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Notes on China

• sebmellen 2y ago
  I’m only halfway through, but I’m truly impressed with the writing. Very engaging and dense but easy to follow. Dwarkesh is not just a podcast host!
  • npinsker 2y ago
    Agreed, his writing is clear and his tone is pleasantly curious and humble. Was a nice read.
• Leary 2y ago
  Americans: I'm not anti-China, just anti-CCP Chinese: I'm not anti-west, just anti people who are anti-China
  • pydry 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • BobbyJo 2y ago
      > Americans: we're not anti you, we just want to overthrow your government and install a puppet. I don't think Americans want a puppet government. We'd be perfectly happy if they just stopped the IP theft, spying, and maybe treated the Chinese people better. Kind of a shame when you can be thrown in prison just for saying your government did something wrong, or trying to look up history like Tiananmen Square.
      • wumeow 2y ago
        My opinion of China would be much more positive if they weren’t chomping at the bit to invade and annex Taiwan.
        • pydry 2y ago
          My opinion of America would probably be a bit more positive if it only behaved aggressively towards territories that were internationally recognized as being part of America. This isnt to excuse China's belligerence, just to put its actions in perspective, something which American nationalists vehemently object to.
          • 1659447091 2y ago
            > just to put its actions in perspective To put Chinas actions in perspective, they continue acts of aggression towards the Philippines in internationally recognized Philippine territory that they wish to control.
      • pydry 2y ago
        >I don't think Americans want a puppet government. The average american doesnt but the elites who feed the average american opinion forming propaganda certainly do. And this is why the average american would draw this distinction - the opinion forming propaganda they are fed draws this distinction. >We'd be perfectly happy if they just stopped the IP theft, spying, and maybe treated the Chinese people better. America had a perfectly good relationship with China when it was weaker and it did all of the same stuff in the past. Now it has become powerful what was once tolerated is now unforgiveable. For American elites China's real crime is being powerful. It tolerates genocide (Israel), spying on America (Israel), BRUTAL disrespect for human rights on a scale that far eclipses China (Saudi), but what it doesnt tolerate ever is imperial rivals.
        • talldayo 2y ago
          The political and financial elite have not advocated for a puppet government ever. Like Europe benefits from cheap Russian gas, American businesses took full advantage of China's ignorance of human rights. The prevailing American diplomatic strategy since the 70s has been to use globalist reform to force hermit kingdoms to sit at the discussion table. It ultimately worked in the case of the USSR - extreme sanctions and paranoia forced a collapse of their government after their leaders refused to fully cooperate with NATO. China is unique, in that this strategy was squarely aimed at them but ended up being turned around completely. China used their autocratic authority to embrace international trade and create incentives to develop a surplus even when their own citizens couldn't keep up with enough demand. Where the USSR denied progress in civilian industries, China embraced and sponsored it. Capitalism saw the benefits, cheap plastic garbage started getting shipped worldwide, and the free market became addicted to unsustainable, low-margin products that were often made in the hands of indentured political ideologues. It's a problem you can solve without a "puppet government" if you create a reasonable basis of accountability and negotiation for both countries. America doesn't reject that, China does. > For American elites China's real crime is being powerful. America tolerates all sorts of morally reprehensible and powerful nations. We sell half of them weapons and then turn around and deny responsibility on a regular basis. China knows they could be an American ally... if it benefit them. The whataboutism spread by the CCP is meant to frustrate American nationalist sentiments, but it doesn't explain why their approach is superior. Truly, China can be as powerful as they want, as long as their interests are aligned with the international community and not the other way around. If the world lets China use their strength to decide who is morally correct, then it's the international community that is the puppet government.
      • janalsncm 2y ago
        Frankly, human rights is mostly a talking point. The US allies itself with plenty of other countries with poor human rights records. Saudi Arabia kidnapped a US resident and cut him into pieces but I have never heard any serious noises about ending that friendship. Is Saudi Arabia’s treatment of gay people or women even a consideration? No. Political expediency is. China is the US’s chief geopolitical rival, Saudi Arabia is not.
