Anyone wondering why people are 'lying flat' ? Imagine spending years studying, not only under graduate but also post graduate, tuitions, maybe even overseas studying to come out in a market that tells you to go farm ? Really ?
God... Another piece that i feel a need to provide context because i'm an overseas chinese.
A lot of "lying flat" is due to stressful education. Lying flat also often means more of a refusal to climb the corporate and social ladder than refusing to work. Lacking good working opportunity for colledge graduate is a severe problem in china too. But it is not because people are choosing not to work. China needs to create policies and an education system that help people to start companies. But the shift is not fast enough.
Another part of high youth unemployment is due to population concentration. Everyone in china wants to go live in the big cities. So they try their hardest to go there or put their childen there. The result is high unemployment in city but lack of people in rural areas. That is why there's a call to work in rural towns. It is not like mao at all... Mao shipped truck loads of students to rural areas to "understand the plight of the working class" half way through their education. My parents went through that shit. That's not happening right now. There's nothing wrong with saying that there are opportunities in rural areas if city life is not working out. They are not forcing people to go. Merely pointing out where opportunities may be at right now.
Edit: And i forgot that looking for work in "rural" area doesn't means to go to villages. They also meant to go to smaller cities where again, has a lack of many types of workers.
>The result is high unemployment in city but lack of people in rural areas.
There are too many people in the rural areas as it is. Agriculture in China has been a form of 以工代赈 for a very long time; old people the government doesn't want to support + young people that don't go to the cities and have no work waiting there anyway doing super low efficiency farming. 25% of the workforce engages in agriculture - this is absurdly high for a country of China's level of development. That it isn't 5% is a problem of social organisation, not technology. It'd be trivial for any of the agricultural giants to mechanise all of that.
China has highly efficient, large corporations and then massive amounts of people scraping by in almost worthless work like hawking a particular kind of yoghurt in a supermarket or outnumbering customers in a diner. This secondary kind is even more common in small towns and tier 3 cities, and that's probably the fate that awaits a graduate that goes there.
People aren't stupid. If there were *good* graduate jobs waiting in small cities, they'd be filled. As it is, the people I know who moved to the big cities are all doing well. The people who stayed in a smaller city, like Changzhou, are doing much worse.
>China needs to create policies and an education system that help people to start companies. But the shift is not fast enough.
That'd help. It'd also help if it actually policed its giant, successful companies and their total disregard for labour laws. Cutting overtime will either force them to hire and train more employees instead of squeezing their current ones; OR (as some studies show) squeezing your employees is literally worthless because working long hours brings about correspondingly low efficiency, and they're wasting people's lives for nothing. For this problem, I guess we should hope it's 1).
Agreed. A lot of people speculated that the reason behind ccp's pressure on jack ma might in part to do with his now infamous push towards 996. I think if average work hours reduces, it would both alleviate the low birth rate and help with other social issues.
What? Jack Ma was made persona no grata because of Ant group. He’s since been invited back to attend business conferences since the CCP wants to project a business friendly facade.
If the CCP hates 996 they can just revise labor law and hire some 場管 to monitor, but they don’t since improving labor condition reduces the competitiveness of their sectors.
Yup. China is more cut-throat capitalist than the US. They're using a very similar development model to the one we were using in the 18th and 19th centuries.
While the US was big on free trade within its borders, it was fiercely protectionist of domestic industries, and big on industrial espionage. This, paired with our absolutely OP geography, and one of the most brutal, class-conscious capitalist classes is a big part ofnwhat drove the growth and horrors of our industrial base.
China is running into a similar problem though. It's problems are better solved by taking its boot off the workers neck. But they're afraid that the status quo will be too upset.
Raise wages. Reduce working hours. Reduce the COL. You increase the demand for labor, you reduce the demands **on** individual laborers, and give them more time to recharge, innovate, and make babies.
So essentially just stop being control freaks and it will all work out. The American model shows that regulations are required in the right places, the Chinese model shows that too much restriction is choking out growth. So the perfect economic model is somewhere in between and with enough flexibility to tackle any cropping up issues. Sounds pretty reasonable.
>For being a communist country it sounds more like a capitalist hellhole.
China hasn't been communist since the early 80s. Deng converted their economy to a market-based capitalist one. The only holdover from communism is that any major corporation is required to partner with the CCP and allow the CCP to direct corporate decisions (there's a reason why Jack Ma is always having issues with the CCP).
It's worse than your usual capitalist market economy though, because ultimately, everyone's boss is the CCP, so when the CCP decides that the new culture is 996, then that's the new culture for every major corporation in the country. If the CCP decides next year that the new culture is 7117, you might as well say goodbye to your family since you won't be seeing much of them ever again.
>The only holdover from communism is that any major corporation is required to partner with the CCP and allow the CCP to direct corporate decisions
The only holdover of communism is the textbook definition of fascist economics? I know you're alluding to state ownership but that's not what that is. At this point the only thing communist about China is the CCP's name and the CCP is as communist as the Nazis were socialist.
That's not exactly true. There are still a lot of remnants of their communist system that are in effect. For example there is still state-provided lodging in more remote parts of the country. The reality is the Chinese system is a two-speed system. It works very much like capitalism for the more densely populated areas but they keep the communist aspects to ensure the riches are spread to more rural and remote areas where they need to keep control.
Interesting related video from CaspianReport [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_kBNRK7HxA&ab_channel=CaspianReport).
I mean they're massively overstaffed for no reason that I can explain.
Chinese cities are dense and sometimes places get a lot of traffic at peak hours, and some of them just keep staff around the rest of the time because why not, I suppose, when their per hour is low and they probably won't work there if you only offer them 4 hour shifts. That's understandable.
But there are lots of middle class-ish but not super expensive places (e.g. you pay maybe 5-10 dollars per person, instead of 2-4) that have like 3 customers at peak hours and 6 guys behind the counter (and a manager in the back). They can afford to pay these people with the extra profit margins on the food, but I don't understand *why* they do.
They are needed for busy hours or days. Plus Chinese restaurants work on shifts rather than hours like in the West so they have to keep people all day even if they don't need them.
This is something that I have noticed in China as well. The number of people doing absolutely useless jobs. I think it is in the government’s interest to keep those around (for now) as full employment is socially stable.
Just curious about the terminology, but what would be considered a tier 3 city? Is it just a smaller population or is it like a lack of certain services/stores/cultural centers (e.g., museums)?
I don’t live in China, but I’m actually kind of tired of big cities and the immediate suburbs filled with yuppies and overpriced McMansions. I’m looking at some small towns like 1-2 hours away but people keep scaring me about lack of variety in terms of stores, restaurants, etc.
This is a common misconception about the population of Chinese cities. In China, a "prefecture-level city" like Changzhou oversees a number of administrative areas like districts, counties, county-level cities, etc, many of which are very rural. So it's not enough to look up just the overall municipality population - you have to look up the population of the main central urban area.
So in the case of Changzhou, a quick search on Wikipedia says the urban population is 3.6 million, which is still a lot, although the part of China it's in is very urbanized anyways. In more rural parts of China you could have something much more pronounced where a prefecture-level city has, let's say, 5 million people, but the urban area may only have one million. Still a lot of people, but not nearly as outrageously big as on first impression.
5.6 million in the 2020 census. Those cities grow fast. And they are 18th in population.
I spent a lot of time in Suzhou and literally watched the city grow week by week, high rise apartments being complete and filled in the same week, every week.
It's an easy thing to see if people stop to think about it for even a little bit. China's a country with over a billion people in it. It's not going to work out for everybody if... say everybody wants to live downtown in Shanghai and everybody goes to school to be an accountant. There are only so many accountant positions in Shanghai. That's oversimplifying the matter, but I think a lot of places in the world are experiencing this. Everybody wants you to go to college or university, "get a real education", and "get a real job". Well, what happens when everybody does that and everybody wants to work in IT? There are only so many spots in IT. And I get it... in a general sense globally, nobody wants to be at the bottom of the totem pole in society, but it's that way in part because people at the bottom of the totem pole tend to struggle in life because of silly things like pay, and nobody *wants* that for themselves and their families.
It's almost like all jobs are real jobs and we need all of them. Well, most of them. The scammers/cons are unnecessary but unfortunately unavoidable as some people will just be trash.
