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Leaving China

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Re: Leaving China

#311

Post by rippercushions »

angled wrote: post #300
shell0x wrote: post #139

Lots of people used to go to China for work and could do pretty much anything they want, but since Jinping took over it went downhill fast. Most people in the expat community I know went to Hong Kong and Singapore instead for the following reasons: 1) Easy to do business 2) Easy to get your money in and out . 3) Low taxes 4) Central travel hubs in Asia 5) Less backwards mindset as these cities feel more cosmopolitan…

HK, it seems, doesn’t have the death penalty or corporal punishment. Let’s see how long that lasts, but for the time being that’s a huge positive over Singapore. Expat life is still pretty nice. Soho is bustling. Restaurants are reopening, clubs open to 6am. Stuff like SVB, CS, and flow on effect to legal is probably just a big an impact.

You are not going to get the death penalty or caning in Singapore if you keep your nose clean (literally and figuratively). Both are only applied for serious crimes, and the few deltas to Western standards on what counts as "serious" (drugs, vandalism) are easily avoided.

Re: Leaving China

#312

Post by refurb »

duxup wrote: post #108
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.

It's actually pretty fascinating if you spend time in SE Asia. Chinese have been immigrating to all the countries for centuries. There are super old communities of Chinese in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, everywhere in fact.

And they are often a distinct community, with their own language (a dialect from where they came from in China). They were often economic migrants, so tend to be seen as a "merchant class" in these countries and hold quite a lot of political power.

The Peranakan in Malaysia are a good example. And there is continued strife in those countries as these Chinese-Malaysian often have much more political power than their numbers alone would suggest.

Re: Leaving China

#313

Post by timeon »

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)

> until the 90s.

So was Czechoslovakia. What is your point?

Re: Leaving China

#314

Post by marcosdumay »

imiric wrote: post #257
photochemsyn wrote: post #214

I suspect China's draconian, desperate attempt to eliminate Covid entirely was largely due to official guilt. They knew that their poorly managed reckless science program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak, and they wanted to somehow prove they could wipe the virus out entirely (which they couldn't). Eventually they had to give up. I wonder what happens to people in China who point this…

Let's entertain the possibility that China wasn't responsible for a lab leak, and that the zoonotic theory is true. Whatever the source, we know that the Wuhan wet market was a super-spreader event, which Chinese authorities concede. Following this, China grounded all domestic flights in January 2020, yet still allowed outbound international flights well into March 2020. Countries were left to ban flights from China…

When planes were grounded, the virus was already all over the world for months. We just didn't know it at the time.

Re: Leaving China

#315

Post by refurb »

amrocha wrote: post #62
ersiees wrote: post #3

Why do we call people expats and not rich migrants or something like that?

Because US and EU citizens think that "immigrant" is a dirty word for people from poor countries. To all the other people talking about intent to settle or not: read the post. The author lived in China for 20 years and built a family there. They're not an "expat" under any technical definition of the word.

This is silly. I migrated to the US from a wealthy country and I am an immigrant. I've also lived temporarily in other countries, and therefore was an expat.

It's not hard to understand.

Re: Leaving China

#316

Post by imiric »

taw567890 wrote: post #286
imiric wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's entertain the possibility that China wasn't responsible for a lab leak, and that the zoonotic theory is true. Whatever the source, we know that the Wuhan wet market was a super-spreader event, which Chinese authorities concede. Following this, China grounded all domestic flights in January 2020, yet still allowed outbound international flights well into March 2020. Countries were left to ban flights from China…

[flagged]

Ah, I see the thread has triggered CCP's mouthpieces.

Please also tell us how the virus was found in frozen food imported from Argentina, Germany and India.

Re: Leaving China

#317

Post by rippercushions »

maskedinvader wrote: post #277
givemeethekeys wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they're most definitely expats. Their engineer colleagues from South Asia call themselves expats.

Interesting, so why don’t we ever see the word expats associated with the millions of laborers from poorer nations working in the Middle East with no path to citizenship ever referred to as expats ? Let’s be honest here, it’s exclusively only ever used when it’s someone who’s predominately white and from the west (and either rich themselves or come from a rich country)

You answered the question yourself: they're laborers, brought in by a third party for a specific purpose like construction, living their lives entirely controlled by the company (housing and food provided, etc) and kicked out as soon as they become unneeded.

Expats have a great deal more agency about their lives: where they live, where they work, when to return, etc.

To be clear, I don't particularly like this distinction, but it absolutely is a thing in the Middle East down to separate immigration lines at airports, and if anything glossing it over by calling the Bangladeshi construction worker living in a container in the brutal heat and sharing a latrine with 50 other guys an "expat" does nobody any favors. Or was the American South powered by African "expat" labor too?

Re: Leaving China

#318

Post by umeshunni »

maskedinvader wrote: post #277
givemeethekeys wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they're most definitely expats. Their engineer colleagues from South Asia call themselves expats.

Interesting, so why don’t we ever see the word expats associated with the millions of laborers from poorer nations working in the Middle East with no path to citizenship ever referred to as expats ? Let’s be honest here, it’s exclusively only ever used when it’s someone who’s predominately white and from the west (and either rich themselves or come from a rich country)

Huh? The term expat is absolutely used for those workers. Have you even been to the middle east?

Re: Leaving China

#319

Post by def_true_false »

coldtea wrote: post #172
dragonwriter wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bastion of democracy which has been a right wing dictatorship from its inception until the 90s. The 1990s being, well, not now , the correct conjugation is either “was” or “had been”, not “has been”. Which relates directly to why its irrelevant.

"That was then and this is now" is not how it works in such transitions (and after such wide-ranging power and influence of the far right, and such bad blood from the murders and torture). Not any more than it worked for the blacks after 1865 (or 1964 for that matter), to give an example from US history. Hell, it took decades even for post-WWII Germany to shake the ex-Nazi-high-ranking influence in its politics, medi…

Keep in mind Germany had to deal with the Soviet threat at the same time. Sadly, the communist influence there will take a few more decades to stomp out.

Things seem to have worked out fine for Central and Eastern European post-communist countries. Also Portugal, Greece.

Re: Leaving China

#320

Post by drytea001 »

lapama wrote: post #297

The scene in the restaurant in Anhui is IMHO not real, I dispute its veracity.

As a Chinese, I believe what he said. On that day, my whole family and most friends were nervously checking their phones. They were afraid of a possible war between China and the US as there was a lot of propaganda on Chinese websites implying a war between China and the US if Pelosi come to visit Taiwan.
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