It was interesting to read about younger Chinese people, and their dissatisfaction with life in China. At the risk of being too US/West-centric, I do worry a lot about Western domination declining, and China taking its place. I fundamentally do not believe that their system of government is good for people, and for the world at large. (To be clear, I'm fine with US/Western dominance declining over time, but I would like to see something I feel is equivalent or better taking its place, or, preferably, sharing its place.)
So in a way it's good to read about two things in concert: 1) Xi tightening things up and cracking down harder and harder on free expression, and 2) younger Chinese people -- despite the propaganda I hear they're exposed to -- becoming disillusioned and frustrated by it. Overall it sucks: I certainly don't wish more and more censorship etc. being foisted upon a billion of my fellow humans. But I also don't want to see a totalitarian regime being the main dominant world power.
Of course, dissatisfied young people -- and probably not even that many when compared to the whole of young Chinese people in China -- don't guarantee any kind of meaningful change over time. I'm sure there are plenty of young people in China who will happily step into the party's shoes once the current leadership's time has past.
That’s a common western view and wishful thinking but life is about power, not happiness. They can be all dissatisfied they want but a few crackdowns always put them in line, and in the end this is what matters.
I know it reads harsh but there’s little to no morality in this, they are “unhappy” because the expectations of having a good job, money, a big house and general prosperity forever is not materializing. In the past when China was really growing at 10% a year, there were also no freedom and horrible things were happening to many people, yet people where “very happy”, again no morality just a matter of power/money.
“Meaningful change” will happen if they align with who has the power at that time and there is no indication “young people” will relinquish their power when they finally have it.
Current old powerful people were also young at some point.
> They can be all dissatisfied they want but a few crackdowns always put them in line, and in the end this is what matters.
Until it doesn't. World history is the history of power being consolidated and then (often forcibly) distributed, either to new consolidators or democracies of various types.
For many years I've been worrying that this becomes harder and harder as surveillance technology improves. I'm also concerned that free media makes it much easier for foreign powers to disrupt things. An issue that doesn't destabilize authoritarian countries. These two potential trends or forces have me very worried about the long-term future of mankind with authoritarian becoming a one-way road.
And the Q is are they as unhappy as youths in the west? And at what point of unhappiness does that translate to systemic change? Is that point different in PRC system. PRC youth are behind west in adjusting to expectations in post academic inflation world. You have the % grinding away in good jobs being sad about cost of living just like in the west. Then you have % living at home on parents dime, with no onerous student loans, who doesn't want to work a well paying blue collar job (lot's of manufacturing opportunities out there that a poor Americans would work) because they wasted their life getting degrees. They're not working 2-3 part time jobs to get into 5-6 figure debts. They're currently on a different point of the disenfranchisement spectrum.
The light at end of tunnel is PRC kids will have more livable options as PRC develops interior provinces and bring them up to tier2 status. Many adequate, lower cost, decent QoL cities in PRC that rivals tier1 western economic hubs in convenience and lifestyle, versus most of west where it seems we'll be trapped in a handful of increasingly unaffordable areas. But it will take a mass change in culture, kids and parents accept their mediocrity - inevitable with normal distribution - and all those years cramming in involuted academic gamble won't pay off in top 1% job in air conditioned office of a tier1 city.
> The light at end of tunnel is PRC kids will have more livable options
That's very unlikely as China continues in its Great Depression https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2024/01/22/chinas-.... And with all economic engines declining (export, internal consumer, real estate), and no big systemic change happening, it will continue this path for a very long time. Remember that Japan's downturn lasted 30 years, and Japanese citizens were making $2000/month on average, not $300/month.
No the average unskilled Chinese elderly left behind by modernzation are stuck in poor informal economy. Average skilled labour in skilled jobs pays significantly better.
TIL 5% growth great depression. What china did was remove 3% of excess real estate malinvestment. Housing is down as expected, but that's a good correction. Other sectors broadly are still growing. Consumption is fine about world average factor in gov social transfers. Everyone's export is down, PRC relative down less after capturing 1T more in value over covid (greatest on record). And export @20% of GDP isn't even a big driver. Export dependant is when you're at 40-50%+. PRC continuing this path of 4-5% grown is... great? Big change happening is PRC ramping up skilled talent and skilled jobs in high value sectors to take on profitable western incumbants. It takes time, but EV/renewables just the start. Indicators everywhere PRC broadly moving up value chain.
If you're going to do JP 2000/month per capita, then PRC is ~2000 per month right now. Right about where JP/SKR was when TFR crapped out. Bottom quartiles are poorer. THat's basic statistic inevitablility. But guess what? Lots of japanese and korean grandparent farmers were poor back then to. Many still are. It's kind of a phenomenon if you follow east asian reporting. But their kids who were in manufacturing were comfortable, and their grandkids in high skilled sectors were "rich".
But this thread is about happiness and livable options. JP/SKR fucked up because they concentrated opportunties in a few regions. That's the trap (western) urbanists wanted for PRC 10 years ago, noting PRC tier 1 cities are remarkably not dense, and they should 2x/3x population, as if it was not affordable enough. Now PRC did opposite, expand developement in land, and lots of new cities/hubs are openning up. Tier 2/3+ cities will be a lot more livable in PPP terms if everything goes right. And give it a few years, 1-2 child policy 1-2:2:4 ratio means every Chinese kid is almost guaranteed to inherit housing whena grand parent croaks. The TLDR is PRC engine for growth is fine, it's not overheated anymore. And PRC urban/develpment/social patterns is trying to avoid the pitfalls of modern SKR/JP. Keyword being trying. Edit: I just realized we're engaging across multiple threads. I'm going to stop because I don't think it will be productive for either of us.
But sufficiently unhappy people, in sufficient numbers, have more power than cynics think. (Though less than optimists think. But enough to change things, at least sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.)
Agreed, that's why functional governments ( democratic or not ) always offer some kind of "candy" for the plebs. It's an optimization problem, what it the exact point where we lose control of the situation? then dial it back a few notches.
It's not because of morality of being "good", it's a practical mechanism for every power structure.
The "saving grace", is that these power structures tend to become so corrupt they can't assess that threshold anymore and then "people revolt", which by itself is far from any guarantee of success or any meaningful change. That's one of the reasons the "silent majority" is not too adept of "revolutions" and always wait to see which horse they should bet.
Agreed, the West has ben better at power for the last few hundred years. I'm responding to the laughable idea that this perspective is exclusive to the west. It clearly isn't, and besides, imperial China seems to be on the rise again, so in the next century they might even grab back the "stinkiest asshole in the room" award.
> I do worry a lot about Western domination declining, and China taking its place.
What gives me hope is that we’re not driving in North Korean or Russian cars, nor use their chips, or airplanes. The Soviet Union tried to be a leader in all these fields. I know China is not Russia, but in many things it is. How many Western companies, for example, have the government sit on their board? Top-down economic planning has never worked and I don’t see why it would be different now.
The CCP is using its authority to make its citizens the slaves of the world. They do this by manipulating the currency and internal environment to stop living standards and wages from rising to Western levels, while trying to avoid interference with economic activity that does not threaten the government. Key nationalized sectors under-perform (like their oil industry) while others work much like they do in America. That doesn't make them a centrally planned economy, any more than FED's currency planning makes the US economy centrally planned in nature. They have a "central plan," which is to drive all of their money towards reinvestment, but it's not a planned economy.
