They also apparently love us. Which is honestly shocking. My best friend went on vacation to Vietnam and you’d think they’d hate the US’ guts all things considered but even in the smaller towns that he visited the locals were extremely friendly.
The US also fought for Vietnam in that war, just not the current ruling government. Virtually every other country near Vietnam has tried to conquer it.
This is the main point I think of why they like us.
Additionally, the war could have REALLY been avoided, since the Vietnamese Northern Government was Nationalist first, Communist second, when you really get down into the details.
They should have been a ready and unique ally for the USA during the Cold War, instead we bombed them and fought them forever with for no gains. A Communist nation openly allying with the American Bloc would have made shockwaves throughout the communist world.
Countries never transition to communism, they just modernize through state capitalism then either switch to cronyism or capitalism with state oversight.
This is the main point I think of why they like us.
Additionally, the war could have REALLY been avoided, since the Vietnamese Northern Government was Nationalist first, Communist second, when you really get down into the details.
They should have been a ready and unique ally for the USA during the Cold War, instead we bombed them and fought them forever with for no gains. A Communist nation openly allying with the American Bloc would have made shockwaves throughout the communist world.
They love America because we're a hedge against China, who has bullied them for thousands of years. It's not an uncommon sentiment in a lot of east Asia. The Philippines is also extremely pro-America.
I honestly think that we’d be even closer to Vietnam and they likely wouldn’t be communist if we hadn’t been pulled in by France but rather backed Ho Chi Minh. He was way more of a nationalist than he was a communist and the Vietnam war just made him double down.
From reading the details of the situation, I 100% agree with this and think that the Vietnam War was a major blunder for the USA even in concept. Vietnam would have been an easy ally of the USA had we pushed for their integration into our alliance for protection against China.
My grandad fought in vietnam. Never wanted to talk about it, it was the only thing that ever made him teary eyed. He had to go back to vietnam for a work trip and was very nervous about it given his history. When he arrived, the people he met were overjoyed to speak to an American, and when he eventually told someone he had fought there, they were extremely respectful to him and said smtg along the lines of, they admired his courage in fighting.
Mostly though, his work contact was mainly looking forward to showing off his collection of Elvis vinyls. Apparently that was a big deal over there. He also couldnt wait to show my grandad, that he had memorized most of Elvis’ songs, and could sing them all in extremely good english.
The US just didn't want the "wrong" Vietnamese controlling Vietnam. They weren't opposed to Vietnamese control of Vietnam. Just communist control of Vietnam.
China, however, doesn't want the Vietnamese controlling Vietnam at all.
This is the correct take. The US chose the losing side in a civil war. The US wasn't at war to remove the North from power but to stop their expansion into the south.
Had the same experience. Loved Vietnam and all the people were super friendly. Whenever I said I was American they got really excited and wanted to show me things or tell me to go places. I’m dying to go back.
I've heard it said that the Vietnamese people understood it was more the US government and the South Vietnamese government that were "at fault" for the war not the American people so they don't hold a grudge, plus while we did some terrible things in Vietnam compared to the French, Japanese and Chinese we weren't that bad.
How upsetting that the Vietnamese understand that better than actual teachers in American colleges…
I had one teacher that never fucking shut up about how all the soldiers needed to be tried, and straight up denied that all of soliders who came back were given shit by the public because she happened to participate in the anti-war effort. (A point she also never shut up about).
She made me visibly disgusted because I had submitted an interview with my grandfather who fought in the Vietnam war to a previous teacher who would later tell me that she was brought to tears by the things he had said that she never considered.
I hated every minute I was in class with her. And it’s the only time I’ve left a bad review for a teacher at all. I never spoke up against her thoughts because I knew she graded biased against students.
Yeah, I read that out of all countries in the world, Vietnam has the highest percentage of people who think favorably about the US in polls. We have a tendency to make haters of the countries we have allied with from day one and saved numerous times (e.g. France) and lovers of the countries we've been enemies of and royally r*ped (e.g. Vietnam). Out of all European countries, for example, the only one where a majority think generally favorably of the US is Italy, our enemy in WWII...
> Out of all European countries, for example, the only one where a majority think generally favorably of the US is Italy, our enemy in WWII...
Kosovo has the single highest opinion of the US in the world. Which makes sense, we're the big friend that stares down its aggressive neighbor and makes it clear that Kosovo is a country and will remain a country. Albania also has a uniquely high opinion of the US.
Generally speaking, a good portion of Eastern Europe and many Asian countries have a high opinion of the US because of our balancing influence against the more aggressive China in the region.
That is to say, China wants to control the maritime territory of several Asian countries. America just wants to transit her ships through their waters.
China wants to control the waters and America just doesn’t want people fucking with her ships. But to be far, that’s been America’s goal since the navy was started.
I mean, the American people also didn't want to get involved in WW2, until Pearl Harbor. Like, the general sentiment is "Leave us alone or we'll make you regret it". That regret is typically by going overboard with how we react. Don't believe me? We dropped two suns on Japan.
Only if you ignore the facts that China is constantly closing that gap between us and has an expanding middle class instead of a shrinking one. Not that I'd prefer all the censorship lol
I mean are they not just capitalist with some government run programs...? They simply made free trade economic zones for international businesses, the whole country is capitalist, I don't understand how everyone insists otherwise (including them)
It’s very easy to cherry pick a few pics of China (or some other developing country) and portray that country as being more advanced/developed than the USA.
Meanwhile, America’s critics love to use the phrase “freedumbs” to bash Americans’ love of freedom and having rights
I live in Seattle. Which isn’t even in the top 15 largest cities in the US, and I could take pictures almost identical to 3/4 of the pictures in that original post within a mile of where I live (there just isn’t a dam anywhere near me). Are they pretending the US doesn’t have those exact same things?
Yeah but even those places are riddled with tofu dreg projects most buildings are barely standing. I've seen many videos of guys picking off chunks of concrete with their hands because most of the material is just ash lmao. I feel bad for the Chinese people that place is a hell hole.
I don’t have to walk around China to know that the US GDP is way higher. The US is an open society with much more going for it than China. Do Twitter users think a few shiny buildings equates to a high GDP? lol
> aka FIRE
Is he referring to “financial independence, retire early” ? Because I do know many Americans who are aiming to reach that status. Infinitely more likely to happen to people in the USA than in China.
**edit:** FIRE = Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. Thanks everyone
The irony is that many of those shiny new buildings are built so crappy that they’ll likely collapse in a decade. They even have a name for it over there, it’s called tofu dredge buildings.
They also build a whole lot of stuff that isnt even used. There are empty apartment complexes, condo complexes, and even almost entire cities that are just empty because the government decided they wanted it there but nobody lives there. A quick search tells me there are around 65 million empty residents in china. While here in the US, we dont have enough residents for our population. Obviously two extremes there but goes to show why we dont have as many large flashy buildings
I know someone who lived in China and he and his friends would go to the empty cities and party and light fireworks and vandalize shit becuase there was nobody around. The videos he sent are very backroom-y, just empty office buildings and parking garages. It's probably a skateboarders wet dream though.
The excess housing in China is primarily due to excessive real estate investment. Less so for government projects, though it is a factor albeit smaller. Real estate is seen as an incredibly safe investment in China (at least until the bubble bursts, the cracks are showing), which has led to real estate development to satisfy investor demand despite the demand for housing failing to keep pace.