        • talldayo 2y ago
          > Is Saudi Arabia’s treatment of gay people or women even a consideration? No. With a reductive enough set of criteria, you could say this of any ally of any nation anywhere in the world. If China was allied with the US instead of adversarial, you'd probably be calling out American tolerance of the Xinjiang cotton industry. But there is serious scrutiny of it, enabled by a remove from Chinese politics and party-aligned thought. If China respected the criticism they received from abroad, they would have a much clearer path to being a respected international power. From an American perspective, partnership with the Saudis isn't completely irredeemable. In fact, things are going pretty well - womens rights were enhanced (albeit not fixed), cultural reform succeeded, Sharia law was partially denounced and minors were exempted from the death sentence. As opposed to what would have happened without diplomatic relations, these citizens would have suffered even greater injustice. Giving Saudi Arabia an obligation to the international community actually did improve the conditions of their government and the people living there. It didn't magically correct things overnight, but the thaw is working. If you really want to make Americans piss their breeches, just mention Israel. That is a proper example of an unrepentant US ally that has abused the trust of the international community and continues to deviate from the global basis of human rights. Khashoggi dies, and the world is up in arms. The Mossad or the IDF does the same thing, and everyone asks why you're surprised since Israel has been targeting journalists for decades. Of course, American nationalists treat Israel the way Chinese nationalists treat Tiananmen Square. The idea of it being a problem is denied - instead, it's a "small chapter in history", "it was justified", "it all happened so long ago" and "we can't do anything to fix it".
        • BobbyJo 2y ago
          You'd be surprised to learn that most Americans also do not like how Saudi Arabia treats its citizens as well. How we feel about a government, and how we interact with it geopolitically, are two different things. We do not like how either of these two governments does things, but we coexist with them to the extent necessary because we share a planet. We trade with both for instance. We are free to feel how we want, and talk about it, and its the government's job to safeguard that freedom with pragmatic and necessary relationships.
    • lacy_tinpot 2y ago
      "No more regime change wars" is literally accused of being a populist slogan.
      • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. In the US, anyone can accuse anything of being a populist slogan, and there's generally no penalties for repeating or adhering to a slogan someone else feels is populist. I've never faced even mild consequences for my vocal belief that the US should stop fighting regime change wars.
        • pydry 2y ago
          Try leaking evidence of a war crime. Something we would consider heroic if a Russian or Chinese dissident did it. You will get nailed to a tree.
          • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
            I've faced no consequences at all for repeatedly telling people that the US has committed war crimes and pointing them to evidence of said war crimes. It's true, of course, that you'll go to jail for a bit if you obtain a security clearance and then violate it, but even then I don't think it's reasonable to characterize that as "nailed to a tree". Chelsea Manning lives freely in the US and is quite popular in some circles; my understanding is that China generally imposes the death penalty for similar leaks (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/6/china-hands-death-sentence-to-state-secrets-leaker https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/6/china-hands-death-s...).
            • janalsncm 2y ago
              > Chelsea Manning lives freely in the US This leaves out the fact that the President of the United States commuted her sentence. She was originally sentenced to 35 years in maximum security prison, which is longer than some murder sentences. If your point is that speaking out against the government carries fewer penalties in the US than China, we should assume whistleblowers will receive the full punishment for doing so. While a 35 year sentence is probably better than a death sentence, its not something I would plant a flag in.
    • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      They want us to stop meddling in what they claim to be their territory. I can see why they want it. What I can't see is why they should expect us to give it to them.
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    In Seattle, in the summer we have anti-CPC protests almost every Saturday run by Chinese Americans I assume, I think it is driven by Falan Dafa though. The biggest critics of the CPC seem to be ethnic Chinese though (well, or other ethnicities present in China or Asia as a whole), not generally European descended Americans.
    • HDThoreaun 2y ago
      And all the cubans in the US hate castro. Its not a representative sample. Also its CCP not CPC
      • marcosdumay 2y ago
        When all the immigrants from some place are there because they are running from the same thing, yes, that's very representative.
        • bboygravity 2y ago
          The few Chinese I met who managed to (permanently) escape China after covid consider themselves extremely lucky. Biased sample, maybe. Life doesn't seem easy for (young) folks in China right now and Winnie doesn't seem to be very popular among them.
        • olalonde 2y ago
          The CCP is actually widely popular in mainland China.
          • rad_gruchalski 2y ago
            Russia is popular in Russia. All North Koreans you would be allowed to speak to in North Korea love North Korea. What a news.
            • olalonde 2y ago
              I used to share this view but it turned out to be naive. After living in China for over a decade I can confidently say that the majority of Chinese actually support the CCP. I know, it's hard to believe for us Westerners.