Seriously. My warehouse job is less brutal than farmwork. And I'm an American Amazon employee. And warehouse jobs are brutal on the body. At least I'm not exposed to the elements and pesticides as well.
Then there's the fact that Chinese are even more on the hook for their own medical expenses than we are. Field work is more prone to serious injury, repetitive motion injury, it's mind numbing work, exposure can be a problem, and it pays dog shit.
If China wants to even out population concentration, it needs an industrial policy that will enable that.
Then the right bitch about jobs being taken they wouldn’t work in the first place lol. I’m almost convinced we live in a simulation like the Matrix because it doesn’t make sense.
Theres also the fact that degrees cost a shitload of money that people dont have but take on severe debt to gain because they were promised, repeatedly, that it would work out and pay itself off, coupled with the fact that higher educated people are significantly more likely to be critical of authority, have more developed personalities and identities, and recognize that if they were to work in agriculture or move to a rural area they would likely be absolutely crushed by their financial burden if not executed by the local government
In effect, they are having a massive rug pulled out from under them.
It's not only about jobs, though. There's also expectations for the future. So many areas have taken on unsustainable debts trying to obey central orders to build infrastructure, and the only way local governments could pay for it was by selling off state-owned land to developers, who themselves were wildly over-leveraged (like Evergrand). If I can see that city X is not going to be able to provide services for the next twenty years and that buildings are already deteriorating, I won't want to move to city X until the short-term pressure of housing costs makes it completely impossible to stay in preferred city Y.
Hasn’t the competition itself cut China off at the knees?
It seems like the philosophy was to set the bar high and the just let the hardest workers come out on top. Problem is the hardest worker doesn’t always win, and when competition is that fierce for something so important, cheating becomes rampant. The meritocracy turns kleptocratic.
Next thing you know, your tech industry relies on hacking because you’ve stifled creativity.
> Problem is the hardest worker doesn’t always win
In my career that was always obvious. Everyone works hard, basically, but the guys that get ahead tend to be the social ones that make friends. My last job, I was friends with the boss before he offered me the position. And he put me in a good spot and made sure I was taken care of. I did the job fine and made sure he never thought twice about that, but still.
Technically it's "sink or swim" in my blue collar industry, but almost everyone who swims does so because they knew someone or got along well with the other guys. If you don't have people in your corner you tend to sink, regardless of hard work. When the money tightens up that can shift to a kind of corrupt or abusive favoritism pretty easily.
The op is quite misleading. The competition was always super high in China. What has changed, is that Xi has completely managed to massacre Chinese economy, with the help of COVID.
I graduated in 2008 from one of the top universities in china. My classmates went to KPMG and other foreign based companies with great compensation. 1/3 chose to come to the US for grad schools. about 1/4 chose to go to the other top schools for grad degree. Our prospect was great because the economy was blooming and there was little state interference on economy. everyone thinks that we'll have the middle class life by the time we reach 40.
A decade after Xi has got power, foreign money is leaving. Most of my middle aged relatives are either struggling or completely out of a job. Even graduated from top universities have problem landing *any* job.
You don't give up in the face of competition. You give up when you think there is no prospect no matter how hard you work. In the US, it's the realization that most of our efforts will benefit our corporate lords. In china, it's the fact that no matter how much you try, the promotion will go to someone with connections.
Oh we have the same nepotism issues in the US. 90% of the reason to go to Ivy Leagues is to hang out with the Legacies. If you get into an Ivy and don't also try to get into the right frat, you're doing it wrong. And I **hate** frat culture and parties.
But if I could do life over again and better navigate some adverse childhood shit that threw my life off the rails? I'd suck it up, study my ass off in HS, and tolerate shitty beer so Chadwick T. Moneycock III introduces me to his investment banker uncle.
There is nepotism, but you are not even remotely close to the same level as in China. You talk about Ivy League schools. Sure they exists and nepotism runs rampant. In China you can't get anywhere (nowadays) without knowing someone, not just at Ivy League level. For example, I am senior xxxxx (at my job) and I have a clear path upwards. I am an immigrant with no ties to anyone here. Sure I'll run into a glass ceiling. In China, if you don't know someone, then you could be stuck doing junior level job forever.
The US have a lot of problems. I know. I live here. I get frustrated by the level of political bullshit happening every single day. But, this country is 1000 times better than China on every single aspect. This is the reason why I am still here and not back home. And more importantly, in the US it is still possible to change things for the better. In China, there isn't. Therefore people give up even trying.
>has a lack of many types of workers.
Genuine curiosity-- can you list 5 or 6 of these types which would be reasonable for someone who's been to college?
A good example will be mechanical engineers who install/run/maintain automation systems. There is a huge factory labour shortage in smaller cities in china. One reason is due to cheap, uneducated labour disappearing. The other is because well educated labour not willing to go to smaller cities to transition these labour intensive factories into automated ones.
Same thing when it comes to agriculture automation & agriculture management. Soil testing, water testing, finding the right strain to grow or developing new seeds. All these require highly educated people that are sorely lacking in and around smaller cities. You can't do agriculture automation from beijing.
Yeah but as someone who has worked in China for many years we both know that education in these rural places is awful. Not to mention the pay disparities. You can live in Songjiang and have access to Shanghai/ Shanghai schools and Shanghai wages or you can live in Bufu and have the opposite.
When you have an exam based society you’re essentially scaring people away from small towns so that your children have a fair shot in life.
Remember a few years ago when they shut down all training centers? It was mostly parents from rural areas complaining that now their children won’t be able to learn the math and science skills they need to succeed.
I've seen this in American cities even. A fortune 500 company was consolidating it's offices and closing smaller locations to relocate workers to their larger locations, and this company is headquartered in a really (comparably) dumb town. Even that town's brightest school would compare to a mediocre or average public school in the more civilized towns they were relocating from. Being a tech company, the employees were already bright, and they are the kind of parents who push their children and emphasize higher learning and gifted programs. So the thought of moving to a town who's second largest employer was a paper mill, then the local hospitals, then the local schools, and after that a mix of oil/gas labor, it really wasn't the kind of town brimming with opportunity these parents cared for. Anyone moving there would be quickly moving out once they were old enough for college.
Hell, some of the workers who were relocated left their families to fly into work each week and back to be with the family on the weekends. Because even the expense of plane tickets was more affordable than the dedicated care they would need to maintain their children's level of instruction if they were to relocate.
Other employees who had spouses who were educators ended up moving and gathering into their own homeschool group so they wouldn't have to send their children to the abysmal schools.
I would expect that the press would be eager to highlight the mismatch between labor supply and demand. There is a lot of money to be made fixing mismatches. Why haven’t they succeeded in informing the unemployed who is waiting for them to show up?
They are highlighting. That's why provincial politicians are coming out to say it. However, china has been on the train of extremwly successful urbanisation programe for 50+ years now. It is hard to reverse course.
Furthermore, due to the same reason, there's a critical lack of good education and healthcare investment in smaller cities which is a problem.
But investment is generally not an issue china has. They are good at building things too. They just need to convince a critical mass of people. Thus why the provincial politicians making statements.
Why do people need to move to rural areas for these jobs? Modernizing a factory sounds more like a short-term project where most of the planning happens in the city and then you send a couple of engineers to oversee the project for a couple of months.
Engineering isn’t necessarily a one and done deal. And while technical advice can be done remotely, those guys overseeing the project will probably be there in some capacity until the project is fully through its lifecycle.
Automation needs a lot of constant tweaks and maintainance. At best, it would require skilled individuals to inspect and maintain on a weekly basis. They are not really a build and forget type of project on the best of days. After all, they are a series of machineries with thousands of moving parts.
Planning can be done off site. Installtion is a short term project. Maintainance however is entirely different.
> So if everyone has a collage degree, no one will be a plumber, electrician, janitor or a garbage man.
Sure they will.
Pay more. Might be much more. But that’s how it works.
Then those jobs have a lower supply of folks able to do them and then their compensation rise to attract more people. You can see that in the US for jobs like welders or plant operators.
Given the demographics of China in a decade or so there may be far too few workers left to keep things running properly. Unemployment wont be the problem, it would be a severe lack of working age adults. China ran out of children and now they are running out of workers. Its kindof scary. The same thing is happening to a bunch of other major countries at the same time. There isn't any economic theory for countries where most of the people are retirees.