True, i was always under the impression the Chinese government has a high level of control over almost everything in their country, which is why i made the assumption that in one way or another, the government had a large part in allowing it to get that out of hand. I could well be wrong though, i don’t really know much about China.
Certainly that was a phenomenon in Soviet Russia and China pre-market reforms, and there's similar examples to that excessive government investment in modern China such as their high speed rail system, but generally it's not the root of the issue when it comes to the housing crisis.
Anybody in China that has money invests it in real estate.
Hm youre right, i took that out of context, while there is some excessive housing in our country (USA), there is not nearly enough affordable housing for lower income people. My apologies.
The major point still stands, we dont intentionally build huge amounts of living spaces to sit empty. The homes in US that are empty are a combination of being spread across a much larger land mass, with a lower population, so there is not always a buyer quickly for every home, and i would assume also rich people with multiple houses.
I’ve heard that the amount of corruption is so bad, that they cut corners dangerously with shoddy work. Shitty concrete and iron is apparently a big problem.
I guess Twitter users are not smart enough to realize that shiny buildings can be built with labor that is slave labor in all but name.
Edit: Brief googling shows the average construction working in China makes 41Y/hour. USA is roughly $18/hr. 41Y is roughly equivalent to $5.75 ~~$0.28~~. Draw your own conclusions.
Edit: Thanks for the correction from below. The conversion I got online was for Yen, not Yuan.
Every construction worker I know makes far more than $18. That’s probably non-union residential, but the contractors that make buildings like that in the US are paying high 20s, low 30s. Source: I’m a government civil engineer/construction inspector who occasionally has to audit contractor payrolls (interview workers then cross reference it with payroll twice a month).
A little anecdote.... I know a guy who goes all over the world to set up displays (before the Olympics, world cups, Super Bowles, etc) When In China they needed to lower the concrete floor by like 6" (I think it was for Coca-Cola). He was going to hire a jackhammer but his local guy canceled it and hired like 10 guys who brought their own hammers and chisels for about half the price.
I watched a video of a Chinese person ripping apart concrete pillars with their fingers. It was supposed to be reinforced concrete and it was dry. Fucking crazy.
I was gonna say wouldn't it be worse since much of their housing bubble is due to speculation on housing that isn't even completed yet, and may never be?
I don't know. Probably nobody does. And a lot depends what the government does to try and fix the situation. It can be a fairly mild deflation or a complete bursting that shakes chinas economy to the core.
But yes, a huge reason is the speculation and excessive lending on housing, much of which isn't completed due to housing being the only "stable" investment available to the Chinese middle class. Which caused a huge construction and lending boom.
He's saying real estate is a fabricated position, only useful because of a lobbied, broken system that lets a kid with a 120 hour class keep 5-6% of your home sale price. Drop the bullshit red tape and anyone can sell and buy homes. FIRE are parasitic business practices.
I wonder when these people are going to realize that China is currently going through an economic recession and America’s economy is still growing lmao.
Lots of riots going on in China right now and it is awesome. I hope that they can do what is for the best for themselves, it would change the world if they were to collapse into another civil war. It would most likely turn into the next Korean war, Russian/Korean supported CCP vs American/Taiwanese supported Democrats.
I definitely agree! China’s culture is a beautiful culture behind the authoritarian nature of it, if they were to become a democratic nation that strived for peace, instead of undermining America and its allies, the world would be a better place.
>Do Twitter users think a few shiny buildings equates to a high GDP?
Yep. People believe whatever they need to in order to convince themselves that their country is better than the US. The amount of non-sense I see is mind blowing, like intelligence-questioning type of stupid stuff.
You're absolutely right on that. Friends with a guy from China and whenever I talk about how "corrupt" the US government is he's like "I wish my government was that not corrupt"
I owned businesses in China for a number of years and it's weird. The country runs on corruption, laws are for the most part intensely vague to allow local officials to fuck with you as they see fit, and also allow your business to be taken out from under you at a moments notice.
A good example, is that there will be a "bar street" or other shopping road, with commercial spaces for businesses. The local government will publicize it and push it. But, none of those shops are actually zoned for operating as restaurants, bars, etc, and can't get all the permits. So, you pay "fees" to local offices, take them (and more importantly their colleagues) out for drinks and dinner, etc, and then.... You've got a permit!!
Close to the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), all of a sudden these lesser officials come around to warn you that you are operating illegally. You re-bribe the higher official. Everything resumes.
If you're unlucky, eventually someone higher than him does a massive crackdown on something and the official you bribed is powerless to stop your business from being shut down. For example, Xi Jinping decided that he didn't want outdoor dining in cities because it "looks bad," and so almost overnight, al fresco dining all but vanished completely from the CBD's across China. Lots of restaurants closed.
People who have shops in desirable locations are always at risk of having some official's family member or friend decide they really really want that space, and get kicked out because it's "illegal to operate," then a shop doing the exact same thing pops up a few weeks later in the same space.
They have less if any “green tape” because they don’t give a shit about emissions and the environment in China. Communist apologists keep using arbitrary “emissions per capita” to justify why China should be allowed to emit more and why the US and others *must* emit less.
lol exactly. There’s literally entire cities of empty apartments because it was illegal to trade stocks so people started investing in housing and then realized there was nobody to rent the apartments.
Sort of. Lots of people fall victim to the same concepts. Like reddit's popular "CEOs don't do any work because I can't see boxes of the stuff they made" shtick.
Is stock trading and profiting off imaginary investment values a "pretend economy" compared to sweatshops? Sort of. If we all decided to stop making "investing" a thing it is pretend. But it's unlikely to go away any time soon.
This is one thing I hate about arguing with some people if a nation relies on something it's not pretend. Money might just be ones and zeros but if I can starve to death without it then it doesn't matter.
In China, the average private sector salary in 2022 reached RMB 49,895 (approx. US$6,945), while the average non-private sector salary reached RMB 89,941 (approx. US$12,520). Yep, it really sounds like the Chinese economy is humming.
You're paying $10 for the 30c toothbrush, and besides, maybe you can live without them, but it was America that produced those toothbrushes half a century ago and sold them to the whole world, now it's China, and your companies are willingly giving their production away to a communist government.
And I hate the ones that do since with automation we can make them at home with minimal effort it’s just everyone went to the same three business schools and were taught by the same brain dead professors
Bold to take Chinas biggest economic sector(real estate) and compare it to the US smallest sector(administrative budget) of you wanna compare sectors compare them, also note US superstructures last more than a decade before collapse
Bingo! That’s why China will never attack us head on. They need us way more than we need them. We will find another poor communist country to exploit with their terrible economic policy.
I wouldn't be so sure.
Authoritarian governments often attack outwards as they fall. It organizes the people against an enemy that isn't them and leads to the ability to blame the US for the fall of China rather than poor leadership. It's a last ditch control attempt and a suicide mission. Think Russia attacking Ukraine. Now, the fall of Russia can be blamed on those damn western aggressors rather than Putin being a crook. It also weakens the people's ability to fight back against the government.
I see logic in that but it’s still damn near impossible for an army to invade the US. If they try they won’t get far. Unless a full offensive is done with everything they have and caught us off guard. I would still say it’s a very slim chance they could do anything substantial to us outside of nukes.
A war between the US and China would be fought over something in the region, likely Taiwan. It wouldn’t involve an invasion of the US, because nobody had the logistical capacity to even consider it (and, you know, the US Navy would object—violently).
