20 ms·

2021 Letter

388 points by jger15 5y ago

pkdpic 5y ago
As somebody who got tricked into drinking way too much baijiu last night by a Beijinger I'm really enjoying this read so far. She had a lot of the same thoughts and observations. I find it all super fascinating.
- azangru 5y ago
  Who is she?
  - pkdpic 5y ago
    An artist that grew up there and goes back to visit family regularly.
    - xwdv 5y ago
      Does she have a dual citizenship?
      - rahimnathwani 5y ago
        Chinese citizens are not permitted to hold a second citizenship.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      This isn't true, see the 'about' page. https://danwang.co/about/ https://danwang.co/about/
      - istorical 5y ago
        I believe the commenter is referring to the individual they shared drinks with, not the author of the piece.
        jacquesm 5y ago
        Ah yes, I see now how that sentence works. Thank you for pointing that out.
        pkdpic 5y ago
        Sorry for the confusion there!
        jacquesm 5y ago
        No problem, my bad, I should have read it slower before commenting. I think the Beijinger is what threw me off, I thought that was the complete reference and then the 'she' referring to the article writer, not cluing in that the Beijinger was the reference of the 'she'.
        DoreenMichele 5y ago
        There's a fair number of international members who speak English as a second (third, fourth) language. I try hard to be as unambiguous as possible to account for that. Though I certainly don't always get it right.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Not quite: https://twitter.com/danwwang https://twitter.com/danwwang
- chunghuaming 5y ago
cheschire 5y ago
> The central government has delineated around a hundred million people to each of these megaregions and charged them to drive future growth. Can someone explain what this means? What does this governmental "charge" look like? Is it just a zoning thing, or is it more personal?
- Stevvo 5y ago
  It's partially a propaganda thing with slogans printed on buildings everywhere saying things like "Charge towards the Chinese dream with vigor, for the betterment of the region and the party!"
- baybal2 5y ago
  Nobody really did. China does not have any kind of coherent regional policy, or, well, any kind of real economic policy. The infamed communist 5 years plans barely mean anything for the real economy. South China got ahead in manufacturing due to market economy reaching it first. Shanghai got banks because Jiang Zemin lived there, and he wanted money like every proper communist. Chongqing seen its development as the only inland China big city, and lack of any other alternative. Beijing is now late to the party, and bureaucrats there basically ordered it to become another "center" through administrative fiat.
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    > China does not have any kind of coherent regional policy I am not sure your basis for this. The presence of the policy itself is effective in guiding the human mind and interests, also broadcast certain information national wide. The policy is comboed with fiscal policy, i.e., easier loan for the designated sectors. And more effective use of nationally-owned enterprises, research facilities, etc. Of course, policy needs to be realistic by matching the regional characteristics. As you said, one cannot industrilize the inner cities first, because the global economy is centered on marine transportation, so naturally it starts from Shanghai and guangdong, which are close to sea ports. But that does not make the policy less coherent. It just means that the policy is sensible and meaningful.
- 5y ago
dannyw 5y ago
I grew up in Beijing (around the 3rd ring). You'd walk past elders playing Xiangqi on the back alleys, while street vendors sold Tanghulu for a few coins. I wonder if the city is anywhere like my childhood two decades ago.
- nus07 5y ago
  You might enjoy reading this - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/chinas-reform-generation-adapts-to-life-in-the-middle-class/amp https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/chinas-reform-...
- jacquesm 5y ago
  paying -> playing
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Not really. My first visit to Beijing was more than two decades ago (winter 1999), when you could get a roasted yam on the street for a few mao. The sea of bicycles was still a thing, old military guys with tuktuks would wait outside of the subway stations to take you to your final destination for a negotiated 5 mao or so, you could choose between a cheap 8 kuai drop taxi or a fancier 10-12 kuai one. Starbucks just opened one store in Xidan, and the department stores were still mainly based on the Soviet model. Things changed quickly when it returned in 2002, and then when I moved there to stay for almost a decade in 2007. It is a completely different place from my memories. The feelings, the momentum of society, the industries.
manor 5y ago
andromaton 5y ago
> Where does Beijing prefer dynamism instead? Science-based industries that serve strategic needs. Beijing, in other words, is trying to make semiconductors sexy again. One might reasonably question how dealing pain to users of chips (like consumer internet firms) might help the industry. I think that the focus should instead be on talent and capital allocation. If venture capitalists are mostly funding social networking companies, then they would be able to hire the best talent while denying them to chipmakers. That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google. They were not willing to compete. Intel and Cisco’s directors had plenty of net income they could have used to compete, but decided to reward shareholders in the present instead, rather than invest in the future.
  - dlcmh 5y ago
    Because “Shareholder Value” is maximised in the US. Therein lies the loophole.
whoevercares 5y ago
While this is an excellent article (admittedly I stopped around half its too long) that refreshes most of my obsolete memory of China, I do think the author is a bit too optimistic. From what I heard from my startup founder friends, it’s becoming increasingly hard to innovate without government relationships (many founders do though, some from family some from bribery). The “national team” is coming to many consumer segment as well so the space is squeezing. Let’s see where this trend goes, I think the golden age of entrepreneurs are ticking
- gruez 5y ago
  >The “national team” is coming to many consumer segment as well so the space is squeezing. Can you expand on this? Are you talking about consumers wanting to buy chinese brands (eg. huawei instead of apple), or some sort of officially state sanctioned brand?
  - whoevercares 5y ago
    More on the to-C technical startup founded by overseas Chinese who returns to the country. The national team now is disguised as private owned companies and have unfair advantage to supply chains, even better pricing with cloud providers
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    No, he wont provide much concrete evidences. This so called national team, is a myth. It never manifests itself. Apparently, national team backed national captical, executed by nationally-owned enterprises, are not agile and innovative enough when competing with private businesses. That's simply a human nature-driven market econmomy law. Chinese people are not living in an alternative universe where economy laws do not apply.
    - whoevercares 5y ago
      Meh not so fast.. it’s China, it has plenty of talents and execution is not a concern. Take ride sharing as an example, those stated owned enterprises CAN do tech! > Other major state-owned automakers have rolled out their own ride-hailing brands: FAW Group established Yiqi Chuxing in 2019; Hong Kong-listed Dongfeng Motor launched Dongfeng Chuxing in 2018; https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kr-asia.com/chinese-automakers-bet-on-ride-hailing-future-amid-slowdown-in-car-sales https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kr-asia.com/chinese-automak... I don’t have data to prove they competed unfairly to DiDi though but we know didi has been punished to death now
baybal2 5y ago
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Thank you for all of your insights into China over the last couple of years. They tend to be blunt and unvarnished but verify as accurate relative to what I know about the country (which, arguably isn't much, I've never visited but am in fairly close contact with some people living there).
- dannyw 5y ago
  I enjoyed the read but I'd like more perspectives that go deeper. Can you share some recommendations?
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Unfortunately, pretty much all even moderately accurate coverage of China is completely evading the Anglophone media. Matters.news is blogging community of few authors not afraid speaking their mind. It's still just a drop in the ocean, and any kind of good reporting on current affairs in China has been extinguished for good. The few people remaining brave enough to open their mouth are either from religious cults on one side, or former regime insiders themselves on another.
- logshipper 5y ago
  I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China. On the contrary, it is their very experience as a Chinese American that helps me (an outsider) see things from a new and interesting perspective. > some seriously confused Chinese American I don't recall where I read this (I think it may have been Rachel Cusk), but it is a writer's job to ask questions. And what better source of questions than confusion? That said, I'd genuinely be interested to seek your recommendations on China from Chinese sources.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China. It does. Americans, and Chinese Americans themselves sometimes don't realise that Chinatown America is absolutely not characteristic of China, nor modern, nor at any point in history. Instead, it's a strange universe on its own, with its own history, and customs. To me, when I talk to Chinese Americans, Chinese Americans feel as Chinese, as American football is football.
whoevercares 5y ago
Funny anecdotes: it’s relatively rare to see company led by “old fart Beijingers” who have been native to the city for 2-3 generations. Immigrants have been driving the leadership there. Native Beijingers tends to be more layback and they thrive in cultural related stuff like xiangsheng, comedy and movies.
- baybal2 5y ago
  There are very few "native Beijingers." Most were sent to the countryside during the cultural revolution, and still live there. Mostly, only very the well connected, or elite members themselves from original population managed to stay in the city through late seventies, early nineties. The current "natives" are mostly people who descended from the new population who came into the city in seventies, and later.
  - whoevercares 5y ago