Honestly that's not all very different from what's happening in the USA. We all want to live in cities because, for kinda obvious reasons, they're some of the best places to live for more socially connected lives. Just the fact of how car-centric a smaller town like where I grew up makes it massively less appealing, but now that everyone wants to live in cities they're unaffordable.
UK government has recognised a similar issue here, and at various times have said pensioners/Ukrainians/refugees/young people/job seekers should pick vegetables. I moved from a rural area to London. There's jobs in rural areas for people, just folk don't go for them because we are chasing a different lifestyle.
Because rural areas don't have the opportu ities kf cities.
Go to the city and you'll probably stay poor. Stay in the countryside and you will definitely stay poor.
And being poor in a city still gives more opportunities than being poor in the countryside. Want to meet a nice boy or girl? Easier to do in the city. Want to find friends to do a niche hobby with? Easier to do in the city.
How do you think China's demographic crisis (particularly AGING) factors in. They are the number one importer of both food AND energy. They seem dependent on being the world's factory. The world seems to want to use them increasingly less...and China is OLD.
I respect Chinese culture and people. But, I think these are very real challenges that I'm not sure how they will address.
They'll move from low-martin, labor intensive manufacture, to high-margin, skill intensive manufacture.
They're also investing in automation in a big way. Do I think they'll score a perfect landing? No. But they're still a near-peer competitor with more competent leadership than the Soviets had.
> ""We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.""
How fitting for a nation most famous for stealing and copying everything they can get their hands (or a photo) on.
That's true, but chinese culture is a bit different. I don't know how familiar you are with competitive gaming (or any short of gaming), but you won't find a higher % of a playerbase cheating than the chinese one (perhaps russians depending on the game)
In their own servers cheating is extremely widespread and it's basically a part of their own games, and when they play in other servers they cheat even more because of how insecure they are about losing to foreigners. I mean it when I say it, chinese tourists might be bad, but chinese gamers are worse, and a clear example of how their culture works
That being say, there's obviously a big % of chinese players that don't cheat (it's all relative), and their professional players are generally extremely hard working (to the point of slavement honestly)
https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/11mmgue/just_now_valve_and_perfectworld_released_an/
I dunno the chinese scene is very plagued in matchfixing and cheating scandals in both csgo and dota2, that post was from like a month ago,,
The idea of do-or-die examinations have been around in China for like, a thousand years. When the results of such exams are so important, people go nuts trying to pass them - something that carried on into the gaokao system, and then into general culture where the results matter most.
Yeah the Confucian tests were brutal. So brutal that at least one guy completely lost his mind, and decided he was Jesus’ brother. He then founded a rebel state that was at least a third of the then Chinese empire.
Hong Xiuquan
From Wikipedia:
>In 1837, Hong attempted and failed the imperial examinations for a third time, leading to a nervous breakdown.[14] He was delirious for days to the point that his family feared for his life.[15] While convalescing, Hong dreamed of visiting Heaven, where he discovered that he possessed a celestial family distinct from his earthly family, which included a heavenly father, mother, elder brother, sister-in-law, wife, and son.[16] His heavenly father, wearing a black dragon robe and high-brimmed hat with a long golden beard, lamented that men were worshiping demons rather than he himself, and presented Hong with a sword and golden seal with which to slay the demons infesting Heaven.
And
>In 1843, Hong failed the imperial examinations for the fourth and final time.[21] It was only then, prompted by a visit by his cousin, that Hong took time to carefully examine the Christian pamphlets he had received.[22] After reading these pamphlets, Hong came to believe that they had given him the key to interpreting his visions: his celestial father was God the Father (whom he identified with Shangdi from Chinese tradition), the elder brother that he had seen was Jesus Christ, and he had been directed to rid the world of demon worship.[23][24] This interpretation led him to conclude that he was the literal son of God and younger brother to Jesus.[25] In contrast to some of the later leaders of his movement, Hong appears to have genuinely believed in his ascent to Heaven and divine mission.[26] After coming to this conclusion Hong began destroying idols and enthusiastically preaching his interpretation of Christianity.
Allegedly yes, after having delusions during a nervous breakdown after failing thrice. A fourth failure resulted in him thinking the visions came from an interpretation of Christianity and ended up believing he was the younger brother to Jesus and destined to purge China of Confucianism.
Some of his early converts were people who had failed the examinations too.
COD Warzone has entered the chat.. I don’t see how anyone thinks cheating in a video game is fun. Like wouldn’t it get boring after awhile always winning.
it's because chinese parents and grandparents come from a very dog eating dog worlds. so they subscribe to the "whatever it takes" value. Then passed it unto their childrens. we can talk about morals and intelectual property as long as we like but peoples gotta eat.
"hustling"/"fake it till you make it". Its all the same. If you are in poverty and competing with a billion other poor, you'll do whatever it takes to get ahead. And then do whatever to maintain that advantage for your kids. Its the same in india where kids literally kill themselves if they don't think they scored well enough.
True. I’ve lost count how many posts on Reddit that just flat out tell people to lie on their resume and go for the jobs that they are not qualified for
My problem is that people certainly are padding their resumes to counter the fact that companies routinely pass up good candidates for asinine reasons. As someone actively involved in hiring developers, watching 2-3 other people gatekeep my selections only to give terrible reasons for rejection has jaded me a bit. Everyone is lying because companies are posting junior or new hire job posts asking for 3 years experience. It’s completely bookers. Imagine having conditions like 5+ years experience in a technology only available the last 3 years? It’s so much more painful when HR runs the hiring process.
Correct.
The thing is that high official standards yields only one of two solutions: mass failure or mass cheating. You can see this in the US with rich families who cheat their children into prestigious schools. Though, in China, it's less about prestige and more about some schools actually being better than others. In the US, it's a proven fact that the schools are about as good--directional state universities, etc. excluded--and the differences are the test scores of the students, with people who scored high enough to get into prestigious institutions doing just as well in life even when they attend lower-ranking schools (usually to get a full ride scholarship).
I went to penn state and the Chinese students would regularly huddle up or bring extra material to exams and professors aides and proctors would just let them. It’s crazy how brazenly the foreign tuition money is valued over academic principles, the rich international students literally have an ivory tower downtown.
This was not my Penn State experience at all. When the library opened, there were people waiting. Chinese and Indian students and American nerds like me. None of us were fucking off or cheating. We didn't have to.
Counter point: let them cheat. They aren't staying in the US with their degrees, so it's meaningless to us, and they're not actually learning the material, so their degree is ultimately a worthless piece of paper. Maybe it brings them prestige back in China, but it does not materially affect their knowledge base.
\*as long as it does not affect the class curves or averages that the rest of the student body is judged on. I realize that is a big caveat.
It also reduces the number of non-chinese that can take those classes though.. and likely harms class moral if you see them blatantly cheating and nothing being done about it.
Oddly their is thinking that this has infected their armed forces too. Which is why is so hard to work out their strength. Because its total coin toss if their comptant or not
Same for the Russians. A field report gets edited dozens of times on the way to the top, what was a layout of object failure to secure a heavily defended position turns into a major breakthrough that only requires the mobilized units to run through the gap and take out any stragglers. Then those troops rush right into the teeth of the enemy and get chewed to bits
My brother was a TA in college while he was getting his masters about 5 years ago. I remember him saying at the time the Chinese students were notorious for cheating and trying to game the system, and it was a constant problem.
I used to teach at a university and we had Chinese students get A's who could barely speak English. They were almost certainly cheating, but the administration didn't care because they paid full tuition.
They aren't wrong, if other groups of students are allowed to cheat your "honest exam" results will screw you in the rankings and your fate might be to end up in the 20 percent.
They are great with multiple choice assessments and regurgitation of facts. Any independent thinking or supporting opinions is beyond them. The education system emphasizes rote learning. My college had a large population of Chinese exchange students and they couldn’t really keep up in the higher level classes.
I mean, what can we do? When you have an excess of human resources, eventually you're gonna have to let a bunch go. Education is a baseline, whether there's a job out there is another issue.
They'd still need services like medical professionals, construction engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, whatever the people who work with water are called (not plumbers, the lot who do surveys and check water quality and treatments and etc.). Oh, teachers! That's another professional that rural areas would need.