Going beyond a statement of facts, I assume the reinvestment is supposed to eventually lead to owning the world, but that isn't working out in Africa and all of the western infrastructure they finance has turned into yet another way for depressed Chinese living standards to transfer wealth to the countries the government is trying to get on top of. (It might feel intrusive to find out that a Chinese company owns a toll road you frequently use, but what actually happened is they froze their capital in a fixed asset, freeing an American firm to start a new project.)
It reminds me of how the US's own foibles, mainly of a neocolonialist/military interventionist type, have done nothing to benefit us but have weakened domestic security and the security of our interests abroad.
Being a hybrid planned/market economy, CCP still has much of a say in what businesses prosper & which do not. China has very little in the way of a consumer sector, quite the opposite of the US consumerism. This means there's very little for consumers to spend their money on versus a US consumer.
China's savings rate as a result of these pressures hovers around 50%, compared to the low 4% in US / 10% in UK / 20% in Germany & Northern EU countries.
Saving such a high % of income means more money is available in the banking system to be lent out to businesses for investment. So China has an export driven market in which they sell goods to the world, and then re-invest it to build more capacity to build more exports to..
> China has very little in the way of a consumer sector, quite the opposite of the US consumerism. This means there's very little for consumers to spend their money on versus a US consumer.
FWIW Chinese middle class tend to gobble up ridiculous amount of foreign overpriced luxury crap instead, starting from designer clothes and ending up with several thousands of dollars worth bottles of whisky (that I bet absolute majority of the buyers couldn't distinguish from random Johnnie Walker in blind testing). High saving rates must be cultural and not just a result of not having the ability to spend the money.
> High saving rates must be cultural and not just a result of not having the ability to spend the money.
You can see this too in the generation that lived through the Great Depression, and some carry-over into the next one.
OTOH those who grew up in boom times tend to take on unhealthy amounts of debt (esp credit card, for weddings and vacations, and fancy cars) and have to struggle to learn to live within their means.
China has had a lot of rough times to until relatively very recently, and much of the country hasn't shared in a lot of the economic growth.
The Chinese savings rate is a bit of a mirage, since there are a couple of things happening
* Chinese banks are swallowing many Chinese citizens' deposits in the bank, without recourse and explanation. There are protests of course, and of course those are squashed. There's even a story of a public listed company's assets in the bank being swallowed without recourse, and the company had to shut down
* The banking system aren't able to lend the deposits out, because the Chinese government has asked them to take over real estate companies and local government debts. Also, there is very little consumer spending, and the state enterprises don't like competitions, so very little investment is given to private enterprises these days
> This means there's very little for consumers to spend their money on versus a US consumer.
How does this line up American consumers spending a large percentage of their money on products built in... China? Surely the Chinese products available to Americans are also available to the Chinese? I have to imagine they are orders of magnitude cheaper in China too given the drastically lower cost of shipping and warehousing.
Shipping and warehousing only accounts for a tiny fraction of the cost of most consumer products. It's hardly an order of magnitude difference.
Chinese consumers can buy pretty much the same products as Americans (with a few limited exceptions such as weapons and narcotics). But they tend to save more on a percentage basis. Some of this is cultural. But mostly it's a practical reaction to a lack of a social safety net. Even though China is nominally communist, as a practical matter most consumers have to pay out of pocket for healthcare and retirement hence they save for those things. They also save to purchase residential real estate since it is seen as the only safe store of value and owning a home is somewhat necessary for marriage (at least for men).
Isn't this a false dichotomy? The inverse -- high spending and low savings -- still leads to reinvestment. From business POV whether they get funds via loans or via revenue the money they have to invest in growth is the same.
In China you have a lot of SOA (State Owned Enterprises) and entire sectors loosely under the CCP thumb.
So 50% of income going back into banks which then direct capital as the CCP sees fit.. more export oriented growth.
This is very different than the US model.
In the US ~95% of income goes into spending which flows into private enterprises which make operational cost, capital cost, and saving decisions on their own.
The US model is more decentralized. We have to create incentives and schemes like IRA and Opportunity Zones to get private individuals and companies to deploy capital where the government prefers, and even then it only works on the margins.
I think there are different levels to "things working" though. A country can be using an economic and governing system that ultimately doesn't work, but still have enough weight to throw around for a while, enough to do plenty of damage to others. Russia is clearly showing that right now in Ukraine. Even if Ukraine prevails (far from certain), the country may never be the same. China may pull something similar (and be more successful at it) in Taiwan in the near future.
I do worry about Chinese products in the classes you mention. OP notes that China became the world's largest automobile exporter in 2023 (by units sold, not by revenue). China still can't rival Intel or AMD in chips, but they're gaining ground all the time, and have some decent (though not superb) competitors in the ARM market, with inroads into RISC-V, I believe. The Comac C919 airliner isn't exactly all over yet, and I don't know how safe, relable, and airworthy it is (not that Boeing has done well in that regard lately), but it exists, regardless of whether or not the allegations that they stole IP from US manufacturers is true.
> Even if Ukraine prevails (far from certain), the country may never be the same.
You can also say: Yes it has never before been as pro-West as it is today.
I agree completely with you that China has enough weight to do plenty of damage in the short term. In the long term, I paraphrase something Stephen Kotkin said: The West has gained more and more friends over time. After the second world war, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have become friends.
Maybe the relationships are not perfect, but they are pretty good if you ask me. Some healthy back and forth and discussing without major drama. Finland has joined NATO and Sweden will soon also. Maybe one day even Ukraine. And maybe India one day?
If anything UKR (and Gaza) war has shown, global south, the dominant reservoirs for future growth, which PRC is courting (and now constitute plurarity of trade) is decidely not pro west. What west is doing is consolidating the elite clique amoung a powerful but increasingly stagnant friends. Which is fine, but it's also matter of relative size of the group. The Chinese "family" i.e just PRC itself, is pumping out comparable human capita and industrial potential than all of the west, their family and her friends. Don't be surprised a well run family business + some acquaintances eventually outcompete tight friend groups that are still connected based on artificial affiliations.
Also most of global android users would be on Chinese phones if US sanctions didn't ban access to Huawei and reduce appetite for PRC firms to continue expansion into western markets. Sanctions / tech control are every bit as top-down economic planning. Once PRC indigenizes their own tech stack, there's a good chance rest of world will drive PRC cars, and fly on PRC planes, and use PRC chips. I think only long durable term competitive advantage of west, and really we're talking about anglo countries like US/CA/AU is being net food/mineral exporters due to resource abundance.
These positive relationships are not artficial. Japanese and Taiwanese people really genuinely like the USA in a way that runs deep in the culture. Im from texas, and live in japan. I was surprised to find this out.
The relationships aren't artificial in feeling but artificial in construction - took generations/decades of postwar political purging in US influenced countries to cultivate local compradors to develop good people to people relations over time. But alliances between countries are still political arrangement are ultimate subject to domestic geopolitical interests and whims. Peoples in democracies still have very little control of their foreign policy. The other consideration we don't speak is you can absolutely massacre a people and still have their kids love you with enough elite capture and control over culture. That's also the story of modern PRC, you can slap the shit out one generation and mold their grandkids into patriotism. Or the story with US/JP, except with atom bombs. Regardless alliances will last, until they're tested. Then they can break or get stronger. I would not be surprised if they break if tested violently enough. That's usually how these things go. Remember Canada was originally a British possession designed to contain America. Then US got kicked out of North America and Canada, a fundmentally anti American project, are very friendly with US, and even the most antiAmerican politician in Canada won't seriously consider moves that would undermine US interests.
