complicated. There's K-Pop that's definitely a thing among younger people (I'm personally 40+ so I'm not in their target demographic) and there's Korean TV dramas, which rival Turkish TV dramas in many parts of the world, but I would say that's not probably what the author had in mind. SK used to have a very, very vibrant movie scene in the 2000s and a little in the early 2010s, its Busan film festival was one of the most interesting movie festivals in the world at some point, but for some reason or another all that is a thing of the past now.
I know less about SK and Taiwan, but for Japan I think you're looking at it quite narrowly.
Others have mentioned videogames, where Japan is more influential than all of Europe combined, this being the biggest (by revenue) cultural industry by far.
In literature then, Japan has one of the most popular still-living authors in the world, Haruki Murakami.
Japanese cuisine and culinary design (pottery, tea paraphernalia) is extremely influential everywhere in the world - with some amount of mix up with Chinese symbolism, to be fair. Japanese visual designs are influential in fashion.
It's true that in cinema and music Japan's influence is small and even shrinking (especially given that they had titans like Akira Kurosawa). But Japanese culture is still an item if fascination and influence in much of the world.
Studio Ghibli's movies have been extremely popular in the US. Midnight Diner has a dedicated following on Netflix. Lost in Translation was set in Tokyo. Pacific Rim is quite clearly a Japanese cultural artifact, even if it wasn't filmed there. Giant-robot-movie is practically a genre.
Japan's influence on world cinema is bigger than just "movies made in Japan".
Americans remain fascinated with all aspects of Japanese culture, from food ("Jiro Dreams of Sushi" and sushi/hibachi places) to clothing to martial arts to Marie Kondo. Haruki Murakami's books are sold at Wal-Mart. Judo and karate studios still populate strip malls. Pokemon's going strong more than 20 years on. I would say Japan's second only to the UK in terms of visible cultural exports here.
> In terms of fashion, Japan's Uniqlo is quite popular in the US and continues to grow
Wearing a pair of Uniqlo jeans right now. Every time I look for the best made (accessible) consumer goods, I seem to end up with something made in Japan. Kitchen knives, charcoal, blue jeans, and even food items like beef, rice, or uni. It just seems that a lot more care goes into creating high quality goods that are meant to last. I think I read somewhere that the last shop that actually made blue jeans in San Francisco closed recently.
> I would say Japan's second only to the UK in terms of visible cultural exports here.
That's really interesting, I haven't been to the States until now so that is really news to me. To be honest I had thought that the Japanese "mania" (if I may call it so) had run its course back in the '80s (the "Karate Kid" movies, Akira as an underground (?) cultural phenomenon, the Nakatomi Corporation), with an important continuation in the '90s through the anime mania, maybe also in the 2000s, when many people (re-)discovered Miyazaki and Takahata. Also the JDM car scene that was made famous by the first F&F movies. Anyway, I thought all that was in the past, for example a Mk4 Toyota Supra sold for a record auction price recently [1], I thought there's no way that culture is still part of the mainstream, joining it has become too expensive.
I certainly do notice the fascination Japan as a country still holds among many in the tech-crowd scene like is the case for many HN-ers in here, but I thought that was a local and contained phenomenon.
In the 1980s, Japan was painted as a threat. "Economic Pearl Harbor", Japanese developers snapping up US real estate, Crichton's "Rising Sun", etc.
Then the Japanese bubble economy burst and new bogeymen (terrorists, China, etc) took center stage, and now the popular image of Japan is blue-haired anime girls squealing "kawaii!".
Meh, China is probably the biggest county in DOTA (just as Korea with SC). The piece has very interesting points, but the author eagerness to criticize every single thing about China (ironic, because he complains that the Chinese are petty) clouds his judgement.
Also, I dont know in which world he lives (I suppose most of his friend were Asian-Canadians) but your average westerner cannot name even 1 single cultural production of Taiwan. In the case of South Korea, most of the stuff they are known for (mainly KPop, and great movies/tv shows) has been produced in the last 20-25 years when the country reached an economic level and show business know-how that allowed them to flourish. China is not there yet.
China produces lots of good stuff, that for many reasons (distribution, advertisement, political hostility) are not known in the west.
Just one example, this is a fantastic TV show. I even say it is the best show I've watched in 2021, and you can watch it, legally and for free:
China produces a lot of costume dramas, which aren’t that popular in the west at but are popular in the rest of Asia. Actually, I have an American non-Asian coworker who surprised me by her interest in Chinese costume dramas, that was a first for me.