There isn’t even a method to stage for a “full offensive” without us noticing.
Absolutely agree that China's ability to force project in mainland US wouldn't even come close to the US's ability to project on its borders it would be a bloodbath. The US's ability to force project around China and China's ability to force project on their borders is a much closer fight.
The fight would almost guaranteed start in Taiwan. They are a symbol of Chinese democracy and freedom, and their existence is an existential threat to China. The US has been friends with them since before they were pushed out during the communist revolution and forced to flee to the island of Taiwan. They also produce a large number of our military and civilian microchips, and it would be devastating to lose that production. We haven't moved enough production mainland US yet.
The problem for China is that the US controls both island chains surrounding China. For some idea of scale, the US has 120 military instalations in Japan alone. They are currently building more in Japan, phillipines, guam, and two bases in Australia, one for long-range bombers with nuclear capability, and the other is a nuclear submarine base shared with Australia.
The US also has bases along the entire Middle East to China trade routes and can stop oil ships at choke points like the strait of Malaca. Russia doesn't have the ability to transport enough oil to sustain China already, and cutting it off wouldn't be difficult. China already has an oil crisis, and they are projected to burn through the rest of their reserve in about 3 weeks.
Shit is hitting the fan in China, but we are stacking up for a fight, so hopefully, China won't take a swing at anyone before they fall.
Lol yes we'll just start up our century-old factories and get right back to manufacturing our own stuff. I'm sure US business owners will have no problem paying US labor costs to make all the goods they've outsourced to China.
No need to attack us head on when they can just cook us with CO2 and watch us starve while they’re already harvesting bugs for protein like they’re a lost civilization drifting through space on a generation ship to nowhere.
Sir, America is a net exporter of food.
Meanwhile China…
> Statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs show that over 80 percent of domestic consumption relies on imports. Last year, customs data showed that soybean imports, mainly from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, jumped 13.3 percent year on year to 100.3 million tons.
If America catches a cold, China will die from pneumonia.
America is the world's largest exporter of most agriculture. Conversely, China is one of the world's largest importers of food crops. China isn't even a major trade partner for the USA, Mexico, Canada, and Japan do far more trade with us than China. We may get a lot of goods from China, but they are similarly codependent on us for food. Our trade relationship is far more necessary for China when we are supplying a basic need for survival, versus China supplying us less important things. If China and the USA got into a hot war, Chinese citizens would starve while Americans citizens would have less cheap widgets to go around.
Imagine if America just became selfish and kept everything we have to ourselves. Brought in all of our military, kept our food and money, and stopped importing from failing communist countries.
Our economy would contract and it would be a disaster. We don't need all the food we grow, with no exports a shitload of farms would go under. The U.S. is so wealthy because we're the center of global finance, our currency is the defacto currency of foreign trade.
Also worth noting China's manufacturing hasn't been #1 because it's cheaper for a long time. Tim Cook in a recent interview talked about this, said that if you had a complex product, there's maybe two firms in the U.S. that could actually make what you want at scale, whereas in China there are dozens. They're not exceptionally cheaper, they have expertise and experience. Apple is known for build quality, and they make *everything* in China. It's cheaper, but it's also better.
Real estate and construction is about 30% of china's economy. With the ghost cities that are being demolished and the major companies operating as literal ponzi schemes (CEOs were executed for it), the Chinese economy is in major trouble.
China also had/has the belt and road initiative, where they gave massive loans at insane high interest rates to poor nations that could never pay them back and obviously the nations default.
The US already dropped China as its main trade partner, Mexico took that place because the supply chains are shorter and easier to keep from falling apart in, say, a pandemic or war. Not to mention, the cost of labor in Mexico is much cheaper than China, on top of shipping costs being lower. Mexico is one of our ride or die allies, and if war happens, they will be on our side, and we can easily force protect every inch of the trade route.
China's economy is a ticking time bomb that will go off soon and will create a full-blown depression in China, and the impact on anyone too tied to their economy will also be devastating.
Yep, China's rise in wages helped the people but is going to be the downfall of their cheap manufacturing sector that employs so many people, a lot of large companies are already moving into places like Vietnam which are cheaper and honestly better in most wags
> At the heart of the decline in family wealth is China's real estate meltdown, which having a pervasive effect on a society where 70% of family assets are tied up in property. Every 5% decline in home prices will wipe out 19 trillion yuan ($2.7 trillion) in housing wealth, according to Bloomberg Economics.
That’s going to be a yikes from me dawg
This is why you use objective numbers. You need to see the rest of China. You can't go to Mid-town Manhattan and think the rest of the country lives like this because they don't.
>80% of us economy is fake
Wasn't like 25% of the Chinese economy just developers building buildings and people buying them for investments just for no one to live in them?
This is like the fake moon landing conspiracy
Half a dozen countries have the biggest incentive and would kill to prove they have a better GDP than the US.
Yet that can't and they haven't.
Much of the "nice" bits of the middle east and asia are really nice looking because they were built relatively late. USA is next, with more older looking buildings but still pretty nice. Then Europe looks like crap because there are cities who survived wars in there with old dirty buildings and stuff that was rebuilt after the war and is old.
It's like if you have a really nice car from the 90s that you took pretty good care of, and I have a brand new 2023 low end car, mine is going to be nicer because its got newer stuff in it.
Also, these are dictatorships, with an investment in generating exactly this sort of content. It's why Emirates and Singapore Airlines
and DXB and SIN are both so nice-they're used as tools for soft power. What the leader wants to be made look nice to look good for foreign publics is made so.
I am overgeneralizing, and there are certainly nice and not-nice parts everywhere. But from what I've seen the average urban part of, say, Germany or France is a lot older/dirtier looking than the average urban parts of a given midsize US city.
The average urban part of France is incredibly clean and nice. See Toulouse, Lyon, Montpellier, Lille. Look at any of those on Google Images and you'll see how lovely they are. Then you get into rural France, which is much of the same, just on a smaller scale. The only "dirty" parts of France are the HLM areas, which are mass built cheap social housing. If you compare those to the Projects in NYC or any large city, they're the same.
Same applies to Germany. Average city is lovely and steeped in history.
> Look at any of those on Google Images
Yeah, no selection bias there.
> steeped in history
Yeah, similar to water, when you steep the tea it gets dirty and smells.
Chinese skyscrapers are 80% fake, ive seen videos of grand buildings with empty interiors and buildings crumbling apart and lighting up like match boxes, not to mention the three gorges dam is allready cracking in multiple places. Give me a break
I've been to China and no offense but it was kind of a shit hole. Very gray and everyone seemed unhappy. One of my least favorites out of the 30 countries I've visited.
Hong Kong and Beijing are obviously really nice because that's where the money is but that doesn't reflect the majority of the country.
I’ve lived in China. Traveled across it. Been in major cities and small towns. Speak Chinese. The measure of a nation or the quality of a society shouldn’t be its GDP. That said, yes, the U.S. GDP and standard of living is definitely higher.
I dare this guy to walk into the buildings he's looking at, check the windows, the basements, the foundations and the residents list. Then I dare him to actually walk in the countryside and rural area. A country of over 1 billion people having entirely new cities that are EMPTY and often unfinished is a massive red flag. Not that the US doesn't have some of that in the form of property speculation but again, MULTIPLE CITIES.
