Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shanghai sets population at 25M

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 240 posts

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#131

Post by sammyjiang »

jamesoo8 wrote: post #63
volgo wrote: post #58

The problem they're trying to solve is city slums, which is common in Asia. I've worked in India before, and every major city (Delhi, Chennai) is filled with massive slums of migrant workers who obviously haven't kept up with the modern development. Without turning this into a pity post and sounding like an uncultured asshole, it was horrifying to see and really broke my heart that people are living in conditions lik…

I have to say, you know nothing about China. India is not comparable to China in every aspect. You just deduct from things happen in India, that is ridiculous. You said hutong is similar to slum, this showed your ignorance. Go to learn more, then talk about hutong again.

I am a chinese and lived in Beijing for more than 25 years, i have the same feeling with you about how ridiculous it is to compare the hutong with Indian slums and many other wrong and tendentious statements. I will explain in another reply to that guy.

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#132

Post by meri_dian »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #126
meri_dian wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have migrant floods, you get slums. The goal should be regulating the flood, keeping it more tame as a gentle flow over time. The Hukou system is good in this respect. You mention illegal immigration, this is why illegal immigration is bad. It's essentially a flood of people that cannot be supported by the system. Floods are never good, the goal in population transfer should almost always be gradual movement…

The problem isn’t migration it’s clearly the conditions and wages they’re to allowed work for, as you admit. Free movement of human beings should be a human right. Restricting immigration is nothing more than descrimination. In China or the United States for that matter.

That's naive, the wages they're paid are what people are willing to pay them. Most are paid illegally so setting a minimum wage won't really help, and even if the minimum wage was followed, it surely wouldn't provide for a reasonable existence in an expensive major city which attracts migrants.

If you raise the minimum wage high enough so that it provides for a liveable wage in a major city and are able to enforce it, then the amount of people willing to pay migrants for work will collapse and the migrants will stop coming to the city.

So you either accept the conditions and wages the migrants are being paid, or you eliminate the very reason migrants travel to cities in the first place.

I want everyone to live in comfort, but it's much more complicated than "just open all the borders and raise minimum wage".

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#133

Post by yourapostasy »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #126
meri_dian wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have migrant floods, you get slums. The goal should be regulating the flood, keeping it more tame as a gentle flow over time. The Hukou system is good in this respect. You mention illegal immigration, this is why illegal immigration is bad. It's essentially a flood of people that cannot be supported by the system. Floods are never good, the goal in population transfer should almost always be gradual movement…

The problem isn’t migration it’s clearly the conditions and wages they’re to allowed work for, as you admit. Free movement of human beings should be a human right. Restricting immigration is nothing more than descrimination. In China or the United States for that matter.

> Free movement of human beings should be a human right. Restricting immigration is nothing more than descrimination.

I agree free movement of sapients should match the ease with which capital moves. However, atoms and bits have different energy profiles, and hence different logistical tails. The logistical tail to support the marginal person moving into full citizenship benefits and rights of say, the Democratic Republic of Congo, versus say, Singapore, are vastly different. How would you propose to bridge this logistics gulf, which doesn't even address the cognitive and knowledge gulf of citizens from more impoverished nations moving into more prosperous nations with a higher societal- and culturally-expected baseline of cognitive abilities, skills, and knowledge? This has historically been a tough problem to crack at the developed nation side to achieve unrestricted immigration, hence why I suspect there is increasing emphasis upon improving the situation at the developing nation angle (a "rising tide" strategy).

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#134

Post by lziest »

volgo wrote: post #58

The problem they're trying to solve is city slums, which is common in Asia. I've worked in India before, and every major city (Delhi, Chennai) is filled with massive slums of migrant workers who obviously haven't kept up with the modern development. Without turning this into a pity post and sounding like an uncultured asshole, it was horrifying to see and really broke my heart that people are living in conditions lik…

You said it like city slums are problems. To me it is not, it is a sign of "organic" growing cities. If I am allowed to take a startup metaphor. Slums are just tech debts. And apparently you didn't understand what the policy in the article means. Instead of enforcing "safe labor practice, minimum wage, vacation days", they simply enforce an upper limit of population. It is like to guarantee productivity you enforce your employee to produce x lines of code every day. Of course it won't work. And you just went way off topic.

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#135

Post by jamesoo8 »

rqs wrote: post #125
jamesoo8 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are a typical so-called westerner. I just expressed my own opinion here, and according to my knowledge and experience, his statement is definitely wrong. This is not an essay, I have no time to write too much. If you want to know more, you should explore it by yourself. Serpentza? I watched most of his videos, and found he is just a hypocritical racist. You see, he never communicate with the locals, and…

Sorry for off-topic, this branch is gone out of hand. OK, No, instead, I'm teaching you how to preform an argument so other people can understand you well, rather than get yourself a brunch of down votes and nobody believes what you said. It's very clear to me, most Chinese people didn't receive any proper training on how to make an argument that could yield good results. Everybody in the end is just ranting to each…

You look ridiculous and arrogant to me. I am reluctant to write too much, it does not mean I cannot write well. I saw bunch of people like you, I assume you are a member from the vested interest groups of the CCP. I still can read out the typical stupid arrogance of such people between the lines you wrote.