The other spice of life and drama formulas seem incredibly derivative. Japan does those better to my tastes when I’m going over the in flight media options on a long trans pacific flight.
in my admittedly limited experience, korea seems to make great suspense, intrigue, and twist-of-fate romance dramas, while japan seems better at the quirky and the heartwrenching.
china seems better at historical/costume dramas (wuxia/xianxia being my current streaming obsession), especially for the costuming (obviously), sets, landscapes, and cultural history. they're not great for plot (holes out the wazoo), editing (quantity over quality), or writing/dialogue (uneven at best). they all lean much too heavily on tired tropes, like love triangles and (weirdly) amnesia, but are still really entertaining on balance.
i've been on the look-out to see when wuxia/xianxia really crosses over in popularity with american/english-speaking audiences, given that it's basically the chinese version of the cowboy western, simple morality tales set in (seemingly) simple times. star wars, a westernized takeoff of xianxia (but in space) seemed like a logical stepping stone, and crouching tiger, hidden dragon (one of my all-time faves) even made the leap, but didn't establish a wider popularity for the genre. shang chi, marvel's recent and modernized foray, doesn't seem to have made much of a splash either.
If you’re interested in checking out new Taiwanese video games, I really enjoyed Opus: Echo of Starsong. It’s worth a go! The Legend of Tianding has a fun feeling to it as well.
For that matter, South Korean electronics are massive too. Samsung, LG, SK Hynix. Not just phones but laptops, refrigerators, chips, air conditioners, etc.
Japan of course has many name brand consumer and engineering product companies.
Taiwan has TSMC and Foxconn which while two of the most important companies in the world aren't well known outside of tech because they dont sell directly and don't do branding (like Intel for example).
With Squid Games being one of the most watched and talked about TV-series last year, and Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Film the year before, I find it odd that you consider SK to be past it's prime.
I speak with California bias, but the culture/recognition of Taiwan is rather massive here. Not as massive as Japan or South Korea, but very notable.
It's all mostly food related though. Boba, Night markets, Taiwanese breakfast.
On the "namebrand" side, there is TSMC as well, though I feel that's gained notoriety in the last few years from the US's media push, not necessarily through Taiwan's own efforts.
There's still a fair amount of association with Taiwan <--> Chinese culture in many American's minds, but there's certainly some differentiation.
I'd say he is a product of the 2000s, his "Memories of Murder" (imo his best movie) dates from 2003 and "The Host" from 2006, it's only now that mainstream Western audiences have gotten a chance to see his work.
That's the thing, Japanese cinema back in the '50s-'70s was pure art: Mizoguchi, Ozu, Oshima, Naruse, Misumi (my favorite), Kinji Fukasaku, Seijun Suzuki (even though you could say he was more on the "entertainment" side) were defining the cultural norm for many in the world. The same goes for the Italian and French cinematographies that I had mentioned.
Sure it is - food, clothing, architecture, design. What else am I missing? Moreover, when taking this into account how does it change the original post’s point?
As mentioned in a different post, he completely missed video games. For example, Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Many game companies are headquartered in Japan such as Nintendo, Sony, and Square Enix. So when taking that into account, it absolutely changes the original post's point. He also mentioned how he's not really into video games (I don't really count age as a factor for this anymore because video games have been around for a couple of decades already).
The more interesting question out of this particular discussion, though, is this: are video games part of culture? I absolutely agree that it is, but the fact that neither you nor the original post brought it up tells me that it is not for a certain percentage of the HN crowd here.
Back in the late '90s - early 2000s the "Cahiers du Cinema" were beginning to treat them like culture, if I'm not mistaken they used to have a relatively small (but important, given the context) "chronique" in each issue talking about a specific game. Then came a "reactionary" backlash, as is typical with French cultural institutions, the directorship of the magazine got changed and there were no more "chroniques" about video games and Michael Jackson. I think Les Inrocks might still give the video-games world a fair representation but to be honest I haven't read them in a long time.
In the Anglo world a magazine like Sight&Sound just ignores video-games almost completely, or that's what they seem to have been doing since I first started reading them (10+ years ago). More generalist media institutions like The Economist, the Financial Times (both of these I try to read pretty constantly), NY Times or the Guardian don't seem to allocate too much space to video games reviews in their Arts&Culture pages, or at least I don't remember having read too many of them (if any, to be honest).
And I do know that video-games have been available for a few decades now, but the thing is that they've become quite compartmentalised from society's point view. More exactly if you like video games or if you're into video games most probably that means that you're the kind of person that is spending tens of hours per month (week?) hooked to a PC or a game-console, ignoring the outside world, hence the outside society. Culture, by definition, was meant to provide some "glue" to society, to embrace it, so to speak, today's video-games (or most of them, anyway) run counter to all that.
>And I do know that video-games have been available for a few decades now, but the thing is that they've become quite compartmentalised from society's point view. More exactly if you like video games or if you're into video games most probably that means that you're the kind of person that is spending tens of hours per month (week?) hooked to a PC or a game-console, ignoring the outside world, hence the outside society. Culture, by definition, was meant to provide some "glue" to society, to embrace it, so to speak, today's video-games (or most of them, anyway) run counter to all that.
Culture has various definitions that it can be interpreted by but by your comments, your views on culture appear to be that relevant to the youth of the mid to late 20th century but are much less relevant to the youth of today. The culture around video games is more dynamic and popular compared to that of cinema which has serious issues drawing eyeballs outside of the repetitive blockbuster films. There's a reason why the CEO of Netflix was more concerned about the threat from video games to their product.
