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Fiendish_Ghoul posted:By the way, I just wanted to point out for anyone who didn't know, since the OP didn't, that the tub of guts at the top of the post is Mao's grandson. Looks like someone needs to take a couple of Long Marches, har har. Edit: Here, have some Mao Xinyu for Page Three:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHyNy7OHeNQ Ladies and gentlemen, a Ph.D. and Major General. A Youtube Commenter posted:He ate all the Food during the Great Leap Forward, no wonder 30 million Chinese died from starvation... 
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GlassEye-Boy posted:Glib, generalizations aside, in all reality you'll have more problems with the cops in the US than in China on a every day basis. It's only when things get serious that the troubles with the system pop up. As long as you don't do something stupid(carry illegal drugs, murder someone, molest children, support Tibet independence openly, etc.), you, as a foreigner will be fine. In fact, the Chinese justice system values the life of a foreigner more than the Chinese citizen.
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Feb 17, 2012 12:12
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DerDestroyer posted:So what's the best way to avoid trouble with the police in China then? It sounds like there are a lot of ways you can get arrested in spite of being mostly harmless to society. Don't piss off the government or people in power or do something heinously bad and you'll be fine. The proliferation of internet access has made it much more difficult for the govt and local officials to exercise their power with impunity. The Li Gang incident mentioned above wouldn't have made any significant news 15 years ago. The government is juggling over exactly how to manage increasing education standards and information access which leads to some ridiculous - though to be honest not entirely dissimilar to our situation in the US/Europe - decisions like mandating real-name registration on social networks. The key difference of course is that you're not likely to be afforded much in the way of legal protection if you use a social network to do something verboten. As long as you're not an overt political dissident and you don't mess with the wrong crowds, you can get away with a surprising amount. Gambling is illegal, but you'll often see some little shops in Beijing covered with thick drapes during the winter and converted into full-on gambling shops. People are skirting the firewall with access to [fill in the blank] or "internet accelerators". I remember the first time I went to China I expected the streets of Beijing to be rammed with a police presence. Instead there appeared to be fewer uniformed officers on the streets than in London and military personal were concentrated on key locations, just as in London.
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Feb 17, 2012 12:28
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Hong XiuQuan posted:
There will be a good amount of non-uniformed cops in densely crowded areas where tourists will be. The Tiananmen Square area is rife with them, ready at a moment's notice to rectify anything that will cause harm to the harmonious tranquility in the People's Republic. If one wants to seek somewhere that resembles martial law, I suggest Tibet or Xinjiang. Here is a video of an insidious Western reporter recording the brave PRC internal security personnel ensuring peace and harmony.
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Feb 17, 2012 12:56
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Ronald Spiers posted:There will be a good amount of non-uniformed cops in densely crowded areas where tourists will be. The Tiananmen Square area is rife with them, ready at a moment's notice to rectify anything that will cause harm to the harmonious tranquility in the People's Republic. Which is no different to most western countries. Ronald Spiers posted:If one wants to seek somewhere that resembles martial law, I suggest Tibet or Xinjiang. Here is a video of an insidious Western reporter recording the brave PRC internal security personnel ensuring peace and harmony. You've posted a video from the province during the riots. What's happening in both the named provinces is heinous, but the military presence is the least concerning aspect. If you want to bang on about something, it should be the not-so-subtle government-supported ethnic redistribution by way of Han migration. That's a far bigger danger to those provinces than the military presence. Hong XiuQuan fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 14:17
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Hong XiuQuan posted:Don't piss off the government or people in power or do something heinously bad and you'll be fine. The proliferation of internet access has made it much more difficult for the govt and local officials to exercise their power with impunity. The Li Gang incident mentioned above wouldn't have made any significant news 15 years ago. The government is juggling over exactly how to manage increasing education standards and information access which leads to some ridiculous - though to be honest not entirely dissimilar to our situation in the US/Europe - decisions like mandating real-name registration on social networks. The key difference of course is that you're not likely to be afforded much in the way of legal protection if you use a social network to do something verboten. Don't have time for a long post right now, but the distinction between types of police forces -- the PAP, MPS, MSS and the units of the PSB at various levels -- is really important. Local police in China seem and are much more "local" than those in Western countries -- they are more deeply involved in the small, 3-5 block precinct their station serves, from what I can tell. Your local PSB folks are more like rural sheriffs in the US used to be -- they know people's business and address and history, and the comings and goings of the area well. They can also be corrupt as hell, like local sheriffs used to be, but they're usually not directly politically oppressive unless they have a very unusual, specific reason to be.