I think you have convinced yourself of something and wouldnt see it any other way.
Youre talking about a world when it took months for a message to cross a country, with totally different dynamics. I dont think the US is going to tax japan, or attack them. What are you even saying.
Geopolitical relationships and people to people sentiments between countries are artificially constructed over time. Tying back to the original comment, Japan, Germany, South Korea didn't "naturally" become friendly over time, it was a carefully cultivated process. The process doesn't work on speed of infomration transmission, but speed of demographic transition. Anti-American forces in those countries didn't get "converted" they were sidelined and repressed so their influence does not transmit to next generation. I'm saying friends western system/hegemony has build are one good fight from flipping.
> Yes it has never before been as pro-West as it is today.
On the other hand Russia has never been more in China's camp than it is now, and I think that loss is far greater than the possible gain of Ukraine and the NATO expansion.
> After the second world war, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have become friends.
Yes, over that period, but that is no longer happening. Power is shifting to other countries - China, India, etc. and they are not "friends". Quotes because I think the idea of friendship in international relations is mistaken.
> and maybe India one day?
India has very different values and interests to the west, and while it is likely to ally with the west against China, I cannot see it in anything else. It is not backing the west over Ukraine, for example.
The Western camp has never invented any framework that would let Russia be in it.
What it could offer was: you sit here and sell us cheap oil and gas, while we court all your neighbours to stop associating with you and associate with us instead. But it did not have any meaningful participation format for Russia, only that it should be increasingly lonely. Not to mention stuff like visa waiver or student exchange programmes. In the end even at the best of relations the integration was actually tiny.
When confronted with this, the West will usually deflect and blame it all on Putin, which is also not constructive: This does not offer any plan to a regular Russian, especially seeing how close EU politicians were to Putin at that time and how they did not care if he stays for as many terms as he wanted to.
And yet all of Russias neighbours are now courting China, Kazakhstan especially. And also Russia is content with becoming a vassal gas station for China as long as it gets to play as a faux empire and slaughter both its citizens and its brother nation's citizens in an industrial meat grinder. 5D chess as the youngsters say these days
China is not so dangerous in this regard because it is not appealing.
It has great amount of economic power, but culturally it is very insular, plus the story of Chinese Uighurs, making people (in Central Asia especially) wary of fully embracing the Chinese Way.
Not so with Europe, which is culturally dominant, and many countries around Russia would love to fully embrace the EU, if EU is willing to take effort. But this is shitty deal for Russia since it was never invited to any such schemes and will lose cultural and economic influence. It's also not all rosy for target countries' population, but it's acceptable and Europe can make it look great.
For Russians it will always look that they cut family bonds for sugar daddy, though. That has sufficient stigma that would explain why Russian population still does not mind the war.
Russia has the Snow White's Evil Queen role assigned here, who is uninvited to the party but crashes it. And boy does Russia embraces this role, unfortunately. "5D checkers" is the term.
Tell me. Had russia treated its neighbors well, not genocided them for centuries on end, enslaved and taken liberties from them. Would they then maybe feel different about russia?
Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Baltics, all the Stans. Everyone has been been attacked by russia over the centuries. Centuries before putin was born.
The biggest problem of course is that russia is STILL doing that. Attacked Georgia, attacked Ukraine, is threatening to attack Baltics again.
There is no sign that russia can be trusted to treat it's neighbors well or be a responsible member of a world where human rights are being valued.
This is completely on russia itself, trying to play the victim is not going to work as everyone has tried to accomodate russia. Germans thought that wandel-durch-handel tried to make russia to understand that trade is more profitable than war, but this was proven to be hopelessly naive.
The West should not pretend they wanted Russia in their camp then. Not talking about faults. "Your fault is that I want to eat", as Krylov's wolf said to a lamb.
Russia just wasted at least 15 years on that bullshit that it could productively spend, as you have framed it, genociding and enslaving people. Now have stuff to catch up.
From Russian perspective, everybody is trespassing on our lands. We tried voluntary giving independence to these regions, which belonged to Russia by right, on assumption they respond with gratitude and uphold the rights of Russians and living there and Russian culture. Here they are now, telling tales about how they were genocided and enslaved. Now the prevailing idea is that we should take that independence back whether possible.
One teeny tiny examples, Russian Empire has secured the lands which are now contested Southern Ukraine, from Donetsk to Odessa. These were nomad-raided steppes with barely any population. Russian Empire secured them and let Ukrainians settle these new lands alongside other ethnicities (Greeks, Jews and of course Russians), and just two centuries later, Ukrainians refuse to acknowledge that and seek to forcibly assimilate all other ethnicities there. Now it is obvious that Ukrainian autonomy during the USSR was a costly mistake. They were gifted these lands for settlement and now they tell fairy tales about centuries of genocide. They were permitted to settle there among others and now they have driven everybody else away.
But the situation with Baltic states is in fact even worse. What happened to Baltic Jews? Baltic Germans? Baltic Russians? :))
Russians exterminated them. When Russians invaded in 1939-1940, they abolished Jewish cultural autonomy, closed all Jewish institutions (schools, associations, etc), rounded up Jews into cattle cars and sent them in entire families to die in Siberian wilderness, because they saw wealthy Jews as kulaks and oppressors of the working man. Russians targeted the entire professional class that was capable of running a country (public administrators, lawyers, engineers, doctors, merchants, etc), but because Jews were overrepresented in middle-upper classes, they got hit the hardest. They were about ten times more likely to get victimized by Russians than anyone else.
> Baltic Germans?
Resettled to newly-occupied Poland between late 1939 and early 1940 under agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union. They were allies at the time and had divided Europe in the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Russians gave Germans free hands to do what they want with Poland and in return, Germany picked up Baltic Germans from the region (in an action called Umsiedlung) and left the rest for Russians to maul.
> Baltic Russians?
Exterminated during WWII by Russians. For example, one third of the pre-war population of Narva was Russian. Russians systematically destroyed Narva in WWII using the same methods we now see in Ukraine. Not a single habitable building was left. After the war, they banned the few surviving former inhabitants of Narva from returning. Instead, they resettled the area with ethnic Russians. This has caused incredible cultural discontinuity. I just finished reading memoirs of a Russian who grew up there in the 1960s. From his youth, he remembers no old men telling stories to kids "how things used to be". In fact, he knows no-one who had lived there before the war. The entire human (people, traditions, culture) and physical (buildings) history of the place got wiped away and replaced with depressing commie blocks and chauvinistic Russian settlers who are bitter that no-one treats them as liberators.
This is particularly striking considering that as a Hanseatic trading city, Narva had vibrant multiethnic population and immaculately preserved baroque architecture. It was a remarkably beautiful place that Swedes had once considered moving their capital to from Stockholm. Now it's a run-down shithole full of angry and miserable rootless Russians who don't understand where they are and why everyone dislikes them so much.
It's also notable how Baltic Russians came into existence. They were historic minority compromised of refugees who had fled religious persecution in the 17th century Russia. Some things never change.