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#136

Post by taoistextremist »

anthonyleecook wrote: post #114
volgo wrote: post #58

The problem they're trying to solve is city slums, which is common in Asia. I've worked in India before, and every major city (Delhi, Chennai) is filled with massive slums of migrant workers who obviously haven't kept up with the modern development. Without turning this into a pity post and sounding like an uncultured asshole, it was horrifying to see and really broke my heart that people are living in conditions lik…

China is still a relatively poor country (1). I lived in Shanghai for a few years back, and even if you just go into the side streets a few blocks from the richest area in Shanghai (Pudong, Huangpu), you can see slums and sometimes dead people lying in the streets with no assistance. And if you go 10 minutes out of the richest areas, you have people living in hutongs and communist-style buildings with low level life…

Are hutongs really all that bad there? When I was in Beijing, they were nice areas typically, albeit they smelled worse because of things like drainage not running as low, but overall it didn't seem terrible and many of them were pretty big areas for local business.

I ask because I always thought Shanghai was more developed pretty much everywhere in comparison to Beijing. I mean, I'm sure the actual commie-blocks were the same (I visited one that was actual nearer to the center of the city and it was ridiculously run-down) but hutongs often consist of people living in houses their grandparents' grandparents once lived in, so they're usually reasonably well kept.

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#137

Post by rm999 »

volgo wrote: post #58

The problem they're trying to solve is city slums, which is common in Asia. I've worked in India before, and every major city (Delhi, Chennai) is filled with massive slums of migrant workers who obviously haven't kept up with the modern development. Without turning this into a pity post and sounding like an uncultured asshole, it was horrifying to see and really broke my heart that people are living in conditions lik…

> What's the balance? I've no idea,

An obvious solution is rural development, looking to India as an example. The accelerating urban migration in India in the 90s/2000s was not organic: young people were forced to leave their homes because they didn't have job opportunities or enough land to farm, and then older people had to follow for cultural and economic reasons. The ultimate goal is sustainable urban growth, but cities can't immediately handle what this would require. Instead, India has instituted fairly successful rural development programs that are aimed at increasing jobs, improving social safety nets, and empowering women. I think China should seriously consider ramping up similar efforts.

http://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/what-india-...

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#138

Post by thriftwy »

mantas wrote: post #124
thriftwy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What they want is urbanization of the less developed areas Everybody wants that. Can't remember that any country ever got it, in the last century, anyway. That's akin to wanting water to roll uphill. Argentine will prefer its population to not clutter around Buenos Aires. France will prefer everybody not move to Paris, same for Russia with Moscow. But that's just not what is happening anywhere. If you're moving to…

USSR did it to some extent. By forced work assignments after university in bum-fuck nowhere. As well as scarce goods more available in those cities as a bonus. On top of that, people were not allowed to freely move. You couldn't just move to a city, rent apartment and look for a job. For people in countryside, university and assignment after it was pretty much the only way to move to a city. University courses were h…

USSR tried to do it to some extent, still Moscow grew from ~1.5mln to 8mln on their watch.

The key was that while theoretically the state wanted it to stop bulging, a huge number of influental state enterprises wanted more workers and wanted them now, and got their way more often than not.

And Russia still deals with millions of people who are spread around evenly across landscape in single-employer towns where there's no longer any jobs. And no economic reason for these towns to have any jobs in the future. Some of these in the far north or Siberia for no apparent reason.

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#139

Post by reallydude »

jsjohnst wrote: post #111
ttflee wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the migrant workers were exploited by local residents and employers, they were still better-off than they could gain in their rural home. I worked in Beijing for more than three years without registering any residential permit, renting a shabby apartment, which is built and owned by the locals, in the village to the north of the city area. Such apartments were cheap compared with the roaring rental and estate…

> Even if the migrant workers were exploited by local residents and employers, they were still better-off than they could gain in their rural home. I’m hopeful you didn’t intentionally imply slavery was a good thing, but that’s essentially what you wrote.

> that’s essentially what you wrote.

Nope.

Re: Shanghai sets population at 25M

#140

Post by mantas »

thriftwy wrote: post #138
mantas wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USSR did it to some extent. By forced work assignments after university in bum-fuck nowhere. As well as scarce goods more available in those cities as a bonus. On top of that, people were not allowed to freely move. You couldn't just move to a city, rent apartment and look for a job. For people in countryside, university and assignment after it was pretty much the only way to move to a city. University courses were h…

USSR tried to do it to some extent, still Moscow grew from ~1.5mln to 8mln on their watch. The key was that while theoretically the state wanted it to stop bulging, a huge number of influental state enterprises wanted more workers and wanted them now, and got their way more often than not. And Russia still deals with millions of people who are spread around evenly across landscape in single-employer towns where there…

Who said they tried to put a hard cap on Moscow at some lower number? Moscow grew to 8mln precisely because of government policies. Had they no limits, it could have been 2x that.

And yes, that policy is definitely baiting ex-USSR countries in the ass nowadays.

Post reply on HN