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How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

quora.com

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Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#51

Post by fspeech »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #25
dmix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the first answer has “Western media won’t tell you this”. Like there’s some western conspiracy to downplay Chinese agriculture industry. The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them, so the citizens don’t get any crazy ideas like democracy and human rights. While simultaneously amplifying the bad news coming out of America to show the ‘dangers’…

I found that comment a bit bizarre, too, as an American. Many (most?) people in America simply don’t care about this or have any general curiosity about the world outside of them. America is the land of fast food and unsustainable cheap beef; we have a president that denies climate change, so it’s no wonder that there is simply no interest in understanding sustainable fishing by a large portion of the population, reg…

Of course Americans aren't in general interested in fish farms. Most Chinese are equally unlikely to know anything about their country's aquaculture development (not to mention sustainable ones). I don't believe the sarcasm is literally aimed at people's ignorance, but more at prevailing general notions (and closed-mindedness) about anything China related. The writer has a Ph.D. from University of Cambridge and still lives in Cambridge. He is entitled to his opinion of what he thinks as biases in the Western media. To me the "biases" much more reflect what the media think that their readers would like to read and believe than a conspiracy to "mislead" their readers.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#52

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tepidandroid wrote: post #45
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of snide remarks in that answer, however, detracting from otherwise great information. (Eg what does the Dalai Lama and Uighur oppression have to do with this?)

> what does the Dalai Lama and Uighur oppression have to do with this The snark likely comes from the fact that Xinjiang is consistently portrayed in Western media as a nightmarish, dystopian, Orwellian hellhole suffering under the iron fisted oppression of the Communist Party. They ignore the very real benefits that have been afforded to millions of poverty-stricken people in Xinjiang via progressive government poli…

It has absolutely nothing to do with the answer, however. Xinjiang and Tibet are complicated, China has obviously improved their economies and has obviously trampled on human rights. Both of those things can easily coexist (the same could be said about western colonialism, one doesn’t excuse the other).

The western media does report those things, it’s just that the Chinese media only focuses on those pieces from the western media that it wants to be defensive about. Call it tunnel tunnel vision if you will.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#53

Post by nathanyukai »

president wrote: post #29
cybersnowflake wrote: post #13

A lot of superdefensive people over at quora everytime you ask a question about china.

Usually either: 1. Paid Chinese State-sponsored propaganda/troll [1] OR 2. Super nationalist Chinese person (most are) either from China or abroad who take major offense when "their" views are challenged. [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/17/how-to-spot-a-state-fun...

I'm Chinese, I think the trolls (50 cents army) is mostly just a joke/meme. But I might be wrong.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#54

Post by einpoklum »

The question should really be "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?"

In most places in the world it's easy and cheap enough to produce food and distribute it. Actually, it's so easy and cheap that many world states artificially subsidize agriculture/livestock farming/etc. to prevent them from collapsing due to low prices.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#55

Post by txcwpalpha »

bllguo wrote: post #46
dmix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the first answer has “Western media won’t tell you this”. Like there’s some western conspiracy to downplay Chinese agriculture industry. The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them, so the citizens don’t get any crazy ideas like democracy and human rights. While simultaneously amplifying the bad news coming out of America to show the ‘dangers’…

The tone is honestly understandable. It pains me to bring up this cliched point, but is the US media not constantly telling us that China is hostile, China is plotting? As someone with a foot in both worlds, US coverage of China is _at least_ equally warped. It's funny; to my parents and relatives in China I'm perceived as having a US bias, but everywhere else I get characterized as being too Chinese. It's hard for m…

>It's funny; to my parents and relatives in China I'm perceived as having a US bias, but everywhere else I get characterized as being too Chinese.

Haha, I can relate. I'm as white as they come but I spent some time living in Singapore and traveling the rest of Asia. In Asia I was obviously "the American", but when I got home to the US I can remember a few distinct times where I was called a "wannabe asian" or something similar just because I was talking about how phenomenal public transit is in major Asian metros compared to the abysmal state of US public transit.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#56

Post by seanmcdirmid »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #42
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you would ever hear something like that in Seattle. I’m guessing deep south somewhere?

One of my Seattle coworkers was one of the specific people who I was thinking of when writing the above comment, actually. I think it's less common now due to stuff like pictures of Marina Bay Sands going viral over the past several years, as well as movies like Crazy Rich Asians "educating" people that Singapore is a modern city. But around ~2010, not so much.

I’m still not seeing it. A lot of my generations introduction to Singapore was via articles like wired’s Disney Land with the Death Penalty (still banned in Singapore to this very day). The Singapore being apart of China is even weirder for someone who knew nothing about Singapore (why would they even know it was populated by mostly ethnic Chinese?).

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#58

Post by baybal2 »

dmix wrote: post #16
cybersnowflake wrote: post #13

A lot of superdefensive people over at quora everytime you ask a question about china.

Even the first answer has “Western media won’t tell you this”. Like there’s some western conspiracy to downplay Chinese agriculture industry. The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them, so the citizens don’t get any crazy ideas like democracy and human rights. While simultaneously amplifying the bad news coming out of America to show the ‘dangers’…

Chinese domestic media threatens to nuke US just any godly day, but saying that, you should also know that quite a number of Chinese media personas were sacked for wrong gestures towards the West in their English language medias, and their military bamboozlers were few times sent to jail over unauthorised threats to USA made in small, nobody known military newspapers.

I heard once that 50 centers were at some point prohibited to do anything English language, to avoid Western ire.

Though, it seems to become much less of a case today.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#59

Post by einpoklum »

dmix wrote: post #16
cybersnowflake wrote: post #13

A lot of superdefensive people over at quora everytime you ask a question about china.

Even the first answer has “Western media won’t tell you this”. Like there’s some western conspiracy to downplay Chinese agriculture industry. The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them, so the citizens don’t get any crazy ideas like democracy and human rights. While simultaneously amplifying the bad news coming out of America to show the ‘dangers’…

"The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them"

But the US is openly hostile towards China (and not just president Trump) - you don't need the Chinese media to notice that. Also, if you follow US media a bit carefully, you'll notice things like the "Pivot to Asia" (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/14/pers-m14.html), the layout of US military bases around China and so on - which, well, kind of constitutes plotting.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#60

Post by heyimherelol »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #21

This and watching HBO's Chernobyl have prompted me to ask: how do communist countries work? Is there something I can read or watch to best understand things like who owns these farms, who profits from them, how do they pay workers, how do you buy a house, etc It's all as foreign to me as medieval peasants and nobles so I don't know how it works from day to day. The fact that China now has billionaires, and billionair…

Read Red Plenty. Here's a good review, though I recommend reading the book first: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty...
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