Some of this is true - but by Soviets, not Russians. I'm not sure why you would conflate the two. Was Stalin Russian? Perhaps Beria? Trotsky? Dzerzhinsky? Lenin? :)
The stupidity of "Russians has occupied Baltics and killed all Russians" will vanish once you call the former the Soviet.
But mostly, it is baltic people themselves who got rid of Jews and helped get rid of Germans, and then after 1990 tried to get rid of Russians too.
> This has caused incredible cultural discontinuity. I just finished reading memoirs of a Russian who grew up there in the 1960s. From his youth, he remembers no old men telling stories to kids "how things used to be". In fact, he knows no-one who had lived there before the war
That's the story of many places past WWII. There was an unprecedented cultural discontinuity. For starters, St. Petersburg is resettled practically anew because almost all of its population either perished in the blockade or was evacuated and was not encouraged to return. Don't get me started on Polish and German resettlements. Why blame Russians for anything here? Russians are the same victims of the war as Baltic people and Jews and Poles and Germans themselves.
> run-down shithole full of angry and miserable rootless Russians who don't understand where they are and why everyone dislikes them so much
Can you perhaps stop disliking your compatriots for who they are, and maybe they will stop treating you as a Nazi who you currently objectively are.
> Some of this is true - but by Soviets, not Russians. I'm not sure why you would conflate the two. Was Stalin Russian? Perhaps Beria? Trotsky? Dzerzhinsky? Lenin?
Whatever possible claims there were along the lines of "Hitler was ackchyually an Austrian", present-day Russians have willingly adopted that legacy instead of denouncing it like Germans, justify it and continue to pursue it further.
> present-day Russians have willingly adopted that legacy
Present-day Woke LGBT socialists from California has adopted that legacy. Russians have no predisposition towards socialism, utopian cults or dictature of minorities. Soviet regime is a branchild of European Social Democracy and it's pathetic how they are trying to frame the victims of this crime for it.
Just ask all these young people from Italy, Spain or Seattle why so many hammer-and-sickles.
I didn't know that "LGBT socialist from California" were the people giving ~70% approval ratings to mass murderers like Stalin in Russian domestic polls and erecting monuments to Lenin in occupied parts of Ukraine.
As Stalin himself has said, "never ask who is doing the voting, ask who is doing the counting".
Most Russian people do not care that much about Stalin since it's all too old and they care much more about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who are much more recent butchers of Russia.
Some people do, but then again, some Italians, French and US campuses also give a lot of shits about people like Trotsky. An absolute majority of humanity are politically clueless, and the worst of them are also opinionated.
There is zero chance of India joining NATO in our lifetimes. They have an entirely different set of priorities. At most we might see some limited defense cooperation agreements between India and other maritime powers to secure their sea lines of communication and contain Chinese expansionism.
Top down government planning is the only thing that has consistently worked in high technology sectors, especially things like semiconductors or spaceflight.
Watch some Asianometry. The guy explains how Japan's semiconductor industry was built on high-level planning and industry/academia collaboration with long-term planning and workshare division rather than competition between companies, to develop the necessary technologies for semiconductor manufacture. Same thing happened in the US.
R&D heavy industries cannot be bootstrapped without deep government pockets and expert oversight, and a risk tolerance that cannot be justified on balance sheets.
Government planning and investment can certainly bootstrap and protect a nascent industry in its infancy, but once the industry becomes competitive it is to the Democracy's own advantage to remove the training wheels and back off.
This book review of How Asia Works[0] gives excellent examples of how South Korea applied this strategy to break out of from economic despair to become a leading economic power, and how other Asian countries failed to apply this formula when their governments were too heavy handed in their approach.
> Top down government planning is the only thing that has consistently worked in high technology sectors, especially things like semiconductors or spaceflight.
That's what gave us Intel processors? SpaceX? Google? ChatGPT?
I strongly disagree with your reading of events. (Yes, there was government involvement in the origins of the semiconductor industry, and in the origins of US spaceflight. No, top down government planning is not the only thing that has consistently worked. Having the government seed things and let private businesses run with it has worked pretty well.)
Intel (Fairchild) has the following in their biography:
> By the end of the 1970s they had few new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for military
Yes, the megabucks put in by the government for Apollo and Military Programs were important, they created static demand - but the government neither planned nor built the technologies needed. It largely happened organically.
I think that just came down to capital requirement thresholds. Some circumstances required the collective funding because the payoff window was so long.
But a lot of that is due to protectionism and sanctions/restrictions.
I used to have a Huawei phone, now I don't because it can't use the Google App Store.
Here in Europe, there was a lot of controversy over the electric car tariffs too - as China produce high quality, cheap electric cars that could help us with the Green transition, yet we slap sky-high tariffs on them to protect Volkswagen shareholders.
How is it that some europeans like yourself don't realize that China is actively supplying military goods and funding to Russia, to help Russia attack Europe??
Why would you want to pay for cars that help to grow your enemy to cause your countries to fall?
>Top-down economic planning has never worked and I don’t see why it would be different now.
Countries have national currencies and central banks. Countries have borders where imports / exports are taxed and inspected for safety, illegal smuggling, etc. The US made Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to maintain liquidity in the mortgage market. All these things are not perfect, but what's the alternative? Where do you draw the line?
China is already number one on the EVs industry, so if we continue going down that route of forced electrification of our cars there's a big chance many of us will be indeed driving Chinese cars going forward. Granted, neither North Korea nor Russia are big in that industry.
> I do worry a lot about Western domination declining, and China taking its place
Chairman Xi made sure that won't happen. Maybe they'll take over Taiwan with disastrous consequences for everyone, but if they don't do it until 2030, they might as well give up. They might also exert their influence in Africa, the Midlle East and Central Asia, at the expense of Russia. I'd argue Chinese influence in Central Asia is somewhat better than Russian influence, which has only created frozen conflicts that Russia can reignite whenever it's convenient for them (see Nagorno-Karabah).
If Chinese trade with the US stays at current rates, there's less risk of war between China and the West.
As usual, Dan Wang's yearly letter is not only beautifully laid out but also an eye opener.
Russia has nothing to do with Nagorno-Karabakh (indeed, in many ways this ethnic conflict has caused the demise of the USSR, not the other way around). Nagorno-Karabakh is not in Central Asia. There are no frozen conflicts in Central Asia, though there are some feuds.
Any Muslim country indeed may have an islamist insurgency and/or a Cotton revolution staged by CIA. Not sure China is great against either one threat.
But the claims that there are any frozen conflicts there are unfounded (no strong claims of one country on the lands of another country in the region), and about Russian involvement also unfounded (it did help secular Tajik win the civil war in a coalition but that's mostly it).
"but if they don't do it until 2030, they might as well give up."
I am not that sure anymore. The Russo-Ukrainian war shattered a lot of my illusions with regard to rationality of leaders. A country with a very bad demographics started a war by deploying clearly insufficient forces (200 000 soldiers are nothing when compared to the size of Ukraine; Germans deployed 12x as more soldiers in 1941 to conquer Ukrainian SSR) and the result is an enormous fuck-up and unendong slaughter of young population which, with current TFRs, will never be replaced.
If Putin can make such a bad judgment, Xi can as well. It is not as if Xi tolerates more dissent/negative feedback to his rule than his Russian counterpart.
The Minsk agreements were highly favourable to the Russians, since they were basically forced on the Ukrainians. That’s why Poroshenko was going around saying Ukraine would never abide by them.
Claiming the opposite is just muddying the waters. Up is down in wartime, I suppose.