    That’s not remotely true. Where did you get this story from? I grew up in Beijing and my parents were sent to the countryside near the end of cultural revolution. They and most of their classmates from our neighborhood came back. My parents are not well connected or elite at all - lowest possible workers in a food factory
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      A lot of the educated beijingers of that generation were assigned to factories in the hinterland (my friend’s family, for example, was assigned to a smaller city in shaanxi even though they were in Beijing before the CR). It gets weird, however, when we mix authoritarian factory assignments and youth being sent down during the cultural revolution (those are very different things), given that the former could have happened anytime from 1950 to the early 90s. The real reason native beijingers are hard to find these days in Beijing is because Beijing has grown rapidly in the last 20 years. They are “less” only because 外地人 are more. During my first trip to Beijing in 1999, the taxi driver would always be a native city Beijinger who couldn’t understand your Chinese unless you used lots of 儿话. That is no longer the case (the taxi drivers are still from Beijing, but from the outer counties rather than the central city).
epberry 5y ago
> The state has subjected scientists to the tender mercies of the US criminal justice system, usually for charges related to relatively unimportant issues implicating research integrity. Does anyone know what this refers to? Is it prosecutions of Chinese researchers in the US?
- everforward 5y ago
  I believe it's this: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/politics/charles-lieber-harvard-china-ties-guilty/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/politics/charles-lieber-harva... And there may have been another similar case, I can't recall. I believe the US line is that China was trying to steal research or something. I don't believe any of the people implicated were charged with treason or spying or anything like that. It's been more mundane "failing to disclose bank accounts" kind of stuff. Whether that's indicative of anything is up in the air.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  The China Initiative. During the Trump administration, the US government began investigating a large number of ethnically Chinese scientists in the US. The initiative was supposedly about rooting out espionage, but it has ended up being more of a witch hunt. The two worst cases so far are Prof. Anming Hu of the University of Tennessee (thankfully acquitted, after getting fired) and Prof. Gang Chen of MIT (this hasn't yet gone to trial, but it looks like the government is essentially going after him for doing his job).
- robocat 5y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/china-initiative-intellectual-property-theft/621058/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/china-init... The US targeted mostly Chinese Scientists working in the US. His thesis is that caused excess harm to scientific productivity.
Gravityloss 5y ago
It's a book! Fascinating insights.
uyt 5y ago
As a tech worker with little knowledge about china, the most interesting section for me starts at "A summer storm" where he talks about why/how the government is cracking down on big consumer tech.
paganel 5y ago
> They care instead more about cultural issues, which is why people have fond views of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan Apart from anime Japan is pretty much a cultural desert for us, Westerners, right now. Compare that to the excellent movies they made back in the '50 to the '70s, back then they were on the vanguard of world cinema together with the French (la Nouvelle Vague) and the Italians (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini), as Hollywood was on its dying bed. Taiwan is even more a cultural wasteland, I can only name you Tsai Ming-liang (who apparently has just filmed his last ever feature film) and Hou Hsiao-hsien, other than that it's only the idea of money and of making money that comes out of Taiwan. South Korea is a little bit more complicated. There's K-Pop that's definitely a thing among younger people (I'm personally 40+ so I'm not in their target demographic) and there's Korean TV dramas, which rival Turkish TV dramas in many parts of the world, but I would say that's not probably what the author had in mind. SK used to have a very, very vibrant movie scene in the 2000s and a little in the early 2010s, its Busan film festival was one of the most interesting movie festivals in the world at some point, but for some reason or another all that is a thing of the past now.
- eatonphil 5y ago
  I think South Korean film industry and quality has only grown massively since the 2000s. All Bong Joonho's work for example.
  - paganel 5y ago
    I'd say he is a product of the 2000s, his "Memories of Murder" (imo his best movie) dates from 2003 and "The Host" from 2006, it's only now that mainstream Western audiences have gotten a chance to see his work.
- vehemenz 5y ago
  You're forgetting about video games. Japan has Nintendo, Sony, and many of the biggest IPs. South Korea has PUBG and is a huge player in eSports.
  - paganel 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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bsenftner 5y ago
Great article. Requires more than one setting to really absorb. Almost 20 years ago I did an extended study in China for my MBA. IBM had billion dollar annual contracts managing the construction of hospitals and medical universities. My MBA class traveled throughout China participating in project reviews. More and more it is impressed upon me how that China of 2004 was a photo-moment in time. With the speed of development, that China I met was lifetimes ago.
danschuller 5y ago
> Manhattan meets Maui I think that is a stretch beyond snapping point for Hong Kong. Most days in Hong Kong I could see the air pollution obscuring buildings in the distance. It's AQI is terrible https://aqicn.org/city/hongkong/ https://aqicn.org/city/hongkong/ . There are nice mountain walks and nearby islands but it is extremely dense and urban. It's one of the places Ghost in the Shell used for reference! Also the narrative here feels mostly from the mainland China point of view; having to go and deal with "problematic" Hong Kong. But problems between Hong Kong and the mainland began when Beijing used its influence to restrict Hong Kong's traditional democracy, so only "approved" candidates could be voted into office. And since then it's increasingly clamped down on the freedoms Hong Kong previously enjoyed, most recently doing things such as removing the Tiananmen Square memorials (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-59764029 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-59764029). At this point the writing is on the wall and bit by bit Hong Kong will brought in step with the rest of mainland China. Unlike the author I found the Hong Kong bureaucracy fast and effective. Enforcers "sometimes able to look the other way" sounds like corruption to me and people with better guanxi being able to bend the rules. I'd rather have the laws fair, clear and applied to all equally (though that's always going to be a gradient). Despite all that, it's undeniable China is on the rise and that's going to be the dominant story of this century. There's potential for that to be a great boon to the world and I hope that's the reality that comes to be.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  I disagree with you on Hong Kong (I m now a voting citizen, for what it's worth - not much). The problems in Hong Kong didnt start 2 years ago, they started when the UK came in, and we inherit a difficulty I know well where I come from (Europe, full of Corsica, Basque Country, Northern Ireland, Brittany, Catalonia and so on). Beijing reacts like we all reacted 2 centuries ago, and will slowly learn to deal with it, especially if they invade Taiwan and have to stop killing because unlike Xinjiang there's nothing to mine there and only cost cost cost to maintain an aggressive colony that builds processors as only output of value. I think the CCP is no more evil than Napoleon, and ask a Frenchman today and he'll rave about what he did that transformed eventually the country, at the cost of 200k+ young people's lives to invade Russia, if you can believe it. Things progress and China has to experience it for themselves, sadly. There's no shortcuts that I know of for such a big place.
ouid 5y ago
the writer speaks too negatively about the government of Hong Kong for me to be entirely trusting of the content. Maybe Hong Kong is desperately in need of new direction, but we'll never know for sure.
- pell 5y ago
  They wrote thousands of words but did not even mention China’s genocide against the Uighur people. How neutral can they really be? Edit: A nice little tidbit also is that I’ve written comments on all sorts of contentious topics. But only when bringing up this specific factually based truth my comments tend to be downvoted within minutes. I wonder why.
  - layer8 5y ago
    The article mentions the internment camps. (I didn’t downvote your comment.)
    - pell 5y ago
      Unless I missed some part here, you’re probably referring to this part of one sentence as the only mention, correct? If so, I find this not very credible when we look at the length of the post alone. But yes, technically you’d be right and I should have phrased my comment better. > That’s due to the operation of detention camps for ethno-religious minorities
      - twolf910616 5y ago
        Calling it a genocide reminds me when some people compare the modern day American football to slavery: such inaccurate and click-baity name calling makes anyone who is sympathetic towards China an accomplice on the order of Nazis, and gives the Chinese government an easy target to refuse. I get that it raises eye-brows and generates attention, but ultimately it detracts from any effort to stop such brutality. It seems lazy.
  - not2b 5y ago
deltaonefour 5y ago
I'd totally live in Shanghai if not for the rampant pollution. I run 5 miles a couple times a week through the city and if the city was shanghai I'd have the lungs of a smoker.
Supermancho 5y ago
> A distinctive feature of Chinese governance is to continuously fix slogans, like “reform and opening” to move the country away from socialism, and the more recent “common prosperity” to move it back. Beijing isn’t satisfied with greater national wealth. > A lot of macro indicators on China are disappointing, like a rise in the amount of credit needed to create growth and a fall in total-factor productivity growth. But we can’t let these poorly-measured data points govern as the gospel truth to understand this economy. The reader is left to interpret the overly broad hand-wavy navel-gazing adjectives and adverbs. I'm not sure what this very long "letter" is supposed to inform a reader about. There's no substance. I'm not sure it's intentional, but it's obvious.
- draw_down 5y ago
- dlcmh 5y ago
  The useful parts to me were the assertions the author made about Beijing attempting to guide future talent into hard science areas.