> Apart from anime Japan is pretty much a cultural desert for us, Westerners, right now.
I'm a late millenial and I would completely disagree. In fact from my perspective growing up and living on the West coast I'd argue that the only significant cultural imports into the US are from Mexico, the UK, and Japan, and to a much lesser extent Korea.
For one, sushi is incredibly popular amongst virtually everyone I know. Probably the single most popular foreign food choice, perhaps in a tie with "Mexican" which I put in quotes because American Mexican food is typically significantly different from authentic Mexican food while American Sushi is far closer to the real thing, at least in my experience.
As other people have mentioned video games are another absolutely huge cultural import from Japan, and the Japanese have created at outsized number of the most beloved franchises. I'm not sure I know a single person who isn't familliar with at least one Japanese-created video game character, Mario and Pikachu have a lot of reach! I don't think I could say that about even US videogames. Pokemon all by itself is absolutely massive, and I think in this conversation it is noteworthy that Pokemon Go! is the only successful AR title to date (that I'm aware of).
Not to mention Samurai and Ninjas are well known amongst virtually everyone I've met. I can't claim similar about the warriors of other countries.
It's also worth noting the Made in Japan is very much synonymous with high quality, and they have tons of brands that are very successful in this vein: Toyota, Honda, Sony, Hitachi, Makita, Nikon/Canon just to name a few.
Finally I think saying that "apart from anime" is a pretty huge cop out. Most people around my age watched a significant amount of anime shows growing up, and many still do. These aren't tech bros either-I didn't grow up in the Bay- just normal people with blue collar careers who will very much talk your ear off about anime. If we're talking about movies, Studio Ghibli continues to be extremely popular even amongst people who aren't into anime.
Elsewhere in the thread you say that you were under the impression that Japanese fever had eclipsed, but I really don't think it has, you also wrote
>I certainly do notice the fascination Japan as a country still holds among many in the tech-crowd scene like is the case for many HN-ers in here, but I thought that was a local and contained phenomenon.
I can honestly say nope! fascination with Japan is a very common phenomenon amongst a lot of people, from many walks of life and I honestly don't see it changing.
Along with a couple of others (this [1] being an example), thanks for responding. I read paganel's follow up post [2] and was flabbergasted at how out of touch he sounded. The shock is the main reason why I chose not to respond myself this morning. You and the others gave a far more eloquent explanation than the one I would have given.
I will say this, though: just because paganel considered Bong Joon-ho's 2003 film Memories of Murder to be his best work doesn't mean that Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 meant absolutely nothing in terms of South Korea's state of its cinema scene. If anything, it's even more indicative of South Korean cinema scene's stock rising in the global stage in recent years. To put it in Civilization terms (which I'm sure he won't understand due to his dismissive outlook of video games), South Korea's going for the cultural victory. Soft power really is a thing!
Coming from the perspective of culture rather than pop culture, Japan and Taiwan have shared a lot to the west, while Korea has recent ascendence in the area of pop culture. Taiwan, in particular, has preserved much of the traditional Chinese culture that was beat down in the mainland during the cultural revolution.
> Korean TV dramas, which rival Turkish TV dramas in many parts of the world
I disagree. While K-drama plots are mostly superficial their execution is quite good and is done with very talented actors. Same goes for the K-pop scene. The competition is overwhelming. Turkish dramas on the other hand are just like South American telenovelas.
Culturally just about everything is bearish right now. I think it has to do with the generally pessimistic feel: the pandemic, the social rift, the threat of a new financial crisis, tensions with China and Russia. Quite a bit like in the 80s behind the Iron Curtain.
I actually didn't know that about Korea's film past. I'm pretty excited about the sudden burst and interest in Korean TV coming out now it feels like it's growing!
Parasite, Train to Busan, and Squid Game have really helped bring in a lot of eyes.
Netflix seems to be invested in growing Korean market, better yet if they can get more english language viewers of Korean language content! I just put Silent Sea on my list looks interesting.
In terms of tv/film/music quality Japan is almost a cultural desert even to Japanese. The industries are pretty stagnant. Japanese have Netflix now and can see the cinematic quality of (some) US tv shows that is beyond anything locally.
But Japan is still widely admired for a good number of iconic cultural exports like food, architecture, games, decorative arts like bonsai, ikebana, martial arts, etc. And every midsize US city has a few ramen restaurants in the past 5-10 years.
>In nearly all of my letters over the years, I’ve lamented the idea that consumer internet companies have taken over the idea of technological progress: “It’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.”
I don’t think that Beijing’s primary goal is to reshuffle technological priorities. Instead, it is mostly a mix of a technocratic belief that reducing the power of platforms would help smaller companies as well as a desire to impose political control on big firms.
I have to agree with this mindset. Technology is neither good nor bad, but it could be used for bad/good things.