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Feb 17, 2012 14:31
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french lies posted:
Yeah, that's the really funny/sad thing. I read a thing or two he wrote (and saw some of his handwriting) and he comes off as near-retarded. His Ph.D. is about as legit as that of his comrade is near-retardation Kong Qingdong.
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Feb 17, 2012 18:53
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Ronald Spiers posted:If one wants to seek somewhere that resembles martial law, I suggest Tibet or Xinjiang. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/02/tibetans-and-han-are-one-family/ US forces rolling into Iraq under the figurative banner of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was bad enough. China, on the other hand, doesn't even bother with keeping it figurative.
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Feb 17, 2012 18:59
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GlassEye-Boy posted:Glib, generalizations aside, in all reality you'll have more problems with the cops in the US than in China on a every day basis. It's only when things get serious that the troubles with the system pop up. Eh, it depends. In plenty of areas, for natives, you can get shaken down by the cops for bribes, protection, etc. It's certainly no worse than any other developing country with corruption issues, but it's definitely a different sort of interaction than what most Americans are used to. But yeah, they usually don't pick on people just to do it. But god help you if you get in the way of some local party cadre/crooked businessman who wants to steal your land or something. Also, as another poster noted, there's a lot of different police-like institutions in China and they're all sort of different. I will try to find a chart or something because it's pretty drat complicated. As with many other areas of the Chinese government, there's multiple groups with heavily overlapping jurisdiction and powers, and conflicts are handled through negotiation and custom (and plenty of bullshit and dick-waving). For instance, at the national level, the two big ministries under the State Council of the PRC in the law enforcement arena are the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and the Ministry of State Security (MSS), both of which have police powers. Then there's the PLA which also does some law enforcement. And the People's Armed Police (PAP) which is a paramilitary police unit which is technically under the MPS, but also has connections to the PLA. The PAP also handles fire-fighting in many areas. Then there's the provincial public security departments, which are nominally subordinate to the MPS, as are the local PSBs. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 20:07
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Their have been a few articles about what China's economy really looks like (a couple in WSJ, Bloomberg and one in Mcleans recently). The most interesting part of it all was the idea that most of China's consumer economy is basically for show for westerns visiting. I think the best comparison I saw was China is in the same place as Georgian England. An absolute dominate upper class, a very small middle class and everyone else basically serves them. Of course the major difference is China is trying to pretend everyone is in the second group.