manor 5y ago
Where there is no democracy can we truly speak of culture? In 2021?
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
Key points: "Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance. Personally, I think it has been a tragedy for the US that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley." "The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports. Decades of American deindustrialization as well as an aversion against idle capacity has eroded domestic manufacturing." "In the face of this challenge against a new peer competitor, the US has demonstrated a superb capacity for self-harm." "For someone in the middle class, there has never been a better year to live in China. That comes down to the entrepreneurs, who are creating businesses to please people." All, absolutely true as I've commented previously in other posts. The decline of America is primarily a story about misallocation of talent and the demise of the American middle class as a result.
- paganel 5y ago
  > a story about misallocation of talent I wish modern-day economists would be more aware of local maximums, which is the economic strategy the US seems to have adopted in the last 2-3 decades. Looks like China is targeting things beyond the local maximums, much like the US used to do back in the '50s and '60s, maybe also in the '70s. Not sure things like the ARPANET would have been possible in today's world when the strategy of "looking for the local maximum" is the only one made use of.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    We need an enemy. The Soviets made the US better. We have identified both Global Warming and China as our current external enemies(terrorism seems to have fallen off the radar for now), but we're not fighting them like we did the Soviets. There is a lack of national purpose and a seriousness which is needed to focus our efforts on survival. Right now we're more focused on fighting each other and while some of our efforts to clean up our political and justice systems may bear fruit they may be irrelevant if we don't survive as a nation.
rsync 5y ago
"And there’s no obvious leader in the southeast, but it is between Shenzhen, the richest city in the region, and Guangzhou, the political capital ..." An incredible statement - made even more so by possibly being true. It was less than ten years ago that Hong Kong might have been considered the leading city in all of China and certainly the most dynamic on the axes that he is considering. FWIW, I think the CCP has made a tactical error in their handling of Hong Kong: As a business owner in Hong Kong I was, previously, only peripherally and philosophically concerned with the behavior of the party throughout the rest of the country - it was possible to compartmentalize the "two systems". But if Hong Kong is just another Chinese city and if there is only one "system" then I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are. This makes me very sad - Hong Kong has for my entire adult life been my favorite city and the city I thought was the most interesting and exciting.
- draw_down 5y ago
  > I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are. You can take as hard a negotiating stance as you like, in most/all situations the leverage resides with them. Even being Apple won't get them to leave you alone, that should tell you something.
  - meribold 5y ago
    In general you make a fair point but GPs business is cloud storage [1] and, as far as I know, they have one datacenter in SEA and it's in Hong Kong [2]. Presumably GP could open a datacenter in e.g. Singapore/Taipei/Tokyo instead and close the HK one—no negotiation with CCP authorities required. [1]: https://rsync.net https://rsync.net [2]: I'm a customer based in SEA that previously used rsync.net's Hong Kong site but moved to one of the US sites following the events in 2019.
- infinity0 5y ago
  If you a "business owner in Hong Kong" then you should be able to see with your own eyes whether Hong Kong is "just another Chinese city" or not, rather than believing the anti-China propaganda that western media regurgitates repetitively and predictably, paying only the most basic level of lip-service to actual events. You will know then that Apple Daily and Stand News were pushing "freedom of the press" into territory that no western media dares to push in their own countries, including actively calling for foreign military intervention in Hong Kong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfVGludKPWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfVGludKPWM SCMP - The insufferable hypocrisy of Western governments hell-bent on destroying Julian Assange "the only solution to bad speech is more free speech" "the only solution to a bad market is more free market" "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" edit: Hacker News that bastion of "free speech" where all opinions not conforming to the "western liberal" doctrine gets downvote-censored because the readers are too fragile to read different opinions > US media personalities calling for military invasion of Australia (1) That's not the same thing as calling for military invasion of the US. (2) No government cares about random small articles that only random internet commentators know about to make a "irrelevant counterexample fallacy"; what matters is large-scale media exhibiting a long-term pattern of behaviour and trying to organise large numbers of people (which they failed at in HK; most people stopped going to the protests after a small group started extreme violence).
beckman466 5y ago
i appreciated this comment at the bottom of the essay. Reader Dude - January 1, 2022 at 5:59 pm: > Dan – I love your letters as always. In terms of China commentary it’s about as good as there is in the English speaking world, but unfortunately that bar is pretty low these days. > I have to say – I’m a little disappointed re: your indictment of Chinese production of culture and some of the platitudes re: repression. The government can be heavy handed and has shown zero agility to respond when it comes to the propagandizing from the west, but you yourself are taking a western lens to what culture means and it’s embedded in your whole spiel (your references, your bit on classical music, etc.). In fact, writing from the states, one might even uncharitably call it the soft internalized racism (unavoidable) of ingesting a western standard of values. > Why must the arbiter of cultural quality be what appeals to a commercialized western marketplace? Is it somehow a bad thing if China doesn’t produce manga or Kpop? Frankly it’s a failure of the state in some ways given that those cultural products help soften image on the world stage, but in short – Who is to say? > Is not the rejuvenation of the Chinese people (something many subscribe to) a culture? Is not the rising patriotism and pride in China’s accomplishments by the vast majority of actual Chinese a culture? The rising “cultural level” (volunteers in Xi An delivering food as the area is in lockdown, the galvanizing of philanthropic attitudes after the Sichuan earthquakes) – Are those not cultures? > Are we mistaking culture for entertainment? In 30 years are the artifacts you mention “culture”? Or some footnote in the history books, much as Madonna might be here stateside?
- justicezyx 5y ago
  These are good point, but not very well received in the west. These comments are obviously from a CHinese national.
- dlcmh 5y ago
  The author speaks very much from his liberal/capitalist outlook on life - the comment is pretty spot-on.
justicezyx 5y ago
> By my count, the country has produced two cultural works over the last four decades since reform and opening that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok. I think a lot of people simply cannot wrap their head when they view from the Western angle. As a result, they sometime just fixate on some main-stream idea without realizing that those views are from limited exposure to the ground. It's true that China has not produced much other attractions than 3body and tiktok, even 3body is heavily influened by US SF writing, and tiktok is originally produced in US by musically. The point is that these productions are easier to be accepted by the Western socieity, because they themselves are linagage from the western tradition, with a more tainted cultural identity than the indigenous stuff. In reality, China have produced enourmouse amount of culturally diverse and innovative work for the domestic audiance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdkAyt9Q2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdkAyt9Q2A I'll give you one example of a recent production of a Cantonese opera mixed with modern filming tech of the classic Bai She Zhuan. And Pop star signing Song Dynasty Chi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t9VT9Dwiqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t9VT9Dwiqg. Of course, these color productions are very distant from the Western cultural heritage, and people from the West simply cannot appreciate their wonderfullness and depth.
- jai_ 5y ago
  The author's overall point is that China does not seen to export many cultural works with global appeal (and not just restricted to western tastes). In comparison you could look to Japan with it's global cultural export of manga, anime, and video games and also South Korea with it's global cultural exports of movies and drama. These exports aren't strictly limited in taste to western audiences but have a global appeal while still retaining elements of it's place of origin. It's unclear to me though if it is deliberate in this way for there not to be many cultural exports like this and if having a strong domestic scene is enough, however purely from a number game I would have expected more (which the author goes onto address later in the essay in the section "Strangling the cultural sector")
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cromwellian 5y ago
jollybean 5y ago
Great work. The lack of 'stupid culture wars' within the treatise is refreshing. How many popular American outlets are addressing these kinds of issues? The media in the US are rabidly obsessed with either demonizing or 'heroizing' a kid in Wisconsin's questionable and difficult-to-place-actions, whereupon in a spectacular bit of irony there was actually a lot of nuanced and thoughtful insight about the subject on TikTok of all places. Pew's political topology is out [1] it's really good, but it doesn't bode well for the US as it identifies hardening, outrageous voices on the far end of 'both sides' that I suggest amounts to a serious cancer on the nation as those voices seem to consume everyone's energy on civic issues. We're not even talking about the right things and when we start to get onto the right subject, it seems as though it's radicalized for clicks & views, or trivialized so the writer/commentator can 'seem smart'. For example, for as much as I very much respect and support Elon Musk's work and achievements, most of his public commentary is glib and uninformed and he's not remotely prepared to start answering questions on these kinds of subjects (unless they are very specifically within his domain). We spend way too much time gawking over his Tweets instead of materially addressing 'manufacturing v. financialization'. And we need to consume much, much more quality news coming out of China and the rest of the world. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v...