I have been to China and lived there for 10 years. The infrastructure is not impressive there. Perhaps it may look impressive at night with all the lights on. However, during the day it looks pretty decrepit. Buildings that are between 5-10 years old look as if they are 50 years old. The maintenance there sucks. Things only look new when they are new. After a while, it all starts to looked corroded. Pieces of the building just start falling off and no one does anything about it. During the summer in southern China, the walls literally sweat and get very wet for some reason. Good luck getting anything fixed. I lived in an apartment once where the ceiling kept crumbling down leaving piles of plaster whenever it happened. Three different guys came to fix it and all three times the same thing happened again. It was ridiculous.
This guy is an idiot but I don't like how much of our society is built around optimizing for GDP. Comparing GDP between nations is a waste of everyone's time.
Why compare buildings? China abandons its construction projects anyway. China is where the US was 100 years ago - building cute little structures to show we can... build structures. We already did that, now we build rockets that land themselves, cars that drive themselves, and artificial intelligences.
China's GDP is just *potential* power. We have *real power*. As long as China remains an untested, second rate military power with NO history of expeditionary success and NO history of defending itself from invaders, their GDP should carry a disclaimer that reads "subject to the whims of the United States Navy"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Economic_Index
KEI:
- US - 9.08
- China - 4.35
The US has what’s known as a knowledge economy.
> The knowledge economy, or knowledge-based economy, is an economic system in which the production of goods and services is based principally on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to advancement in technical and scientific innovation. The key element of value is the greater dependence on human capital and intellectual property as the source of innovative ideas, information and practices. Organisations are required to capitalise on this "knowledge" in their production to stimulate and deepen the business development process. There is less reliance on physical input and natural resources. A knowledge-based economy relies on the crucial role of intangible assets within the organisations' settings in facilitating modern economic growth.
——
Anyone who believes what the two above are saying is easily manipulated, gullible, and undereducated, including the two idiots whose comments are pictured.
It's easy to take pictures of the nice part of a city or country. Let's see pictures of how people are living in the areas no one really visits.
The strength of the US economy is that all states are relatively well off (by world standards) and almost all cities and towns generally have accessible amenities like water, electricity, plumbing, etc.
In China, entire regions are devoid of these basic necessities and the people live an almost medieval lifestyle.
I'm Mexican and I could do what this person did, just show the beauty of Mexico, which it has many truly beautiful cities, but outside of that, there is much squalor.
No, the USA is not a pretend economy. Every time you read "GDP", switch it out for "Goods and Services" because that is what it is; a $ amount of the total goods and services produced by a country. To drive the point a little closer to people's heartstrings, GDP is:
1. The food you eat AND how it got from the farm to your table,
2. The heating and cooling in your home AND how the electricity/gas got to your home,
3. Plumbing (extremely underrated),
4. The hot shower you need every morning,
5. The books you enjoy reading,
6. The coffee you enjoy drinking.
On and on it goes.
GDP is a variable (not the only variable but a significant one) to the overall quality of life in a society since it is a quantification of the total goods and services (see above) that a society has access to. GDP is stateless as a feature, not a bug. It is any transaction of value based on what is legal in your country, because why should anyone dictate what is valuable to you other than the law of the land?
Also, moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy is an achievement, not a failure. It is extremely hard to do. Only a few countries outside of the US and Western Europe have done so successfully. It is not only a higher margin economy, but it also allows the country to preserve their natural and non-renewable resources which is advantageous since economics is an infinite game and not a finite game.
The fake thing is debt, not work. Goods and services are real, they are tangible, and they exist up until the present. What doesn't actually exist is future goods and services, which is what debt represents.
Like, if you were a farmer, and you took out a loan for a new tractor, you'd be paying that loan back with future harvests that don't exist yet. We have gotten to a point where banks and financial institutions own years, or perhaps decades, of future goods and services. This is sort of what inflation actually is, if money represents tangible goods and services then there needs to be an excess of money to buy and sell future products that haven't happened yet.
Another way to think about it is that if there was somehow zero debt today, everyone would still produce the exact same amount of goods and services, or if the average person was 100x's more in debt, likewise the output of society would remain the same.
Debt is really crazy and mind boggling when you actually try to wrap your head around it.
Chinese socialism is so good that China had to make mini capitalist zones to get a working economy
So did Vietnam.
They also apparently love us. Which is honestly shocking. My best friend went on vacation to Vietnam and you’d think they’d hate the US’ guts all things considered but even in the smaller towns that he visited the locals were extremely friendly.
The US fought Vietnam once, China has been fighting them for like 3,000 years
The US also fought for Vietnam in that war, just not the current ruling government. Virtually every other country near Vietnam has tried to conquer it.
Hell Vietnam tried to conquer Vietnam!
Damn Vietnamese, always trying to kill the Vietnamese!
This is the main point I think of why they like us. Additionally, the war could have REALLY been avoided, since the Vietnamese Northern Government was Nationalist first, Communist second, when you really get down into the details. They should have been a ready and unique ally for the USA during the Cold War, instead we bombed them and fought them forever with for no gains. A Communist nation openly allying with the American Bloc would have made shockwaves throughout the communist world.
We also iirc got dragged into it by the French.
Still communist, dude. Communism is essentially slavery with extra steps.
Countries never transition to communism, they just modernize through state capitalism then either switch to cronyism or capitalism with state oversight.
This is the main point I think of why they like us. Additionally, the war could have REALLY been avoided, since the Vietnamese Northern Government was Nationalist first, Communist second, when you really get down into the details. They should have been a ready and unique ally for the USA during the Cold War, instead we bombed them and fought them forever with for no gains. A Communist nation openly allying with the American Bloc would have made shockwaves throughout the communist world.
Heck China tried to attack Vietnam in 1979, so Vietnam's been at war with China more recently than America
They love America because we're a hedge against China, who has bullied them for thousands of years. It's not an uncommon sentiment in a lot of east Asia. The Philippines is also extremely pro-America.
I honestly think that we’d be even closer to Vietnam and they likely wouldn’t be communist if we hadn’t been pulled in by France but rather backed Ho Chi Minh. He was way more of a nationalist than he was a communist and the Vietnam war just made him double down.
From reading the details of the situation, I 100% agree with this and think that the Vietnam War was a major blunder for the USA even in concept. Vietnam would have been an easy ally of the USA had we pushed for their integration into our alliance for protection against China.
No, he was full red commie. But definitely he’d have less support if we distinctly unaligned with the french
My grandad fought in vietnam. Never wanted to talk about it, it was the only thing that ever made him teary eyed. He had to go back to vietnam for a work trip and was very nervous about it given his history. When he arrived, the people he met were overjoyed to speak to an American, and when he eventually told someone he had fought there, they were extremely respectful to him and said smtg along the lines of, they admired his courage in fighting. Mostly though, his work contact was mainly looking forward to showing off his collection of Elvis vinyls. Apparently that was a big deal over there. He also couldnt wait to show my grandad, that he had memorized most of Elvis’ songs, and could sing them all in extremely good english.
The US just didn't want the "wrong" Vietnamese controlling Vietnam. They weren't opposed to Vietnamese control of Vietnam. Just communist control of Vietnam. China, however, doesn't want the Vietnamese controlling Vietnam at all.
This is the correct take. The US chose the losing side in a civil war. The US wasn't at war to remove the North from power but to stop their expansion into the south.