We should strive to progress society forward and we need to be careful with profitable distractions.
Many of the technologies we now take for granted (books, newspapers, film) were once considered “profitable distractions” by somebody. But each one drove the development of some essential aspects of our modern world, without which we’d be much poorer.
The North vs South disparity always fascinates me. In many ways, they're the opposite of each other.
The North:
- Beijing sucks up all the resources, just like Moscow. People in the surrounding regions hate it, but it's also their best bet to make a fortune.
- Many regions feel post-Soviet. Industries are falling apart, the neighborhoods feel depressing. Young people leave and go to Beijing, Southern China, or abroad. It feels like how Eastern Europeans are making livings in Western Europe.
- People who stay in their hometowns are desperate to get jobs in the public sector.
- There are substantially more propaganda banners on the street.
The South:
- Just like op said, there are no obvious leaders. The cities in the two delta region create more network effects rather than suck up resources.
- The south is much more vibrant. People are more adventurous to make fortune in the private sector or start their own businesses.
i appreciated this comment at the bottom of the essay.
Reader Dude - January 1, 2022 at 5:59 pm:
> Dan – I love your letters as always. In terms of China commentary it’s about as good as there is in the English speaking world, but unfortunately that bar is pretty low these days.
> I have to say – I’m a little disappointed re: your indictment of Chinese production of culture and some of the platitudes re: repression. The government can be heavy handed and has shown zero agility to respond when it comes to the propagandizing from the west, but you yourself are taking a western lens to what culture means and it’s embedded in your whole spiel (your references, your bit on classical music, etc.). In fact, writing from the states, one might even uncharitably call it the soft internalized racism (unavoidable) of ingesting a western standard of values.
> Why must the arbiter of cultural quality be what appeals to a commercialized western marketplace? Is it somehow a bad thing if China doesn’t produce manga or Kpop? Frankly it’s a failure of the state in some ways given that those cultural products help soften image on the world stage, but in short – Who is to say?
> Is not the rejuvenation of the Chinese people (something many subscribe to) a culture? Is not the rising patriotism and pride in China’s accomplishments by the vast majority of actual Chinese a culture? The rising “cultural level” (volunteers in Xi An delivering food as the area is in lockdown, the galvanizing of philanthropic attitudes after the Sichuan earthquakes) – Are those not cultures?
> Are we mistaking culture for entertainment? In 30 years are the artifacts you mention “culture”? Or some footnote in the history books, much as Madonna might be here stateside?
As somebody who got tricked into drinking way too much baijiu last night by a Beijinger I'm really enjoying this read so far. She had a lot of the same thoughts and observations. I find it all super fascinating.
There's a fair number of international members who speak English as a second (third, fourth) language. I try hard to be as unambiguous as possible to account for that.
No problem, my bad, I should have read it slower before commenting. I think the Beijinger is what threw me off, I thought that was the complete reference and then the 'she' referring to the article writer, not cluing in that the Beijinger was the reference of the 'she'.
"China can simply follow the roadmap set by the US, while enjoying the easier task of reinventing existing technologies rather than dreaming up new ideas. It can worry about new invention after it has caught up."
This was said about Japan 40 years ago. How would you compare/contrast the outcome for Japan versus the prospects for China?
Funny anecdotes: it’s relatively rare to see company led by “old fart Beijingers” who have been native to the city for 2-3 generations. Immigrants have been driving the leadership there. Native Beijingers tends to be more layback and they thrive in cultural related stuff like xiangsheng, comedy and movies.
There are very few "native Beijingers." Most were sent to the countryside during the cultural revolution, and still live there.
Mostly, only very the well connected, or elite members themselves from original population managed to stay in the city through late seventies, early nineties.
The current "natives" are mostly people who descended from the new population who came into the city in seventies, and later.
That’s not remotely true. Where did you get this story from? I grew up in Beijing and my parents were sent to the countryside near the end of cultural revolution. They and most of their classmates from our neighborhood came back. My parents are not well connected or elite at all - lowest possible workers in a food factory
A lot of the educated beijingers of that generation were assigned to factories in the hinterland (my friend’s family, for example, was assigned to a smaller city in shaanxi even though they were in Beijing before the CR). It gets weird, however, when we mix authoritarian factory assignments and youth being sent down during the cultural revolution (those are very different things), given that the former could have happened anytime from 1950 to the early 90s.
The real reason native beijingers are hard to find these days in Beijing is because Beijing has grown rapidly in the last 20 years. They are “less” only because 外地人 are more. During my first trip to Beijing in 1999, the taxi driver would always be a native city Beijinger who couldn’t understand your Chinese unless you used lots of 儿话. That is no longer the case (the taxi drivers are still from Beijing, but from the outer counties rather than the central city).
Yep that’s more true - it’s an inevitable demographic shift caused by multiple factors and modernization. But I don’t think the cultural revolution play a critical role at all
I'd totally live in Shanghai if not for the rampant pollution. I run 5 miles a couple times a week through the city and if the city was shanghai I'd have the lungs of a smoker.
