4 ms·

Why would anyone willingly move to an authoritarian dictatorship?

koala_man 8y ago
For me it was the money and opportunities. I turned a blind eye to the power abuse, human rights violations and corruption, and moved to the US anyways.
- j_shi 8y ago
  lmao. kernel of truth to be sure but in fairness American legal system and democratic governance do strictly result in more liberty and security for individuals by and large, corner cases notwithstanding
  - koala_man 8y ago
    Definitely. The fact that I can even make such a joke strongly supports that.
- jimrhods23 8y ago
  "I turned a blind eye to the power abuse, human rights violations and corruption" I'm not sure how you can compare the US, which does have it's problems, but is one of the least racist (and offers many more opportunities to people that start with nothing) countries in the world to China, one of the most corrupt and authoritarian. In China, for example, you need to include your head shot on your resume and I've known people that were told the were too fat to work at a company. If people actually cared, they would look at the gross human rights abuses by the Chinese government. You just don't see things like this: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/china-and-tibet https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/china... In the US.
  - 49531 8y ago
    You don't see reports like that about the US because of US hegemony, and most things that do come up is usually by the UN and isn't taken seriously. I'm not saying china is perfect by any means, but things ain't great in the US either. They just seem normal to us because we're used to it.
    - wolco 8y ago
      Only someone who has never lived elsewhere would say that.
    - refurb 8y ago
      What? The media thrives off of "the US is crap", especially international media. There is no lack of negativity about the US.
    - jimrhods23 8y ago
      "You don't see reports like that about the US because of US hegemony" I've see so many negative news reports about the US, that if it were even 1% as bad as you say it is, it would be shoved down our throats. "They just seem normal to us because we're used to it." When you live outside the US, you will quickly see the amount of poverty and corruption that just doesn't exist here. It's why I moved back and have no plan leaving again. Corruption in many countries is normal and accepted. It happens in the US, but it's certainly not accepted. Have you seen what the EU is doing lately in terms of the freedom of speech on the Internet? China has already cracked down considerably and many other countries are using the same technology to suppress free speech and the EU is in the process of passing laws that do the same. "I'm not saying china is perfect by any means," 'not perfect' is an understatement. In terms of freedom, China is a horrible place to live. If you have money, it's great. You can buy yourself out of anything...including prison time.
  - MandieD 8y ago
    To be fair, employers in Germany expect headshots with your resume, as well as your date and place of birth and family status (married, kids...) Job-hunting as a married, but childless 30-year-old woman was super fun. That said, I love living and working in Germany. Somewhat higher taxes, somewhat lower salaries, far more time to enjoy life (5-6 weeks vacation! Legal limit of 48 working hours in a given week! My boss gets in trouble if I forget myself and work over 10 hours in a day more than a few times per year!)
  - ubercow13 8y ago
    What's having to include a headshot on your resume got to do with corruption and authoritarianism? China isn't the only country where that is normal.
- wolco 8y ago
  From Finland? Why bother when you have such a high quality of living.
  - refurb 8y ago
    Apparently not when it comes to money and opportunity!
    - koala_man 8y ago
      I mean, it's true. (Norway, though) The Nordic countries are probably the best places in the world to be average or below, but I'm willing to claim that the US is better for the top 10%.
      - adventured 8y ago
        You could safely draw that line at the top 25%, in terms of the US being competitive. If you look at income, wealth, employment, education, healthcare, life expectancy, infant mortality, there's a very large difference in the US between the 25% line and the median. If you don't think you can get into that top 25% bracket in the US, pick another country if you can like Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, etc. 40%-45% of the world's millionaires reside in that top 25%. Full-time employment will get you $80,000+ at the 25% bracket cut-off. Healthcare is broadly high quality and easily accessible for the top 25%. Economic opportunities are abundant and unemployment is always very low outside of deep recessions. You can also hit that $80,000 income line in dozens of cities, depending on profession (much easier in tech, energy, healthcare, banking/finance). Household net wealth skyrockets from about $100,000 at the median to $425k-$450k at the 25% line (and to $1.2 million at the 10% line). Just consider software developers in the US. 1.25 million of them with a median income of $103,000 for 2017 (per the BLS). So there's probably ~650,000 software developers in the US earning six figures for 2019. That's more than the rest of the world combined. The biggest downside to being in the US if you're in the top 25%, is that many of our largest cities aren't nearly as livable or safe as those in other developed nations. This also assumes a city to income match, where you're not making $90,000 trying to live well in San Francisco or New York (in which case you're generally going to struggle).