rsync 5y ago
"Shenzhen and Guangzhou are still attracting entrepreneurial types, producing an even more commercially-oriented culture than Shanghai. But while Shenzhen is pleasant, it is also a boring city with minimal culture. A friend relates an anecdote from a gallery artist, who said that clients in Shenzhen rarely comment on the art that they plan to buy. Instead they ask only its expected price in five years." This is a bit dated (2015 ?) but I was wandering around Shenzhen very late at night. After midnight. I came across a Lamborghini dealership and I thought it was noteworthy. Then I noticed that it was open.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Lamad123 5y ago
How about Uyghuristan?
Xcelerate 5y ago
Fascinating letter. It's a bit of a tangent, but I would be interested in similar perspectives on the development (or stagnation) of cities in the U.S., and how they compare to China.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Cities in the USA are already mostly developed, the USA is not a developing country, it’s not like there is much movement in our industries or skylines. After China reaches developed status, it will similarly become boring and stagnate (since you can’t grow forever).
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. A little over a hundred years ago we hadn't invented flight. We probably have many thousands of years left. Who says there's no way to build a city that makes our cities look the same way we look at a medieval town? Our 'developed' world is boring and stagnant because we've made a choice to not push towards the future, and instead relive the 80s pop culture in VR.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      > I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. The fallacy of “rapid growth forever” has been repeatedly asserted multiple times in history, to be knocked down each time. The last time we went through this was with Japan, where, in the early 80s, the prediction was made that Japanese would be twice as rich as Americans by the year 2010. And then their real estate bubble crashed and they lost a couple of decades. China today is like Japan in the early 80s with an even more insane property bubble. The developed world keeps developing, just at a far slower pace than the developing world. If China avoids the middle income trap and reaches developed status, then they will experience slow growth just like other developed countries do. But rapidly aging demographics is a huge challenge for China to overcome in sustaining its current rate of growth before reaching developed status.
andromaton 5y ago
> Somehow the US has evolved to become a political system in which people can dream up a hundred reasons not to do things like “build housing in growing areas” or “admit people with skills into the country.” If the US wants to win a decades-long challenge against a peer competitor, it needs to be able to improve state capacity.
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
"China can simply follow the roadmap set by the US, while enjoying the easier task of reinventing existing technologies rather than dreaming up new ideas. It can worry about new invention after it has caught up." This was said about Japan 40 years ago. How would you compare/contrast the outcome for Japan versus the prospects for China?
rastapasta42 5y ago
>In nearly all of my letters over the years, I’ve lamented the idea that consumer internet companies have taken over the idea of technological progress: “It’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.” I don’t think that Beijing’s primary goal is to reshuffle technological priorities. Instead, it is mostly a mix of a technocratic belief that reducing the power of platforms would help smaller companies as well as a desire to impose political control on big firms. I have to agree with this mindset. Technology is neither good nor bad, but it could be used for bad/good things. We should strive to progress society forward and we need to be careful with profitable distractions.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  Many of the technologies we now take for granted (books, newspapers, film) were once considered “profitable distractions” by somebody. But each one drove the development of some essential aspects of our modern world, without which we’d be much poorer.
rastapasta42 5y ago
>Over the last two decades, the major American growth stories have been Silicon Valley (consumer internet and software) on one coast and Wall Street (financialization) on the other. I don't think California deserves this label anymore. I propose we rename Silicon Valley to "MetaSoft" valley.
- yosito 5y ago
  Why not just Silicon Wasteland? Is that not "meta" enough?
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    I've always been a fan of Silly Valley
infinity0 5y ago
The author makes an incorrect assessment without considering the appropriate context for China. The gaping hole in his assessment of "Chinese cultural exports" is the failure to account for China's population and GDP per capita, which currently is only about $17k PPP. This is no position to be exporting culture to the globe from; that would just be a waste of resources. Culture is a result of being rich, not a cause of being rich. In other words, China is not "culturally-stunted" than any other country with a similar GDP per capita PPP. Chinese culture is also all in the Chinese language, and China has no strategic reason to make any effort to export it globally into English, a foreign language, where fitting translations would cost even more resources.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  Culture doesn't need any kind of "official" export. If it is good, it gets discovered, now more than ever in social media. I didn't grow up watching Atom Boy, Voltron, and Robotech because the Japanese government invested in exporting it. Those were pulled into the US by some distributor in the Midwest who discovered them by accident, and decided to have them translated and show on US television. A lot of KPop and Anime was exported to the US by fans, who free of charge as a labor of love, did translation and distribution. In the 70s, 80s, even 90s, a lot of this happened by an underground distribution network, people would make copies and trade. Indeed, I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching lots of Hong Kong Kung-fu films, eg Shaw Bros, Golden Harvest, etc. There didn't need to be a "strategic reason" for HK canto films to have atrociously bad translation and dubbing slapped on them and marked to Americans. It was done because someone noticed that Americans loved watching these things. You're making excuses for the fact that domestic mainland Chinese art is suffering a crisis of creativity caused by the crushing censorship of the state. People only make "safe" art in China. If you make any art that criticizes the establishment, or tells history in a way other than they want it to be seen, you may find yourself punished. Ask Ai Weiwei. This is not a conducive environment for artistic expression.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  India seems to manage it.
beckman466 5y ago
what strategies are people here using to disarm Sinophobia, and the unwarranted cold war -like escalations the US elite is pushing in the media, in your communities?
rcpt 5y ago
ctrl-f "gentrification", no hits. Ugh. California urban discourse is insufferable. Crazy to see a write up like that about booming livable cities without getting dragged into a quagmire about who's rightly deserving of a place to live.
manor 5y ago
Writing something like: “Shanghai is highly livable.” means one considers adult citizenship without proper voting rights to be acceptable. This is an endorsement of tyranny. How “livable” is Shanghai to its residents when they ask for an end to one-party rule?
- dreinhardt 5y ago
  Democracy - not really needed for a liveable life /s
namelosw 5y ago
The North vs South disparity always fascinates me. In many ways, they're the opposite of each other. The North: - Beijing sucks up all the resources, just like Moscow. People in the surrounding regions hate it, but it's also their best bet to make a fortune. - Many regions feel post-Soviet. Industries are falling apart, the neighborhoods feel depressing. Young people leave and go to Beijing, Southern China, or abroad. It feels like how Eastern Europeans are making livings in Western Europe. - People who stay in their hometowns are desperate to get jobs in the public sector. - There are substantially more propaganda banners on the street. The South: - Just like op said, there are no obvious leaders. The cities in the two delta region create more network effects rather than suck up resources. - The south is much more vibrant. People are more adventurous to make fortune in the private sector or start their own businesses. - The vibes are less political, more economical.
Aidevah 5y ago
Pleasantly surprised to find an intelligent and thoughtful description of Italian comic opera on the front page. I find much to agree with much of the author's thoughts, possibly because of our shared reading of critics like Tovey and Rosen. Opera has always been the most (and at times, the only) popular genre of Western literate music, and its absurdities are also legendary. Charles Rosen gave a very good summary of the spectacle of opera in the nyrb titled "The ridiculous & sublime"[1], and I recommend it for those who cannot understand how people can become obsessed by something so patently silly. The reputation of Mozart's three Da Ponte operas, along with The Magic Flute, are uniformly high and any ranking would come down to personal preference. Speaking as someone who is decidedly not an opera buff, it's the ostentatiously showy parts (the fugal exposition and chorale prelude pastiche in the magic flute; the three orchestras playing dances in different meters simultaneously in Don Giovanni; and of course the marvelous ensemble numbers which make up the act finales) which attracts me to Mozart operas. These displays of compositional virtuosity are sadly lacking in his Italian successors. Some devotees of pure instrumental music may occasionally sneer at comic opera and consider it frivolous. This is undeserved since the rhythms of comic opera underly the classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The remarkable thing isn't that Mozart wrote great Italian comic operas as a German, but that he wrote much of his pure instrumental music as if they were comic opera. [1]https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/04/22/the-ridiculous-sublime/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/04/22/the-ridiculous-s...

