Every once in a while, I'm reminded of what a tenuous position the United States economy and its businesses are in, in terms of the world market. The US is in relative decline in influence, while China is rising in influence and wealth. American exceptionalism is going to become less and less viable as a governing philosophy in the coming years. This is one of those instances where I'm reminded.
Also, I need to learn start learning Mandarin, like today. The opportunities missed in the tech industry by not knowing it are going to be huge in the coming years. I set for myself a goal of learning one new language a year this year, starting with Spanish (and I'm doing pretty good on that goal). But, I'm tempted to try to learn both simultaneously. Just not sure where I'll find the time. Spanish study already gets a lot of my leisure time. Maybe I need to do less facebook, reddit, and HN.
Don't get discouraged if you can't learn Mandarin in one year. Unless you're taking daily classes and living in a Chinese speaking country, you are likely to take about five years to achieve a passable conversational ability, let alone be able to read or write effectively.
If you have some time and are serious about it, I highly recommend NTNU in Taipei. I spent this past summer in an intensive course there and I progressed a ton. It's also not too expensive.
I've been diligently learning Mandarin for the past year, and I can maybe converse with a first or second grader.
Yeah, I had kinda put languages that are very different from English onto a back-burner, where I'd sort of consider it a thing to tackle once I had a system in place (some sort of mental model, proven practice tactics, etc.) for learning the easier languages, like Spanish, French, and German. Slavic languages like Russian and Polish are high on my list of languages to learn, as places that speak them are high on my list of places to visit, but also seem very challenging. Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese take that to a whole new level of difficulty.
Thanks for the tips. I may make it a tiny part of my daily language practice (I spend about 30-60 minutes a day on Spanish right now, and find that consistency is the most important thing), and maybe in a year or two "starting" Mandarin seriously will seem like starting Spanish or French to me now.
Even if the 'empire' falls, there are still very profitable pockets that will outlive your lifespan.
Look at the UK for example. London is still a major finance center. What is the total GDP of the 6 English native countries is another thing to keep in mind vs. the total GDP of the Slavic countries or the Chinese countries.
Don't learn a language until you actually have a requirement to actually use it professionally or personally. Otherwise your time is better spent on other things, like regular exercise, healthy eating and increasing your skill in your profession or working on starting your own business.
I tend to think language learning is one of those things that are intrinsically valuable. And, I'm embarrassed to have made it to middle age without fluency in anything other than English. From a pragmatic perspective it might not 've directly profitable...but it makes me happy.
So many people know both English and Mandarin already. If you know both English and Mandarin, there isn't a real advantage there. Disclosure: partial Mandarin speaker living and working in China for 7+ years; my value add is not Mandarin.
I think SwellJoe's thought might be that knowing Mandarin doesn't so much add value, but that it's a hygenie factor, just like literacy. Literacy is the norm, and people without are seriously disadvantaged.
And, yet, 大山 can read the websites of manufacturers, their specifications and documentation, can interact directly with the people involved in the design with lower language barriers, etc. I've been researching contracting a manufacturing partner in China for a variety of products I'd like to see but don't exist (or do exist, but at a price point that is absurd, given cost of manufacture); nothing all that complicated, really, but I still find I'd like to be able to dig deeper into the manufacturers reputation and I'd like to be able to interact with them in a way that insures we're actually talking about the same things, and that's challenging for an English speaker.
Realistically speaking, I probably just need to find a business partner who is fluent, maybe someone in China near the relevant manufacturing region. It'll take years to be fluent..Though I recognized 大, as I've been doing Chinese words in Memrise.
You'll still have lots of problems in China even if you speak fluently; most of the problems we encounter are cultural and not linguistic. You'll get ripped to shreds unless you can find an honest but savvy local partner.
If you do intensive for a year at BLCU, you could get fluent. I did intensive for 6 months at PKU, and my Chinese has gotten worse since I started working here 7 years ago. You don't have that much time to practice chinese and do your job at the same time (my Chinese today is limited to communicating with taxi drivers).
Over the last seven years, during which Europe's GDP has been stuck at or below 2007 levels, the US has added $3.5 or so trillion to its GDP, and is presently adding ~$550 billion per year to its GDP. Its unemployment rate continues to fall, in very real terms (not just on the U3). Wages are rising nicely, finally. The US is now fully capable of supplying 100% of its own energy needs, in fact the US has one million barrels of oil per day too much, the US is now drowning in too much oil supply. The US also will retain the global reserve currency for decades to come, making it possible to easily finance its debts. The US has a healthy demographic base, unlike much of Europe, China and Japan.