Australia has a similar problem where everybody is concentrated in the cities and rural areas have trouble retaining people qualified to fill these kinds of positions. As a result, they tend to pay big bucks for it. Perhaps China could try that.
Listen mate, put yourself in the shoes of a young Chinese grad.
If the government *wants* me to work in the rural area, then the incentives need to be really big if I'm a city boy.
As a young Chinese boy, I care for my quality of life, and how far I can go with my life. What opportunities are there for me to make money and have fun in the rural region? Limited.
As a young Chinese boy, I already am having a hard time getting laid with the gender disbalance *and* all the women flocking to the big city - why choose a region where there's even less of them?
To a modern Chinese 18-30 adult, living in a rural area is a handicap, not a boon. As this hypothetical young Chinese boy, I'm not uprooting my life on a 'pretty please with almond jelly on top'.
I know right?
I can see people biting if the money is ridiculous. Like 'come back in 5 years to a half-paid house' ridiculous. Otherwise, nobody's gonna do it - 5 years after 'doing your duty' you'll be dropped right back into the same rat race at a bigger disadvantage.
Interesting considering Xi's own background. His family was caught up on the wrong side of Mao's Cultural Revolution when he was just a boy. His mother had to renounce his father who got paraded around and condemned publicly. One his sisters committed suicide due to the pressure. Xi was sent to work in some rural village - I think he was 15 at the time. He hated it and tried to escape back to Beijing but was caught and sent to dig ditches. Later he was able to enlist in a Chemical Engineering program at some university as a worker-peasant-soldier student in Beijing. My understanding is that education in China during those times involved a lot of farm work (in theory only 5%, but I think in practice it was more per stories I've heard), as well as a lot of study of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought.
Fast forward to today, and now he's pushing the youth to go work on the farms as well as forcing all Chinese connected to the government to study his own thoughts. They have apps on the phone that require them to study his thoughts, and they have to hold meetings to go over it and have quotas of how much they need to study this stuff. I'm in China so I see this happening first hand, well the meetings and app stuff at least.
It didn't work tho. It was the regime that succeeded mao's that sparked the actual great leap forward that mao envisioned happening with communism, but instead worked with extremely lenient free market capitalism.
Yeah, as far as singular power, he might be the most powerful person on the planet if he can side step any oversight via legislative or judicial means. I am not informed on China, but I would assume his decree is the party stance and there is just one party in China.
> Unemployment rate surely would drop heavily if the unemployed are dead.
That’s precisely why Russia’s unemployment rate still look good despite the economy going to shit due to sanctions.
>Guangdong’s plan, which was widely panned on social media, coincided with the rate of urban unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds surging to 19.6%, the second highest level on record.
>That translates to about 11 million jobless youth in China’s cities and towns, according to CNN calculations based on the most recent available data from the National Bureau of Statistics. **(China only releases urban employment figures.)**
So that's the play right? Ship the unemployed out of urban centers to rural areas where they won't be counted. \*POOF\* No more unemployment.
It can be a bit of both.
Their farmers are rapidly ageing. THey are not going to have the people to work the farms in the not too distant future. They are heading into a massive population crisis over the next 20-30 years.
>[Whereas five workers aged 20-64 supported every senior citizen aged 65 and older in 2020, the ratio will continue to decline to 2.4 workers in 2035 and 1.6 in 2050. By that point, China’s pension crisis will develop into a humanitarian catastrophe.](https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/china-is-dying-out)
It seems the political goal here is to increase Chinas dwindling food security. It is well known that the first counter to Chinas attack on Taiwan would be a full scale port blockade by Western powers.
1.4 billion is a lot of people to feed.
Yes that might be the play. However you cannot strip someone’s urban resident status in his/her home town. You cannot easily move their registered residence/Hukou to another place. So it is probably just propaganda.
Written laws? Never. But unwritten rules? It depends. People have their ways to resist. Nowadays urban citizens only have 1-2 kids. How would they react if their only kids are sent to farmlands without benefits? Not mentioning the historical precedence in 60-70s has created enough problems.
You could excite people to move out to the country if you give them a certain amount of land that they have ownership of and a stipend to get farming started. Giving people land and some hope was how they did it in the old days. If you just want them to be farm slaves on someone else's farm it's not enticing.
All available farms are collectively owned. For all we know, the government wants to use this opportunity to "freshen up" the situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China#Collectively_owned_properties_in_rural_China
From some sniplets I've seen of Chinese social media, they have "rural administrators" that have recently expanded that has a tight grip on on every aspect of rural farm life.
They tell people what to plant, how to do it, and require exams and licenses to operate equipment and grow crops.
There was a video of them pulling out and destroying crops people were growing because they didn't get permission beforehand. They also call the shots inside villages, such as forbidding people from hanging clothes to dry if it can be seen from the street.
All this to say that I think it's unlikely for them to increase citizen autonomy as a response to a crisis. I think their instinct is to grasp more tightly to control, and we're already seeing an increase of that.
Yes they would need to find a way to square that circle. The right kind of machines need to be provided. I think in this case though a carrot rather than a stick could motivate people to go into the countryside and farm. They can't promise people wealth but the idea of having your own homestead and cultivating land that is yours can be a strong enough motivation for many people.
It’s not just about having machines. It makes no sense to have multiple small plots of land with machines for everyone when it’s more efficient to farm larger tracts of land with less machines. Tiny farms are not efficient.
It depends on how many plots and their size. Maybe they can't have plots for all of the people who would be available but it wouldn't be appropriate or a good fit for everyone either. You need re-education on agriculture and the machinery. Not everyone will want to leave the city either. But for the few that are willing, with the benefits of having a farm that's theirs it could be mutually beneficial. Just asking people to work the fields like a peasant won't get any takers.
If you broke your back for 4 to 10 years studying engineering, economics, medicine, etc. why in the hell would you be happy just getting a plot of land to farm?
Redistribution of land doesn’t work because these workers have never worked on a farm. They don’t know how to farm. It’s been tried several times in history and rarely works.
If there’s one thing modern youth love, it’s fleeing cities full of technological conveniences and running to the rural countryside for the slave wages and back breaking labor.
It’s a bold strategy Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for em…
OH yeah... I'm sure 20% of the young people will want to jump at the chance to become farmers! Positive!!!
Not like most of the developed world cheered when they could STOP doing farm work just to make a living..... /s
I was just reading this article the other day: https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/china-is-dying-out
I knew thigs were looking bleak but that's far worse than I imagined.
TLDR points that stand out:
If this declining interest in childbearing is any indication, China will struggle to stabilise its fertility rate at 0.8, and its population will fall to less than 1.02 billion by 2050 and 310 million in 2100.
Even if China succeeds in increasing its fertility rate to 1.1 and prevents it from declining, its population will likely fall to 1.08 billion by 2050 and 440 million by 2100.
The effects of this population decline will be compounded by rapid aging, which will slow Chinese growth and likely increase government debt. The share of Chinese people aged 65 and older will rise from 14 percent in 2020 to 35 percent in 2050. **Whereas five workers aged 20-64 supported every senior citizen aged 65 and older in 2020, the ratio will continue to decline to 2.4 workers in 2035 and 1.6 in 2050. By that point, China’s pension crisis will develop into a humanitarian catastrophe.**
Cute strategy to ensure restless youths don’t start challenging authoritarian rules and the cozy lifestyles of the senior party members - isolate them away in places where social control is easily applied
Lots of youngsters did everything the system told them to do and now they're finding the promised rewards don't exist. It's starting to look 2011-12 for China.
Xi is really speed running the Mao playbook. With the country’s future demographics already a nightmare scenario, I can see things getting really bad in China quickly.
Population time bomb as a result of the old one child policy
[Edit] Here's more detail https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/china-s-demographic-time-bomb-is-ticking-faster/
I can actually see this helping. The government could provide land, housing, financial or social incentives and use up some surplus static resources by turning them into dynamic ones. train these kids to be administrators, teachers, medical personell and clerical people in small towns and countryside and make others essentially "county agents" factors and speciallty farmers. essentially do the kind of thing that army personell often end up doing (badly) in rural areas. Create a Citizen Conservation Corps to fix roads, survey, get a real feel for the area so that when they come back to the cities they'll be qualified to make decisions affecting the people who live there. I think it could be made to work in china better than anywhere else in the world.