2021 Letter

388 points by jger15 5y ago

As somebody who got tricked into drinking way too much baijiu last night by a Beijinger I'm really enjoying this read so far. She had a lot of the same thoughts and observations. I find it all super fascinating.

azangru 5y ago
Who is she?
- pkdpic 5y ago
  An artist that grew up there and goes back to visit family regularly.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    Does she have a dual citizenship?
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      Chinese citizens are not permitted to hold a second citizenship.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    This isn't true, see the 'about' page. https://danwang.co/about/ https://danwang.co/about/
    - istorical 5y ago
      I believe the commenter is referring to the individual they shared drinks with, not the author of the piece.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Ah yes, I see now how that sentence works. Thank you for pointing that out.
        pkdpic 5y ago
        Sorry for the confusion there!
        jacquesm 5y ago
        No problem, my bad, I should have read it slower before commenting. I think the Beijinger is what threw me off, I thought that was the complete reference and then the 'she' referring to the article writer, not cluing in that the Beijinger was the reference of the 'she'.
        DoreenMichele 5y ago
        There's a fair number of international members who speak English as a second (third, fourth) language. I try hard to be as unambiguous as possible to account for that. Though I certainly don't always get it right.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Not quite: https://twitter.com/danwwang https://twitter.com/danwwang
chunghuaming 5y ago

cheschire 5y ago

> The central government has delineated around a hundred million people to each of these megaregions and charged them to drive future growth. Can someone explain what this means? What does this governmental "charge" look like? Is it just a zoning thing, or is it more personal?

Stevvo 5y ago
It's partially a propaganda thing with slogans printed on buildings everywhere saying things like "Charge towards the Chinese dream with vigor, for the betterment of the region and the party!"
baybal2 5y ago
Nobody really did. China does not have any kind of coherent regional policy, or, well, any kind of real economic policy. The infamed communist 5 years plans barely mean anything for the real economy. South China got ahead in manufacturing due to market economy reaching it first. Shanghai got banks because Jiang Zemin lived there, and he wanted money like every proper communist. Chongqing seen its development as the only inland China big city, and lack of any other alternative. Beijing is now late to the party, and bureaucrats there basically ordered it to become another "center" through administrative fiat.
- justicezyx 5y ago
  > China does not have any kind of coherent regional policy I am not sure your basis for this. The presence of the policy itself is effective in guiding the human mind and interests, also broadcast certain information national wide. The policy is comboed with fiscal policy, i.e., easier loan for the designated sectors. And more effective use of nationally-owned enterprises, research facilities, etc. Of course, policy needs to be realistic by matching the regional characteristics. As you said, one cannot industrilize the inner cities first, because the global economy is centered on marine transportation, so naturally it starts from Shanghai and guangdong, which are close to sea ports. But that does not make the policy less coherent. It just means that the policy is sensible and meaningful.
5y ago

dannyw 5y ago

I grew up in Beijing (around the 3rd ring). You'd walk past elders playing Xiangqi on the back alleys, while street vendors sold Tanghulu for a few coins. I wonder if the city is anywhere like my childhood two decades ago.

nus07 5y ago
You might enjoy reading this - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/chinas-reform-generation-adapts-to-life-in-the-middle-class/amp https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/chinas-reform-...
jacquesm 5y ago
paying -> playing
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Not really. My first visit to Beijing was more than two decades ago (winter 1999), when you could get a roasted yam on the street for a few mao. The sea of bicycles was still a thing, old military guys with tuktuks would wait outside of the subway stations to take you to your final destination for a negotiated 5 mao or so, you could choose between a cheap 8 kuai drop taxi or a fancier 10-12 kuai one. Starbucks just opened one store in Xidan, and the department stores were still mainly based on the Soviet model. Things changed quickly when it returned in 2002, and then when I moved there to stay for almost a decade in 2007. It is a completely different place from my memories. The feelings, the momentum of society, the industries.

manor 5y ago

andromaton 5y ago

> Where does Beijing prefer dynamism instead? Science-based industries that serve strategic needs. Beijing, in other words, is trying to make semiconductors sexy again. One might reasonably question how dealing pain to users of chips (like consumer internet firms) might help the industry. I think that the focus should instead be on talent and capital allocation. If venture capitalists are mostly funding social networking companies, then they would be able to hire the best talent while denying them to chipmakers. That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google. They were not willing to compete. Intel and Cisco’s directors had plenty of net income they could have used to compete, but decided to reward shareholders in the present instead, rather than invest in the future.
- dlcmh 5y ago
  Because “Shareholder Value” is maximised in the US. Therein lies the loophole.

whoevercares 5y ago

While this is an excellent article (admittedly I stopped around half its too long) that refreshes most of my obsolete memory of China, I do think the author is a bit too optimistic. From what I heard from my startup founder friends, it’s becoming increasingly hard to innovate without government relationships (many founders do though, some from family some from bribery). The “national team” is coming to many consumer segment as well so the space is squeezing. Let’s see where this trend goes, I think the golden age of entrepreneurs are ticking

gruez 5y ago
>The “national team” is coming to many consumer segment as well so the space is squeezing. Can you expand on this? Are you talking about consumers wanting to buy chinese brands (eg. huawei instead of apple), or some sort of officially state sanctioned brand?
- whoevercares 5y ago
  More on the to-C technical startup founded by overseas Chinese who returns to the country. The national team now is disguised as private owned companies and have unfair advantage to supply chains, even better pricing with cloud providers
- justicezyx 5y ago
  No, he wont provide much concrete evidences. This so called national team, is a myth. It never manifests itself. Apparently, national team backed national captical, executed by nationally-owned enterprises, are not agile and innovative enough when competing with private businesses. That's simply a human nature-driven market econmomy law. Chinese people are not living in an alternative universe where economy laws do not apply.
  - whoevercares 5y ago
    Meh not so fast.. it’s China, it has plenty of talents and execution is not a concern. Take ride sharing as an example, those stated owned enterprises CAN do tech! > Other major state-owned automakers have rolled out their own ride-hailing brands: FAW Group established Yiqi Chuxing in 2019; Hong Kong-listed Dongfeng Motor launched Dongfeng Chuxing in 2018; https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kr-asia.com/chinese-automakers-bet-on-ride-hailing-future-amid-slowdown-in-car-sales https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kr-asia.com/chinese-automak... I don’t have data to prove they competed unfairly to DiDi though but we know didi has been punished to death now

baybal2 5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago
Thank you for all of your insights into China over the last couple of years. They tend to be blunt and unvarnished but verify as accurate relative to what I know about the country (which, arguably isn't much, I've never visited but am in fairly close contact with some people living there).
dannyw 5y ago
I enjoyed the read but I'd like more perspectives that go deeper. Can you share some recommendations?
- baybal2 5y ago
  Unfortunately, pretty much all even moderately accurate coverage of China is completely evading the Anglophone media. Matters.news is blogging community of few authors not afraid speaking their mind. It's still just a drop in the ocean, and any kind of good reporting on current affairs in China has been extinguished for good. The few people remaining brave enough to open their mouth are either from religious cults on one side, or former regime insiders themselves on another.
logshipper 5y ago
I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China. On the contrary, it is their very experience as a Chinese American that helps me (an outsider) see things from a new and interesting perspective. > some seriously confused Chinese American I don't recall where I read this (I think it may have been Rachel Cusk), but it is a writer's job to ask questions. And what better source of questions than confusion? That said, I'd genuinely be interested to seek your recommendations on China from Chinese sources.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > I don't think the author's American-ness disqualifies them from writing about China. It does. Americans, and Chinese Americans themselves sometimes don't realise that Chinatown America is absolutely not characteristic of China, nor modern, nor at any point in history. Instead, it's a strange universe on its own, with its own history, and customs. To me, when I talk to Chinese Americans, Chinese Americans feel as Chinese, as American football is football.

whoevercares 5y ago

Funny anecdotes: it’s relatively rare to see company led by “old fart Beijingers” who have been native to the city for 2-3 generations. Immigrants have been driving the leadership there. Native Beijingers tends to be more layback and they thrive in cultural related stuff like xiangsheng, comedy and movies.

