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

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

#111

Post by LunaSea »

saalweachter wrote: post #90
feral wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinion: The tough truth is that improving the world at that scale is mostly about politics. Politics is how the nations allocate resources to problems. You maybe want them to talk about the technical fundamentals of the problem but the important bit is usually the politics. [A sibling comment says to look at TED talks. This is an excellent idea. Then, after a couple of years, ask why none of the solutions have been…

In the 1950s, building a moonbase would have been an engineering and technological challenge. Today, it's basically a political and economics challenge, to convince enough people it would be worth while to spend the time and effort to do it. Which is not to say there wouldn't be engineers involved, solving new problems, but we already know enough of the solutions that it's not really the sticking point now. (Which is…

The 50s were during the Cold War so building a moon base was absolutely a political challenge. It just so happens that it was an internal political challenge rather than an internal one.

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

nfoz wrote: post #87
bllguo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hard for me to emphasize enough how little typical Westerners understand about Asia. I bet the typical human knows very little about life and culture outside of their specific environment. A typical city-dweller knows little about rural life even in their own region, and vice-versa. It's weird how easily we fall into a trap of saying "look how ignorant x people are". I mean, of course, it's a big world, and we…

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by wjmao88 »

nfoz wrote: post #78
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?)

I am grateful for these "snide remarks", as to me there is nothing so important and interesting as trying to bring humans out of oppression and suffering (no matter who is the instigator). Something I found amazing (horrific) when reading the article: what if this writing only sounds snide to us, but not to others? Consider your examples: > Some of these Uyghurs, Kazakhs are sent to the reeducation camps and they are…

> But imagine if you believed the Uyghurs/Kazakhs are inferior peoples, and that Tibetan temples/monks are evil.

That's a big stretch. More likely that

1. The author, like many Han Chinese people, was raised in a completely atheist environment, and just don't put any value on religious activities at all.

2. Again, like in many East Asian countries, Chinese people value/praise hard work above "enjoying life".

So, what you see as horrific and dystopian is seen as progress and a sign of a thriving community.

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

#114

Post by ElFitz »

refurb wrote: post #105
pm90 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans work longer hours and save less than most other developed nations. Plus they don’t have extensive social safety nets. If you’re struggling to get by it’s hard to be curious about the world. Also the country is ginormous.

This seems like a ridiculous hypothesis. America works longer hours, but not the most. Canadians save even less than Americans and have more debt. And the US has one of the highest median incomes in the world (with a few exceptions).

For income, one interesting metric would be the distribution. How much do most people make?

Because the US is also a developed country where 15$ an hour with pretty much no coverage is considered "good" in some parts (ie good enough to work as a Facebook content moderator rather than making Big Macs at the local McDonald's)

Edit: I might be a bit rusty on US social safety net & health benefits

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

#115

Post by crimsonalucard »

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’…

I got downvoted here on HN for saying things like "living in China isn't so bad. " A huge number of people on this site think it's something akin to North Korea.

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

#116

Post by Cacti »

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…

> Xinjiang is consistently portrayed in Western media as a nightmarish, dystopian, Orwellian hellhole suffering under the iron fisted oppression of the Communist Party

That’s because it is, and if you visited you wouldn’t be so flippant about it. In large part because a tourist can’t even make a stop in the area without getting their own personal police minder.

It’s little different than North Korea.

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

#117

Post by jpindar »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #40
txcwpalpha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a very large (and reasonably well-educated) company that had coworkers from everywhere (LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, NYC, etc) and it was quite a common misconception amongst almost all of them (and to be fair, I also met a handful of Europeans who thought the same). Also very common was the belief that Singapore is a city in China.

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

I heard they don't even have internet in the deep south.

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

#118

Post by crimsonalucard »

tepidandroid wrote: post #82
baybal2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Chinese domestic media is for the most part trash and it's well understood that it conveys the views of the ruling political class. It has never even pretended to be an unbiased source of information. As far as the Chinese domestic media threatening to nuke US just any godly day, I highly doubt it and I've never seen this. Their domestic media is much more focused on internal development and accomplishments. It serve…

The US media is also trash. It's a different sort of bias. A bias towards big business.

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

#119

Post by jtolmar »

kartan wrote: post #75
einpoklum wrote: post #54

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…

> "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?" I never see this question on TV. What I mainly see on Tv is talk about political strategies, result surveys and the like. Climate change is one of the few things that I see being discussed. And even that has a lot of this let's talk about politicians positions and poll results. I…

https://thebreadbook.org/ - Peter Kropotkin argues that there's now enough industrial capability to feed, shelter, and clothe everyone, but this capability is poorly distributed. Notably he wrote this over 100 years ago.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/no-shortcuts-9780190... - Jane F. McAlevey examines the difference between the ineffective activism of the last 40 years and successful movements like the Civil Rights Movement and the industrial labor movement. Her work is also explained well in this interview - https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/jane-mcalevey-on-how-...

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

#120

Post by crimsonalucard »

_bxg1 wrote: post #66
cybersnowflake wrote: post #13

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

I enjoyed having my perspective on China as a country expanded; I don't hear many positive things about it, and the environmental focus is genuinely refreshing, in stark contrast to my own country's idiocy in that department. With that said, nothing outweighs their government's human rights violations. Nothing. I know the U.S. has some of its own, but not to an extremity nor scale nor public acceptance that comes any…

Both countries are equal in terms of human rights violations. It's not popularized, but the US has a good amount of this stuff as well.
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