Yes and no. Putin could rationally expect no direct western intervention or even the level of support we have given. We did nothing when the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014, and we did nothing when they invaded Georgia. The threat to invade Ukraine was originally made at least as early as 2008 and we did nothing in the intervening years to deter it.
Taiwan is very different. Xi also knows it is of far created economic importance to the west (and the US in particular) than Ukraine is.
The miscalculation was primarilly political rather than military. They expected the Ukrainians to roll over rather than fight. Possibly they believed their own propaganda (and their experience from the 2014 invasion) and expected a lot of Ukrainian support. The invaders were not even prepared to fight and the planning was lead by the FSB, not the military. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9ym9TDs6Dg
"Yes and no. Putin could rationally expect no direct western intervention or even the level of support we have given. We did nothing when the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014, and we did nothing when they invaded Georgia."
This still sounds like a huge gamble with very high stakes. Ukraine received a lot of Western weapons between 2014-2022, and it was those weapons like Javelin that helped stop the original Russian armored onslaught.
International politics does not reliably work on the principle "actor X hasn't done Y before, so actor X won't do Y now". There may be thresholds that, once reached, change the entire situation.
To look at a historical example, the Allies did nothing when Hitler re-occupied the Ruhr, they did nothing when he annexed Austria, they allowed him to take Sudetenland and later they did nothing when he annexed the rest of Bohemia and Moravia. But with Poland, the threshold was crossed once and for all.
>but if they don't do it until 2030, they might as well give up.
Why? PRC is currently extracting the greatest high skill demographic divident in human history in the next 30 years, and even with shit tier TFR they're producing more bodies than any modern military needs, and will continue to under the most pessimestic demographic projections until end of century. They have decades to try and try again, because they can replicate US expeditionary military model with even less than fraction of their population and industrial output. Ultimately IMO PRC doesn't need to dominate, or take over west/really US tier of hyperdominance, which it can't. But that's also exactly why it's fine and even prudent for PRC to take over TW and bring pyrrhic disaster for everyone. In terms of cold interest calculus, the west, being at the top has more to lose, and historically, you displace regional hegemon with force. Meanwhile PRC got plenty of excess/surplus workforce past 2050s for reconstruction. The TLDR is PRC comprehensive power by herself is going to increase / close gap with west. And even if she doesn't want war, structure forces / trends won't dissuade her, and if anything incentivizes escalation.
> PRC is currently extracting the greatest high skill demographic divident in human history in the next 30 years
China is not. There is a trend in China for companies to not hire people over the age of 35. Also, their unofficial youth unemployment rate is something like 45%. In addition, 1 billion people live in poverty in China https://www.newsweek.com/china-article-censorship-1-billion-.... That means those people don't have the knowledge/connection/skillset to contribute. Lastly, Chinese population is expected to shrink to 600B even faster than 2050
At current PRC STEM / skilled labour production rate, they're on trend to generate 50-100M new skilled workers in the next 20 years. Those are growing bodies already born and accounted for. That's multiple times more than US is set to gain in people via all methods birth/immigration. In the next few years, PRC will have more skilled talent IN WORKFORCE than US in absolute numbers. It's exactly beause relative skill across workforce is still low, currently 20% vs developed countries for 60-80% that PRC has incredible skilled demographic divident to squeeze. It's how JP/SKR GDP doubled/tripled after TFR crash 20 years ago, by training up new generations into more skilled/productive work. Hence PRC similarly marching to advanced economy workforce composition is - objectively the greatest concentration in high skilled talent within one coordinated system in human history. Even at lower relative % of skilled workforce, due to PRC population denominator, that means PRC will have significantly more aggregate knowledge/skill/connection than any other competitor.
PRC broad unemployment rate is 5%, youth find jobs within a few years. Right now you have massive cohorts of new graduates post academic expansion who don't want to settle for jobs they think are beneath them, but eventually, like all humans, they will. It's going to take a few years because PRC kids have no crippling student debt, can mooch off parents living at home, and don't need to work 2 part time jobs to make ends meet. Even if 40% of youth unemployemnt was durable, implying 40% of PRC skilled workforce end up not working, which is an idiotic hopium position to draw analysis from, the remaining 60% is still MORE aggregate skill pool than again, any other competitor, at any time in past or projected future in next 30-50 years. Which if you care about geopolitical balance/stragetic competition, is the cohort and period worth considering.
There's no credible model where PRC population will dip to 600M in 2050.
On poverty: there's 600M, on 1000rmb disposable household income, 900m on 2000rmb. That again, that's precisely why they don't matter for growth. That 60% of population constitutes merely 10% of GDP. Most of GDP/productivity in advanced/modern economy driven by the minority of skilled workforce. In PRC case, the minority in developed tier1/2 regions. The same cohort responsible for 90% of the GDP is set to increase by order of magnitude within the next 20 years. They're the real growth drivers. That growth will trickle down so the bottom 60% can eventually charge 10rmb for a haircut instead of 5rmb and live on 2000/4000rmb instead of 1000/2000, but ultimately their contribution to development is/was always going to be marginal. You don't need everyone to be high skilled, and with PRC population, modernization timeframe, they couldn't. But going forward they can certainly have more absolute/aggregate skilled labour than US+partners, and still have a few 100 million stuck in informal economy doing shit all. And right now that's where impactful demographic trend is heading.
> generate 50-100M new skilled workers in the next 20 years
You're overestimating the impact since
1.) 80% of the top minds will study abroad and stay there, not in China, like they are now. More smart people are realizing if they live in a freedom-less dictatorship, being just a chive to be cut down, they are better to move. When they see their hero Jack Ma was imprisoned and stripped of power. When they hear their hero Ma Huateng of Tencent actively proclaiming one should not attract attention and to lower profile
2.) rote studying + cheating culture + mandatory Xi Jing Ping learning for 3 hours every day for these workers in college make them inferior workers than workers in the West. Chinese colleges are already not as good as Western colleges to start with.
3.) when these skilled workers graduate and can't find jobs, much like now when tsinghua graduates are forced to become didi drivers, they won't be able to learn the actual skills to contribute, since college learnings are just that, college learnings.
4.) US can get skilled immigrations from around the world, and can ramp up whenever they want. They also have skilled partners like Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea to work with
> settle for jobs they think are beneath them, but eventually, like all humans, they will
Yes, these new college grads now are driving for didi and delivering for meituan, which they will continue to do for 20 years. There is no magic bullet to turn an event like Great Depression around
> There's no credible model where PRC population will dip to 600M in 2050
There are many, but first you have to not buy China's word that it has 1.4B to start with. (why would you when they still proclaim 5% GDP growth in 2023) Many guesses are 1.2B, before all the unreported covid related deaths
1) Subtantially less (like single digit %) PRC tier1 talent are leaving now, and more skilled talent are flowing back from west to PRC due to better opportunities. Record number in last few years. What you're seeing is some old wealth, accumulated in PRC at time when you didn't need high skill talent, capital flighting. And a bunch of low skilled migrants trying to enter from south America to flip burgers. This isn't the 2000s where best of best PRC goes abroad, some do, but largely it's the extra mediocre/dumb who can't hack Chinese gaokao. This isn't diasphora from 90s where every Chinese group has friends who were like top10 from their province. The common story now is my kid too dumb/fragile to survive PRC tertiary, lets send them abroad. Which relates back to old wealth fleeing, a lot of rich peasants who guanxied their way into wealth and know their kids aren't smart enough to do well in PRC but maybe can coast in west where talent pool is shallow. Like this
2) Except they're climbing/leading science/innovation indexes in west controlled for quality. As if university in the west don't have retarded waste of time rereqs. No one is learning XJP app for 3 hours a day. They're studying their courses and farming primogems.