  • maxglute 2y ago
    Americans: >If I was the US President, and I wanted to win hearts and minds in China, here's what I'd do. In every single speech where I'm talking about China, I'd make a conspicuous effort to complement Chinese people, Chinese values, and Chinese culture. I'd talk about how my Chinese staffers are the smartest and most hardworking people I've ever worked with (which honestly is probably true). I'd talk about how much my daughter is obsessed with ancient Chinese dresses. I'd talk about how I'm learning Mandarin in my free time, and have a live "Aw shucks" conversation in Mandarin. It's kind of incredible this is a serious suggestion. "Our foreign policy is to punch you in the face, but now we're also going to lie about our enmity to gaslight you, because we think you're that naive and stupid". PRC nationals also not going to buy a word of it when the central narrative is economic / military containment. New gen of patriots/nationalisms doesn't seek western validation anymore. Few in PRC is going to be fooled as long as sanctions / export controls are ongoing and US military bases are around. People not that gullible. There's also the 100,000s of international students and millions of diasphora to report back all the sinophobic shit happening in the west despite honeyed words.
• arnvald 2y ago
  > I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China - who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn't exist there I have never heard of Sam Harris, but are the other 3 the prominent examples of American intellectual ecosystem? I haven’t listened to them a lot, but in the couple examples of Friedman’s or Rogan’s podcast episodes I listened to, they let their guests say whatever anti-intellectual bs they wanted, without trying to correct the guests. Maybe I chose the wrong episodes?
  • modeless 2y ago
    I appreciate podcasters who let their guests talk. I'm not listening to hear the the host. I'll form my own opinions, thank you very much.
  • mwkaufma 2y ago
    Ask a podcaster to name intellectuals, and they just name other podcasters.
  • throwup238 2y ago
    “Intellectual landscape” is way over selling it. Joe Rogan used to host a reality tv show where people ate cockroaches for money. They’re little more than glorified influencers.
  • BadHumans 2y ago
    Jordan Peterson is intelligent when he is in his field I will give him that but calling Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman intellectuals should be a crime.
  • JackMorgan 2y ago
    Jordan Peterson, Lex Friedman, and Joe Rogan are conservative, right-wing entertainers. They are not widely accepted as intellectuals, but rather as entertaining lecturers and interviewers who are quite biased. That the author would consider them public intellectuals is fascinating and speaks to their worldview and media consumption habits.
• max_ 2y ago
  I love Dwarkesh's guests. My problem with this podcast, is that the host talks too fast. I have found this rushed "fast" talking amongst westerners, but few seem to complain about it. Any one else experience this?
  • ajb 2y ago
    Hmm, I only listened briefly but it sounds a normal rate to me. Perhaps the high end of norma; podcasters do want to convey enthusiasm and that often translates to speed. As an aside, some people whose first language is not English speak English too fast, because their first language uses fewer phonemes and hence uses a higher syllable rate to reach the same information rate. I wondered if that might be the case here, but this sounds like a native speaker.
    • roncesvalles 2y ago
      Just an aside, notions of "first language" and "second language" don't work well in Indian and other Asian contexts. Often, the language that people learn first (their "mother tongue") would be a local language (say, Marathi) which eventually ends up being the second- or third-best language that they know, superseded by Hindi and English. So, for many urban middle-class Indians, English is actually their "first language" as in the language they know best, even though it might be the third language in the order that they learned it. (Actually, even the notion of learning them in an "order" applies only loosely because you'd be learning all 3 languages at the same time). This is also true for many Chinese people. E.g. a person's mother tongue may be Shanghainese but eventually they learn Mandarin and English to a much more advanced degree than Shanghainese.
      • ajb 2y ago
        Oh, that's good to know, thanks.
  • rocmcd 2y ago
    Yes, Dwarkesh does speak quite fast, though I think much of it is nervousness and excitement. He spoke even faster in his first few interviews, but learned to tone it down. Bryan Caplan even mentioned it to him in one of his interviews. I wouldn't say it's representative of westerners, but more of hyper-active, eager intellectuals (over-represented in the programming world, from my experience). Marc Andreessen is another example of someone who talks very fast.
• jncfhnb 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Yea not knowing why cameras are everywhere is naive. And the fix to “winning” Chinese citizens over is to dismantle the CCP, by practicing asymmetric warfare - like economically weakening them - until citizens are ready for change.
    • ahazred8ta 2y ago
      In the 1980s, "Reagan's great director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, asked the CIA's Soviet Division two obvious questions: Where is the Soviet Union weak? and Where is it most vulnerable? The answer he received was: We don't know. No one's ever asked this before."
  • rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    So he would be doing exactly what the Chinese government wants. As a US president the guy would shoot himself in the foot.