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  I take it that you are not a Uyghur Muslim...
- dang 8y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
netsharc 8y ago
Insert "But the USA/EU is..." comment here.
forkLding 8y ago
There is a million Taiwanese living in China, most of them go there to work or have families in China. Mainland China tends to have higher wages, lower living costs, better working conditions and a lot of young Taiwanese talent move to the Mainland which is cited as a brain drain problem in Taiwan. Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Taiwanese https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Taiwanese https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4906162/taiwan-brain-drain-youth-china-jobs-economy https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4906162/taiw...
walrus01 8y ago
An authoritarian dictatorship where the air pollution and other environmental pollution (heavy metals, PCBs, food supply chain chemical/pesticide contamination) will probably knock years off your life expectancy. From the point of view of somebody who lives in a place with clear air and a decent paying job, I would require significant extra compensation to move my residence to a place with air pollution on the level of New Delhi, Lahore, or Beijing.
- eznoonze 8y ago
  Good for you! You live in a place where you can offload your pollution to other poor countries so you can enjoy your clean air and water. Congrats!
empath75 8y ago
Money, adventure seeking, curiosity, lots of reasons. For most people, most of the time, one can have a somewhat ‘normal’ life even in the worst dictatorships, even in the middle of active war zones. Having an American passport is a tremendous asset because you can just leave for the most part, unless you get caught up in politics, for some reason (a small risk for most people if they don’t go out of their way to draw attention). I spent quite a bit of time in Nicaragua which has an authoritarian communist government and on the surface, it seems like any other Central American country. I’m sure I’d notice more problems if I got political, but just being there exploring for a month or so, it seemed okay.
dang 8y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- driverdan 8y ago
  I was interested in genuine responses, not in starting a flamewar.
  - dang 8y ago
    I believe you, but intention isn't enough. How you frame such a question has the largest impact on what responses emerge. The combo of a low-information comment, a pejorative, and a divisive topic is going to be a flamebait cocktail regardless of anything else.
    - tomcam 8y ago
      Sorry to bother you, but this is frustrating. I think I may be a little on the spectrum, so please take my statement literally. The comment by the parent was undeniably true. It really is an authoritarian dictatorship (Source: obvious common sense and also my extended family is all Chinese). Source: obvious common sense and also my beloved extended family is mostly Chinese). I feel like the question was framed properly and I can’t attribute any of those traits to it – pejorative, divisive, flame bait. Your thoughts?
      - dang 8y ago
        You're not bothering me! But I only saw this reply by accident. If you want to be sure to get an answer you should email us instead (hn@ycombinator.com). Just keep in mind that we can't always reply right away. There are two problems. First, the term "authoritarian dictatorship" is not as well-defined as you seem to suggest, and carries a pejorative meaning which is separate from any factual information it does contain. Second, the comment was too short to convey much information in its own right. When people post pejorative, low-information comments about inflammatory topics, that's flamebait, whether or not they intended it that way. I'm sure that driverdan had no malicious intent, but intent doesn't protect a dry forest from dropped matches. I can understand why you would be frustrated by this response if you look at the comment as an atomic, standalone thing. But comments on internet forums aren't standalone. They're prefixes of the subthreads that follow from them, and commenters are partly responsible for what follows from their comments. Certainly they are responsible for following the site guidelines, which distill much of what we've learned over the years about how to comment in ways that don't lead to degenerate subthreads.