baybal2 5y ago
There are very few "native Beijingers." Most were sent to the countryside during the cultural revolution, and still live there. Mostly, only very the well connected, or elite members themselves from original population managed to stay in the city through late seventies, early nineties. The current "natives" are mostly people who descended from the new population who came into the city in seventies, and later.
- whoevercares 5y ago
  That’s not remotely true. Where did you get this story from? I grew up in Beijing and my parents were sent to the countryside near the end of cultural revolution. They and most of their classmates from our neighborhood came back. My parents are not well connected or elite at all - lowest possible workers in a food factory
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    A lot of the educated beijingers of that generation were assigned to factories in the hinterland (my friend’s family, for example, was assigned to a smaller city in shaanxi even though they were in Beijing before the CR). It gets weird, however, when we mix authoritarian factory assignments and youth being sent down during the cultural revolution (those are very different things), given that the former could have happened anytime from 1950 to the early 90s. The real reason native beijingers are hard to find these days in Beijing is because Beijing has grown rapidly in the last 20 years. They are “less” only because 外地人 are more. During my first trip to Beijing in 1999, the taxi driver would always be a native city Beijinger who couldn’t understand your Chinese unless you used lots of 儿话. That is no longer the case (the taxi drivers are still from Beijing, but from the outer counties rather than the central city).

epberry 5y ago

> The state has subjected scientists to the tender mercies of the US criminal justice system, usually for charges related to relatively unimportant issues implicating research integrity. Does anyone know what this refers to? Is it prosecutions of Chinese researchers in the US?

everforward 5y ago
I believe it's this: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/politics/charles-lieber-harvard-china-ties-guilty/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/politics/charles-lieber-harva... And there may have been another similar case, I can't recall. I believe the US line is that China was trying to steal research or something. I don't believe any of the people implicated were charged with treason or spying or anything like that. It's been more mundane "failing to disclose bank accounts" kind of stuff. Whether that's indicative of anything is up in the air.
DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
The China Initiative. During the Trump administration, the US government began investigating a large number of ethnically Chinese scientists in the US. The initiative was supposedly about rooting out espionage, but it has ended up being more of a witch hunt. The two worst cases so far are Prof. Anming Hu of the University of Tennessee (thankfully acquitted, after getting fired) and Prof. Gang Chen of MIT (this hasn't yet gone to trial, but it looks like the government is essentially going after him for doing his job).
robocat 5y ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/china-initiative-intellectual-property-theft/621058/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/china-init... The US targeted mostly Chinese Scientists working in the US. His thesis is that caused excess harm to scientific productivity.

Gravityloss 5y ago

It's a book! Fascinating insights.

uyt 5y ago

As a tech worker with little knowledge about china, the most interesting section for me starts at "A summer storm" where he talks about why/how the government is cracking down on big consumer tech.

paganel 5y ago

> They care instead more about cultural issues, which is why people have fond views of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan Apart from anime Japan is pretty much a cultural desert for us, Westerners, right now. Compare that to the excellent movies they made back in the '50 to the '70s, back then they were on the vanguard of world cinema together with the French (la Nouvelle Vague) and the Italians (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini), as Hollywood was on its dying bed. Taiwan is even more a cultural wasteland, I can only name you Tsai Ming-liang (who apparently has just filmed his last ever feature film) and Hou Hsiao-hsien, other than that it's only the idea of money and of making money that comes out of Taiwan. South Korea is a little bit more complicated. There's K-Pop that's definitely a thing among younger people (I'm personally 40+ so I'm not in their target demographic) and there's Korean TV dramas, which rival Turkish TV dramas in many parts of the world, but I would say that's not probably what the author had in mind. SK used to have a very, very vibrant movie scene in the 2000s and a little in the early 2010s, its Busan film festival was one of the most interesting movie festivals in the world at some point, but for some reason or another all that is a thing of the past now.

eatonphil 5y ago
I think South Korean film industry and quality has only grown massively since the 2000s. All Bong Joonho's work for example.
- paganel 5y ago
  I'd say he is a product of the 2000s, his "Memories of Murder" (imo his best movie) dates from 2003 and "The Host" from 2006, it's only now that mainstream Western audiences have gotten a chance to see his work.
vehemenz 5y ago
You're forgetting about video games. Japan has Nintendo, Sony, and many of the biggest IPs. South Korea has PUBG and is a huge player in eSports.
- paganel 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bsenftner 5y ago

Great article. Requires more than one setting to really absorb. Almost 20 years ago I did an extended study in China for my MBA. IBM had billion dollar annual contracts managing the construction of hospitals and medical universities. My MBA class traveled throughout China participating in project reviews. More and more it is impressed upon me how that China of 2004 was a photo-moment in time. With the speed of development, that China I met was lifetimes ago.

danschuller 5y ago

> Manhattan meets Maui I think that is a stretch beyond snapping point for Hong Kong. Most days in Hong Kong I could see the air pollution obscuring buildings in the distance. It's AQI is terrible https://aqicn.org/city/hongkong/ https://aqicn.org/city/hongkong/ . There are nice mountain walks and nearby islands but it is extremely dense and urban. It's one of the places Ghost in the Shell used for reference! Also the narrative here feels mostly from the mainland China point of view; having to go and deal with "problematic" Hong Kong. But problems between Hong Kong and the mainland began when Beijing used its influence to restrict Hong Kong's traditional democracy, so only "approved" candidates could be voted into office. And since then it's increasingly clamped down on the freedoms Hong Kong previously enjoyed, most recently doing things such as removing the Tiananmen Square memorials (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-59764029 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-59764029). At this point the writing is on the wall and bit by bit Hong Kong will brought in step with the rest of mainland China. Unlike the author I found the Hong Kong bureaucracy fast and effective. Enforcers "sometimes able to look the other way" sounds like corruption to me and people with better guanxi being able to bend the rules. I'd rather have the laws fair, clear and applied to all equally (though that's always going to be a gradient). Despite all that, it's undeniable China is on the rise and that's going to be the dominant story of this century. There's potential for that to be a great boon to the world and I hope that's the reality that comes to be.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
secondaryacct 5y ago
I disagree with you on Hong Kong (I m now a voting citizen, for what it's worth - not much). The problems in Hong Kong didnt start 2 years ago, they started when the UK came in, and we inherit a difficulty I know well where I come from (Europe, full of Corsica, Basque Country, Northern Ireland, Brittany, Catalonia and so on). Beijing reacts like we all reacted 2 centuries ago, and will slowly learn to deal with it, especially if they invade Taiwan and have to stop killing because unlike Xinjiang there's nothing to mine there and only cost cost cost to maintain an aggressive colony that builds processors as only output of value. I think the CCP is no more evil than Napoleon, and ask a Frenchman today and he'll rave about what he did that transformed eventually the country, at the cost of 200k+ young people's lives to invade Russia, if you can believe it. Things progress and China has to experience it for themselves, sadly. There's no shortcuts that I know of for such a big place.

ouid 5y ago

the writer speaks too negatively about the government of Hong Kong for me to be entirely trusting of the content. Maybe Hong Kong is desperately in need of new direction, but we'll never know for sure.

pell 5y ago
They wrote thousands of words but did not even mention China’s genocide against the Uighur people. How neutral can they really be? Edit: A nice little tidbit also is that I’ve written comments on all sorts of contentious topics. But only when bringing up this specific factually based truth my comments tend to be downvoted within minutes. I wonder why.
- layer8 5y ago
  The article mentions the internment camps. (I didn’t downvote your comment.)
  - pell 5y ago
    Unless I missed some part here, you’re probably referring to this part of one sentence as the only mention, correct? If so, I find this not very credible when we look at the length of the post alone. But yes, technically you’d be right and I should have phrased my comment better. > That’s due to the operation of detention camps for ethno-religious minorities
    - twolf910616 5y ago
      Calling it a genocide reminds me when some people compare the modern day American football to slavery: such inaccurate and click-baity name calling makes anyone who is sympathetic towards China an accomplice on the order of Nazis, and gives the Chinese government an easy target to refuse. I get that it raises eye-brows and generates attention, but ultimately it detracts from any effort to stop such brutality. It seems lazy.
- not2b 5y ago

deltaonefour 5y ago

I'd totally live in Shanghai if not for the rampant pollution. I run 5 miles a couple times a week through the city and if the city was shanghai I'd have the lungs of a smoker.

