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Leaving China

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Re: Leaving China

#101

Post by tomohelix »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #25
inconceivable wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed. vietnam is run by the communist party of vietnam. remember, they won the war. that's why there is no south vietnam and north vietnam anymore (unlike korea). there is no free speech. there is no rule of law. there is no free market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Vietnam i wonder how long it will take before we start hearing "i hate the VCP but i love vietnamese people/culture". probably when…

The US and Vietnam are very strong allies now, its unlikely that will ever happen.

I don't think we have an alliance with Vietnam. AFAIK, there is no US base or military agreement or anything indicating a higher relationship than trade partner.

In fact, a few times DC sent some diplomats to Vietnam, the govt over there responded by sending their diplomats to China. Basically saying they prefer China over the US. It makes sense to them since China is closer and have higher trade value than the US. But because of that I don't see how Vietnam can be a "strong ally" to the US.

Can you explain more or cite your sources?

Re: Leaving China

#102

Post by seszett »

coldtea wrote: post #92
jasonjei wrote: post #63

I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…

> Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy. A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

The 90s are now thirty years ago, and Taiwan has undisputably been a functioning democracy since then.

Re: Leaving China

#103

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #92
jasonjei wrote: post #63

I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…

> Meanwhile, Taiwan’s value to the Chinese diaspora can’t be understated—it’s a bastion of a mandarin-speaking democracy. A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

[deleted]

Re: Leaving China

#104

Post by FpUser »

simonh wrote: post #76
FpUser wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things do change over the time. And if you are so willing to look back I am sure you'll find enough trash in a history of your own country.

They do change, in mainland China they have devolved considerably under Xi. I have Family over there, and a lot of the optimism of a decade ago was already being squeezed out of the country before the pandemic.

Yes things devolved, and they might get better over the time. Or not. Nobody knows.

Re: Leaving China

#105

Post by RedCondor »

ren_engineer wrote: post #64

>But in order to live everyday life, most people living in China find it necessary to turn a blind eye until it affects them directly. That became impossible during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the force of China’s technocracy was on full display it's amazing how people were able to delude themselves for so long, Tiananmen should have been enough to make people and governments realize things weren't going to change

[dead]

Re: Leaving China

#106

Post by Waterluvian »

thefounder wrote: post #90
Waterluvian wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pay that price for a great society in return You’re not just paying in your own freedoms. You’re paying in the freedoms of others, like the Muslims that the Chinese government have decided aren’t compatible with the “great society” that you seek.

There are worse places for muslims than China as far as human rights are concerned. I feel the whole muslim issue in China is just a pretext. Have we forgot about Saudi Arabia or whatever mess is left in Afghanistan?

Last week my six year old tried to justify his bad behaviour because his little brother did something worse. I didn’t buy it, and I don’t here either.

Re: Leaving China

#107

Post by majormajor »

livueta wrote: post #93
majormajor wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2014 I worked with a company in Beijing for a few weeks. The local engineers all had pretty long and packed subway commutes from various outer developments, so my first guess would be that "affordable housing in the city center" is long gone for most major cities. The surface-level infrastructure was interesting, it felt like Los Angeles - much more than it did Manhattan or SF aboveground - just blown up 3-to-5x.…

+1, at least anecdotally, at least in T1 cities: I spent a few months in Shanghai for work in 2018 and all of my local colleagues had messed up housing situations of one flavor or another. One guy lived alone in a shoebox but when he had a free weekend, he'd take the train ~2h out to a smaller city where his family lived in a decent house. There were also a lot of complaints about apartment quality even/especially in…

With the folks I was working with it wasn't "messed up" in any way, it just was hardly any more relatively affordable give local wages than most big cities in the US.

Some fun/awkward differences though. For instance, I had imagined it would be easy to find a laundromat - I didn't want to pay the hotel prices for cleaning. Ended up almost accidentally offending the people I was asking - "why would we need to go somewhere to do our laundry, we have laundry machines, we aren't poor" - while since a lot of US cities are older in the dense parts of town, laundry machines in-unit were less common even for sometimes pretty pricey places.

