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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?

#61

Post by fspeech »

tyingq wrote: post #26
mikeash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is communist in name only at this point. The government is authoritarian but the economy works in a pretty familiar way as far as business ownership and financial transactions.

Does everyone have a job, no homelessness, etc?

If you have rural hukou you are entitled to a piece of land for building a home and a piece of land for farming. But it is possible that you could have sold off these rights. In cities there is 低保 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BD%8E%E4%BF%9D If you are really resourceful you may be able to survive on it. But if you are really resourceful you are unlikely to need it in the first place.

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

#62

Post by opportune »

jotm wrote: post #41
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…

It was pretty simple in the USSR: the government owns the farms, the government profits from them, they pay the workers (very often in product). The government/party says a new farm will be created here, the order goes out. It is all controlled from the top (communist party) through the regional council, through the local council (often a few councils inbetween). After the farm is established, a few inspections by pa…

I've always wondered how this system would work out in countries that don't have a recent history of petty corruption.

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

#63

Post by rolltiide »

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…

Americans are way more defensive in preserving their perception of China whereas Chinese are removed from the political machinations and marginally curious about US culture at best

In other parts of “the west” nobody is deathly afraid of being disappeared by the Chinese government and just raves about how energetic Shanghai is

I think Americans are the outliers here, over emphasizing the darkest parts of China and should consider re-evaluating.

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

#64

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

Steve Jobs once said that when he was young, he was convinced that most TV was a conspiracy to make people stupid; but when he got older, he realized the truth was much worse: TV is just giving people what they want.

China today is in many ways very much like the U.S. in the middle of the 20th Century. New technologies and markets are creating rapid, wide-spread growth in living standards. At the same time, government and media encourage a culture of national pride bordering on paranoia, combined with intense pressure to conform. The U.S. grew out of it and I hope China does too.

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

#65

Post by einpoklum »

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…

They're only called "Communist". They don't even define themselves as having reached Communism. Their economy is based on the exchange of commodities and the use of money as a key mediating commodity; the main difference is state ownership of most of the means of production, and state planning (which to be honest is not entirely unlike planning in large corporations, but with different considerations).

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

#66

Post by _bxg1 »

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 anywhere close to that in China.

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

#67

Post by txcwpalpha »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #56
txcwpalpha wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

You're citing a piece of literature that famously contrasts Kowloon Walled City [1] as preferable to Singapore, and yet you are confused why people are misinformed and uneducated about it?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

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

#68

Post by pavanky »

MiroF wrote: post #39
pavanky wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI India has more arable land than USA at the moment: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA?end=2016...

yes.. and also three times the people

It isnt a competition. The point I was trying to make is that India not only has highly fertile land, but also a lot of it to theoretically feed its people without relying on others.

As you said, US has only a 3rd of the population. This is probably the reason they are the largest exporters of food in the world.

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

#69

Post by andrey_utkin »

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…

1. Nationalise land owned by peasants. Kill protesters and imprison their families. 2. Coerce peasants to cultivate the land. 3. Take all the harvest. Can leave peasants to starve to the death, that's OK. 4. Profit!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

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

#70

Post by seanmcdirmid »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #67
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

You're citing a piece of literature that famously contrasts Kowloon Walled City [1] as preferable to Singapore, and yet you are confused why people are misinformed and uneducated about it? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

I didn’t say the article had problems, but Singapore lacking electricity wasn’t one of them.
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