    • CobrastanJorji 2y ago
      It's not wrong, though. If your goal is purely "win hearts and minds in China," doing whatever the Chinese government wants is good step. It is, however, not clear that this would be a good primary goal for a US president.
      • oldasfuk 2y ago
        Clearly it would only win hearts, the point of winning minds is to persuade them to your viewpoint. If you really want to win hearts alone, drop all visa and foreign registration requirements, close Pacific military bases, cede Hawaii. There's so much you can do to win hearts.
• talldayo 2y ago
  > Another person told me that these Chinese nationalists were only a vocal minority, similar to the wokes in America circa 2020. I have no idea what this is supposed to elicit from me as a reader. "[A] vocal minority, similar to the wokes" ...that won the election? It feels like you could say this for every American election year and it would sound equally as stupid. In 2012 it was the economic reformists and pro-regulation pundits, in 2016 it was virulent anti-woke crowd and staunch defenders of nationalism. So on and so forth. Were any of these really minority opinions, or was it that they were hot-topic issues at the time that divided voting citizens along party lines?
  • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    The point is that, if your only exposure to American public opinion was Twitter, you might get an unrealistic view of how to understand the relationship between public opinion and government policy. It's not the case that the 2020 election proves the American people broadly endorse the most extreme left-wing thought on Twitter, any more than the Twitter ownership change and 2024 election proves that the American people have now become extreme right-wing devotees.
• ksynwa 2y ago
  > This layout seems designed partly for social control - during zero-COVID, authorities could lock down 10,000 people by simply guarding a few entrance gates. The wide roads would also make it easy to move military forces through the city. This seems like a bit of a leap? Apart from zero covid, which I say is an exceptional scenario, I haven't heard of Chinese people socially controlled en masse into their home through use of force. The idea of military driving through the middle of city is even more ridiculous.
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Covid was an exceptional scenario and also a convenient test period for that control. As for moving military forces into cities - it would be very viable. Look at any situation on leaked social media where police or state actors are shutting down protests - for example when masses of Chinese citizens demonstrate against their employer or real estate scammers or banks or whatever. The authorities have an easy ability to bring lots of personnel and gear to any situation quickly. Then there’s the dystopian stuff that ranges from social credit scores preventing use of public transit to police drones patrolling the air between apartment buildings telling citizens to stay home. The Chinese society is under mass control all the time from all sides.
  • regularization 2y ago
    Most western cities were designed with such things in mind. Look at Haussmann's renovation of Paris. Why do you think all those armories were built in US industrial cities at the turn of the 20th century? The odd thing is he makes it sound like China designs its cities with concerns not seen in the West.
  • KeplerBoy 2y ago
    It's not a secret or chinese thing. European kings and emperors also had their cities remodeled to stack the odds in their favor in case they had to deal with uprisings.
  • rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    > The idea of military driving through the middle of city is even more ridiculous. Okay… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protes...
• wahisurf 2y ago
  > These endless rows of skyscrapers, put up in the construction frenzy of the last few decades, are ugly And dangerous, and won't last more than a few decades. Just watch some of the tofu dreg videos https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1eyUAZCb3sA https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1eyUAZCb3sA > There were very few foreigners. In Beijing I might have seen half a dozen cumulatively across entire seas of people Most foreigners from US and Europe have left after the COVID lockdown - they've seen with their own eyes the true nature of authoritarian/dictatorship regime. Also, the closer relationship of Russia and China has many unable to stomach supporting a regime that attacks Ukraine, another democracy. The foreigners are now from Africa, Middle East, or Belt and Road countries. > Outside of Shanghai, almost nobody spoke English. This is why China will be irrelevant in a few decades, as it recedes into its own shell. When most export manufacturing will have moved to Southeast Asia, when domestic goods is preferred over foreign goods, when export dwindles due to sanctions and tariffs, when it gets harder to harder for average citizens to obtain passports. China will be closed off just like the 18th century, just how Xi Jing Ping wants it. > many young people expressed feeling stressed or overwhelmed Imagine that you just graduated, and no one is hiring in your fields. And you can only drive didi or meituan, but the pay is decreasing fast, and there are 20+ idle drivers at lunchtime every day, and you are only making $300/month. And next year, there will be another 12+ million graduates - the size of the entire population of Sweden. You are trying to look for a job in another country, but travelling outside the country is discouraged and passports are hard to get. > The biggest surprise from talking to Chinese VCs people at AI labs was how capital constrained they felt China’s startup scene is dead as investors pull out—’Today, we are like lepers’ https://fortune.com/2024/09/14/china-economy-startup-creation-venture-capital-fundraising-investors-xi-jinping/ https://fortune.com/2024/09/14/china-economy-startup-creatio...