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Feb 17, 2012 20:10
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Cream_Filling posted:Eh, it depends. In plenty of areas, for natives, you can get shaken down by the cops for bribes, protection, etc. It's certainly no worse than any other developing country with corruption issues, but it's definitely a different sort of interaction than what most Americans are used to. The law enforcement structure of China looks something like this:  Here, the body of a box indicates who controls it, while the border indicates who staffs it for the most part and arrows represent aid and control between agencies in practice. For example, the PAP is controlled by the CMC and MPS jointly, but mostly staffed by CMC/PLA personnel, and helps out the on-the-street law enforcement fairly often with heavy lifting. Therefore it is a red box with a red border (effective CMC control and CMC personnel), a green arrow of control from the MPS on the ground, and a red arrow to the PSBs on the ground. The State Council is technically the endorser of all law enforcement. Under the State Council, there are two main agencies, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The Ministry of State Security (MSS) is a foreign and domestic espionage, political intelligence, and sensitive missions ministry. They have authority to do domestic law enforcement in the nation, too, but don't do much. Think of them as a combination of the CIA, FBI, and the House Un-American-Activities Commission -- the only exception being they don't actually have the kind of personnel and firepower the FBI does in the US, but they have all the listening equipment and intelligence gathering and stuff. The MSS is connected to both the PLA and the CMC, but also to the State Council, making it a very powerful but also very politically sensitive organization. Within the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), there are three or four big distinctions. There is the People's Armed Police (PAP). These are the ATF and SWAT and FBI heavy units of China's domestic police force. They enforce the law in politically sensitive areas of the country and act as the most effective riot police available. Often, they are the ones acting in major drug busts and border enforcement. They are literally The Goddamn Army In Disguise -- they even share command with the Central Military Commission without being part of the PLA. There are at least a million PAP troops in China on active duty. If you want a rough analogy, it would be as if we had the National Guard mobilized at all times to do a lot of our law enforcement work. They're technially under the control of the MPS, but in reality a lot of their control and power is with the Central Military Commmission (CMC), the high command of the PLA and one of China's paramount Party leadership bodies. The second is the Public Security Bureau. This is the overarching term for the general law enforcement offices in every city, town, county, and neighborhood and all their central offices. It's worth distinguishing between different offices in the PSB, though. There are Domestic Affairs offices of the PSB -- they do everything from visa processes, visitor tracking, traffic control and planning, to 'public security' functions like making sure no one is living in abandoned buildings and so on. These folks tend to operate out of big, centralized offices in one city or district and are more administrative than law-enforcement. They can be notoriously corrupt, because they control so many important functions and privileges. Then there are Local Offices, which are very small stations with between 6-30 (usually) uniformed PSB members that act like I mentioned earlier in the thread -- community police, like the good and the bad parts of the local sheriffs of rural American lore. They're often the real focus of corruption protests -- and in situations where the local administrative/domestic affairs offices are in cahoots with the PSB, you're in trouble. The PSB is also often the go-to for other domestic security functions, like firefighting, though sometimes the PAP help with that because of their greater access to money and equipment through the CMC connection. Also in the MPS' purview is law enforcement policy, economic crimes and fraud, and even information censorship and policing policy. The folks who work in these divisions are basically separate from the PRC, and act like an extended "justice department" at a national and provincial level. BrotherAdso fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 20:48
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A more apt comparison of the PAP would be something like the armed forces of the Russian MVD or Ministry of the Interior. One thing that Most of the FSU states retained such a force and it's common in many authoritarian countries, like Iraq, and the German Bundespolizei or French Gendarmerie Nationale are a bit more distantly similar. It wasn't that long ago when the French Army tried to launch a coup, after all. Anglo Saxon countries generally don't have so many internal security threats as to need such an organization, there isn't really a British or American equivilant.
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Feb 17, 2012 21:14
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Throatwarbler posted:A more apt comparison of the PAP would be something like the armed forces of the Russian MVD or Ministry of the Interior. One thing that Most of the FSU states retained such a force and it's common in many authoritarian countries, like Iraq, and the German Bundespolizei or French Gendarmerie Nationale are a bit more distantly similar. It wasn't that long ago when the French Army tried to launch a coup, after all. I tend to assume I'm writing for an American audience, which is why I had such a kludged together analogy for the PAP. The MVD are a good analogy, so are the Bundespolizei for sure.
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Feb 17, 2012 21:20
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BrotherAdso posted:I tend to assume I'm writing for an American audience, which is why I had such a kludged together analogy for the PAP. The MVD are a good analogy, so are the Bundespolizei for sure. Yeah, The British and American governments generally aren't worried that some rogue army unit is going to storm the Capitol/Parliment because they want to keep fighting in Afghanistan forever and also a pay raise or something, but throughout the world it's more the exception than the rule. The PAP/MVD/Gendarmarie Nationale are huge and heavily armed/trained to almost equal levels as the regular army for a reason, and it isn't law enforcement.