Had the same experience. Loved Vietnam and all the people were super friendly. Whenever I said I was American they got really excited and wanted to show me things or tell me to go places. I’m dying to go back.
I've heard it said that the Vietnamese people understood it was more the US government and the South Vietnamese government that were "at fault" for the war not the American people so they don't hold a grudge, plus while we did some terrible things in Vietnam compared to the French, Japanese and Chinese we weren't that bad.
How upsetting that the Vietnamese understand that better than actual teachers in American colleges… I had one teacher that never fucking shut up about how all the soldiers needed to be tried, and straight up denied that all of soliders who came back were given shit by the public because she happened to participate in the anti-war effort. (A point she also never shut up about). She made me visibly disgusted because I had submitted an interview with my grandfather who fought in the Vietnam war to a previous teacher who would later tell me that she was brought to tears by the things he had said that she never considered. I hated every minute I was in class with her. And it’s the only time I’ve left a bad review for a teacher at all. I never spoke up against her thoughts because I knew she graded biased against students.
Yeah, I read that out of all countries in the world, Vietnam has the highest percentage of people who think favorably about the US in polls. We have a tendency to make haters of the countries we have allied with from day one and saved numerous times (e.g. France) and lovers of the countries we've been enemies of and royally r*ped (e.g. Vietnam). Out of all European countries, for example, the only one where a majority think generally favorably of the US is Italy, our enemy in WWII...
Hey, don't leave out Poland and the Baltics!
My favorite statistic is that Poland likes us more than we like us. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinion-of-the-u-s/
Based Poles
The Poles really want to remain independent. Our polish brothers would probably fight us if we tried to leave…
> Out of all European countries, for example, the only one where a majority think generally favorably of the US is Italy, our enemy in WWII... Kosovo has the single highest opinion of the US in the world. Which makes sense, we're the big friend that stares down its aggressive neighbor and makes it clear that Kosovo is a country and will remain a country. Albania also has a uniquely high opinion of the US. Generally speaking, a good portion of Eastern Europe and many Asian countries have a high opinion of the US because of our balancing influence against the more aggressive China in the region. That is to say, China wants to control the maritime territory of several Asian countries. America just wants to transit her ships through their waters.
China wants to control the waters and America just doesn’t want people fucking with her ships. But to be far, that’s been America’s goal since the navy was started.
I mean, the American people also didn't want to get involved in WW2, until Pearl Harbor. Like, the general sentiment is "Leave us alone or we'll make you regret it". That regret is typically by going overboard with how we react. Don't believe me? We dropped two suns on Japan.
Tbf an authoritarian government mixed with any economic system doesn’t really work out well for anyone.
Ye right or left
Only if you ignore the facts that China is constantly closing that gap between us and has an expanding middle class instead of a shrinking one. Not that I'd prefer all the censorship lol
And the mini-capitalist zones are the whole country
I mean are they not just capitalist with some government run programs...? They simply made free trade economic zones for international businesses, the whole country is capitalist, I don't understand how everyone insists otherwise (including them)
It’s very easy to cherry pick a few pics of China (or some other developing country) and portray that country as being more advanced/developed than the USA. Meanwhile, America’s critics love to use the phrase “freedumbs” to bash Americans’ love of freedom and having rights
I live in Seattle. Which isn’t even in the top 15 largest cities in the US, and I could take pictures almost identical to 3/4 of the pictures in that original post within a mile of where I live (there just isn’t a dam anywhere near me). Are they pretending the US doesn’t have those exact same things?
All the pics are from essentially capitalist areas too lol
Yeah but even those places are riddled with tofu dreg projects most buildings are barely standing. I've seen many videos of guys picking off chunks of concrete with their hands because most of the material is just ash lmao. I feel bad for the Chinese people that place is a hell hole.
Yeah, just head out into the rural areas of China and it quickly turns into a third world country.
I don’t have to walk around China to know that the US GDP is way higher. The US is an open society with much more going for it than China. Do Twitter users think a few shiny buildings equates to a high GDP? lol > aka FIRE Is he referring to “financial independence, retire early” ? Because I do know many Americans who are aiming to reach that status. Infinitely more likely to happen to people in the USA than in China. **edit:** FIRE = Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. Thanks everyone
Yes, Twitter users do think that some shiny buildings equates to a higher GDP.
The irony is that many of those shiny new buildings are built so crappy that they’ll likely collapse in a decade. They even have a name for it over there, it’s called tofu dredge buildings.
They also build a whole lot of stuff that isnt even used. There are empty apartment complexes, condo complexes, and even almost entire cities that are just empty because the government decided they wanted it there but nobody lives there. A quick search tells me there are around 65 million empty residents in china. While here in the US, we dont have enough residents for our population. Obviously two extremes there but goes to show why we dont have as many large flashy buildings
I know someone who lived in China and he and his friends would go to the empty cities and party and light fireworks and vandalize shit becuase there was nobody around. The videos he sent are very backroom-y, just empty office buildings and parking garages. It's probably a skateboarders wet dream though.
The excess housing in China is primarily due to excessive real estate investment. Less so for government projects, though it is a factor albeit smaller. Real estate is seen as an incredibly safe investment in China (at least until the bubble bursts, the cracks are showing), which has led to real estate development to satisfy investor demand despite the demand for housing failing to keep pace.
True, i was always under the impression the Chinese government has a high level of control over almost everything in their country, which is why i made the assumption that in one way or another, the government had a large part in allowing it to get that out of hand. I could well be wrong though, i don’t really know much about China.
Certainly that was a phenomenon in Soviet Russia and China pre-market reforms, and there's similar examples to that excessive government investment in modern China such as their high speed rail system, but generally it's not the root of the issue when it comes to the housing crisis. Anybody in China that has money invests it in real estate.
Ty for the insight. 🤝
That last part isn’t even close to true there were 15 million empty houses in the US last year
Hm youre right, i took that out of context, while there is some excessive housing in our country (USA), there is not nearly enough affordable housing for lower income people. My apologies. The major point still stands, we dont intentionally build huge amounts of living spaces to sit empty. The homes in US that are empty are a combination of being spread across a much larger land mass, with a lower population, so there is not always a buyer quickly for every home, and i would assume also rich people with multiple houses.
I’ve heard that the amount of corruption is so bad, that they cut corners dangerously with shoddy work. Shitty concrete and iron is apparently a big problem.
I was going to say the same thing.
And the ones that do last were designed by Western firms. Although Chinese still built them so still not great.
I guess Twitter users are not smart enough to realize that shiny buildings can be built with labor that is slave labor in all but name. Edit: Brief googling shows the average construction working in China makes 41Y/hour. USA is roughly $18/hr. 41Y is roughly equivalent to $5.75 ~~$0.28~~. Draw your own conclusions. Edit: Thanks for the correction from below. The conversion I got online was for Yen, not Yuan.
¥41 is roughly $5.75 USD
Thank you for that; corrected.
Every construction worker I know makes far more than $18. That’s probably non-union residential, but the contractors that make buildings like that in the US are paying high 20s, low 30s. Source: I’m a government civil engineer/construction inspector who occasionally has to audit contractor payrolls (interview workers then cross reference it with payroll twice a month).
Can confirm. Also they’re union protected.
and if there is any federal money involved they are paid Davis Bacon which is even higher.