  • infecto 2y ago
    Tofu dreg is not as large of a problem as it once was but I agree on the other points. I am interested to see if their monoculture experiment works. My armchair analysis has always been they made mistakes alienating foreigners as much as they historically did pre covid. With the lack of any way to get citizenship and the general hostility towards non Chinese.
  • 2y ago
• nyokodo 2y ago
  > I asked him what the hardest part of ramping up production is - apparently constructing factories is just not an issue - tons of construction firms can make you a new facility quite reliably (along with the adjacent dorm room building for workers). He never finishes this thought but moves on to a new topic. I want to know what he said in reply!
• clpmsf 2y ago
  Why is this guy so popular of late? Is it because he manages to book interesting podcast guests? He doesn't seem to have any particularly interesting or impressive original thoughts on display...
  • DevX101 2y ago
    He's pretty good at curating very smart people and interviewing them. There's no shortage of interviews with double talking politicians and polemicists so podcasts like his are a breath of fresh air. I'm not watching his podcasts to learn about Dwarkesh, but to learn what his guests have to say.
  • janalsncm 2y ago
    Tend to agree. His interview with Leopold Aschenbrenner and subsequent interview with François Chollet revealed a pretty obvious LLM maximalist position. Kind of off-putting.
  • screye 2y ago
    The bar for wide-audience podcasters and interviewers is low. They're expected to be generalists who can ask good questions, not experts driving the conversation. Now, expertise is valuable for focused Podcasters like Peter Attia for fitness or Razib for population genomics. But, Dwarkesh is trying to cover all tech and wider HN-friendly content. For that purpose, his CS education and knowledge of the tech industry workings are solid. He does a better job than Lex, Rogan, or other tech-adjacent Podcasters. Nowhere near as personable as some of the more mainstream successes. But, when those podcasters get tech guests, we're stuck with tired questions like:"Will AI kill us all?".
• resters 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    > We have our great firewall (Meta) and our social credit score (Meta). Oh, do you, really? What a load of bs. No, you don’t.
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    Meta??? such a bad example :) I don’t have Facebook or Insta or Whatsup or anything owned by Meta and neither do most of my friends. My daughter would not get Face/Insta/… account if you paid her $10k and would flat out laugh at your face just for suggesting it. you may as well as said MySpace here… too funny…
    • resters 2y ago
      Currently TikTok is the only one that is not heavily skewed to promote state-approved content.
      • bdangubic 2y ago
        US state - maybe not. The state of China - perhaps /s Jokes aside, I signed up for TikTok over the summer and while it feels like it is not heavily skewed either way it 100% can be gamed (see Romanian elections)… I believe that the only way social media could be net positive so the society when the comes to politics is with account identity proofing like IAL2. this is also why talking about “freedom of speech” when it comes to social media is ridiculous because while individuals should have freedom of speech (rogue)government-controlled bots are not afforded those same liberties.
  • CobrastanJorji 2y ago
    That's stupid. China's Great Firewall actively blocks people from accessing disfavored international websites, like Google or Wikipedia. Meta is a very popular website, but it doesn't actively block people from using other websites.
• jackcampanella 2y ago
  Curious what led to the decision to use "burner" devices, was it fear of confiscation? I spent 2 weeks in China in 2024 (Tianjin, Tangshan, Chengdu, and Beijing), used Astrill as my VPN on my iphone and macbook pro and didn't experience any connectivity issues or app crashes. I even had a 45min signal voice call with someone state side. I was using Astrill's VIP add-on however. > It's a good reminder that what's lacking in life is not time. It's focus. If you're working on what matters, you can advance leaps and bounds in 8 hours. And if you're just clearing the slog, you can spend a lifetime staying in the same place. This. Incredibly obvious yet incredibly difficult to put into practice day-to-day. Another underrated perk of traveling internationally. All of a sudden, trivial nonsense starts to reveal itself through absence, allowing you to sort accordingly - carries over when you're at your home-base as well.
  • oldasfuk 2y ago
    > > It's a good reminder that what's lacking in life is not time. It's focus. If you're working on what matters, you can advance leaps and bounds in 8 hours. And if you're just clearing the slog, you can spend a lifetime staying in the same place. bahahaha literally spoken by a 24 year-old. Let's see if he thinks time is not a limiter at 48. With any self-awareness the profound truth he should be saying: Life can be abnormally easy when you're handsome and charistmatic.