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Feb 17, 2012 21:32
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Don't worry fellow Americans, we're busy militarizing our police forces, too. We'll be goddamned if we let the Chinese and Europeans beat us. We'll just give machine guns and body armor to local cops, though, so hopefully that doesn't affect your day to day...
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Feb 17, 2012 21:56
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Hong XiuQuan posted:You've posted a video from the province during the riots. That's a video from a few days ago, not 2008. Right now most of Kardze and Ngaba prefectures are under de facto martial law, and areas like Ngaba town have been for months. And yeah, there are far more insidious things happening than the overt military presence, but abusive militarized police deployments have been heightening tensions everywhere they go recently. The han chauvinism of the military and your average PAP member means they treat locals like poo poo, and that has a huge effect on whether or not these conflicts escalate. Electro-Boogie Jack fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Feb 18, 2012 |
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Feb 18, 2012 01:30
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sbaldrick posted:The most interesting part of it all was the idea that most of China's consumer economy is basically for show for westerns visiting. Think about how dumb this sounds. Think about what a stupid idea it is. Countries do not go through major economic and class structure shifts for the benefit of foreign opinion. I live with middle-class Chinese people, see them every day, and I am aware of a large number of them that I don't personally know. Granted, I live in a large city, but China's population is rapidly shifting towards urban living. I would say the majority of people I see every day are poor and not middle class, but the middle class definitely exists. And they buy things. The department stores everywhere, electronics supermarkets, clothes retailers huge and small, western franchises moving in, these are supposed to be a facade to impress poor expats like me? The Chinese people I see buying things in them must be part of an elaborate government coverup squad to convince me there's not a huge native consumer economy in my city. Even my Chinese friends must be in on it, they have nice things in their homes sometimes. Oh god, the woman who sells friend noodles and dumplings down the alley who lives in a loft over her store has a television and a washing machine! Where did she get those!? The consumer economy conspiracy is everywhere! 
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Feb 18, 2012 06:33
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China has consumer culture, but their consumption share of GDP is low and a goal of Chinese leadership is to raise private consumption a great deal. I think the expected successor to Jiabao wanted to target something like 11-12% growth by 2015, which is still pretty low.
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Feb 18, 2012 07:59
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Oh hi shots shots shots, are you chiming in on anything relevant to my post or just throwing out random statistics? And do you mean Xi Jinping?
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Feb 18, 2012 09:02
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Arglebargle III posted:Oh hi shots shots shots, are you chiming in on anything relevant to my post or just throwing out random statistics? And do you mean Xi Jinping? Yes, consumption share of GDP is very relevant when talking about consumer behavior. With a very low percentage that's been resistant to change, it represents a serious problem with regard to consumer spending, especially in an already poor country.
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Feb 18, 2012 09:20
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shots shots shots posted:Yes, consumption share of GDP is very relevant when talking about consumer behavior. With a very low percentage that's been resistant to change, it represents a serious problem with regard to consumer spending, especially in an already poor country. 1) You should post what the share of GDP is down to consumption. China Daily seems to think it was 36% in 2011. 2) You should post what the share has been over the last 5-10 years so you can substantiate that it's resistant to change. 3) You should substantiate your claims about rate of growth and perhaps provide why you think it should be quicker or what the Chinese could do to increase the rate. 4) You should also probably provide some sort of comparison between other nations with high rural populations - think the last figure I heard was that it had just crossed the 50% urban mark, but the CIA World Factbook still uses the 2010 46% figure - because while it may be low relative very heavily urbanised western countries, it may not be so low relative other developing nations.