I grew up in Beijing (around the 3rd ring). You'd walk past elders playing Xiangqi on the back alleys, while street vendors sold Tanghulu for a few coins.
I wonder if the city is anywhere like my childhood two decades ago.
Not really. My first visit to Beijing was more than two decades ago (winter 1999), when you could get a roasted yam on the street for a few mao. The sea of bicycles was still a thing, old military guys with tuktuks would wait outside of the subway stations to take you to your final destination for a negotiated 5 mao or so, you could choose between a cheap 8 kuai drop taxi or a fancier 10-12 kuai one. Starbucks just opened one store in Xidan, and the department stores were still mainly based on the Soviet model.
Things changed quickly when it returned in 2002, and then when I moved there to stay for almost a decade in 2007. It is a completely different place from my memories. The feelings, the momentum of society, the industries.
It's partially a propaganda thing with slogans printed on buildings everywhere saying things like "Charge towards the Chinese dream with vigor, for the betterment of the region and the party!"
It’s more image than an official distinction, and it is hardly accurate. For example, both Tianjin and Beijing are autonomous cities not part of provinces, while neither Shenzhen or Guangzhou in the Bay Area are autonomous. The cities and provinces around Shanghai are incredibly wealthy and each hold their orbits. But like San Jose becomes an adjunct of San Francisco, so does Hangzhou of Shanghai for some reason.
> China does not have any kind of coherent regional policy
I am not sure your basis for this. The presence of the policy itself is effective in guiding the human mind and interests, also broadcast certain information national wide. The policy is comboed with fiscal policy, i.e., easier loan for the designated sectors. And more effective use of nationally-owned enterprises, research facilities, etc.
Of course, policy needs to be realistic by matching the regional characteristics. As you said, one cannot industrilize the inner cities first, because the global economy is centered on marine transportation, so naturally it starts from Shanghai and guangdong, which are close to sea ports. But that does not make the policy less coherent. It just means that the policy is sensible and meaningful.
> The state has subjected scientists to the tender mercies of the US criminal justice system, usually for charges related to relatively unimportant issues implicating research integrity.
Does anyone know what this refers to? Is it prosecutions of Chinese researchers in the US?
And there may have been another similar case, I can't recall. I believe the US line is that China was trying to steal research or something.
I don't believe any of the people implicated were charged with treason or spying or anything like that. It's been more mundane "failing to disclose bank accounts" kind of stuff. Whether that's indicative of anything is up in the air.
During the Trump administration, the US government began investigating a large number of ethnically Chinese scientists in the US. The initiative was supposedly about rooting out espionage, but it has ended up being more of a witch hunt.
The two worst cases so far are Prof. Anming Hu of the University of Tennessee (thankfully acquitted, after getting fired) and Prof. Gang Chen of MIT (this hasn't yet gone to trial, but it looks like the government is essentially going after him for doing his job).
As a tech worker with little knowledge about china, the most interesting section for me starts at "A summer storm" where he talks about why/how the government is cracking down on big consumer tech.
>
Somehow the US has evolved to become a political system in which people can dream up a hundred reasons not to do things like “build housing in growing areas” or “admit people with skills into the country.” If the US wants to win a decades-long challenge against a peer competitor, it needs to be able to improve state capacity.
Great article. Requires more than one setting to really absorb. Almost 20 years ago I did an extended study in China for my MBA. IBM had billion dollar annual contracts managing the construction of hospitals and medical universities. My MBA class traveled throughout China participating in project reviews. More and more it is impressed upon me how that China of 2004 was a photo-moment in time. With the speed of development, that China I met was lifetimes ago.
Pleasantly surprised to find an intelligent and thoughtful description of Italian comic opera on the front page. I find much to agree with much of the author's thoughts, possibly because of our shared reading of critics like Tovey and Rosen. Opera has always been the most (and at times, the only) popular genre of Western literate music, and its absurdities are also legendary. Charles Rosen gave a very good summary of the spectacle of opera in the nyrb titled "The ridiculous & sublime"[1], and I recommend it for those who cannot understand how people can become obsessed by something so patently silly.
The reputation of Mozart's three Da Ponte operas, along with The Magic Flute, are uniformly high and any ranking would come down to personal preference. Speaking as someone who is decidedly not an opera buff, it's the ostentatiously showy parts (the fugal exposition and chorale prelude pastiche in the magic flute; the three orchestras playing dances in different meters simultaneously in Don Giovanni; and of course the marvelous ensemble numbers which make up the act finales) which attracts me to Mozart operas. These displays of compositional virtuosity are sadly lacking in his Italian successors.
Some devotees of pure instrumental music may occasionally sneer at comic opera and consider it frivolous. This is undeserved since the rhythms of comic opera underly the classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The remarkable thing isn't that Mozart wrote great Italian comic operas as a German, but that he wrote much of his pure instrumental music as if they were comic opera.