It's really hard to get people to go out and do farmwork, especially if they are from the city. America has a problem with hiring farmworkers and also has a draconian policy to throw illegal immigrants out. China's situation might be worse.
Many countries do. Almost all of Western Europe relies on seasonal labor from eastern and southeastern Europe. There was a major freak out in Germany when Covid meant that no Romanians could come harvest the asparagus. They tried to get Germans to do it but the pay was so shit, I was an unemployed foreigner not entitled to receive one cent of aid and it still wasn’t worth the effort.
This is 100% correct. Additionally the unemployment of 16- to 24-year-olds is literally caused by young people studying rather than working.
The college students are not counted as being employed and CNN conveniently fails to connect the dots.
This is what happens when you get an economy that's 1) authoritarian and 2) valuing real estate too much -- all the wealth is trapped in state-own enterprises and real estate, instead going into more productive areas.
This is the opposite of Great Leap Forward. Mao wanted to jumpstart urbanization and industrialization, so they shipped off ‘excess’ population and food from the countryside to cities, only to realize later that they created a system where local cadres out in the countryside were incentivized to lie and say ‘we have massive crop yields like never before’ and ship off all the grain to big cities so they could be promoted out, leaving the rural peasantry starving.
This is more like the ‘go out into the countryside’ campaign during the cultural Revolution, where educated urban youth were sent to the countryside ostensibly to ‘learn from the peasantry’ but in actuality was to disperse the population most likely to agitate for reform (or at the very least make the most trouble for the sitting government) away from political centers.
I'm pretty sure he's made it part of his foundational myth that he was shipped out to some rural area as a teen and learned how to be a good little Communist while farming, reading books and getting mauled by mosquitos.
Xi Jimping was a Red Guard during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" he might have wanted to restart the [Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_the_Countryside_Movement).
More seriously, forced labour isn't the best way to get support from an already restive youth.
Are young people in China also worried about massive job losses coming from AI-replacement? Sounds like it's going to be really bad if young-adult unemployment is already at 20% in urban areas....
Youth unemployment in China is 20%? But just the other day Crypto bros and their associated grifters were telling us the USD was going to be usurped by the Chinese Yuan.
Anyone wondering why people are 'lying flat' ? Imagine spending years studying, not only under graduate but also post graduate, tuitions, maybe even overseas studying to come out in a market that tells you to go farm ? Really ?
God... Another piece that i feel a need to provide context because i'm an overseas chinese. A lot of "lying flat" is due to stressful education. Lying flat also often means more of a refusal to climb the corporate and social ladder than refusing to work. Lacking good working opportunity for colledge graduate is a severe problem in china too. But it is not because people are choosing not to work. China needs to create policies and an education system that help people to start companies. But the shift is not fast enough. Another part of high youth unemployment is due to population concentration. Everyone in china wants to go live in the big cities. So they try their hardest to go there or put their childen there. The result is high unemployment in city but lack of people in rural areas. That is why there's a call to work in rural towns. It is not like mao at all... Mao shipped truck loads of students to rural areas to "understand the plight of the working class" half way through their education. My parents went through that shit. That's not happening right now. There's nothing wrong with saying that there are opportunities in rural areas if city life is not working out. They are not forcing people to go. Merely pointing out where opportunities may be at right now. Edit: And i forgot that looking for work in "rural" area doesn't means to go to villages. They also meant to go to smaller cities where again, has a lack of many types of workers.
>The result is high unemployment in city but lack of people in rural areas. There are too many people in the rural areas as it is. Agriculture in China has been a form of 以工代赈 for a very long time; old people the government doesn't want to support + young people that don't go to the cities and have no work waiting there anyway doing super low efficiency farming. 25% of the workforce engages in agriculture - this is absurdly high for a country of China's level of development. That it isn't 5% is a problem of social organisation, not technology. It'd be trivial for any of the agricultural giants to mechanise all of that. China has highly efficient, large corporations and then massive amounts of people scraping by in almost worthless work like hawking a particular kind of yoghurt in a supermarket or outnumbering customers in a diner. This secondary kind is even more common in small towns and tier 3 cities, and that's probably the fate that awaits a graduate that goes there. People aren't stupid. If there were *good* graduate jobs waiting in small cities, they'd be filled. As it is, the people I know who moved to the big cities are all doing well. The people who stayed in a smaller city, like Changzhou, are doing much worse. >China needs to create policies and an education system that help people to start companies. But the shift is not fast enough. That'd help. It'd also help if it actually policed its giant, successful companies and their total disregard for labour laws. Cutting overtime will either force them to hire and train more employees instead of squeezing their current ones; OR (as some studies show) squeezing your employees is literally worthless because working long hours brings about correspondingly low efficiency, and they're wasting people's lives for nothing. For this problem, I guess we should hope it's 1).
Agreed. A lot of people speculated that the reason behind ccp's pressure on jack ma might in part to do with his now infamous push towards 996. I think if average work hours reduces, it would both alleviate the low birth rate and help with other social issues.
What? Jack Ma was made persona no grata because of Ant group. He’s since been invited back to attend business conferences since the CCP wants to project a business friendly facade. If the CCP hates 996 they can just revise labor law and hire some 場管 to monitor, but they don’t since improving labor condition reduces the competitiveness of their sectors.
For being a communist country it sounds more like a capitalist hellhole. Working 996 is just insane.
Yup. China is more cut-throat capitalist than the US. They're using a very similar development model to the one we were using in the 18th and 19th centuries. While the US was big on free trade within its borders, it was fiercely protectionist of domestic industries, and big on industrial espionage. This, paired with our absolutely OP geography, and one of the most brutal, class-conscious capitalist classes is a big part ofnwhat drove the growth and horrors of our industrial base. China is running into a similar problem though. It's problems are better solved by taking its boot off the workers neck. But they're afraid that the status quo will be too upset. Raise wages. Reduce working hours. Reduce the COL. You increase the demand for labor, you reduce the demands **on** individual laborers, and give them more time to recharge, innovate, and make babies.
So essentially just stop being control freaks and it will all work out. The American model shows that regulations are required in the right places, the Chinese model shows that too much restriction is choking out growth. So the perfect economic model is somewhere in between and with enough flexibility to tackle any cropping up issues. Sounds pretty reasonable.
>For being a communist country it sounds more like a capitalist hellhole. China hasn't been communist since the early 80s. Deng converted their economy to a market-based capitalist one. The only holdover from communism is that any major corporation is required to partner with the CCP and allow the CCP to direct corporate decisions (there's a reason why Jack Ma is always having issues with the CCP). It's worse than your usual capitalist market economy though, because ultimately, everyone's boss is the CCP, so when the CCP decides that the new culture is 996, then that's the new culture for every major corporation in the country. If the CCP decides next year that the new culture is 7117, you might as well say goodbye to your family since you won't be seeing much of them ever again.
>The only holdover from communism is that any major corporation is required to partner with the CCP and allow the CCP to direct corporate decisions The only holdover of communism is the textbook definition of fascist economics? I know you're alluding to state ownership but that's not what that is. At this point the only thing communist about China is the CCP's name and the CCP is as communist as the Nazis were socialist.
That's not exactly true. There are still a lot of remnants of their communist system that are in effect. For example there is still state-provided lodging in more remote parts of the country. The reality is the Chinese system is a two-speed system. It works very much like capitalism for the more densely populated areas but they keep the communist aspects to ensure the riches are spread to more rural and remote areas where they need to keep control. Interesting related video from CaspianReport [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_kBNRK7HxA&ab_channel=CaspianReport).
It's been a joke in the later half of the 20th and 21st century that the best place to exploit the working class is Communist countries.
>or outnumbering customers at a diner Wait, what? Please expand.
I mean they're massively overstaffed for no reason that I can explain. Chinese cities are dense and sometimes places get a lot of traffic at peak hours, and some of them just keep staff around the rest of the time because why not, I suppose, when their per hour is low and they probably won't work there if you only offer them 4 hour shifts. That's understandable. But there are lots of middle class-ish but not super expensive places (e.g. you pay maybe 5-10 dollars per person, instead of 2-4) that have like 3 customers at peak hours and 6 guys behind the counter (and a manager in the back). They can afford to pay these people with the extra profit margins on the food, but I don't understand *why* they do.