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Feb 18, 2012 14:53
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Oh hey forums poster shots shots shots, glad to see you responded to my question, although it looks like you forgot part of it. I'm gonna guess you were talking about Xi Jinping. Maybe you could have googled him instead of sounding so ignorant? You were responding to my response to a poster who said that Chinese consumer culture was fabricated for the benefit of Western visitors.* I stated that Chinese people do in fact buy things and that their purchasing patterns are not part of a conspiracy to impress Westerners. Do you think your post supports or disagreed with my point? *Sorry, mostly fabricated. Gotta give that guy an out in case he manages to prove Chinese consumer culture is exactly 51% a fraud to convince people like me! Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Feb 18, 2012 |
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Feb 18, 2012 14:54
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Arglebargle III posted:Oh hey forums poster shots shots shots, glad to see you responded to my question, although it looks like you forgot part of it. I'm gonna guess you were talking about Xi Jinping. Maybe you could have googled him instead of sounding so ignorant? quote:Li Keqiang, vice-premier of the State Council, pointed out that the strategy of expanding internal consumption must continue to be implemented, with an emphasis on increasing citizen [consumer] spending. This must be done through measures such as encouraging employment, entrepreneurship and strengthening public services, and a fair adjustment of income distribution, in order to increase the disposable income and buying power of the citizenry. This was made in response to reports earlier last year that consumer spending was down in 2010 from 2009. I also think you're being uncharitable by interpreting the previous comment in a literal sense. To me, it doesn't seem like he's talking about Potemkin villages, but rather that the modern consumer economy in China is largely isolated to first-tier cities and the kind of places that westerners are likely to visit. So a lot of times, you'll have people like Thomas Friedman going to Shanghai, seeing iPhones, and writing enthusiastic op-eds on the importance of Chinese consumers, all while ignoring the fact that the economy is still largely an agrarian and developing economy.
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Feb 18, 2012 15:41
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french lies posted:I also think you're being uncharitable by interpreting the previous comment in a literal sense. To me, it doesn't seem like he's talking about Potemkin villages, but rather that the modern consumer economy in China is largely isolated to first-tier cities and the kind of places that westerners are likely to visit. So a lot of times, you'll have people like Thomas Friedman going to Shanghai, seeing iPhones, and writing enthusiastic op-eds on the importance of Chinese consumers, all while ignoring the fact that the economy is still largely an agrarian and developing economy. Yeah, fooling Thomas Friedman is no evidence of deception. Dude's been a credulous dum-dum since forever. You could tell him the moon was made of cheese if you took him out for golf first and talked about how a cheesemoon economy would globalize our paradigm shifts.
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Feb 18, 2012 18:38
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I haven't heard of Li Keqiang, which is odd because I was just talking about the upcoming power transfer with one of my Chinese coworkers. Still, it's not my fault shots shots shots never bothered to find the name of the person he was paraphrasing. I think it's hard to be charitable to this: quote:The most interesting part of it all was the idea that most of China's consumer economy is basically for show for westerns visiting though. It's a profoundly stupid idea, or a benign idea that's been badly misstated. Either way, as written, it's silly. Saying that the Chinese consumer economy is small relative to GDP or concentrated in large cities is uncontroversial, but it's not what he said at all.
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Feb 18, 2012 18:43
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Wait, so two people who have never heard of Le Keqiang are arguing about something he may or may not have said? He's pretty much one of the top 5 or so important people in China right now... This thread went downhill really fast  I think it's more fair to say that China is stratified, even more stratified than the US. Westerners disproportionately visiting Shanghai and Beijing leads to a false impression that all the Chinese youth are using iPhones and carrying LV bags. Also, it's not wrong to say that China is trying to promote a positive(ie; rich) image to the world, all countries try to do that, through tourism offices and such.
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Feb 18, 2012 19:33
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hitension posted:Wait, so two people who have never heard of Le Keqiang are arguing about something he may or may not have said? He's pretty much one of the top 5 or so important people in China right now... But yeah, China is still basically two countries: a first world country with 200-300 million in it living within a second-third world country (depend on where you are) with a billion people in it.