The lack of 'stupid culture wars' within the treatise is refreshing.
How many popular American outlets are addressing these kinds of issues?
The media in the US are rabidly obsessed with either demonizing or 'heroizing' a kid in Wisconsin's questionable and difficult-to-place-actions, whereupon in a spectacular bit of irony there was actually a lot of nuanced and thoughtful insight about the subject on TikTok of all places.
Pew's political topology is out [1] it's really good, but it doesn't bode well for the US as it identifies hardening, outrageous voices on the far end of 'both sides'
that I suggest amounts to a serious cancer on the nation as those voices seem to consume everyone's energy on civic issues.
We're not even talking about the right things and when we start to get onto the right subject, it seems as though it's radicalized for clicks & views, or trivialized so the writer/commentator can 'seem smart'.
For example, for as much as I very much respect and support Elon Musk's work and achievements, most of his public commentary is glib and uninformed and he's not remotely prepared to start answering questions on these kinds of subjects (unless they are very specifically within his domain). We spend way too much time gawking over his Tweets instead of materially addressing 'manufacturing v. financialization'.
And we need to consume much, much more quality news coming out of China and the rest of the world.
> A distinctive feature of Chinese governance is to continuously fix slogans, like “reform and opening” to move the country away from socialism, and the more recent “common prosperity” to move it back. Beijing isn’t satisfied with greater national wealth.
> A lot of macro indicators on China are disappointing, like a rise in the amount of credit needed to create growth and a fall in total-factor productivity growth. But we can’t let these poorly-measured data points govern as the gospel truth to understand this economy.
The reader is left to interpret the overly broad hand-wavy navel-gazing adjectives and adverbs.
I'm not sure what this very long "letter" is supposed to inform a reader about. There's no substance. I'm not sure it's intentional, but it's obvious.
the writer speaks too negatively about the government of Hong Kong for me to be entirely trusting of the content. Maybe Hong Kong is desperately in need of new direction, but we'll never know for sure.
They wrote thousands of words but did not even mention China’s genocide against the Uighur people. How neutral can they really be?
Edit: A nice little tidbit also is that I’ve written comments on all sorts of contentious topics. But only when bringing up this specific factually based truth my comments tend to be downvoted within minutes. I wonder why.
Unless I missed some part here, you’re probably referring to this part of one sentence as the only mention, correct? If so, I find this not very credible when we look at the length of the post alone. But yes, technically you’d be right and I should have phrased my comment better.
> That’s due to the operation of detention camps for ethno-religious minorities
Calling it a genocide reminds me when some people compare the modern day American football to slavery: such inaccurate and click-baity name calling makes anyone who is sympathetic towards China an accomplice on the order of Nazis, and gives the Chinese government an easy target to refuse. I get that it raises eye-brows and generates attention, but ultimately it detracts from any effort to stop such brutality. It seems lazy.
> By my count, the country has produced two cultural works over the last four decades since reform and opening that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok.
I think a lot of people simply cannot wrap their head when they view from the Western angle. As a result, they sometime just fixate on some main-stream idea without realizing that those views are from limited exposure to the ground.
It's true that China has not produced much other attractions than 3body and tiktok, even 3body is heavily influened by US SF writing, and tiktok is originally produced in US by musically. The point is that these productions are easier to be accepted by the Western socieity, because they themselves are linagage from the western tradition, with a more tainted cultural identity than the indigenous stuff.
In reality, China have produced enourmouse amount of culturally diverse and innovative work for the domestic audiance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdkAyt9Q2A I'll give you one example of a recent production of a Cantonese opera mixed with modern filming tech of the classic Bai She Zhuan. And Pop star signing Song Dynasty Chi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t9VT9Dwiqg.
Of course, these color productions are very distant from the Western cultural heritage, and people from the West simply cannot appreciate their wonderfullness and depth.
The author's overall point is that China does not seen to export many cultural works with global appeal (and not just restricted to western tastes). In comparison you could look to Japan with it's global cultural export of manga, anime, and video games and also South Korea with it's global cultural exports of movies and drama. These exports aren't strictly limited in taste to western audiences but have a global appeal while still retaining elements of it's place of origin.
It's unclear to me though if it is deliberate in this way for there not to be many cultural exports like this and if having a strong domestic scene is enough, however purely from a number game I would have expected more (which the author goes onto address later in the essay in the section "Strangling the cultural sector")
The point is, it's all either WW2 films, period dramas, or rom-keys. Why? Because these are safe subjects that steer clear of the government censors. Why are there no films telling realistic everyday Chinese stories in modern China, like the person got who out of college and can't find a job, or the elderly person with no children who is having a hard time? There are 8 million of these kinds of stories. But no, it's mostly Hanfu and Wire-fu dramas, or slicing and dicing Japanese soldiers, or basically office rom-com drama. It does seem like there's something going on that is limiting the creativity and range of artistic expression in terms of subject matter.
