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Leaving China

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Re: Leaving China

#361

Post by tatrajim »

fortuna86 wrote: post #335
tatrajim wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree, from study in Taiwan, life in the PRC, Hong Kong, and South Korea over decades: democracy in Taiwan is healthier than that in the U.S. For the skeptical, check out videos of how ballots are counted in Taiwan. Individual ballots are lifted out on the ballot box, one-by-one, and held up for any and all observers to verify. Compare this to how the matter is typically conducted in the U.S., in near-secrecy…

every single election in the US is subject to a complete audit after the fact. counting quickly and verifying accurately after the fact are not mutually exclusive.

If you're an American, you'll be all too aware of what a mess the US electoral system is, subject to varying rules across thousands of jurisdictions, large and small, and involving now prolonged "early voting", "absentee voting" for a wide variety of reasons, mail in ballots only for some states, little or no ID verification for some states, outdated voter rolls, legal "ballot harvesting" etc.

Growing up we used to politely nod at the common belief that the 1960 presidential race (Kennedy vs. Nixon) was decided by Mayor Daley's corrupt intervention in Chicago. And, of course, the wild 2000 Gore vs. Bush race decided in Florida further eroded hugely trust in the electoral system. And etc. etc.

Re: Leaving China

#362

Post by onethought »

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

But Taiwan, HK, Singapore, and Melbourne all did the same thing, extended lockdowns.

This wasn't autocracy, this was logical health policy: Do you overwhelm hospitals, potentially causing them to fail, or do you limit personal freedom? That's the question that they had to answer.

China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine".

Re: Leaving China

#363

Post by petesergeant »

refurb wrote: post #312
duxup wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 cla…

Thailand is weird[0], in that there's no love lost at all for mainland Chinese or Chinese tourists, but it's very socially important to have a Chinese grandparent or two.

[0]: Actually I think this is true of most of South East Asia where the Chinese community doesn't have as distinct a separation as Malaysia and Singapore

Re: Leaving China

#364

Post by RedCondor »

m00x wrote: post #348
RedCondor wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In America, working class people get killed by cops and corporations with little recourse. In China, elites get disciplined by the party with little recourse. It's a matter of which class you see yourself in. >According to Harvard University’s large-scale 2003-2016 study tracking the evolution of public opinion via 32,000 individual respondents, at the time of the study’s conclusion “95.5 percent of respondents were…

Working class people get killed in China too. My friend's wife's family completely disappeared because they said something bad about the local government on WeChat. Their house was empty when she went to check up on them (after COVID). Neighbors said the police came in and they haven't seen them since. She now blames herself for not bringing them to Canada. The reason the surveys are so high is because they fear it's…

[flagged]

Re: Leaving China

#365

Post by raincole »

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.

Since Taiwan became a democracy, Taiwan's stance has always been against "one country, two systems". It was like that wayyyyy before the Hong Kong protest.

It's not my personal opinion. These are the polls from varies institutions in Taiwan (in Chinese): https://www.modernchinastudies.org/cn/issues/past-issues/106...

The first column is date (ROC year 80 = year 1991, etc), the second is pro one-country-two-systems, the third is against it.

You can see the percentage of pro went from ~10% to ~30% then back to ~10%. It has never been the majority.

Re: Leaving China

#366

Post by photochemsyn »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #342
photochemsyn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that amazing, it's just that American investors wanted to cut labor costs in the late 1990s and China was offering dollar-a-day workers. The claim that opening up trade with China would have a 'liberalizing influence on the country' was one of the key selling points back in 2000-2001, pushed by both Clinton and GW Bush: https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/east/09/18/china.... See Clinton's Mar 2000 sp…

> Of course it was all nonsense, Clinton and Bush were just listening to Wall Street interests I'm not a fan of either Clinton or Bush, but this is unfair. There was far more going on. At the time, there was a strong sense that democracy had won, and that it was inevitable. That empowering people economically would eventually, without fail, lead to democratic reform. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" i…

I'm afraid my view is a bit more jaded - I think those storylines were manufactured for ulterior motives as part of an effort to sell a program to the American public that would significantly reduce the average standard of living while concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaires. They'd already seen the effects of NAFTA and with China, they were hungry for more of the same.