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Feb 18, 2012 19:50
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hitension posted:Wait, so two people who have never heard of Le Keqiang are arguing about something he may or may not have said? He's pretty much one of the top 5 or so important people in China right now... shots shots shots tends to do that. You may remember when he came into the China Megathread and posted a bunch of unsourced assertions that didn't directly address anything anyone else said yet managed to be argumentative. Hong XiuQuan broke his posts down pretty well so I won't say anything else there. I'm really surprised I didn't know who Li Keqiang was when I looked him up because of this thread, I probably should know someone that important. But I think we can all agree that prosperity and consumer culture in China is distributed quite unevenly, I don't think anyone would dispute that or has disputed that. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 18, 2012 21:02
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You clearly didn't read the rest of my post or know much about Georgian England. As far as most people can tell China has a very small real middle class, a larger upper class and a giant lower class. This mirrors Georgian England despite being said that it was a nation of shopkeepers. Most of China's consumer economy exists for a small fraction of the economy, and it's build out may, and I say may be based on a small fraction of the population. The rest has been built and kept open at this point for western observes of China's internal economic growth. Given that no one knows what China's real internal growth numbers are, it's just spitting in the wind really.
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Feb 18, 2012 22:49
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Glad to see this thread in D&D. I majored in Chinese in undergrad, and am currently teaching English in a rural area. If anyone is interested about Chinese pre-college education, rural life, or the true penetration of standard Mandarin, I'd be happy to contribute. Also, Classical Chinese Poetry. Quick book rec: "Governing Educational Desire" by Andrew Kipnis. More academic, but a great look at Chinese attitudes towards education.
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Feb 19, 2012 02:53
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A really good interview with Vamsi Vakulabharanam about how China and India are not based on the same developmental state model of Japan Korea and Taiwan, and thefore are suffering much higher income stratification than those states did at similar points in their development. He's certainly not a fan of the neoliberal model. http://ineteconomics.org/video/30-ways-be-economist/vamsi-vakulabharanam-inequality-asia-local-effects-global-capitalism
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Feb 19, 2012 03:02
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sbaldrick posted:The rest has been built and kept open at this point for western observes of China's internal economic growth. I'd like you to expand on what you mean by this please.
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Feb 19, 2012 03:59
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Hong XiuQuan posted:I'd like you to expand on what you mean by this please. The some faction in the Chinese government is keeping open high end stories in some areas in an attempt to show that China has a great domestic economic growth then it really does. There are enough stories about China's empty open malls and buildings to show that to some extent China is lying on it's economy.
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Feb 19, 2012 16:39
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sbaldrick posted:The some faction in the Chinese government is keeping open high end stories in some areas in an attempt to show that China has a great domestic economic growth then it really does. There are enough stories about China's empty open malls and buildings to show that to some extent China is lying on it's economy. That conclusion would be a distant 3rd compared to 1) It's anticipation of future growth or 2) It's a bad business decision. Malls get built and not used in the U.S. too. When it happens it's a mistake and people involved pay a heavy price. As it happens this week's Planet Money addressed this directly: The Friday Podcast: Is China's Economy Genius, Or Bound For Disaster?
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Feb 19, 2012 20:32
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asdf32 posted:That conclusion would be a distant 3rd compared to 1) It's anticipation of future growth or 2) It's a bad business decision. Malls get built and not used in the U.S. too. When it happens it's a mistake and people involved pay a heavy price. 3 of the people listed in the OP, Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn, occasionally Bill Bishop and Gady Epstein(the "China" columnist for The Economist) run a podcast series called Sinica, where they talk about all kinds of poo poo and have had both Michael Pettis and Arthur Kroeber on as guests. The podcast shows up in iTunes under "Popup Chinese", a podcast for teaching the Chinese language, and the episodes are all mixed together and you sort of have to read each one to figure out what's what - a strange setup which I suspect they do intentionally to stay somewhat below the radar of the Chinese censors. Unfortunately right now they seem to have having hosting issues (or the MSS are on to them ) and the podcast is inaccesible, but here is a Google cache of the page containing the episode where they do an hour or so long interview with Kroeber and go into the details much more in depth than the 20 min Planet Money episode. Until they come back or someone finds a copy of the file I guess you'll just have to take my word for it that it's a pretty good episode.  http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...n&ct=clnk&gl=ca
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Feb 19, 2012 21:12
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I frequently come across the argument put forth by globalization advocates that outsourcing of manufacturing to China has been a great boon to the citizens and country as a whole, lifting them from poor starving rice farmers to industrious go-getters poised to experience a revolution in living standards. They argue that this excuses a lot of the exploitation because, well, they don't live in grass reed huts anymore. I'm highly suspicious this is nothing but an attempt to rationalize and justify the abuse of foreign workers, but is there even any truth to this claim? Has the standard of living actually increased an appreciable amount as a direct result of jobs created by outsourcing from first world nations?