  • MisterTea 2y ago
    > Curious what led to the decision to use "burner" devices, When visiting you are required to install a tracking app. At that point your phone is considered compromised. So you bring a burner that gets infected instead and you toss afterwards.
    • 1659447091 2y ago
      > When visiting you are required to install a tracking app Do you have details on this? I visited a little before Covid went down and that was not the case at the time. Been wanting to go back before my visa expires
    • olalonde 2y ago
• Animats 2y ago
  "One explanation I heard while there is that there are plenty of menial jobs available, but today's educated youth - who've gone through high school and college - just won't take the low-skilled positions their parents and grandparents did. Meanwhile, there's a real shortage of the high-skilled jobs that would actually match their education and aspirations. It's a mismatch between the jobs available and the jobs young people feel qualified for and willing to do." Same problem the US has. Too much education for the job market. Only about half of US college graduates have jobs that actually need a college education. The last time China had this problem, Mao said "It is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside and undergo re-education by poor peasants." 40 million students were rusticated. Historically, this leads to unrest. Egypt hit this, with good education but, especially post oil boom, not many jobs that needed it.
  • f1shy 2y ago
    This is happening all around the globe, I would argue. There is title (hyper)-inflation. In the EU are just lots of PhD, doing jobs that hardly require more than some basic training.
  • rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    > Same problem the US has. Too much education for the job market. Quite a stark contrast to arguments used by the soon-in-power in the current US H-1B political kerfuffle. However, this is happening in a lot of places.
  • maxglute 2y ago
    TBF very simple (not easy, but anticipated) structural problem: currently PRC ~5 years into ~20 year period where the intersection of cohort from when PRC had higher TFR - was generating 15m+ new borns while simultaneously massively expanding tertiary capacity and enrollment (single digit to 60% and increasing). Unsurprisingly (and again anticipated when scale of academic reforms was being proposed) sought after air conditioned office jobs hasn't kept pace to frankly stupendous tertiary expansion, meanwhile tuition doesn't drive PRC student into crippling debt, and parents have high savings % to doddle kids who can afford to fuck around. Broad unemployment is steady ~5% - sooner or later youth will enter workforce doing less desirable jobs when they realize they're not tier1 material. Same with all the ones now chillaxing in tier2+ cities, not everyone makes the grind in NYC either. West simply had to deal with academic inflation earlier and culture have already learned to live with paper degrees. If one followed the domestic/elite debate 30 years ago (project 211/985), it was exceedingly obvious CCP decided it was more useful to max out the dial to brrrrt teritary talent generation even if it means eventual talent oversupply and opportunity mismatch. At end of the day, more useful to have excess talent where top minds are discovered and coordinated, then not. Teritiary talent can fail back to delivering DiDi, but undereducated DiDi driver not going to work in fabs. Still given PRC youth unemployment rates, the % employed is still integrating ~2-3x more STEM workforce per year vs US (excluding non STEM technical fields). They have massive relative youth unemployment, but massive absolute youth employment that has closed the STEM/technical #s with US in last decade, and set to lead for decade(s). Like if current trend/ratio continues, PRC set to add 40M stem in next 20 years, about as much US projected to gain population total (births + immigration). The talent:opportunity gap will eventually close since new cohorts moving from 15m new birth years to 9 million (and declining) new births, i.e. if PRC keep pace with high skilled job generation (difficult), they'll eventually experience (skilled) talent shortage, but by then they may well have OECD combined in high end talent in the workforce. There isn't going to be rustication, unless you count mediocre people realizing they're doomed to mediocre work in mediocre location rustication. And ultimately, that's what all the developing tier2/3+ cities and interior provinces is about, why CCP was lolling at all the naive (western) urbanists trying to convince them to increase tier1 density to increase productivity and follow zipf scaling. CCP solution is to tell people NYC is full, but here, we build multiple NYC alternatives, with comparable amenities, slower pace for the mediocre/mids (not meant to disparage but mere statistic reality), but you'll end up making 1/2 the money but have same or better QoL because local PPP is scaled accordingly. They're not moving people to the countryside, they're moving people to other world class cities.
• xg15 2y ago
  > We saw again and again small paddy farms surrounding a handful of 5-10 story skyscraper, plopped in the seeming middle of nowhere. Without wanting to invalidate any of his points, but his use of "skyscraper" seems a bit inflationary if he includes 10 story apartment high-rises in it.
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    That was the original definition. I mean, that was from 100 years ago, and language does drift over time. Still, it's not an outlandish definition.