I don't believe the conversion of the industrial manufacturing heartland of the United States to a region now called 'The Rust Belt' was accidental or unplanned. Nor was the destruction of much of the West Coast garment and electronics manufacturing industries.

This has been a deliberately planned policy with a known outcome by its architects, and it's been going on for about four decades. See for example:

https://www.epi.org/blog/nafta-twenty-years-disaster/

> "By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today—channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton—the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe."

Re: Leaving China

#367

Post by jeromegv »

fortuna86 wrote: post #335
tatrajim wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree, from study in Taiwan, life in the PRC, Hong Kong, and South Korea over decades: democracy in Taiwan is healthier than that in the U.S. For the skeptical, check out videos of how ballots are counted in Taiwan. Individual ballots are lifted out on the ballot box, one-by-one, and held up for any and all observers to verify. Compare this to how the matter is typically conducted in the U.S., in near-secrecy…

every single election in the US is subject to a complete audit after the fact. counting quickly and verifying accurately after the fact are not mutually exclusive.

Considering how close you came to a coup and how the elected president could spend months trying to destroy democracy while also personally using his power and influence to try to sway local officials, it doesn’t seem like the complete audit isn’t really helping. Especially when 40%+ of the population thinks those audits are manufactured lies from main stream media.

Re: Leaving China

#368

Post by RedCondor »

robomartin wrote: post #202
RedCondor wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Latin American and very, very happy we have China as an alternative to America's tyrannical Monroe Doctrine. The demonization of China feels incredibly absurd, like when someone wearing an exceedingly ugly outfit, lacking self-awareness, tries to criticize someone else's fashion.

[flagged]

I can't imagine literally submitting a House.gov link and some gusana YouTube clip link to try to tell a Latin American that they need to side with the U.S., to save themselves from China.

Y'all live in your own little reality.

Re: Leaving China

#369

Post by SkyMarshal »

mettamage wrote: post #350
light_hue_1 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course it was all nonsense, Clinton and Bush were just listening to Wall Street interests I'm not a fan of either Clinton or Bush, but this is unfair. There was far more going on. At the time, there was a strong sense that democracy had won, and that it was inevitable. That empowering people economically would eventually, without fail, lead to democratic reform. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" i…

> They created an incredibly unequal world that has eroded democracy to the point where we can seriously discuss a US that isn't a democracy anymore in our lifetimes. Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic

Executives and shareholders captured all of the increased profit margins from outsourcing, workers little or none of it. Additionally, the replacement service jobs those workers transitioned to provided lower total compensation. All that on top of increased costs for health care and other necessities.

Net result was drastically increasing inequality, and a political system with cradle-to-grave capture of politicians by the 1% (or 10% or whatever), using their increased wealth to fund political campaigns, lobbying of those politicians while in office, and to provide cushy revolving door jobs and board memberships when politicians leave office.

Re: Leaving China

#370

Post by claytongulick »

jgwil2 wrote: post #328
claytongulick wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your perspective, because it's one that I've so often found confounding. > I think I lie towards giving up more if it gives me a comfortable society in return It seems like you are very practical minded, which I appreciate. I think the fundamental skepticism that those of us who tend to be more "libertarian" minded is whether you're actually getting value in return for giving up liberties. > I am willing…

> Drive from New Mexico, through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama to Florida sometime and compare the roads and bridges. TBF it's much easier to maintain infrastructure in a mild climate.

Sorry, I should have been more clear: my point was to compare and contrast between the roads and bridges of those states.

There's significant quality differences between them that are noticable as soon as you drive across the state line.

I've done the drive many times, and it's always stood out to me.

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