>Over the last two decades, the major American growth stories have been Silicon Valley (consumer internet and software) on one coast and Wall Street (financialization) on the other.
I don't think California deserves this label anymore. I propose we rename Silicon Valley to "MetaSoft" valley.
Writing something like: “Shanghai is highly livable.” means one considers adult citizenship without proper voting rights to be acceptable. This is an endorsement of tyranny. How “livable” is Shanghai to its residents when they ask for an end to one-party rule?
Ugh. California urban discourse is insufferable. Crazy to see a write up like that about booming livable cities without getting dragged into a quagmire about who's rightly deserving of a place to live.
what strategies are people here using to disarm Sinophobia, and the unwarranted cold war -like escalations the US elite is pushing in the media, in your communities?
>
Where does Beijing prefer dynamism instead? Science-based industries that serve strategic needs. Beijing, in other words, is trying to make semiconductors sexy again. One might reasonably question how dealing pain to users of chips (like consumer internet firms) might help the industry. I think that the focus should instead be on talent and capital allocation. If venture capitalists are mostly funding social networking companies, then they would be able to hire the best talent while denying them to chipmakers. That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google.
> That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google.
They were not willing to compete. Intel and Cisco’s directors had plenty of net income they could have used to compete, but decided to reward shareholders in the present instead, rather than invest in the future.
Fascinating letter. It's a bit of a tangent, but I would be interested in similar perspectives on the development (or stagnation) of cities in the U.S., and how they compare to China.
Cities in the USA are already mostly developed, the USA is not a developing country, it’s not like there is much movement in our industries or skylines. After China reaches developed status, it will similarly become boring and stagnate (since you can’t grow forever).
I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future.
A little over a hundred years ago we hadn't invented flight. We probably have many thousands of years left. Who says there's no way to build a city that makes our cities look the same way we look at a medieval town? Our 'developed' world is boring and stagnant because we've made a choice to not push towards the future, and instead relive the 80s pop culture in VR.
> I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future.
The fallacy of “rapid growth forever” has been repeatedly asserted multiple times in history, to be knocked down each time. The last time we went through this was with Japan, where, in the early 80s, the prediction was made that Japanese would be twice as rich as Americans by the year 2010. And then their real estate bubble crashed and they lost a couple of decades. China today is like Japan in the early 80s with an even more insane property bubble.
The developed world keeps developing, just at a far slower pace than the developing world. If China avoids the middle income trap and reaches developed status, then they will experience slow growth just like other developed countries do. But rapidly aging demographics is a huge challenge for China to overcome in sustaining its current rate of growth before reaching developed status.
The idea of diminishing returns and that compounding growth can't continue is a "cultural product"? Funny, I thought it fell out of the math.
Our developed world is stagnant because once you go from an agrarian undeveloped state into a state with vast quantities of built infrastructure, it becomes increasingly hard to economically justify ripping it all up to rebuild it better.
Let's say you build a tremendously good enough sewage and public water delivery system. Water quality is practically perfect. Then a technological breakthrough happens and you could build an even more efficient, environmentally responsible system, but the cost is you have to dig up every municipal water system around the country -- that's already working -- and build this new system. It is far far harder for a country to justify that if it already has a working system vs a developing coutry which might not even have municipal water.
And I'll point out that much of the architecture in European cities has preserved buildings that go back 1000 years. People aren't exactly tearing down 500 year old buildings to build modern glass and steel office buildings. The internals of these buildings have changed, like the Google office in Munich hid inside of an old city wall structure.
The reality is, China's growth is going to slow, for many reasons. 1) They have passed the low hanging fruit, and each new improvement becomes more expensive and requires more investment. 2) there is tons of inherent corruption and malinvestment in the system, they seem on the verge of a 2008-style or Japan-90s style crisis in real estate. 3) The one child policy harmed their demographics, and the median age of Chinese citizens will be much higher than it is in the US, couple that with a political system that can't attract or encourage significant overseas immigration to replace that low birthrate, and you have a recipe for stagnation.
This letter reminds me of lots of articles written during the 80s about Japan. Oh no, Japan is now spending on the Fifth Generation Computer Project, oh no, Japan just built this super impressive new manmade island airport, etc. Every month, a new article came out extolling the incredibly futuristically advanced Japan and how the US was falling far behind. We stopped making VCRs and TVs, Americans were bulldozing piles of CDs in anger. But the reality was that Japan's super impressive development run was going to hit diminishing returns, and Japan would become a nation like the US, or the countries of the EU, in terms of growth rate.
This will happen to China too, as surely as it happened to all of the other "Asian tigers". The CCP doesn't have a magic wand here, and if anything, it may hasten the stagnation.
It might very well happen to China but I don't think this is an inevitability or 'math'. Diminishing returns appear when existing systems are pushed towards their limitations, but it doesn't account for the dynamic nature of technological progress. When we were plowing fields with horses there were diminish returns but that didn't imply the end of history. You invent the motor and you're in an entirely new world altogether. Through paradigm shifts you can always reset the timer on your returns.
