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Have you actually ever been to China or spoken with any Chinese people in China? (Not expats, but, say, taxi drivers and businessmen.) Frankly, they're practic

Have you actually ever been to China or spoken with any Chinese people in China? (Not expats, but, say, taxi drivers and businessmen.) Frankly, they're practically as free as Americans and Europeans. In some respects they're more free. There's far less violent crime and property crime, too, so living in the city feels more free in ways which should be obvious -- women can walk around alone at night and not fear for their own safety. Imagine walking around Memphis at midnight, alone and unarmed, or parts of London... even as a man, it would be very ill-advised. China's business culture, also, is very explicitly laissez-faire, competition between firms is brutal, and there's less red tape than you'd get in Europe. They do a lot of things right. > treating your own people as disposable serfs How do you mean? How is the average Shanghai banker any more or less of a serf than a banker in Frankfurt or Indianapolis? Democracy?

asdff 2y ago
> Imagine walking around Memphis at midnight, alone and unarmed Says it all about your biases that you seriously think this is actually a dangerous proposition in terms of real statistical risk.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  Memphis had 63.9 homicides per 100,000 people in 2023. I don't have stats for individual Chinese cities, but China's rate is 0.46 per 100,000 people. In China, it's plausible that the cities are safer than the countryside, and I don't think that Beijing's number is substantially higher than the national average. Basically, you are 139x more likely to be murdered in Memphis.
  - onjectic 2y ago
    It’s comical that you are comparing Memphis to China. But lets take this even further and increase our sample set from just Jan 2023 - Dec 2023, to Jan 1923 - Dec 2023, this is more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism, and clearly shows Memphis as less homicidal than China.
    - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
      > more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism Look at the trends and think about what you're saying. What you're calling "authoritarianism" (very vaguely defined) has brought order from chaos. I don't know if there's a single large American city that is now safer than Beijing. Sure, things were different in 1960. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - asdff 2y ago
    Factor out the domestic violence, bar fights, and gang activity, and how many of these are random people minding their own business that happen to get shot for walking around at midnight? Probably zero I'm guessing.
luckydata 2y ago
Not even remotely true.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  That Chinese cities are safer is obviously true. That there's tremendous small-firm competition and a more or less hands-off attitude towards private business is also true, which people who buy anything from China or speak with Chinese business partners quickly come to realize. Frankly, I'm not even convinced that the average Chinese person has less say in his or her Government than the average American or (especially) European.
inglor_cz 2y ago
Is Memphis representative of the Western civilization? I have never been to Memphis, but I just returned from Warsaw, Poland. (I wrote my previous comment literally on IC Sobieski.) It is very safe at night, even if you are alone and unarmed. So is Prague, where I lived for 26 years. The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen. An average citizen in China was, for example, subject to three years of Zero Covid policy gone wild. AFAIK it took some street unrest, very untypical for China, for the government to reconsider. For all their faults, Western governments didn't stick to three years of nonsense during Covid. The people who would got voted out, because they could be voted out.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  > The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen. A banker is like any other professional. But we can go one step down: Is the average taxi driver more of a "disposable serf" in China than the West? And consider your use of the word "disposable." If you travel to China and defraud Chinese citizens, they will throw the book at you. If you travel to China and murder a Chinese citizen, they will execute you, and quickly. I've personally been involved in a civil (commercial) legal case in China, and I walked away extremely impressed with the speed, low cost, and the fairness of their legal system, whereas the system in the West seemed almost completely broken to me. (That civil case in China cost less than $10k, start to finish, including trial. In US Federal Court, $300k+ before we even got to trial, thanks in large part to "discovery" and pretrial motions which were -- accurately -- deemed unnecessary in China. Ran out of money before trial and had to settle, lol.) Chinese people enjoy extremely robust legal protections. Their own government evidently doesn't consider them disposable; quite the contrary, it signals that they're not to be trifled with. If you travel to Finland and murder a Finn, you'll probably get a statistically average sentence of 12 years. In which country is the innocent life of its citizens more "disposable"? Are China's "disposable serfs" not afforded obviously better protection from evil and harm? Look, my point is that the Chinese do an awful lot right. In the administration of law, commerce, industry, etc., we should look at them and realize that we in the West have a lot that we can still learn. It's not all bad. As for Covid, that's a very particular matter and the US/EU/UK/Canada/Australia didn't exactly cover themselves in glory.
duxup 2y ago
The crime aspect is always an interesting talking point. I see it a lot with folks saying things like "when I visited the US i had to wear my backpack backwards to avoid thieves". (a line like that got reposed several times on HN and reddit for a while, it was almost a meme at one point). Living in the US, I never do that ... not worried about thieves. Somehow not robbed. People see some articles or movies and they just assume every negative thing is an enormous / constant threat I think.
corank 2y ago
Have you tried using Google in China? Or post anything that the government/party doesn't like online?