For me it was the money and opportunities. I turned a blind eye to the power abuse, human rights violations and corruption, and moved to the US anyways.

j_shi 8y ago
lmao. kernel of truth to be sure but in fairness American legal system and democratic governance do strictly result in more liberty and security for individuals by and large, corner cases notwithstanding
- koala_man 8y ago
  Definitely. The fact that I can even make such a joke strongly supports that.
jimrhods23 8y ago
"I turned a blind eye to the power abuse, human rights violations and corruption" I'm not sure how you can compare the US, which does have it's problems, but is one of the least racist (and offers many more opportunities to people that start with nothing) countries in the world to China, one of the most corrupt and authoritarian. In China, for example, you need to include your head shot on your resume and I've known people that were told the were too fat to work at a company. If people actually cared, they would look at the gross human rights abuses by the Chinese government. You just don't see things like this: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/china-and-tibet https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/china... In the US.
- 49531 8y ago
  You don't see reports like that about the US because of US hegemony, and most things that do come up is usually by the UN and isn't taken seriously. I'm not saying china is perfect by any means, but things ain't great in the US either. They just seem normal to us because we're used to it.
  - wolco 8y ago
    Only someone who has never lived elsewhere would say that.
  - refurb 8y ago
    What? The media thrives off of "the US is crap", especially international media. There is no lack of negativity about the US.
  - jimrhods23 8y ago
    "You don't see reports like that about the US because of US hegemony" I've see so many negative news reports about the US, that if it were even 1% as bad as you say it is, it would be shoved down our throats. "They just seem normal to us because we're used to it." When you live outside the US, you will quickly see the amount of poverty and corruption that just doesn't exist here. It's why I moved back and have no plan leaving again. Corruption in many countries is normal and accepted. It happens in the US, but it's certainly not accepted. Have you seen what the EU is doing lately in terms of the freedom of speech on the Internet? China has already cracked down considerably and many other countries are using the same technology to suppress free speech and the EU is in the process of passing laws that do the same. "I'm not saying china is perfect by any means," 'not perfect' is an understatement. In terms of freedom, China is a horrible place to live. If you have money, it's great. You can buy yourself out of anything...including prison time.
- MandieD 8y ago
  To be fair, employers in Germany expect headshots with your resume, as well as your date and place of birth and family status (married, kids...) Job-hunting as a married, but childless 30-year-old woman was super fun. That said, I love living and working in Germany. Somewhat higher taxes, somewhat lower salaries, far more time to enjoy life (5-6 weeks vacation! Legal limit of 48 working hours in a given week! My boss gets in trouble if I forget myself and work over 10 hours in a day more than a few times per year!)
- ubercow13 8y ago
  What's having to include a headshot on your resume got to do with corruption and authoritarianism? China isn't the only country where that is normal.
wolco 8y ago
From Finland? Why bother when you have such a high quality of living.
- refurb 8y ago
  Apparently not when it comes to money and opportunity!
  - koala_man 8y ago
    I mean, it's true. (Norway, though) The Nordic countries are probably the best places in the world to be average or below, but I'm willing to claim that the US is better for the top 10%.
    - adventured 8y ago
      You could safely draw that line at the top 25%, in terms of the US being competitive. If you look at income, wealth, employment, education, healthcare, life expectancy, infant mortality, there's a very large difference in the US between the 25% line and the median. If you don't think you can get into that top 25% bracket in the US, pick another country if you can like Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, etc. 40%-45% of the world's millionaires reside in that top 25%. Full-time employment will get you $80,000+ at the 25% bracket cut-off. Healthcare is broadly high quality and easily accessible for the top 25%. Economic opportunities are abundant and unemployment is always very low outside of deep recessions. You can also hit that $80,000 income line in dozens of cities, depending on profession (much easier in tech, energy, healthcare, banking/finance). Household net wealth skyrockets from about $100,000 at the median to $425k-$450k at the 25% line (and to $1.2 million at the 10% line). Just consider software developers in the US. 1.25 million of them with a median income of $103,000 for 2017 (per the BLS). So there's probably ~650,000 software developers in the US earning six figures for 2019. That's more than the rest of the world combined. The biggest downside to being in the US if you're in the top 25%, is that many of our largest cities aren't nearly as livable or safe as those in other developed nations. This also assumes a city to income match, where you're not making $90,000 trying to live well in San Francisco or New York (in which case you're generally going to struggle).
patrickg_zill 8y ago
I take it that you are not a Uyghur Muslim...
dang 8y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