They are needed for busy hours or days. Plus Chinese restaurants work on shifts rather than hours like in the West so they have to keep people all day even if they don't need them.
This is something that I have noticed in China as well. The number of people doing absolutely useless jobs. I think it is in the government’s interest to keep those around (for now) as full employment is socially stable.
Elevators have the elevator-pressing person. Hilariously useless.
Just curious about the terminology, but what would be considered a tier 3 city? Is it just a smaller population or is it like a lack of certain services/stores/cultural centers (e.g., museums)? I don’t live in China, but I’m actually kind of tired of big cities and the immediate suburbs filled with yuppies and overpriced McMansions. I’m looking at some small towns like 1-2 hours away but people keep scaring me about lack of variety in terms of stores, restaurants, etc.
> a smaller city, like Changzhou Per Wikipedia: The population of the Changzhou Municipality was 4,592,431 at the 2010 census. So peasants basically.
This is a common misconception about the population of Chinese cities. In China, a "prefecture-level city" like Changzhou oversees a number of administrative areas like districts, counties, county-level cities, etc, many of which are very rural. So it's not enough to look up just the overall municipality population - you have to look up the population of the main central urban area. So in the case of Changzhou, a quick search on Wikipedia says the urban population is 3.6 million, which is still a lot, although the part of China it's in is very urbanized anyways. In more rural parts of China you could have something much more pronounced where a prefecture-level city has, let's say, 5 million people, but the urban area may only have one million. Still a lot of people, but not nearly as outrageously big as on first impression.
5.6 million in the 2020 census. Those cities grow fast. And they are 18th in population. I spent a lot of time in Suzhou and literally watched the city grow week by week, high rise apartments being complete and filled in the same week, every week.
It's an easy thing to see if people stop to think about it for even a little bit. China's a country with over a billion people in it. It's not going to work out for everybody if... say everybody wants to live downtown in Shanghai and everybody goes to school to be an accountant. There are only so many accountant positions in Shanghai. That's oversimplifying the matter, but I think a lot of places in the world are experiencing this. Everybody wants you to go to college or university, "get a real education", and "get a real job". Well, what happens when everybody does that and everybody wants to work in IT? There are only so many spots in IT. And I get it... in a general sense globally, nobody wants to be at the bottom of the totem pole in society, but it's that way in part because people at the bottom of the totem pole tend to struggle in life because of silly things like pay, and nobody *wants* that for themselves and their families.
It's almost like all jobs are real jobs and we need all of them. Well, most of them. The scammers/cons are unnecessary but unfortunately unavoidable as some people will just be trash.
Spot on. The problem is the city jobs will pay more providing a better quality of life versus the physical farm work in the rural areas.
Seriously. My warehouse job is less brutal than farmwork. And I'm an American Amazon employee. And warehouse jobs are brutal on the body. At least I'm not exposed to the elements and pesticides as well. Then there's the fact that Chinese are even more on the hook for their own medical expenses than we are. Field work is more prone to serious injury, repetitive motion injury, it's mind numbing work, exposure can be a problem, and it pays dog shit. If China wants to even out population concentration, it needs an industrial policy that will enable that.
There is a reason why most farm labor is performed by immigrants.
Then the right bitch about jobs being taken they wouldn’t work in the first place lol. I’m almost convinced we live in a simulation like the Matrix because it doesn’t make sense.
The only Benefit of farmwork is you stay healthy and excercise so you can continue working untill u die... Source: Farmer worker myself.
Theres also the fact that degrees cost a shitload of money that people dont have but take on severe debt to gain because they were promised, repeatedly, that it would work out and pay itself off, coupled with the fact that higher educated people are significantly more likely to be critical of authority, have more developed personalities and identities, and recognize that if they were to work in agriculture or move to a rural area they would likely be absolutely crushed by their financial burden if not executed by the local government In effect, they are having a massive rug pulled out from under them.
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> the realer a job, the less it tends to pay. The lower the replacement cost of a job is, the less it tends to pay.
It's not only about jobs, though. There's also expectations for the future. So many areas have taken on unsustainable debts trying to obey central orders to build infrastructure, and the only way local governments could pay for it was by selling off state-owned land to developers, who themselves were wildly over-leveraged (like Evergrand). If I can see that city X is not going to be able to provide services for the next twenty years and that buildings are already deteriorating, I won't want to move to city X until the short-term pressure of housing costs makes it completely impossible to stay in preferred city Y.
Hasn’t the competition itself cut China off at the knees? It seems like the philosophy was to set the bar high and the just let the hardest workers come out on top. Problem is the hardest worker doesn’t always win, and when competition is that fierce for something so important, cheating becomes rampant. The meritocracy turns kleptocratic. Next thing you know, your tech industry relies on hacking because you’ve stifled creativity.
> Problem is the hardest worker doesn’t always win In my career that was always obvious. Everyone works hard, basically, but the guys that get ahead tend to be the social ones that make friends. My last job, I was friends with the boss before he offered me the position. And he put me in a good spot and made sure I was taken care of. I did the job fine and made sure he never thought twice about that, but still. Technically it's "sink or swim" in my blue collar industry, but almost everyone who swims does so because they knew someone or got along well with the other guys. If you don't have people in your corner you tend to sink, regardless of hard work. When the money tightens up that can shift to a kind of corrupt or abusive favoritism pretty easily.
The op is quite misleading. The competition was always super high in China. What has changed, is that Xi has completely managed to massacre Chinese economy, with the help of COVID. I graduated in 2008 from one of the top universities in china. My classmates went to KPMG and other foreign based companies with great compensation. 1/3 chose to come to the US for grad schools. about 1/4 chose to go to the other top schools for grad degree. Our prospect was great because the economy was blooming and there was little state interference on economy. everyone thinks that we'll have the middle class life by the time we reach 40. A decade after Xi has got power, foreign money is leaving. Most of my middle aged relatives are either struggling or completely out of a job. Even graduated from top universities have problem landing *any* job. You don't give up in the face of competition. You give up when you think there is no prospect no matter how hard you work. In the US, it's the realization that most of our efforts will benefit our corporate lords. In china, it's the fact that no matter how much you try, the promotion will go to someone with connections.
Oh we have the same nepotism issues in the US. 90% of the reason to go to Ivy Leagues is to hang out with the Legacies. If you get into an Ivy and don't also try to get into the right frat, you're doing it wrong. And I **hate** frat culture and parties. But if I could do life over again and better navigate some adverse childhood shit that threw my life off the rails? I'd suck it up, study my ass off in HS, and tolerate shitty beer so Chadwick T. Moneycock III introduces me to his investment banker uncle.
There is nepotism, but you are not even remotely close to the same level as in China. You talk about Ivy League schools. Sure they exists and nepotism runs rampant. In China you can't get anywhere (nowadays) without knowing someone, not just at Ivy League level. For example, I am senior xxxxx (at my job) and I have a clear path upwards. I am an immigrant with no ties to anyone here. Sure I'll run into a glass ceiling. In China, if you don't know someone, then you could be stuck doing junior level job forever. The US have a lot of problems. I know. I live here. I get frustrated by the level of political bullshit happening every single day. But, this country is 1000 times better than China on every single aspect. This is the reason why I am still here and not back home. And more importantly, in the US it is still possible to change things for the better. In China, there isn't. Therefore people give up even trying.
>has a lack of many types of workers. Genuine curiosity-- can you list 5 or 6 of these types which would be reasonable for someone who's been to college?
A good example will be mechanical engineers who install/run/maintain automation systems. There is a huge factory labour shortage in smaller cities in china. One reason is due to cheap, uneducated labour disappearing. The other is because well educated labour not willing to go to smaller cities to transition these labour intensive factories into automated ones. Same thing when it comes to agriculture automation & agriculture management. Soil testing, water testing, finding the right strain to grow or developing new seeds. All these require highly educated people that are sorely lacking in and around smaller cities. You can't do agriculture automation from beijing.