Supermancho 5y ago

> A distinctive feature of Chinese governance is to continuously fix slogans, like “reform and opening” to move the country away from socialism, and the more recent “common prosperity” to move it back. Beijing isn’t satisfied with greater national wealth. > A lot of macro indicators on China are disappointing, like a rise in the amount of credit needed to create growth and a fall in total-factor productivity growth. But we can’t let these poorly-measured data points govern as the gospel truth to understand this economy. The reader is left to interpret the overly broad hand-wavy navel-gazing adjectives and adverbs. I'm not sure what this very long "letter" is supposed to inform a reader about. There's no substance. I'm not sure it's intentional, but it's obvious.

draw_down 5y ago
dlcmh 5y ago
The useful parts to me were the assertions the author made about Beijing attempting to guide future talent into hard science areas.

manor 5y ago

Where there is no democracy can we truly speak of culture? In 2021?

howmayiannoyyou 5y ago

Key points: "Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance. Personally, I think it has been a tragedy for the US that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley." "The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports. Decades of American deindustrialization as well as an aversion against idle capacity has eroded domestic manufacturing." "In the face of this challenge against a new peer competitor, the US has demonstrated a superb capacity for self-harm." "For someone in the middle class, there has never been a better year to live in China. That comes down to the entrepreneurs, who are creating businesses to please people." All, absolutely true as I've commented previously in other posts. The decline of America is primarily a story about misallocation of talent and the demise of the American middle class as a result.

paganel 5y ago
> a story about misallocation of talent I wish modern-day economists would be more aware of local maximums, which is the economic strategy the US seems to have adopted in the last 2-3 decades. Looks like China is targeting things beyond the local maximums, much like the US used to do back in the '50s and '60s, maybe also in the '70s. Not sure things like the ARPANET would have been possible in today's world when the strategy of "looking for the local maximum" is the only one made use of.
- 01100011 5y ago
  We need an enemy. The Soviets made the US better. We have identified both Global Warming and China as our current external enemies(terrorism seems to have fallen off the radar for now), but we're not fighting them like we did the Soviets. There is a lack of national purpose and a seriousness which is needed to focus our efforts on survival. Right now we're more focused on fighting each other and while some of our efforts to clean up our political and justice systems may bear fruit they may be irrelevant if we don't survive as a nation.

rsync 5y ago

"And there’s no obvious leader in the southeast, but it is between Shenzhen, the richest city in the region, and Guangzhou, the political capital ..." An incredible statement - made even more so by possibly being true. It was less than ten years ago that Hong Kong might have been considered the leading city in all of China and certainly the most dynamic on the axes that he is considering. FWIW, I think the CCP has made a tactical error in their handling of Hong Kong: As a business owner in Hong Kong I was, previously, only peripherally and philosophically concerned with the behavior of the party throughout the rest of the country - it was possible to compartmentalize the "two systems". But if Hong Kong is just another Chinese city and if there is only one "system" then I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are. This makes me very sad - Hong Kong has for my entire adult life been my favorite city and the city I thought was the most interesting and exciting.

draw_down 5y ago
> I am forced to very critically reconsider my business activities there - small as they are. You can take as hard a negotiating stance as you like, in most/all situations the leverage resides with them. Even being Apple won't get them to leave you alone, that should tell you something.
- meribold 5y ago
  In general you make a fair point but GPs business is cloud storage [1] and, as far as I know, they have one datacenter in SEA and it's in Hong Kong [2]. Presumably GP could open a datacenter in e.g. Singapore/Taipei/Tokyo instead and close the HK one—no negotiation with CCP authorities required. [1]: https://rsync.net https://rsync.net [2]: I'm a customer based in SEA that previously used rsync.net's Hong Kong site but moved to one of the US sites following the events in 2019.
infinity0 5y ago
If you a "business owner in Hong Kong" then you should be able to see with your own eyes whether Hong Kong is "just another Chinese city" or not, rather than believing the anti-China propaganda that western media regurgitates repetitively and predictably, paying only the most basic level of lip-service to actual events. You will know then that Apple Daily and Stand News were pushing "freedom of the press" into territory that no western media dares to push in their own countries, including actively calling for foreign military intervention in Hong Kong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfVGludKPWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfVGludKPWM SCMP - The insufferable hypocrisy of Western governments hell-bent on destroying Julian Assange "the only solution to bad speech is more free speech" "the only solution to a bad market is more free market" "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" edit: Hacker News that bastion of "free speech" where all opinions not conforming to the "western liberal" doctrine gets downvote-censored because the readers are too fragile to read different opinions > US media personalities calling for military invasion of Australia (1) That's not the same thing as calling for military invasion of the US. (2) No government cares about random small articles that only random internet commentators know about to make a "irrelevant counterexample fallacy"; what matters is large-scale media exhibiting a long-term pattern of behaviour and trying to organise large numbers of people (which they failed at in HK; most people stopped going to the protests after a small group started extreme violence).

beckman466 5y ago

i appreciated this comment at the bottom of the essay. Reader Dude - January 1, 2022 at 5:59 pm: > Dan – I love your letters as always. In terms of China commentary it’s about as good as there is in the English speaking world, but unfortunately that bar is pretty low these days. > I have to say – I’m a little disappointed re: your indictment of Chinese production of culture and some of the platitudes re: repression. The government can be heavy handed and has shown zero agility to respond when it comes to the propagandizing from the west, but you yourself are taking a western lens to what culture means and it’s embedded in your whole spiel (your references, your bit on classical music, etc.). In fact, writing from the states, one might even uncharitably call it the soft internalized racism (unavoidable) of ingesting a western standard of values. > Why must the arbiter of cultural quality be what appeals to a commercialized western marketplace? Is it somehow a bad thing if China doesn’t produce manga or Kpop? Frankly it’s a failure of the state in some ways given that those cultural products help soften image on the world stage, but in short – Who is to say? > Is not the rejuvenation of the Chinese people (something many subscribe to) a culture? Is not the rising patriotism and pride in China’s accomplishments by the vast majority of actual Chinese a culture? The rising “cultural level” (volunteers in Xi An delivering food as the area is in lockdown, the galvanizing of philanthropic attitudes after the Sichuan earthquakes) – Are those not cultures? > Are we mistaking culture for entertainment? In 30 years are the artifacts you mention “culture”? Or some footnote in the history books, much as Madonna might be here stateside?

justicezyx 5y ago
These are good point, but not very well received in the west. These comments are obviously from a CHinese national.
dlcmh 5y ago
The author speaks very much from his liberal/capitalist outlook on life - the comment is pretty spot-on.

justicezyx 5y ago

> By my count, the country has produced two cultural works over the last four decades since reform and opening that have proved attractive to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok. I think a lot of people simply cannot wrap their head when they view from the Western angle. As a result, they sometime just fixate on some main-stream idea without realizing that those views are from limited exposure to the ground. It's true that China has not produced much other attractions than 3body and tiktok, even 3body is heavily influened by US SF writing, and tiktok is originally produced in US by musically. The point is that these productions are easier to be accepted by the Western socieity, because they themselves are linagage from the western tradition, with a more tainted cultural identity than the indigenous stuff. In reality, China have produced enourmouse amount of culturally diverse and innovative work for the domestic audiance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdkAyt9Q2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdkAyt9Q2A I'll give you one example of a recent production of a Cantonese opera mixed with modern filming tech of the classic Bai She Zhuan. And Pop star signing Song Dynasty Chi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t9VT9Dwiqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t9VT9Dwiqg. Of course, these color productions are very distant from the Western cultural heritage, and people from the West simply cannot appreciate their wonderfullness and depth.

jai_ 5y ago
The author's overall point is that China does not seen to export many cultural works with global appeal (and not just restricted to western tastes). In comparison you could look to Japan with it's global cultural export of manga, anime, and video games and also South Korea with it's global cultural exports of movies and drama. These exports aren't strictly limited in taste to western audiences but have a global appeal while still retaining elements of it's place of origin. It's unclear to me though if it is deliberate in this way for there not to be many cultural exports like this and if having a strong domestic scene is enough, however purely from a number game I would have expected more (which the author goes onto address later in the essay in the section "Strangling the cultural sector")
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cromwellian 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

Great work. The lack of 'stupid culture wars' within the treatise is refreshing. How many popular American outlets are addressing these kinds of issues? The media in the US are rabidly obsessed with either demonizing or 'heroizing' a kid in Wisconsin's questionable and difficult-to-place-actions, whereupon in a spectacular bit of irony there was actually a lot of nuanced and thoughtful insight about the subject on TikTok of all places. Pew's political topology is out [1] it's really good, but it doesn't bode well for the US as it identifies hardening, outrageous voices on the far end of 'both sides' that I suggest amounts to a serious cancer on the nation as those voices seem to consume everyone's energy on civic issues. We're not even talking about the right things and when we start to get onto the right subject, it seems as though it's radicalized for clicks & views, or trivialized so the writer/commentator can 'seem smart'. For example, for as much as I very much respect and support Elon Musk's work and achievements, most of his public commentary is glib and uninformed and he's not remotely prepared to start answering questions on these kinds of subjects (unless they are very specifically within his domain). We spend way too much time gawking over his Tweets instead of materially addressing 'manufacturing v. financialization'. And we need to consume much, much more quality news coming out of China and the rest of the world. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v...

rsync 5y ago

"Shenzhen and Guangzhou are still attracting entrepreneurial types, producing an even more commercially-oriented culture than Shanghai. But while Shenzhen is pleasant, it is also a boring city with minimal culture. A friend relates an anecdote from a gallery artist, who said that clients in Shenzhen rarely comment on the art that they plan to buy. Instead they ask only its expected price in five years." This is a bit dated (2015 ?) but I was wandering around Shenzhen very late at night. After midnight. I came across a Lamborghini dealership and I thought it was noteworthy. Then I noticed that it was open.