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Feb 19, 2012 21:15
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McKracken posted:I frequently come across the argument put forth by globalization advocates that outsourcing of manufacturing to China has been a great boon to the citizens and country as a whole, lifting them from poor starving rice farmers to industrious go-getters poised to experience a revolution in living standards. They argue that this excuses a lot of the exploitation because, well, they don't live in grass reed huts anymore. Actually I'm a huge proponent of this argument in general but would also like to hear from people who know more specifically about China.
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Feb 19, 2012 21:22
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McKracken posted:I frequently come across the argument put forth by globalization advocates that outsourcing of manufacturing to China has been a great boon to the citizens and country as a whole, lifting them from poor starving rice farmers to industrious go-getters poised to experience a revolution in living standards. They argue that this excuses a lot of the exploitation because, well, they don't live in grass reed huts anymore. I've only my own personal experience to go on, but the short answer is an unequivocal yes. I moved to the states with my parents almost 25 years ago from a third tier city that pretty much no one in the states has heard of. Since moving I've been back every 3 or 4 years to visit family and every time their standard of living as well as the general standard of living in the city and countryside has gotten better by leaps and bounds. Keep in mind that most of my family are very avg as far as the socio-economic standing in China so it's not merely the elite benefiting.
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Feb 20, 2012 00:53
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McKracken posted:I'm highly suspicious this is nothing but an attempt to rationalize and justify the abuse of foreign workers, but is there even any truth to this claim? Has the standard of living actually increased an appreciable amount as a direct result of jobs created by outsourcing from first world nations? Much as sweatshop conditions are deplorable, the people who work in them aren't (usually) slaves. They come because despite how hard the work is and how modest the wage, it's better than their other options. You don't just see this in China. For all the bad faith and sheer rapacious greed on the part of the factory bosses and foreign investors, sweatshop workers get a better deal than they would back in their home towns. Companies like Foxconn are deplored in the Western world, but they have trained, employed, and (relatively) enriched literally millions of young Chinese women from the rural countryside. Think about what life means for a teenage girl in a tiny village in Hebei. Wouldn't assembling iPads for 12 hours a day actually seem a lot better? Now, is it lovely? Yeah. And it could be better, I don't think anyone would disagree or say that trying to improve working conditions in 3rd world factories is bad. But just as much as factories go to those countries for a reason, the people who come to the factories go there for a reason too. It's an unfortunate truth that the industrial world went through exactly the same trials and tribulations a hundred years ago. Maybe it doesn't have to be like this, but the way it is is better for the locals than they way it was. Hopefully when this process has played out everywhere it will be over for good. Now the impact of all this globalization on the environment is a different story entirely. I often wonder if the standard globalization apologia argument that I've just laid out has a catch, in that it will destroy the world as we know it before the shining future without sweatshops ever arrives.
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Feb 20, 2012 06:50
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Throatwarbler posted:Unfortunately right now they seem to have having hosting issues (or the MSS are on to them Edit: And I'm really glad I did. Very informative podcast, I'll put it in the OP. Some highlights:
quote:Glad to see this thread in D&D. I majored in Chinese in undergrad, and am currently teaching English in a rural area. If anyone is interested about Chinese pre-college education, rural life, or the true penetration of standard Mandarin, I'd be happy to contribute. Also, Classical Chinese Poetry. french lies fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Feb 20, 2012 |
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Feb 20, 2012 08:44
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