3) Yeah they're going to spend years bumming a round while job creation meet talent creation, which is expected artefact of PRC overcapacity. That'll sort itself out in a a few years. Supply/demand etc. The important point being, right now there are host of significant, strategic industries where there's lots of demand and having excess talent is net good, i.e. PRC is basically the only country on trend to not have talent shortage in semiconductors in 5 years. And guess what happens when there's extra demand, companies take and retrain less qualified applicants. It's better to have a pool of STEM taxi drivers who can skill work because you know they were filtered by tertiary system than the west who has excess demand for skill work, and taxi drivers who can't.
4) Now break down the numbers. US has access to global talent, but what US actually has access is 400M english speakers, 600m with some english proficency, from a few countries with skill development. And guess who they have overwhelmingly chose in the last 10-15 years. PRC talent, that they are now making harder to brain drain due to domestic policies. Meanwhile, PRC has 900m mandarin speakers, but realistically like US, the subsect of viable tertiary talent is much lower. But PRC talent bias skill/technical work, vs gender studies and has much bigger pool for high skill work. Meanwhile, they've been retaining significantly more talent due to more opportunities, and frankly produce so much that US/west can't even brain drain enough to make a dent, assuming US/PRC domestic politics allows prior levesl of brain drain. US has access to "more" talent, but realistically can only takein/incorporate so much. Meanwhile PRC has access to MORE talent, more than US can ever take, including top end.
Very few are skilled youths driving did/meituan. Some do, but youth umemployment stats concenrates low skill. Credentialled youth and taking their time job seeking, looking into teaching/government, and eventually will settled into bluecollar work that pays better than delivery work if they can stomach the shame. Broke, medicore skilled youth, the C students are desperate enough to do low end work. If you're an A level talent, you're already working sometime nice. No so different from advanced economies as they deal with academic inflation.
Conspiracy/FLG/and that one professor guess 1.2B. Which doesn't even matter since output of PRC exports and value chain can be measured by proxy. That 1.2B is consuming resources for previous 1.4B, and living 10% better. It's fine. And as if PRC having 200M less mouth to feed and fuel is actually a problem. Meanwhile commodity imports and energy increase trend is clear and can't be systematically fudged over timescale. Dang's not going to be happy if I interrogate every luny claim on PRC. Suffice to say, PRC skilled demographic boom, and ability to to coordinate them is so large, that they have large advantage even if you think they're fudged by double digit percentages.
I think the answer is, it doesn't. It requires coordinating bodies, industrial base, and resources. Not ability to vote or unfettered media. See PRC recently moving up value chains, topping science and innovation indexes in western publications, controlled for quality. That's PRC goign from fraction of high skilled talent in 2010, to near parity in in last few years after boosting tertiary education. If you buy into the innovation+freedom argument and also PRC is less free argument, then innovation is negatively correlated to free thought. Regardless, whatever system PRC has in place, it's been driving innovation in last few years with less talent than west, and soon more talent, with more experience. Absurdly more. Meanwhile everyone else is adopting PRC industrial policy, or rather re-adopting indy policy that PRC copied from Asian Tigers who copied from US. And ultimately even if you presume leading edge innovation requires the "right" culture, PRC is still good at replicating and commercializing. Hence whatever lead an innovation an "innovative" culture produces, PRC can still replicate and commercialize and at scale faster and cheaper and reduce market share / R&D of those companies on global market.
I'd wager the enormous media machinery does work to some extent in scaring people away, though I know people that have moved there and things are going extremely well for them.
I share many of your sentiments, but I have a theory that it won't be China or the West, but a blend of the two, which dominates the future (or, hopefully, rules without dominating). It's like our cultures are mating, and posterity will be the child of both. And like actual mating, the courtship is often rocky and marked by conflict. We'll sort it out.
This. While one could argue the current conflicts we're seeing are the Thucydides Trap, as the US' power wanes and China rises, this transition from quasi-unipolar hegemony to a multipolar and multicentric is clearly being mediated by conflict.
Personally I think it's the only realistic way we could have a system of checks-and-balances. You truly need a set of superpowers fending each other off, keeping each other in line for there to be some stability, offsetting their influences.
I am pleasantly surprised to see that he attended the "walk and talk" organized by Craig Mod, also discussed previously on HN [0].
I am really inspired by that, and I am trying to organize one in either the Dolomites (Italy), or in Venice and its Lagoon (also Italy), which would have to be adapted to the characteristics of a lagoon with islands [2].
Anyway, if this is of interest to you, please say hi to WalkAndTalkItaly@gmail.com and let me know why you'd like to do it, and if you'd prefer Venice or Dolomites.
> There still are some corners in China that are relatively permissive. One of these is Yunnan’s Dali, a city on the northern tip of highland Southeast Asia, where I spent much of 2022. There, one can find the remnants of a drug culture as well as a party scene for an occasional rave. But even Dali is becoming less tenable these days since the central government has cottoned on that the city is a hub for free spirits. The tightening restrictions emanating from Beijing are spreading to every corner of the country. “China feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower,” one person told me. “To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.”
This is incredibly sad, and the analogy is both palpable and frightening.
> I’ve written seven annual letters. Every year, a few weeks after I’ve published a letter, I would open up a new notepad for the following year’s. That’s where I put in data, observations, and book recommendations that should go into the next year’s letter. These notes are not organized. In the last two weeks of the year, I sort through everything, try to coax out a structure, and then write the damn thing. I’ve complained about how much work it demands, but I also want to say that it has been great fun. I don’t understand why more people aren’t writing them. It’s not just about sharing your thoughts and recommendations with the rest of the world. Having this vessel that you’re motivated to fill encourages being more observant and analytical in daily life too.
I think the reason that more people aren't writing them is that they don't have the patience, that they want to immidiately tweet every thought they have, get feedback, approval/disapproval.
It's hard for humans to be unbiased. Part of the reason is he seems to be an ABC.
ABCs are attached to both worlds, and thus are likely to feel pride and shame for both countries. Sometimes they will feel more loyalty towards one world over the other and sometimes the loyalties cancel out where you're left with a rare person who can look at the situation completely impartially.
A lot of ABCs have more of a chip on their shoulder about China, or for that matter immigrants from China itself. Every Saturday, a bunch of falun dafa protesters are out in downtown Seattle protesting against the CCP, most of them just Chinese Ayis (middle aged women).
Gordon Chang “china will implode” articles are a popular straw man whenever any news articles mentions China possibly going into recession.
It's a whole spectrum. But almost everyone on the face of the earth has some bias towards their own country.
The percentage of impartiality among ethnic minorities born in the US like ABCs have a tendency to be much higher then normal. I wouldn't say it's the majority but it's definitely much higher then normal.
TBH Dan's still an Anglo Chinese Canadian who grew up under western pedagogy that colours his analysis, but it's fairly level-headed given his background.
Dan's letter is a largely objective personal account, but it is heavily biased towards a particular worldview. This "Ezra Klein" liberal worldview is absolutely not representative of China. It represents a tiny (affluent, expat-oriented) minority.