At a time when many other nation's households are accumulating tons of debt, the US has returned its household debt to income ratio back to about 100%, or close to where it was 10 and 15 years ago. Contrast that to, say, Denmark (260%), Sweden (150%), the Netherlands (250%+), Norway (180%), or Canada:
Since 2008, China has become the world's most indebted nation, taking on at least $30 to $35 trillion in new debt (some analysts put the number at closer to $45 trillion). In the next five or six years, China will add another $25 to $30 trillion in debt. Their sovereign wealth fund pales in size to the extreme debt they've accumulated, among both consumers, corporations and their shadow economy. They're accelerating into a disaster of epic proportions, all in the name of faking growth (real growth is zero at this point, if they're lucky); their growth boom came to a crashing stop during the great recession, so they shifted to accumulating vast debt to keep it going, with ever lessening returns on that debt. China is replicating the mistakes Japan made when their growth engine ceased, but doing so over an extremely compressed time-line.
Simultaneously China has upwards of 600 million unemployed people that are presently pretending to be farmers, held in place by intentionally backwards government farming policies because there are no jobs for those people.
China also has no social safety net of meaningful scope, at a time when they're already in the late desperate stages of debt accumulation.
China has a demographics disaster that is already underway. The repeated line that they will get old before they get rich, is indeed the case. Simultaneously we're entering the era of robotics, which will wipe out tens of millions of low quality manual labor jobs in China.
China's real estate bubble has already popped and is deflating.
Bottom line, the US is in vastly better shape than China.
Thanks for posting all of this. It's really interesting and useful.
However, I think you're overly optimistic about some elements of the US economy. Oil? Much of our oil surplus is in tar sands/shale oil, which is the most expensive oil in existence to extract, and it only became profitable to extract during a brief window when the price of oil climbed into the stratosphere. Now that the OPEC nations have flooded the market, several of those oil producers have had to shut down their fracking operations (which is a blessing for the rest of us, given the ecological disaster that fracking represents), or are facing the possibility of economic disaster...huge sums have been invested in something that can only pay off if oil prices quadruple in the near future. Energy in the US is in an extremely precarious position, and there seems to be little motivation to correct course toward renewable sources.
China, on the other hand, while still mired in a fossil-fuel based economy like most of the rest of the world, and suffering extreme pollution in many of its large cities, has invested heavily in renewable energy, and Chinese manufacturers produce 63% of the world's photovoltaic cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
I don't know enough to discuss the issue of debt (though the US is not exactly debt free, both on a national level and an individual level; our student loan problem is pretty much guaranteed to destroy an entire generation of wealth, and almost no one is talking about it). And, I agree with you that China is not a nice place to live or work for most of its people. I'm certainly not suggesting I'd rather live in China than the US.
"Bottom line, the US is in vastly better shape than China."
Today. We're certainly agreed on that. I don't know that I believe today is a strong predictor of ten, twenty, and fifty years from now. While it's true that national debt is dangerous and China is in many ways a backward nation, it's also true that China is home to many of the world's best technologists...we don't know their names, we don't know their work on an individual level. But, they're helping design the computers, phones, etc. that we're using, and they're writing much of the software for them.
The history of Silicon Valley has shown that a handful of very bright people with a lot of resources can change the world. China has a lot more than a handful of bright people and the manufacturing sector has vast resources. I believe we're only beginning to see what they can do.
"Simultaneously we're entering the era of robotics, which will wipe out tens of millions of low quality manual labor jobs in China."
This is an interesting discussion to have, particularly in the comparison of the US to China. Low cost manual labor left the United States to go to China beginning roughly around the time I was a kid. The US suffered through stagflation, and a variety of ups and downs, and some would argue the US is still recovering from loss of those jobs (real wage growth at the low end of the market has almost been flat for decades). If the US is healthy now, it is because it recovered from loss of those low-skill manufacturing jobs. It is US exceptionalism to assume that China cannot recover from the loss of those jobs. It may take decades (and that'll suck for Chinese people, because things are already pretty sucky for the poor in China), but it doesn't negate my argument that China has a hand in building nearly every element of our future.
In short, I think we're kinda coming at this from different angles. I'm not really arguing against most of what you say; and in fact, I completely agree with most of it. But, I think my point was maybe missed: I'm not saying China is a better place to live than the US. Merely that it's importance in the world economy going forward is almost impossible to overestimate.
Also, the US is failing to deliver STEM field graduates at the rate needed to grow our knowledge-based economy. This is a different discussion to have, but the anti-science, anti-reason, sentiment among our governing elite virtually guarantees long-term decline into stagnation.
The US energy position is the strongest in the world, and most diversified. The US is the world's #2 solar energy producer / market behind Germany (who cares who makes the cells? that's a low value commodity business racing to the bottom), and the US is among the top four majors when it comes to solar in most every respect (with Japan, China, Germany); the US has a vast supply of coal; the US is soon to become the world's largest oil producer; the US is the world's largest nuclear energy producer; the US is the world's #2 wind energy producer (18% of all global wind energy, with about 22% of global GDP, not bad).