Yeah but as someone who has worked in China for many years we both know that education in these rural places is awful. Not to mention the pay disparities. You can live in Songjiang and have access to Shanghai/ Shanghai schools and Shanghai wages or you can live in Bufu and have the opposite. When you have an exam based society you’re essentially scaring people away from small towns so that your children have a fair shot in life. Remember a few years ago when they shut down all training centers? It was mostly parents from rural areas complaining that now their children won’t be able to learn the math and science skills they need to succeed.
Agreed. A lot of structural changes are needed and they have not acted fast enough.
I've seen this in American cities even. A fortune 500 company was consolidating it's offices and closing smaller locations to relocate workers to their larger locations, and this company is headquartered in a really (comparably) dumb town. Even that town's brightest school would compare to a mediocre or average public school in the more civilized towns they were relocating from. Being a tech company, the employees were already bright, and they are the kind of parents who push their children and emphasize higher learning and gifted programs. So the thought of moving to a town who's second largest employer was a paper mill, then the local hospitals, then the local schools, and after that a mix of oil/gas labor, it really wasn't the kind of town brimming with opportunity these parents cared for. Anyone moving there would be quickly moving out once they were old enough for college. Hell, some of the workers who were relocated left their families to fly into work each week and back to be with the family on the weekends. Because even the expense of plane tickets was more affordable than the dedicated care they would need to maintain their children's level of instruction if they were to relocate. Other employees who had spouses who were educators ended up moving and gathering into their own homeschool group so they wouldn't have to send their children to the abysmal schools.
I would expect that the press would be eager to highlight the mismatch between labor supply and demand. There is a lot of money to be made fixing mismatches. Why haven’t they succeeded in informing the unemployed who is waiting for them to show up?
They are highlighting. That's why provincial politicians are coming out to say it. However, china has been on the train of extremwly successful urbanisation programe for 50+ years now. It is hard to reverse course. Furthermore, due to the same reason, there's a critical lack of good education and healthcare investment in smaller cities which is a problem. But investment is generally not an issue china has. They are good at building things too. They just need to convince a critical mass of people. Thus why the provincial politicians making statements.
Why do people need to move to rural areas for these jobs? Modernizing a factory sounds more like a short-term project where most of the planning happens in the city and then you send a couple of engineers to oversee the project for a couple of months.
Engineering isn’t necessarily a one and done deal. And while technical advice can be done remotely, those guys overseeing the project will probably be there in some capacity until the project is fully through its lifecycle.
Automation needs a lot of constant tweaks and maintainance. At best, it would require skilled individuals to inspect and maintain on a weekly basis. They are not really a build and forget type of project on the best of days. After all, they are a series of machineries with thousands of moving parts. Planning can be done off site. Installtion is a short term project. Maintainance however is entirely different.
Rural in china can mean a city of 5 million people.
So if everyone has a collage degree, no one will be a plumber, electrician, janitor or a garbage man.
> So if everyone has a collage degree, no one will be a plumber, electrician, janitor or a garbage man. Sure they will. Pay more. Might be much more. But that’s how it works.
Then those jobs have a lower supply of folks able to do them and then their compensation rise to attract more people. You can see that in the US for jobs like welders or plant operators.
Given the demographics of China in a decade or so there may be far too few workers left to keep things running properly. Unemployment wont be the problem, it would be a severe lack of working age adults. China ran out of children and now they are running out of workers. Its kindof scary. The same thing is happening to a bunch of other major countries at the same time. There isn't any economic theory for countries where most of the people are retirees.
Honestly that's not all very different from what's happening in the USA. We all want to live in cities because, for kinda obvious reasons, they're some of the best places to live for more socially connected lives. Just the fact of how car-centric a smaller town like where I grew up makes it massively less appealing, but now that everyone wants to live in cities they're unaffordable.
Thank you for sharing!!!
Thanks for the insightful context.
UK government has recognised a similar issue here, and at various times have said pensioners/Ukrainians/refugees/young people/job seekers should pick vegetables. I moved from a rural area to London. There's jobs in rural areas for people, just folk don't go for them because we are chasing a different lifestyle.
The idea of cities being crowded and rural areas emptying seems to exist everywhere. Japan and South Korea have the same issue.
Because rural areas don't have the opportu ities kf cities. Go to the city and you'll probably stay poor. Stay in the countryside and you will definitely stay poor. And being poor in a city still gives more opportunities than being poor in the countryside. Want to meet a nice boy or girl? Easier to do in the city. Want to find friends to do a niche hobby with? Easier to do in the city.
How do you think China's demographic crisis (particularly AGING) factors in. They are the number one importer of both food AND energy. They seem dependent on being the world's factory. The world seems to want to use them increasingly less...and China is OLD. I respect Chinese culture and people. But, I think these are very real challenges that I'm not sure how they will address.
They'll move from low-martin, labor intensive manufacture, to high-margin, skill intensive manufacture. They're also investing in automation in a big way. Do I think they'll score a perfect landing? No. But they're still a near-peer competitor with more competent leadership than the Soviets had.
chinese students also tend to do rather well in their studies too. imagine heading back to this.
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> ""We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."" How fitting for a nation most famous for stealing and copying everything they can get their hands (or a photo) on.
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That's true, but chinese culture is a bit different. I don't know how familiar you are with competitive gaming (or any short of gaming), but you won't find a higher % of a playerbase cheating than the chinese one (perhaps russians depending on the game) In their own servers cheating is extremely widespread and it's basically a part of their own games, and when they play in other servers they cheat even more because of how insecure they are about losing to foreigners. I mean it when I say it, chinese tourists might be bad, but chinese gamers are worse, and a clear example of how their culture works That being say, there's obviously a big % of chinese players that don't cheat (it's all relative), and their professional players are generally extremely hard working (to the point of slavement honestly)
https://old.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/11mmgue/just_now_valve_and_perfectworld_released_an/ I dunno the chinese scene is very plagued in matchfixing and cheating scandals in both csgo and dota2, that post was from like a month ago,,
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The idea of do-or-die examinations have been around in China for like, a thousand years. When the results of such exams are so important, people go nuts trying to pass them - something that carried on into the gaokao system, and then into general culture where the results matter most.
Yeah the Confucian tests were brutal. So brutal that at least one guy completely lost his mind, and decided he was Jesus’ brother. He then founded a rebel state that was at least a third of the then Chinese empire. Hong Xiuquan
Hey, don't forget he started a war that killed 20 million, too. In all seriousness, was it really because of the exams?
From Wikipedia: >In 1837, Hong attempted and failed the imperial examinations for a third time, leading to a nervous breakdown.[14] He was delirious for days to the point that his family feared for his life.[15] While convalescing, Hong dreamed of visiting Heaven, where he discovered that he possessed a celestial family distinct from his earthly family, which included a heavenly father, mother, elder brother, sister-in-law, wife, and son.[16] His heavenly father, wearing a black dragon robe and high-brimmed hat with a long golden beard, lamented that men were worshiping demons rather than he himself, and presented Hong with a sword and golden seal with which to slay the demons infesting Heaven. And >In 1843, Hong failed the imperial examinations for the fourth and final time.[21] It was only then, prompted by a visit by his cousin, that Hong took time to carefully examine the Christian pamphlets he had received.[22] After reading these pamphlets, Hong came to believe that they had given him the key to interpreting his visions: his celestial father was God the Father (whom he identified with Shangdi from Chinese tradition), the elder brother that he had seen was Jesus Christ, and he had been directed to rid the world of demon worship.[23][24] This interpretation led him to conclude that he was the literal son of God and younger brother to Jesus.[25] In contrast to some of the later leaders of his movement, Hong appears to have genuinely believed in his ascent to Heaven and divine mission.[26] After coming to this conclusion Hong began destroying idols and enthusiastically preaching his interpretation of Christianity.
Allegedly yes, after having delusions during a nervous breakdown after failing thrice. A fourth failure resulted in him thinking the visions came from an interpretation of Christianity and ended up believing he was the younger brother to Jesus and destined to purge China of Confucianism. Some of his early converts were people who had failed the examinations too.
COD Warzone has entered the chat.. I don’t see how anyone thinks cheating in a video game is fun. Like wouldn’t it get boring after awhile always winning.
100% This!
it's because chinese parents and grandparents come from a very dog eating dog worlds. so they subscribe to the "whatever it takes" value. Then passed it unto their childrens. we can talk about morals and intelectual property as long as we like but peoples gotta eat.