netsharc 8y ago

Insert "But the USA/EU is..." comment here.

forkLding 8y ago

There is a million Taiwanese living in China, most of them go there to work or have families in China. Mainland China tends to have higher wages, lower living costs, better working conditions and a lot of young Taiwanese talent move to the Mainland which is cited as a brain drain problem in Taiwan. Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Taiwanese https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Taiwanese https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4906162/taiwan-brain-drain-youth-china-jobs-economy https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/4906162/taiw...

walrus01 8y ago

An authoritarian dictatorship where the air pollution and other environmental pollution (heavy metals, PCBs, food supply chain chemical/pesticide contamination) will probably knock years off your life expectancy. From the point of view of somebody who lives in a place with clear air and a decent paying job, I would require significant extra compensation to move my residence to a place with air pollution on the level of New Delhi, Lahore, or Beijing.

eznoonze 8y ago
Good for you! You live in a place where you can offload your pollution to other poor countries so you can enjoy your clean air and water. Congrats!

empath75 8y ago

Money, adventure seeking, curiosity, lots of reasons. For most people, most of the time, one can have a somewhat ‘normal’ life even in the worst dictatorships, even in the middle of active war zones. Having an American passport is a tremendous asset because you can just leave for the most part, unless you get caught up in politics, for some reason (a small risk for most people if they don’t go out of their way to draw attention). I spent quite a bit of time in Nicaragua which has an authoritarian communist government and on the surface, it seems like any other Central American country. I’m sure I’d notice more problems if I got political, but just being there exploring for a month or so, it seemed okay.

dang 8y ago

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

driverdan 8y ago
I was interested in genuine responses, not in starting a flamewar.
- dang 8y ago
  I believe you, but intention isn't enough. How you frame such a question has the largest impact on what responses emerge. The combo of a low-information comment, a pejorative, and a divisive topic is going to be a flamebait cocktail regardless of anything else.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    Sorry to bother you, but this is frustrating. I think I may be a little on the spectrum, so please take my statement literally. The comment by the parent was undeniably true. It really is an authoritarian dictatorship (Source: obvious common sense and also my extended family is all Chinese). Source: obvious common sense and also my beloved extended family is mostly Chinese). I feel like the question was framed properly and I can’t attribute any of those traits to it – pejorative, divisive, flame bait. Your thoughts?
    - dang 8y ago
      You're not bothering me! But I only saw this reply by accident. If you want to be sure to get an answer you should email us instead (hn@ycombinator.com). Just keep in mind that we can't always reply right away. There are two problems. First, the term "authoritarian dictatorship" is not as well-defined as you seem to suggest, and carries a pejorative meaning which is separate from any factual information it does contain. Second, the comment was too short to convey much information in its own right. When people post pejorative, low-information comments about inflammatory topics, that's flamebait, whether or not they intended it that way. I'm sure that driverdan had no malicious intent, but intent doesn't protect a dry forest from dropped matches. I can understand why you would be frustrated by this response if you look at the comment as an atomic, standalone thing. But comments on internet forums aren't standalone. They're prefixes of the subthreads that follow from them, and commenters are partly responsible for what follows from their comments. Certainly they are responsible for following the site guidelines, which distill much of what we've learned over the years about how to comment in ways that don't lead to degenerate subthreads.