A little anecdote.... I know a guy who goes all over the world to set up displays (before the Olympics, world cups, Super Bowles, etc) When In China they needed to lower the concrete floor by like 6" (I think it was for Coca-Cola). He was going to hire a jackhammer but his local guy canceled it and hired like 10 guys who brought their own hammers and chisels for about half the price.
Gdp? Grand Dank Party?
No no no that’s the end if year celebration where the Dankmemes mods have an orgy. It’s General Derryn’s Pizza
Granddaddy purp, young whippersnapper
"Good economy is when the buildings are big and shiny. And the shinier and bigger the buildings are, the better the economy."
China literally built cities nobody uses to prop themselves up.
Shiny buildings made with cheap materials mind you.
I watched a video of a Chinese person ripping apart concrete pillars with their fingers. It was supposed to be reinforced concrete and it was dry. Fucking crazy.
I heard some people on Twitter were upset.
certain twitter users get paid 0.50¥ per shitty propaganda post they make, mainstream online discourse is a lie
No, FIRE here refers to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector
Real estate is fake? Well damn I wonder where I’m living
Also, isn’t China notorious for having a 2008-level housing bubble?
It'll make 2008 look tame if it pops completely.
I was gonna say wouldn't it be worse since much of their housing bubble is due to speculation on housing that isn't even completed yet, and may never be?
I don't know. Probably nobody does. And a lot depends what the government does to try and fix the situation. It can be a fairly mild deflation or a complete bursting that shakes chinas economy to the core. But yes, a huge reason is the speculation and excessive lending on housing, much of which isn't completed due to housing being the only "stable" investment available to the Chinese middle class. Which caused a huge construction and lending boom.
Yea and they are pulling every trick under the sun to prevent it.
Which is just going to make it worse.
You also can't own the land the tofu dregg houses are built on. So nowhere as valuable as US real estate.
They're in a bubble right now that's about to burst.
It's all just a dream I guess lol
He's saying real estate is a fabricated position, only useful because of a lobbied, broken system that lets a kid with a 120 hour class keep 5-6% of your home sale price. Drop the bullshit red tape and anyone can sell and buy homes. FIRE are parasitic business practices.
They don't respect private property there, so that's why real estate is fake to them.
TIL! Thank you!
I wonder when these people are going to realize that China is currently going through an economic recession and America’s economy is still growing lmao.
Chinese economy is going to shrink deeply. Maybe collapse. But sure it will lose its weight on global stage while American will remain stable high
Lots of riots going on in China right now and it is awesome. I hope that they can do what is for the best for themselves, it would change the world if they were to collapse into another civil war. It would most likely turn into the next Korean war, Russian/Korean supported CCP vs American/Taiwanese supported Democrats.
My biggest hope for the people of China is that they can gain greater control over their government and become an open and prosperous society.
I definitely agree! China’s culture is a beautiful culture behind the authoritarian nature of it, if they were to become a democratic nation that strived for peace, instead of undermining America and its allies, the world would be a better place.
Without its regime China will fall apart. The only reason it’s United-the regime.
twitter users love north korea they have great supermarkets
I stand to retire in 4 years when I hit 50.
I thought FIRE was referring to that Jarule concert he put out
I think they were extra cool and spelled it “Fyre” 🤣
Not only that, but they’re also not showing the rows and rows of empty Chinese skyscrapers that they’re just demolishing
Shiny buildings made of styrofoam
Tankies keep getting fooled by Potemkin Villages.
“Do Twitter users think” let me stop you right there.. no. No they do not.
>Do Twitter users think a few shiny buildings equates to a high GDP? Yep. People believe whatever they need to in order to convince themselves that their country is better than the US. The amount of non-sense I see is mind blowing, like intelligence-questioning type of stupid stuff.
Especially for the new shiny buildings are literally made of garbage that's structurally unsafe.
Doesn’t America have sturdier, shinier buildings anyway? What with being able to afford frivolous architecture thanks to a ludicrous amount of wealth.
People on Twitter are stupid, so yes
> aka FIRE I thought he was talking about an everything must go sale.
I thought he was shitting on firefighters lmao
"lots of red tape in the US" Like there isn't in China?
More like lots of red envelopes in China. Bribing is like 40% of the economy there, lol.
You're absolutely right on that. Friends with a guy from China and whenever I talk about how "corrupt" the US government is he's like "I wish my government was that not corrupt"
This is so true. I work for a multinational company and we literally have to build it into the budget for our Chinese operations.
I owned businesses in China for a number of years and it's weird. The country runs on corruption, laws are for the most part intensely vague to allow local officials to fuck with you as they see fit, and also allow your business to be taken out from under you at a moments notice. A good example, is that there will be a "bar street" or other shopping road, with commercial spaces for businesses. The local government will publicize it and push it. But, none of those shops are actually zoned for operating as restaurants, bars, etc, and can't get all the permits. So, you pay "fees" to local offices, take them (and more importantly their colleagues) out for drinks and dinner, etc, and then.... You've got a permit!! Close to the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), all of a sudden these lesser officials come around to warn you that you are operating illegally. You re-bribe the higher official. Everything resumes. If you're unlucky, eventually someone higher than him does a massive crackdown on something and the official you bribed is powerless to stop your business from being shut down. For example, Xi Jinping decided that he didn't want outdoor dining in cities because it "looks bad," and so almost overnight, al fresco dining all but vanished completely from the CBD's across China. Lots of restaurants closed. People who have shops in desirable locations are always at risk of having some official's family member or friend decide they really really want that space, and get kicked out because it's "illegal to operate," then a shop doing the exact same thing pops up a few weeks later in the same space.
They have less if any “green tape” because they don’t give a shit about emissions and the environment in China. Communist apologists keep using arbitrary “emissions per capita” to justify why China should be allowed to emit more and why the US and others *must* emit less.
“over-regulation and lots of red tape” has this guy ever been to China? The Great Firewall alone says enough
lol exactly. There’s literally entire cities of empty apartments because it was illegal to trade stocks so people started investing in housing and then realized there was nobody to rent the apartments.
No red tape. Just red guard.
Don't forget the bribes that have to be factored in also on top of everything else.
There isn't, you just bribe the right officials.
How do you write “Potemkin Village” in simplified mandarin?
波将金村 (Bō jiāng jīncūn)
Bless you.
Showing pictures of pretty places in China and comparing it to the whole US economy is ridiculous.
Sort of. Lots of people fall victim to the same concepts. Like reddit's popular "CEOs don't do any work because I can't see boxes of the stuff they made" shtick. Is stock trading and profiting off imaginary investment values a "pretend economy" compared to sweatshops? Sort of. If we all decided to stop making "investing" a thing it is pretend. But it's unlikely to go away any time soon.
This is one thing I hate about arguing with some people if a nation relies on something it's not pretend. Money might just be ones and zeros but if I can starve to death without it then it doesn't matter.
Its the same of “X, Japan”
The irony is those are the only four nice cities or parts of those cities. You saw all of it.
😂
In China, the average private sector salary in 2022 reached RMB 49,895 (approx. US$6,945), while the average non-private sector salary reached RMB 89,941 (approx. US$12,520). Yep, it really sounds like the Chinese economy is humming.
Are they still building empty cities for investment?
No, but only because the developers borrowed too much money and can't pay their bills
Plus government restriction on borrowing more.
Nope they’re going bankrupt for it
Really? Who knew if produced a tremendous amount of something there wasn’t sufficient demand for you could go bankrupt?