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Lamad123 5y ago

How about Uyghuristan?

Xcelerate 5y ago

Fascinating letter. It's a bit of a tangent, but I would be interested in similar perspectives on the development (or stagnation) of cities in the U.S., and how they compare to China.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Cities in the USA are already mostly developed, the USA is not a developing country, it’s not like there is much movement in our industries or skylines. After China reaches developed status, it will similarly become boring and stagnate (since you can’t grow forever).
- Barrin92 5y ago
  I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. A little over a hundred years ago we hadn't invented flight. We probably have many thousands of years left. Who says there's no way to build a city that makes our cities look the same way we look at a medieval town? Our 'developed' world is boring and stagnant because we've made a choice to not push towards the future, and instead relive the 80s pop culture in VR.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. The fallacy of “rapid growth forever” has been repeatedly asserted multiple times in history, to be knocked down each time. The last time we went through this was with Japan, where, in the early 80s, the prediction was made that Japanese would be twice as rich as Americans by the year 2010. And then their real estate bubble crashed and they lost a couple of decades. China today is like Japan in the early 80s with an even more insane property bubble. The developed world keeps developing, just at a far slower pace than the developing world. If China avoids the middle income trap and reaches developed status, then they will experience slow growth just like other developed countries do. But rapidly aging demographics is a huge challenge for China to overcome in sustaining its current rate of growth before reaching developed status.

andromaton 5y ago

> Somehow the US has evolved to become a political system in which people can dream up a hundred reasons not to do things like “build housing in growing areas” or “admit people with skills into the country.” If the US wants to win a decades-long challenge against a peer competitor, it needs to be able to improve state capacity.

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago

"China can simply follow the roadmap set by the US, while enjoying the easier task of reinventing existing technologies rather than dreaming up new ideas. It can worry about new invention after it has caught up." This was said about Japan 40 years ago. How would you compare/contrast the outcome for Japan versus the prospects for China?

rastapasta42 5y ago

>In nearly all of my letters over the years, I’ve lamented the idea that consumer internet companies have taken over the idea of technological progress: “It’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.” I don’t think that Beijing’s primary goal is to reshuffle technological priorities. Instead, it is mostly a mix of a technocratic belief that reducing the power of platforms would help smaller companies as well as a desire to impose political control on big firms. I have to agree with this mindset. Technology is neither good nor bad, but it could be used for bad/good things. We should strive to progress society forward and we need to be careful with profitable distractions.

matthewdgreen 5y ago
Many of the technologies we now take for granted (books, newspapers, film) were once considered “profitable distractions” by somebody. But each one drove the development of some essential aspects of our modern world, without which we’d be much poorer.

rastapasta42 5y ago

>Over the last two decades, the major American growth stories have been Silicon Valley (consumer internet and software) on one coast and Wall Street (financialization) on the other. I don't think California deserves this label anymore. I propose we rename Silicon Valley to "MetaSoft" valley.

yosito 5y ago
Why not just Silicon Wasteland? Is that not "meta" enough?
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  I've always been a fan of Silly Valley

infinity0 5y ago

The author makes an incorrect assessment without considering the appropriate context for China. The gaping hole in his assessment of "Chinese cultural exports" is the failure to account for China's population and GDP per capita, which currently is only about $17k PPP. This is no position to be exporting culture to the globe from; that would just be a waste of resources. Culture is a result of being rich, not a cause of being rich. In other words, China is not "culturally-stunted" than any other country with a similar GDP per capita PPP. Chinese culture is also all in the Chinese language, and China has no strategic reason to make any effort to export it globally into English, a foreign language, where fitting translations would cost even more resources.

cromwellian 5y ago
Culture doesn't need any kind of "official" export. If it is good, it gets discovered, now more than ever in social media. I didn't grow up watching Atom Boy, Voltron, and Robotech because the Japanese government invested in exporting it. Those were pulled into the US by some distributor in the Midwest who discovered them by accident, and decided to have them translated and show on US television. A lot of KPop and Anime was exported to the US by fans, who free of charge as a labor of love, did translation and distribution. In the 70s, 80s, even 90s, a lot of this happened by an underground distribution network, people would make copies and trade. Indeed, I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching lots of Hong Kong Kung-fu films, eg Shaw Bros, Golden Harvest, etc. There didn't need to be a "strategic reason" for HK canto films to have atrociously bad translation and dubbing slapped on them and marked to Americans. It was done because someone noticed that Americans loved watching these things. You're making excuses for the fact that domestic mainland Chinese art is suffering a crisis of creativity caused by the crushing censorship of the state. People only make "safe" art in China. If you make any art that criticizes the establishment, or tells history in a way other than they want it to be seen, you may find yourself punished. Ask Ai Weiwei. This is not a conducive environment for artistic expression.
stickfigure 5y ago
India seems to manage it.

beckman466 5y ago

what strategies are people here using to disarm Sinophobia, and the unwarranted cold war -like escalations the US elite is pushing in the media, in your communities?

rcpt 5y ago

ctrl-f "gentrification", no hits. Ugh. California urban discourse is insufferable. Crazy to see a write up like that about booming livable cities without getting dragged into a quagmire about who's rightly deserving of a place to live.

manor 5y ago

Writing something like: “Shanghai is highly livable.” means one considers adult citizenship without proper voting rights to be acceptable. This is an endorsement of tyranny. How “livable” is Shanghai to its residents when they ask for an end to one-party rule?

dreinhardt 5y ago
Democracy - not really needed for a liveable life /s

namelosw 5y ago

The North vs South disparity always fascinates me. In many ways, they're the opposite of each other. The North: - Beijing sucks up all the resources, just like Moscow. People in the surrounding regions hate it, but it's also their best bet to make a fortune. - Many regions feel post-Soviet. Industries are falling apart, the neighborhoods feel depressing. Young people leave and go to Beijing, Southern China, or abroad. It feels like how Eastern Europeans are making livings in Western Europe. - People who stay in their hometowns are desperate to get jobs in the public sector. - There are substantially more propaganda banners on the street. The South: - Just like op said, there are no obvious leaders. The cities in the two delta region create more network effects rather than suck up resources. - The south is much more vibrant. People are more adventurous to make fortune in the private sector or start their own businesses. - The vibes are less political, more economical.

Aidevah 5y ago

Pleasantly surprised to find an intelligent and thoughtful description of Italian comic opera on the front page. I find much to agree with much of the author's thoughts, possibly because of our shared reading of critics like Tovey and Rosen. Opera has always been the most (and at times, the only) popular genre of Western literate music, and its absurdities are also legendary. Charles Rosen gave a very good summary of the spectacle of opera in the nyrb titled "The ridiculous & sublime"[1], and I recommend it for those who cannot understand how people can become obsessed by something so patently silly. The reputation of Mozart's three Da Ponte operas, along with The Magic Flute, are uniformly high and any ranking would come down to personal preference. Speaking as someone who is decidedly not an opera buff, it's the ostentatiously showy parts (the fugal exposition and chorale prelude pastiche in the magic flute; the three orchestras playing dances in different meters simultaneously in Don Giovanni; and of course the marvelous ensemble numbers which make up the act finales) which attracts me to Mozart operas. These displays of compositional virtuosity are sadly lacking in his Italian successors. Some devotees of pure instrumental music may occasionally sneer at comic opera and consider it frivolous. This is undeserved since the rhythms of comic opera underly the classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The remarkable thing isn't that Mozart wrote great Italian comic operas as a German, but that he wrote much of his pure instrumental music as if they were comic opera. [1]https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/04/22/the-ridiculous-sublime/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/04/22/the-ridiculous-s...