He spends a few paragraphs talking about how returning to NYC/SF was disappointing, that the NYC subways were strictly worse than he remembered, then turns around and says "the real [America] is getting better". Huh? Based on what? The stock market?
Being a Chinese liberal in 2024 is an exercise in cognitive dissonance and blind faith. You have to just believe that Xi's China is about to collapse, and Biden's America is on the cusp of a golden age. You have to ignore decades-deep trends (in education, development, economic inequality, geopolitics) and wish that they are going to suddenly reverse. Because of an 80 year old POTUS who has been US Senator since 50 years ago when Shenzhen was a dumpy fishing village? It's a very difficult ideological position right now.
I think it's hilarious that when westerners provide data based arguments that China is failing, China supporters will say you don't understand China and you need to live there, and they've heard China's impending fail many times. And then when a Chinese person that lives in China provides arguments that China is failing, China supporters will say well they're biased.
Cherry-picking can look superficially like a "data-based argument", but that doesn't make it a good argument or approximation of the truth.
Dan isn't outright lying, but he is omitting a lot of uncomfortable truths (long-term trends) in order to reinforce his worldview.
Voluntary expats in particular are unreliable narrators because they are incentivized to fit in their new home and defend their major life choice. An expat that expresses loyalty to their old country over their new one is not really an expat, they will be viewed socially as an eternal outsider, foreign agent or invasive settler.
In the past few months I have talked (separately) to three Chinese students who were doing PhDs in different countries. I asked each what their plans were for the future, and was struck by how determined all three were to not return to China. This is obviously a biased sample, since they already chose to do their PhD outside China, but conditions in China, such as 996 culture, definitely seem to be pushing some talented young people away.
> One of the questions I ask my SF friends is what the entrepreneurial 20-year-olds are doing these days. Are they starting a billion-dollar company, or are they more interested in becoming a memelord who is trying to incite a movement on the Internet? I’m not sure we’re seeing a surge of exciting startup creation, but we sure are seeing a lot more online craziness.
This is a fun question. These things could mean the same thing: Starting a website. But too many people think that "becoming a memelord" and "inciting a movement" means trolling around on someone elses website. The only reason people start their own website today is to start a billion-dollar company.
I haven't traveled to many places like the author, nor have I ever been in contact with those young people in the mountains. To comment on the whole of China based on the comments and feelings of these people is probably one-sided. Asking these people in the mountains or those living overseas is as ridiculous as investigating on the train if everyone has bought tickets. Western networks always have such inherent prejudices, when criticizing our leaders, they always criticize our system. But when criticizing their own country's leaders, they never consider the issue of the system. Isn't it true that those obnoxious leaders in the West were elected under their system? Or is it not because they have that kind of system or culture that they would elect more and more unsatisfactory leaders? There is an ancient saying in China, "I reflect on myself three times a day", while the Western world never does "self-reflection", only "others reflection".
> I’ve never felt great enthusiasm for crypto. After chatting with these young Chinese, I became more tolerant of their appeal. Digital currencies are solutions looking for problems most everywhere in the Western world, but they have real value for people who suffer from state controls. The crypto community in China has attracted grifters, as it has everywhere else. But it is also creating a community of people trying to envision different paths for the future.
This is where most HN commenters fall down. It is easy to sit in "the west" and hate on crypto, but once you've experienced capital controls first hand in poorer countries, it all starts to make more sense. It goes beyond just paying for things.
The problem with that outlook is that crypto isn't really all that great for people who live under capital controls. It's possibly better than the local currency, depending on what they want to do, but it still has serious drawbacks.
Looking at the USD-BTC price chart over the years, pretty much any time after mid-2017, BTC is just a very risky store of value. It's super volatile. You need to know that what you have will still buy you what you expect in a month, 3 months, a year, etc.
Now, again, this still may be a better deal than the local currency for some people. And if you're primarily using it as a money transmission method (convert local currency to BTC, send to recipient, they convert to their local currency), you lose a lot of the price risk. But that still doesn't make it a good deal.
And that's just one issue that directly affects anyone using it. On top of that there's the proliferation of scams, enabling of criminal activity, ridiculous electricity use, etc.
I think my position has softened, over time, though. I used to be very anti-crypto, and wished for its demise. Now I just kinda don't care too much about it; if people want to spend their time working on the technology to see where it goes, who am I to tell them to do something else with their time? And it does seem to be helping a lot of people who don't have good financial options. And who knows, maybe it'll eventually grow or morph into something I might find useful or interesting.
What is “good” is determined by the options available, not by all theoretically possible options. The average person in say, Argentina, isn’t going to have access to complex financial instruments and so is functionally choosing between a hyperinflating local currency and a volatile-but-still-going-up bitcoin. This is a real world use case and it’s echoed in countless places around the world - most of which, I imagine, the most strident crypto critics haven’t ever been to.
Sure, I get that. And I'm not in a position where I need to use crypto, so I know I'm not going to feel it like someone in that position would. And I agree that they should use the best option available to them, and that crypto might be it.
But otherwise, I disagree: "good" is not solely determined by the options available. When comparing options, you can only say that some are "better" or "worse". Crypto may be better for some people than their other options, but that doesn't make it good. (Consider sayings like "the best of bad options" or "the lesser of evils". It's an acknowledgement that none of the options are good, but some are nonetheless better than others.)
Ideally people in these situations do -- sooner rather than later -- get some actually good options. Maybe crypto will morph into that, or maybe people would get better (and quicker) bang for their buck tackling the problem from a different angle. I don't know what that other angle might be, but I worry that crypto ends up being a sort of local maximum that hits a ceiling, one that is better than the alternatives for some people, but is still not particularly good.
What’s the alternative you’re proposing? For the average person in these countries to push for radical political and economic changes against their governments? Governments which are typically more controlling in the first place? All of this so that they can just not have their meager savings eaten away by inflation?
Again, this kind of criticism has little contact with reality and mostly comes from people without actual experience in using the tech. In the real world, in places with hyperinflation or other financial issues, bitcoin isn’t “the lesser of two evils.”
I think you're not really listening. I explicitly said I don't have any alternatives to offer. Maybe some sort of future magical internet money that doesn't suck in the ways the current crypto ecosystems do?
I also absolutely acknowledged I don't have experience living in that kind of situation. Not sure why you seem to be getting so worked up about this.
I never claimed Bitcoin was the lesser of two evils. I was merely illustrating my disagreement with your assertion that "good" is determined by the options available, not out of hypothetical options or some idea of "objective good". But I do think Bitcoin (and most crypto) can be (for some people) the best of bad/so-so/meh options. And that's great that it exists for people, when their other options are worse.
But I really hope we can do better than this. Obviously we can't right now, and I'm not suggesting that someone who lives under a repressive financial regime is going to have to be the one responsible for figuring out what that is. But I have to believe that better -- something that's actually good, unlike current cryptocurrency -- is possible.
I’m not getting worked up about it, I just don’t really understand this line of criticism. Yeah, it’s not perfect and the people pushing it as some messianic currency solution are obviously grifters. But what technology is perfect?
It is being used right now, today, in ways that benefit people’s lives in demonstrable ways, and so with your admitted lack of alternatives, I don’t quite understand the reasoning here, unless you’re just arguing about the abstract definition of good.