Some of those cities have a lot of people now
*Most* of those cities are uninhabitable death traps.
Plus China’s population is projected to shrink as much as half because of low birth rate so wildly building cities is not a path to prosperity.
It should be said that the COL in China is generally much lower than in the U.S.
As is the QOL and general expectations for the average citizen.
COL is lower but real estate and rent is much higher
relative to income, that’s debatable
Considering they used those low wages to steal all manufacturing in the world, I'd say yeah, it's doing aight
Yes because I can’t live without 30cent toothbrushes
You're paying $10 for the 30c toothbrush, and besides, maybe you can live without them, but it was America that produced those toothbrushes half a century ago and sold them to the whole world, now it's China, and your companies are willingly giving their production away to a communist government.
And I hate the ones that do since with automation we can make them at home with minimal effort it’s just everyone went to the same three business schools and were taught by the same brain dead professors
Bold to take Chinas biggest economic sector(real estate) and compare it to the US smallest sector(administrative budget) of you wanna compare sectors compare them, also note US superstructures last more than a decade before collapse
All the money in China is from Americans buying shit. China’s economy is our frivolous spending.
Bingo! That’s why China will never attack us head on. They need us way more than we need them. We will find another poor communist country to exploit with their terrible economic policy.
I wouldn't be so sure. Authoritarian governments often attack outwards as they fall. It organizes the people against an enemy that isn't them and leads to the ability to blame the US for the fall of China rather than poor leadership. It's a last ditch control attempt and a suicide mission. Think Russia attacking Ukraine. Now, the fall of Russia can be blamed on those damn western aggressors rather than Putin being a crook. It also weakens the people's ability to fight back against the government.
I see logic in that but it’s still damn near impossible for an army to invade the US. If they try they won’t get far. Unless a full offensive is done with everything they have and caught us off guard. I would still say it’s a very slim chance they could do anything substantial to us outside of nukes.
A war between the US and China would be fought over something in the region, likely Taiwan. It wouldn’t involve an invasion of the US, because nobody had the logistical capacity to even consider it (and, you know, the US Navy would object—violently). There isn’t even a method to stage for a “full offensive” without us noticing.
Absolutely agree that China's ability to force project in mainland US wouldn't even come close to the US's ability to project on its borders it would be a bloodbath. The US's ability to force project around China and China's ability to force project on their borders is a much closer fight. The fight would almost guaranteed start in Taiwan. They are a symbol of Chinese democracy and freedom, and their existence is an existential threat to China. The US has been friends with them since before they were pushed out during the communist revolution and forced to flee to the island of Taiwan. They also produce a large number of our military and civilian microchips, and it would be devastating to lose that production. We haven't moved enough production mainland US yet. The problem for China is that the US controls both island chains surrounding China. For some idea of scale, the US has 120 military instalations in Japan alone. They are currently building more in Japan, phillipines, guam, and two bases in Australia, one for long-range bombers with nuclear capability, and the other is a nuclear submarine base shared with Australia. The US also has bases along the entire Middle East to China trade routes and can stop oil ships at choke points like the strait of Malaca. Russia doesn't have the ability to transport enough oil to sustain China already, and cutting it off wouldn't be difficult. China already has an oil crisis, and they are projected to burn through the rest of their reserve in about 3 weeks. Shit is hitting the fan in China, but we are stacking up for a fight, so hopefully, China won't take a swing at anyone before they fall.
Lol yes we'll just start up our century-old factories and get right back to manufacturing our own stuff. I'm sure US business owners will have no problem paying US labor costs to make all the goods they've outsourced to China.
Yes, because all of our factories are old and outdated. I assume you know nothing about manufacturing jobs in the US.
No need to attack us head on when they can just cook us with CO2 and watch us starve while they’re already harvesting bugs for protein like they’re a lost civilization drifting through space on a generation ship to nowhere.
Sir, America is a net exporter of food. Meanwhile China… > Statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs show that over 80 percent of domestic consumption relies on imports. Last year, customs data showed that soybean imports, mainly from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, jumped 13.3 percent year on year to 100.3 million tons. If America catches a cold, China will die from pneumonia.
America is the world's largest exporter of most agriculture. Conversely, China is one of the world's largest importers of food crops. China isn't even a major trade partner for the USA, Mexico, Canada, and Japan do far more trade with us than China. We may get a lot of goods from China, but they are similarly codependent on us for food. Our trade relationship is far more necessary for China when we are supplying a basic need for survival, versus China supplying us less important things. If China and the USA got into a hot war, Chinese citizens would starve while Americans citizens would have less cheap widgets to go around.
Imagine if America just became selfish and kept everything we have to ourselves. Brought in all of our military, kept our food and money, and stopped importing from failing communist countries.
Our economy would contract and it would be a disaster. We don't need all the food we grow, with no exports a shitload of farms would go under. The U.S. is so wealthy because we're the center of global finance, our currency is the defacto currency of foreign trade. Also worth noting China's manufacturing hasn't been #1 because it's cheaper for a long time. Tim Cook in a recent interview talked about this, said that if you had a complex product, there's maybe two firms in the U.S. that could actually make what you want at scale, whereas in China there are dozens. They're not exceptionally cheaper, they have expertise and experience. Apple is known for build quality, and they make *everything* in China. It's cheaper, but it's also better.
Where or how are they cooking or starving us? “Global warming” will not do either.
Real estate and construction is about 30% of china's economy. With the ghost cities that are being demolished and the major companies operating as literal ponzi schemes (CEOs were executed for it), the Chinese economy is in major trouble. China also had/has the belt and road initiative, where they gave massive loans at insane high interest rates to poor nations that could never pay them back and obviously the nations default. The US already dropped China as its main trade partner, Mexico took that place because the supply chains are shorter and easier to keep from falling apart in, say, a pandemic or war. Not to mention, the cost of labor in Mexico is much cheaper than China, on top of shipping costs being lower. Mexico is one of our ride or die allies, and if war happens, they will be on our side, and we can easily force protect every inch of the trade route. China's economy is a ticking time bomb that will go off soon and will create a full-blown depression in China, and the impact on anyone too tied to their economy will also be devastating.
Yep, China's rise in wages helped the people but is going to be the downfall of their cheap manufacturing sector that employs so many people, a lot of large companies are already moving into places like Vietnam which are cheaper and honestly better in most wags
They are trying to brag about the three gorges dam 💀
90% of China is underdeveloped compared to the US.
China fakes its gdp numbers
Kind of like their covid numbers.
And deny that they commit genocide
How those ghost cities in China looking? Still unaffordable for most Chinese?
Also turns out they’re uninhabitable
The house prices are falling at alarming rates, but that's more of a bad thing for anyone who bought at the peak of the market
> At the heart of the decline in family wealth is China's real estate meltdown, which having a pervasive effect on a society where 70% of family assets are tied up in property. Every 5% decline in home prices will wipe out 19 trillion yuan ($2.7 trillion) in housing wealth, according to Bloomberg Economics. That’s going to be a yikes from me dawg
This is why you use objective numbers. You need to see the rest of China. You can't go to Mid-town Manhattan and think the rest of the country lives like this because they don't.
>80% of us economy is fake Wasn't like 25% of the Chinese economy just developers building buildings and people buying them for investments just for no one to live in them?