asdff 2y ago

> Imagine walking around Memphis at midnight, alone and unarmed Says it all about your biases that you seriously think this is actually a dangerous proposition in terms of real statistical risk.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
Memphis had 63.9 homicides per 100,000 people in 2023. I don't have stats for individual Chinese cities, but China's rate is 0.46 per 100,000 people. In China, it's plausible that the cities are safer than the countryside, and I don't think that Beijing's number is substantially higher than the national average. Basically, you are 139x more likely to be murdered in Memphis.
- onjectic 2y ago
  It’s comical that you are comparing Memphis to China. But lets take this even further and increase our sample set from just Jan 2023 - Dec 2023, to Jan 1923 - Dec 2023, this is more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism, and clearly shows Memphis as less homicidal than China.
  - A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
    > more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism Look at the trends and think about what you're saying. What you're calling "authoritarianism" (very vaguely defined) has brought order from chaos. I don't know if there's a single large American city that is now safer than Beijing. Sure, things were different in 1960. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- asdff 2y ago
  Factor out the domestic violence, bar fights, and gang activity, and how many of these are random people minding their own business that happen to get shot for walking around at midnight? Probably zero I'm guessing.

luckydata 2y ago

Not even remotely true.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
That Chinese cities are safer is obviously true. That there's tremendous small-firm competition and a more or less hands-off attitude towards private business is also true, which people who buy anything from China or speak with Chinese business partners quickly come to realize. Frankly, I'm not even convinced that the average Chinese person has less say in his or her Government than the average American or (especially) European.

inglor_cz 2y ago

Is Memphis representative of the Western civilization? I have never been to Memphis, but I just returned from Warsaw, Poland. (I wrote my previous comment literally on IC Sobieski.) It is very safe at night, even if you are alone and unarmed. So is Prague, where I lived for 26 years. The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen. An average citizen in China was, for example, subject to three years of Zero Covid policy gone wild. AFAIK it took some street unrest, very untypical for China, for the government to reconsider. For all their faults, Western governments didn't stick to three years of nonsense during Covid. The people who would got voted out, because they could be voted out.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
> The average banker anywhere isn't likely a serf, but the average banker is not an average citizen. A banker is like any other professional. But we can go one step down: Is the average taxi driver more of a "disposable serf" in China than the West? And consider your use of the word "disposable." If you travel to China and defraud Chinese citizens, they will throw the book at you. If you travel to China and murder a Chinese citizen, they will execute you, and quickly. I've personally been involved in a civil (commercial) legal case in China, and I walked away extremely impressed with the speed, low cost, and the fairness of their legal system, whereas the system in the West seemed almost completely broken to me. (That civil case in China cost less than $10k, start to finish, including trial. In US Federal Court, $300k+ before we even got to trial, thanks in large part to "discovery" and pretrial motions which were -- accurately -- deemed unnecessary in China. Ran out of money before trial and had to settle, lol.) Chinese people enjoy extremely robust legal protections. Their own government evidently doesn't consider them disposable; quite the contrary, it signals that they're not to be trifled with. If you travel to Finland and murder a Finn, you'll probably get a statistically average sentence of 12 years. In which country is the innocent life of its citizens more "disposable"? Are China's "disposable serfs" not afforded obviously better protection from evil and harm? Look, my point is that the Chinese do an awful lot right. In the administration of law, commerce, industry, etc., we should look at them and realize that we in the West have a lot that we can still learn. It's not all bad. As for Covid, that's a very particular matter and the US/EU/UK/Canada/Australia didn't exactly cover themselves in glory.

duxup 2y ago

The crime aspect is always an interesting talking point. I see it a lot with folks saying things like "when I visited the US i had to wear my backpack backwards to avoid thieves". (a line like that got reposed several times on HN and reddit for a while, it was almost a meme at one point). Living in the US, I never do that ... not worried about thieves. Somehow not robbed. People see some articles or movies and they just assume every negative thing is an enormous / constant threat I think.

corank 2y ago

Have you tried using Google in China? Or post anything that the government/party doesn't like online?