And sure we might be in an era of stagnation for 100 years and all the singularity people may be crazy but how likely is it really, that in the grand scheme of things there's not another era of rapid change, and that some country in principle can find a mode of governance that doesn't end in 'late stage Japan'?
It is technically possible, just not likely. Advancement from behind being rapid makes sense, you have something clear to aim for. Rapid advancement from the front is much less certain. If they continue to advance, it will be purely through novel innovation and production rather than being a cheap place to make stuff or by catching up with (or borrowing) developed world tech.
And eventually the Chinese people will want to enjoy life more rather than work hard to develop even more (especially since so many will be at or past retirement age).
We're mostly stuck with the development we've got, which isn't great (rail transportation is hugely inferior in the US as compared to other developed countries, for example), because the US is a "vetocracy", to use a word the author mentioned. It's much easier to say no than yes, and new infrastructure is hugely expensive in part because of all the people who will fight it with everything they've got.
You want the long form? Fine… Writing something like: “Shanghai is highly livable.” means you consider adult citizenship without proper voting rights to be acceptable. This is an endorsement of tyranny. How “livable” is Shanghai to its residents when they ask for an end to one-party rule?
Sorry, but that is more nationalistic and political flamebait—just the sort of thing we don't want on HN because of the low-quality, repetitive, and nasty threads it leads to. No more of this, please.
I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China. On the contrary, it is their very experience as a Chinese American that helps me (an outsider) see things from a new and interesting perspective.
> some seriously confused Chinese American
I don't recall where I read this (I think it may have been Rachel Cusk), but it is a writer's job to ask questions. And what better source of questions than confusion?
That said, I'd genuinely be interested to seek your recommendations on China from Chinese sources.
> I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China.
It does. Americans, and Chinese Americans themselves sometimes don't realise that Chinatown America is absolutely not characteristic of China, nor modern, nor at any point in history. Instead, it's a strange universe on its own, with its own history, and customs.
To me, when I talk to Chinese Americans, Chinese Americans feel as Chinese, as American football is football.
Thank you for all of your insights into China over the last couple of years. They tend to be blunt and unvarnished but verify as accurate relative to what I know about the country (which, arguably isn't much, I've never visited but am in fairly close contact with some people living there).
Unfortunately, pretty much all even moderately accurate coverage of China is completely evading the Anglophone media.
Matters.news is blogging community of few authors not afraid speaking their mind. It's still just a drop in the ocean, and any kind of good reporting on current affairs in China has been extinguished for good.
The few people remaining brave enough to open their mouth are either from religious cults on one side, or former regime insiders themselves on another.
The author makes an incorrect assessment without considering the appropriate context for China.
The gaping hole in his assessment of "Chinese cultural exports" is the failure to account for China's population and GDP per capita, which currently is only about $17k PPP. This is no position to be exporting culture to the globe from; that would just be a waste of resources. Culture is a result of being rich, not a cause of being rich.
In other words, China is not "culturally-stunted" than any other country with a similar GDP per capita PPP.
Chinese culture is also all in the Chinese language, and China has no strategic reason to make any effort to export it globally into English, a foreign language, where fitting translations would cost even more resources.
Culture doesn't need any kind of "official" export. If it is good, it gets discovered, now more than ever in social media. I didn't grow up watching Atom Boy, Voltron, and Robotech because the Japanese government invested in exporting it. Those were pulled into the US by some distributor in the Midwest who discovered them by accident, and decided to have them translated and show on US television.
A lot of KPop and Anime was exported to the US by fans, who free of charge as a labor of love, did translation and distribution. In the 70s, 80s, even 90s, a lot of this happened by an underground distribution network, people would make copies and trade.
Indeed, I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching lots of Hong Kong Kung-fu films, eg Shaw Bros, Golden Harvest, etc. There didn't need to be a "strategic reason" for HK canto films to have atrociously bad translation and dubbing slapped on them and marked to Americans. It was done because someone noticed that Americans loved watching these things.
You're making excuses for the fact that domestic mainland Chinese art is suffering a crisis of creativity caused by the crushing censorship of the state. People only make "safe" art in China. If you make any art that criticizes the establishment, or tells history in a way other than they want it to be seen, you may find yourself punished.
Ask Ai Weiwei. This is not a conducive environment for artistic expression.
An incredible statement - made even more so by possibly being true.
It was less than ten years ago that Hong Kong might have been considered the leading city in all of China and certainly the most dynamic on the axes that he is considering.
FWIW, I think the CCP has made a tactical error in their handling of Hong Kong:
As a business owner in Hong Kong I was, previously, only peripherally and philosophically concerned with the behavior of the party throughout the rest of the country - it was possible to compartmentalize the "two systems".
But if Hong Kong is just another Chinese city and if there is only one "system" then I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are.
This makes me very sad - Hong Kong has for my entire adult life been my favorite city and the city I thought was the most interesting and exciting.