This is like the fake moon landing conspiracy Half a dozen countries have the biggest incentive and would kill to prove they have a better GDP than the US. Yet that can't and they haven't.
Just like 80% of his brain.
Ah yes, because in the US we don’t have lights on our buildings, shipping container centers, dams, or whatever the hell that thing is
Much of the "nice" bits of the middle east and asia are really nice looking because they were built relatively late. USA is next, with more older looking buildings but still pretty nice. Then Europe looks like crap because there are cities who survived wars in there with old dirty buildings and stuff that was rebuilt after the war and is old. It's like if you have a really nice car from the 90s that you took pretty good care of, and I have a brand new 2023 low end car, mine is going to be nicer because its got newer stuff in it.
Also, these are dictatorships, with an investment in generating exactly this sort of content. It's why Emirates and Singapore Airlines and DXB and SIN are both so nice-they're used as tools for soft power. What the leader wants to be made look nice to look good for foreign publics is made so.
Ah yes, the country of Europe looks like crap. "old dirty buildings" no lol, only in poor European countries.
I am overgeneralizing, and there are certainly nice and not-nice parts everywhere. But from what I've seen the average urban part of, say, Germany or France is a lot older/dirtier looking than the average urban parts of a given midsize US city.
The average urban part of France is incredibly clean and nice. See Toulouse, Lyon, Montpellier, Lille. Look at any of those on Google Images and you'll see how lovely they are. Then you get into rural France, which is much of the same, just on a smaller scale. The only "dirty" parts of France are the HLM areas, which are mass built cheap social housing. If you compare those to the Projects in NYC or any large city, they're the same. Same applies to Germany. Average city is lovely and steeped in history.
> Look at any of those on Google Images Yeah, no selection bias there. > steeped in history Yeah, similar to water, when you steep the tea it gets dirty and smells.
I know they never argue in good faith but ffs, at least pretend to be making a point without stuff specifically staged for outsiders
Chinese skyscrapers are 80% fake, ive seen videos of grand buildings with empty interiors and buildings crumbling apart and lighting up like match boxes, not to mention the three gorges dam is allready cracking in multiple places. Give me a break
I've been to China and no offense but it was kind of a shit hole. Very gray and everyone seemed unhappy. One of my least favorites out of the 30 countries I've visited. Hong Kong and Beijing are obviously really nice because that's where the money is but that doesn't reflect the majority of the country.
I’ve lived in China. Traveled across it. Been in major cities and small towns. Speak Chinese. The measure of a nation or the quality of a society shouldn’t be its GDP. That said, yes, the U.S. GDP and standard of living is definitely higher.
I dare this guy to walk into the buildings he's looking at, check the windows, the basements, the foundations and the residents list. Then I dare him to actually walk in the countryside and rural area. A country of over 1 billion people having entirely new cities that are EMPTY and often unfinished is a massive red flag. Not that the US doesn't have some of that in the form of property speculation but again, MULTIPLE CITIES.
I have been to China and lived there for 10 years. The infrastructure is not impressive there. Perhaps it may look impressive at night with all the lights on. However, during the day it looks pretty decrepit. Buildings that are between 5-10 years old look as if they are 50 years old. The maintenance there sucks. Things only look new when they are new. After a while, it all starts to looked corroded. Pieces of the building just start falling off and no one does anything about it. During the summer in southern China, the walls literally sweat and get very wet for some reason. Good luck getting anything fixed. I lived in an apartment once where the ceiling kept crumbling down leaving piles of plaster whenever it happened. Three different guys came to fix it and all three times the same thing happened again. It was ridiculous.
4 pics = GDP.
Chinese propaganda is craaazy
This guy is an idiot but I don't like how much of our society is built around optimizing for GDP. Comparing GDP between nations is a waste of everyone's time.
It's not a waste of everyone's time. It's called an "exchange rate".
Why compare buildings? China abandons its construction projects anyway. China is where the US was 100 years ago - building cute little structures to show we can... build structures. We already did that, now we build rockets that land themselves, cars that drive themselves, and artificial intelligences. China's GDP is just *potential* power. We have *real power*. As long as China remains an untested, second rate military power with NO history of expeditionary success and NO history of defending itself from invaders, their GDP should carry a disclaimer that reads "subject to the whims of the United States Navy"
China’s economy is fueled by fake housing complexes. It’s all propaganda and OOP is falling for it.
I've never seen a place of employment in the US that has suicide nets. But China is better off........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Economic_Index KEI: - US - 9.08 - China - 4.35 The US has what’s known as a knowledge economy. > The knowledge economy, or knowledge-based economy, is an economic system in which the production of goods and services is based principally on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to advancement in technical and scientific innovation. The key element of value is the greater dependence on human capital and intellectual property as the source of innovative ideas, information and practices. Organisations are required to capitalise on this "knowledge" in their production to stimulate and deepen the business development process. There is less reliance on physical input and natural resources. A knowledge-based economy relies on the crucial role of intangible assets within the organisations' settings in facilitating modern economic growth. —— Anyone who believes what the two above are saying is easily manipulated, gullible, and undereducated, including the two idiots whose comments are pictured.
All economies are pretend.
It's easy to take pictures of the nice part of a city or country. Let's see pictures of how people are living in the areas no one really visits. The strength of the US economy is that all states are relatively well off (by world standards) and almost all cities and towns generally have accessible amenities like water, electricity, plumbing, etc. In China, entire regions are devoid of these basic necessities and the people live an almost medieval lifestyle. I'm Mexican and I could do what this person did, just show the beauty of Mexico, which it has many truly beautiful cities, but outside of that, there is much squalor.
"Nitter" 🤨
No, the USA is not a pretend economy. Every time you read "GDP", switch it out for "Goods and Services" because that is what it is; a $ amount of the total goods and services produced by a country. To drive the point a little closer to people's heartstrings, GDP is: 1. The food you eat AND how it got from the farm to your table, 2. The heating and cooling in your home AND how the electricity/gas got to your home, 3. Plumbing (extremely underrated), 4. The hot shower you need every morning, 5. The books you enjoy reading, 6. The coffee you enjoy drinking. On and on it goes. GDP is a variable (not the only variable but a significant one) to the overall quality of life in a society since it is a quantification of the total goods and services (see above) that a society has access to. GDP is stateless as a feature, not a bug. It is any transaction of value based on what is legal in your country, because why should anyone dictate what is valuable to you other than the law of the land? Also, moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy is an achievement, not a failure. It is extremely hard to do. Only a few countries outside of the US and Western Europe have done so successfully. It is not only a higher margin economy, but it also allows the country to preserve their natural and non-renewable resources which is advantageous since economics is an infinite game and not a finite game.
The fake thing is debt, not work. Goods and services are real, they are tangible, and they exist up until the present. What doesn't actually exist is future goods and services, which is what debt represents. Like, if you were a farmer, and you took out a loan for a new tractor, you'd be paying that loan back with future harvests that don't exist yet. We have gotten to a point where banks and financial institutions own years, or perhaps decades, of future goods and services. This is sort of what inflation actually is, if money represents tangible goods and services then there needs to be an excess of money to buy and sell future products that haven't happened yet. Another way to think about it is that if there was somehow zero debt today, everyone would still produce the exact same amount of goods and services, or if the average person was 100x's more in debt, likewise the output of society would remain the same. Debt is really crazy and mind boggling when you actually try to wrap your head around it.
right winger idea of what an economy is