I focused on the real world knowledge because I think a lot of the criticism of bitcoin in general lacks an understanding of how the tech is really used, and is just abstract academic criticism.
Its getting more useful over time. There are good fiat backed stablecoins + ethereum and its peers are all proof-of-stake so no ridiculous electricity usage. But the risk premium of using it(falling prey to scams, hacks, etc) makes no sense in countries with stable financial regimes.
The funny thing about this though is that this is so easy to whatabout. Fraud is all over tradfi. I have a true story. The head of finance got phished. Ended up transferring money to some new bank account number they received on a friday. He called, when they opened, on Monday. The money was gone and the bank wouldn't do anything to return it. Call the police/feds they said.
I think the next step is to build trustless escrow services. I know that sounds weird, but we need some sort of insurance system that if fraud happens, we can get our money back. Programmable money makes that possible and that would be an improvement on what we have today.
Don't forget... how can credit cards afford to absorb the losses? Fees and penalties. Someone always has to pay.
I think another commenter said it better, but you second sentence buries the lede. If crypto is better than the alternatives, people will rationally choose to use it, and that seems like a good thing for them. Even if I agree with literally everything else you said.
The problems with crypto are two folds and I think it's resounding in HN in general:
A- it festers with scams and scammers.
B- it uses astronomic resources world-wide.
Both of these have counter points but the overwhelming majority denies it credibility.
I have for example envisionned systems like "proof of latency" but have never engaged in proving it seriously, due to the overwhelming putrid nature of the crypto world.
I hope some day it turns, I personally love the ideology behind it.
Those two points are valid and I don't deny the credibility at all. As someone who's been involved in crypto for quite some time, I can add 1000 other items to that list.
At the same time, I also think it is wrong to deny/ignore/discount the counter points. In my eyes, there are always two sides to any story.
How does crypto solve capital constraints when you have to convert the fiat to crypto? This is by far the biggest challenge. Crypto is like a solution that is worse than the problem in many instances. Maybe fine for small transactions, but not subverting capital controls.
That is very well put, but it does rely on the government not interfering in the crypto sphere too much. Given the CCP's crackdowns everywhere else, if citizens stashing away money in bitcoin becomes a big problem, they're likely to pay attention to this area too.
After all, you somehow have to get your dollars or RMB or whatever converted into cryptocurrency in the first place, and then get them out again when you want to buy something with them. You also need to hope that the government doesn't have the resources to take over 51% of the network by conscripting all the miners running in their country.
What most people do not consider is that in countries with a lot of capital controls, black/OTC markets are the way most citizens interact. Just head to any gold dealer for all your currency conversion.
You might think, wow, that is crazy, I'm not going to take a bunch of cash to a gold dealer to do that. But the reality is that this is how local citizens do things all day long. It is normal there.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, right? I guess the people who are actually at legal risk might research it more throughly than some westerners, but I worry that mixing up the two is an easy and common mistake, to the point where it is often informally described as anonymous.
The article seems to suggest that the role of crypto to these young Chinese individuals is that it forms a means of community and a nonjudgemental channel of new thoughts. I feel it's become quite a trope worldwide actually: a following has ammassed not because of the core tenets of the technology itself, but because it is a story of something new and different, promising progress and a severe and much-needed change. When I was younger I was enamored by something called the Venus project, a movement that aimed to re-architecturalize all of society towards a post-scarcity world. Something utterly enthralling to me at the time. But when I attended enough talks and saw the people I was sitting besides, I saw that all I shared in common was a deep disatisfaction with the status quo and a distrust of authority. I saw that topics of discussion extended into various conspiracies, from 9/11 to illuminati and UFOs and beyond. I felt quite alienated at that point and never looked back. That's what I see when I see crypto. It's not a cult, per se, but it seems to gain buy-in in the same brain lobes.. if that makes sense? People make friends, find common validation, and it all snowballs. I dare say: It was never about the blockchain.
This is a great comment. Part of what is missing for most people is utility. Without utility, it is easy to go off on the cultish aspects of it as a replacement. What convinced me was actually being able to use my pet rocks, to do something valuable for myself.
...yeah, but also capital controls make sense. you don't want foreign currency to inflate your economy, as you don't want too much of your currency going abroad. it's not like capital controls are made for fun.
Ofc they are not in the interest of everybody, but usually they are for the greater good.
And despite what the IMF was hammering in the 90s: yes, they really work. (also the IMF backpedaled on this)
Crypto isn't effective against governments. They can just ban it, and since most of them publish all their history in public forever they can find you using it.
It's only useful in situations where it's legal and yet some private actor is not letting you use bank transfers for something. Porn and weird research chemicals maybe.
If I live in one country where it is legal and I travel to another country, where it is illegal. Do you actually think that will stop me from being able to use it?
Due to market forces, it is often easier, and a lot more powerful, for me to use it in the banned country. Once I'm in that other country, I'm also anonymous again.
> Do you actually think that will stop me from being able to use it?
Yes. Obviously you can't do infinite financial crimes by traveling to another country and doing them there. For instance, they can get you the next time you want to travel there.
In this case you also can't use local exchanges if they don't exist and you have to evade the Great Firewall.
Love these annual letters from Dan. It was a joy meeting him randomly in Berlin years ago and I'm glad to see him having carved out such an interesting part of the internet for himself.
Well, a lot of people flag those topics because Israel is part of our western hegemony as far as political influence goes. What I find the most interesting is how uncritical we in the west are of the raise in authoritarianism in our own countries.
I’m Danish and all of our internet traffic is monitored and saved by our ISPs on behalf of our own government. A government who recently tried to have a former minister of justice and the former chief of the military spy agency (not sure what the English word for that is) tried for treason, not because they did anything wrong, but because they sort of leaked that our secret police let the NSA monitor our traffic because while it’s illegal for the PET to monitor Danish citizens directly, it’s not illegal for them to use surveillance information gathered by the NSA… Obviously we’re not living in a totalitarian state like the citizens of China, but it’s not like we’re really living in a democratic paradise either and things are continuing slipping in the authoritarian direction. With the US likely to re-elect Trump and several European nations going for far right wing or very conservative governments it’s not like there will be a lot of “help” from our foreign partners either.
But to return to your question, any political topic related to the west is often flagged on HN. I suspect this particular topic, and topics focused on China stay here because a lot of people actually find them interesting. It’s not exactly hard to find your information on Israel and Palestine, and almost none of it is related to HN, but insights into China especially with a tech focus aren’t easy or common in much of western media. This particular input is also very unbiased and well written on top of being very interesting. Where as a lot of the conflict or political topics that get flagged are mostly propaganda of sorts.
This was useful. I understand why gpt summaries are frowned upon, but this is a fine TLDR for anyone looking for one. And you’ve properly attributed it.
So in a way it's good to read about two things in concert: 1) Xi tightening things up and cracking down harder and harder on free expression, and 2) younger Chinese people -- despite the propaganda I hear they're exposed to -- becoming disillusioned and frustrated by it. Overall it sucks: I certainly don't wish more and more censorship etc. being foisted upon a billion of my fellow humans. But I also don't want to see a totalitarian regime being the main dominant world power.
Of course, dissatisfied young people -- and probably not even that many when compared to the whole of young Chinese people in China -- don't guarantee any kind of meaningful change over time. I'm sure there are plenty of young people in China who will happily step into the party's shoes once the current leadership's time has past.