One of my big takeaways is that development is a lot easier and cheaper than redevelopment. Building a ton of new housing? Put in today's amenities! It might be crappy quality even in "luxury" new construction (whether here or there) but it's gonna be a lot easier than retrofitting into a bunch of units from 50 years ago. Want a QR-code/app-based payment system to take off? It's gonna be easier if you're one of the first widespread options to replace cash (like in China at the time) vs if you're competing with ubiquitous credit/debit cards in the US. Really illustrative of how things are path-dependent - and why I'm bearish on "super apps" replacing what we already have here.

Re: Leaving China

#108

Post by duxup »

jasonjei wrote: post #63

I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…

>Chinese diaspora

I had no idea how wide it is until a family member married someone from Asia and he explained ot me that his family thinks of themselves as ethnically Chinese, although they're totally disconnected from China.

Re: Leaving China

#109

Post by another_story »

tiny_ta wrote: post #13

It's so interesting to read this perspective since it drives home "the grass is always greener.." for me. I've lived a pretty charmed life in the US for the past few years (like the majority of HN, I imagine) but I find myself longing to move to a country with dense cities, affordable housing in the city center, great public infrastructure and a modicum of agreement among the citizens and China fits the bill pretty g…

Ahh yes, China, with its brutal Darwinian rush hour on the metro. The experience of needing to shove aside a 70 year old women with her grocery trolley who doesn't understand you need to wait until people get off before you get on.

That affordable downtown housing which is on par with costs in Manhattan, where you'll hear someone renovating until 9pm every night and smell the sewage gas wafting from bathroom drains because what's a u-trap and inadequate underlying infrastructure.

Agreement between citizens that if they can cheat the laowai, or any mark really, or cut someone's line then they will.

Try living there for a bit. It's nice enough if you don't mind seeing the sun a few weeks a year through the smog.

China is actually fun to live in, but it's not a good place to live if you value your health, physical or mental. At least not the cities.

Re: Leaving China

#110

Post by jasonjei »

scrubs wrote: post #97
jasonjei wrote: post #63

I used to travel to China all the time for work during my first job in 2008. Those times were super optimistic. Hong Kong was filled with Chinese pride, and it seemed inevitable that China would absorb Taiwan. China had just hosted the Olympics. I visited Hong Kong late 2018 after many years of not having been there. It was a very different place from the Hong Kong I had visited in 2009-2011. The energy was a bit dar…

Although off topic from the original post, would you entertain this question? What's Taiwan's position on integration with China? What does Taiwan want for itself? I'd like to hear more about that minus American and Chinese input.

This is an extremely interesting question because I’ve heard various viewpoints. The vast majority want to keep the “technical debt” (legacy code being “Republic of China”) of this uneasy bridge to China—that is trade and movement of people between the strait, and maintaining the status quo of the “Republic of China” government (controlling Taiwan) and PRC (controlling China or “mainland”).

Many Taiwanese don’t want war, but they already are functionally independent. The PRC has never governed in Taiwan. The ROC, which governed China from 1912 to 1949, governs Taiwan and its child islands.

Many young Taiwanese just want to be Taiwanese and left alone, but the vast majority want to keep the status quo as long as it’s tenable (it’s not, Xi Jinping has indicated a timeline). The big question is how this might be possible without poking the bear that resembles Pooh… It’s obvious to most Taiwanese that China won’t keep its promises, since it made clear violations of promises made to the HK people and UK.

Recent elections have shown KMT party (pro-PRC relations, the grandfather of the Republic of China government, and in someways the father party of the Communists that forked from KMT) gaining ground because people are afraid of war. Nobody in Taiwan wants war, but as the saying goes, in order to have peace, prepare for war.

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