The US is also a leader in solar technology, including the world's fiscally strongest stand-alone solar company, First Solar. SunPower and First Solar are also among the five largest in sales.
The US is arguably still the leader in nuclear technology, certainly among the top three. It's very likely that over the coming decades the US will deploy increasing amounts of new nuclear reactors.
Oil production is still climbing, not declining, despite the drop in oil prices. That will continue until almost all foreign oil is pushed out of the US market. Oil prices will also not stay low permanently, and meanwhile fracking / shale technology will only get cheaper and more efficient. The US is sitting on a 100 year boom in oil production, $50 oil is not going to even remotely stop that. Consider the recently boosted Spraberry/Wolfcamp oil field, now considered to be the world's second largest oil field at 75 billion barrels (behind Ghawar) - and it has hardly been touched. Not to mention the vast reserves off the coast of the US, which haven't been updated in ~40 years, and are likely many times larger than anticipated. The US position when it comes to oil, is even better than presently estimated.
Now consider how most of Europe and China are heavily dependent on outside sources of energy (oil, coal, natural gas). Europe is at Russia's mercy when it comes to energy, not a good place to be. Japan also struggles with energy independence, for now due to the plant shutdowns their nuclear energy supply is a mere 1.7% of their energy, and they don't even make the list when it comes to wind energy.
Europe (especially Poland) has lots of shale oil and gas. They just don't have the regulation to get it out. (Because of geology the technology needed is also a bit different than in the US, so needs some investment.)
Also, I need to learn start learning Mandarin, like today. The opportunities missed in the tech industry by not knowing it are going to be huge in the coming years.
I talked to some Angel investor recently and he said that the language itself doesn't really matter for doing business in China – or at least, it is somewhere at the bottom of the priority list.
If you want to do business in China, it is much more important to have the right connections. Without locals, you cannot do anything. Better yet, have locals with connections to the government. Otherwise, China is simply not a viable option.
There are some very easy introductory tutorials on YouTube to learn chinese. Nothing too amazing but enough to get you moving towards speaking the basic language.
The future of US was debated recently on Intelligence Squared [0]. Excellent podcast to subscribe to. But you can also watch or listen to debate singles on the website.
> What am I missing here? How has Amazon.cn failed in the Chinese market?
Most popular US services/companies have Chinese-based (and Chinese-targeted) equivalents[0], and in most cases, the Chinese version is more successful in China than its US-based counterpart.
So the real question is: why do Chinese companies tend to outperform foreign ones in China?
I have a number of speculations as to why, but I'm not sure if the answer is really cut-and-dry[1].
[0] Some of these even predate the US version!
[1] Though the inability to (or difficulty with?) store Chinese user data outside China is probably a big part of it
> So the real question is: why do Chinese companies tend to outperform foreign ones in China?
Isn't that obvious? Foreign companies are limited or just entirely prevented from doing business in China. China is basically a closed market: you can maybe play if you follow some strict rules your competitors can ignore, but rule #1 is that a foreign company can't in any way lead.
Look at the countries around China and things are quite different. Chinese internet companies in general do very poorly outside of China, even in adjacent countries or even open Chinese territories.
If you look at Chinese-speaking regions outside mainland China such as Hong Kong or Taiwan, foreign brands such as Yahoo!, Google or Facebook tend to dominate and are more successful.
A third possibility is that these foreign companies were not able to gain early traction in mainland China, due to government policies (the Great Firewall) and/or the company finding it hard to navigate the Chinese bureaucracy. Perhaps the companies at that earlier point in time (late '90s/early '00s) simply did not pay enough attention to the Chinese market and focused on expanding in the more developed parts of Asia with better Internet bandwidth and speeds, leaving room for native Chinese companies to grow and reap the first mover's advantage.
China is an extraordinarily difficult market to crack for outsiders. It's dominated by domestic companies across nearly every product category / industry.
For Amazon I actually think this move makes sense. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. There's no reason Amazon can't build a ~$40 billion per year type business riding on another platform in the massive China market (say over the next decade). Alibaba makes all of its money from advertising, and essentially zip from product sales. Amazon makes almost all of its money from product sales, and almost zip from advertising - Tmall is a great way for Amazon to drive sales via riding Alibaba's platform.
Does anyone knows how is the warehousing/delivery done in that case? Is Amazon using the Alibaba capacity there or it has still to do it itself in China?
Also, I need to learn start learning Mandarin, like today. The opportunities missed in the tech industry by not knowing it are going to be huge in the coming years. I set for myself a goal of learning one new language a year this year, starting with Spanish (and I'm doing pretty good on that goal). But, I'm tempted to try to learn both simultaneously. Just not sure where I'll find the time. Spanish study already gets a lot of my leisure time. Maybe I need to do less facebook, reddit, and HN.