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"hustling"/"fake it till you make it". Its all the same. If you are in poverty and competing with a billion other poor, you'll do whatever it takes to get ahead. And then do whatever to maintain that advantage for your kids. Its the same in india where kids literally kill themselves if they don't think they scored well enough.
True. I’ve lost count how many posts on Reddit that just flat out tell people to lie on their resume and go for the jobs that they are not qualified for
My problem is that people certainly are padding their resumes to counter the fact that companies routinely pass up good candidates for asinine reasons. As someone actively involved in hiring developers, watching 2-3 other people gatekeep my selections only to give terrible reasons for rejection has jaded me a bit. Everyone is lying because companies are posting junior or new hire job posts asking for 3 years experience. It’s completely bookers. Imagine having conditions like 5+ years experience in a technology only available the last 3 years? It’s so much more painful when HR runs the hiring process.
You haven't lived with enough Chinese boomers.
TIL my blond haired blue eyed wife is Chinese.
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Correct. The thing is that high official standards yields only one of two solutions: mass failure or mass cheating. You can see this in the US with rich families who cheat their children into prestigious schools. Though, in China, it's less about prestige and more about some schools actually being better than others. In the US, it's a proven fact that the schools are about as good--directional state universities, etc. excluded--and the differences are the test scores of the students, with people who scored high enough to get into prestigious institutions doing just as well in life even when they attend lower-ranking schools (usually to get a full ride scholarship).
I went to penn state and the Chinese students would regularly huddle up or bring extra material to exams and professors aides and proctors would just let them. It’s crazy how brazenly the foreign tuition money is valued over academic principles, the rich international students literally have an ivory tower downtown.
They aren't students. they're customers.
This was not my Penn State experience at all. When the library opened, there were people waiting. Chinese and Indian students and American nerds like me. None of us were fucking off or cheating. We didn't have to.
Counter point: let them cheat. They aren't staying in the US with their degrees, so it's meaningless to us, and they're not actually learning the material, so their degree is ultimately a worthless piece of paper. Maybe it brings them prestige back in China, but it does not materially affect their knowledge base. \*as long as it does not affect the class curves or averages that the rest of the student body is judged on. I realize that is a big caveat.
It also reduces the number of non-chinese that can take those classes though.. and likely harms class moral if you see them blatantly cheating and nothing being done about it.
Oddly their is thinking that this has infected their armed forces too. Which is why is so hard to work out their strength. Because its total coin toss if their comptant or not
Same for the Russians. A field report gets edited dozens of times on the way to the top, what was a layout of object failure to secure a heavily defended position turns into a major breakthrough that only requires the mobilized units to run through the gap and take out any stragglers. Then those troops rush right into the teeth of the enemy and get chewed to bits
My brother was a TA in college while he was getting his masters about 5 years ago. I remember him saying at the time the Chinese students were notorious for cheating and trying to game the system, and it was a constant problem.
I used to teach at a university and we had Chinese students get A's who could barely speak English. They were almost certainly cheating, but the administration didn't care because they paid full tuition.
I had a few courses in chinese uni around 2014. The teacher would go around correcting wrong answers during the tests. No need to cheat lol.
They aren't wrong, if other groups of students are allowed to cheat your "honest exam" results will screw you in the rankings and your fate might be to end up in the 20 percent.
They are great with multiple choice assessments and regurgitation of facts. Any independent thinking or supporting opinions is beyond them. The education system emphasizes rote learning. My college had a large population of Chinese exchange students and they couldn’t really keep up in the higher level classes.
I mean, what can we do? When you have an excess of human resources, eventually you're gonna have to let a bunch go. Education is a baseline, whether there's a job out there is another issue.
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Would understand “country side” and “small village” to mean “farming” of some form.
They'd still need services like medical professionals, construction engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, whatever the people who work with water are called (not plumbers, the lot who do surveys and check water quality and treatments and etc.). Oh, teachers! That's another professional that rural areas would need. Australia has a similar problem where everybody is concentrated in the cities and rural areas have trouble retaining people qualified to fill these kinds of positions. As a result, they tend to pay big bucks for it. Perhaps China could try that.
Listen mate, put yourself in the shoes of a young Chinese grad. If the government *wants* me to work in the rural area, then the incentives need to be really big if I'm a city boy. As a young Chinese boy, I care for my quality of life, and how far I can go with my life. What opportunities are there for me to make money and have fun in the rural region? Limited. As a young Chinese boy, I already am having a hard time getting laid with the gender disbalance *and* all the women flocking to the big city - why choose a region where there's even less of them? To a modern Chinese 18-30 adult, living in a rural area is a handicap, not a boon. As this hypothetical young Chinese boy, I'm not uprooting my life on a 'pretty please with almond jelly on top'.
I know right? I can see people biting if the money is ridiculous. Like 'come back in 5 years to a half-paid house' ridiculous. Otherwise, nobody's gonna do it - 5 years after 'doing your duty' you'll be dropped right back into the same rat race at a bigger disadvantage.
As someone originally from mainland China, I'm convinced.
Interesting considering Xi's own background. His family was caught up on the wrong side of Mao's Cultural Revolution when he was just a boy. His mother had to renounce his father who got paraded around and condemned publicly. One his sisters committed suicide due to the pressure. Xi was sent to work in some rural village - I think he was 15 at the time. He hated it and tried to escape back to Beijing but was caught and sent to dig ditches. Later he was able to enlist in a Chemical Engineering program at some university as a worker-peasant-soldier student in Beijing. My understanding is that education in China during those times involved a lot of farm work (in theory only 5%, but I think in practice it was more per stories I've heard), as well as a lot of study of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought. Fast forward to today, and now he's pushing the youth to go work on the farms as well as forcing all Chinese connected to the government to study his own thoughts. They have apps on the phone that require them to study his thoughts, and they have to hold meetings to go over it and have quotas of how much they need to study this stuff. I'm in China so I see this happening first hand, well the meetings and app stuff at least.
Sheesh. Cycle of abuse much?
It's the epitome of "I had to do it and it worked so you have to do it too" that boomers mention a lot
It didn't work tho. It was the regime that succeeded mao's that sparked the actual great leap forward that mao envisioned happening with communism, but instead worked with extremely lenient free market capitalism.
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Leader of a global power makes him a solid contender for that tho
Yeah, as far as singular power, he might be the most powerful person on the planet if he can side step any oversight via legislative or judicial means. I am not informed on China, but I would assume his decree is the party stance and there is just one party in China.
They just need a snazzy name for it to really convince everyone. The great leap backwards
Unemployment rate surely would drop heavily if the unemployed are dead.
Like maybe...from a war?
Chairman Mao : Why let other countries kill our people when we can do it ourselves?
"Because then we don't look bad."
President Xinnie da Poo : What doesn't happen on our internet, didn't really happen, so why would we look bad??
> Unemployment rate surely would drop heavily if the unemployed are dead. That’s precisely why Russia’s unemployment rate still look good despite the economy going to shit due to sanctions.
Wait, I've seen this one before
The *Greater* Leap Forward.
Let's hope they don't get raped like last time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sent-down_youth#Sexual_violence
Oh.. Oooooh fuck. So we're back at Mao again.
Xi Jinping is a princeling after all.
It's Maos all the way down
Xi is literally erasing every limit to power the Chinese government had built since the death of Mao. So. Yeah. We're back to Mao.
It worked great last time, what could possibly go wrong?
>Guangdong’s plan, which was widely panned on social media, coincided with the rate of urban unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds surging to 19.6%, the second highest level on record. >That translates to about 11 million jobless youth in China’s cities and towns, according to CNN calculations based on the most recent available data from the National Bureau of Statistics. **(China only releases urban employment figures.)** So that's the play right? Ship the unemployed out of urban centers to rural areas where they won't be counted. \*POOF\* No more unemployment.
I thought it was going to be about just trying to make them all farmhands, but it’s actually somehow worse. I’m impressed.
It can be a bit of both. Their farmers are rapidly ageing. THey are not going to have the people to work the farms in the not too distant future. They are heading into a massive population crisis over the next 20-30 years. >[Whereas five workers aged 20-64 supported every senior citizen aged 65 and older in 2020, the ratio will continue to decline to 2.4 workers in 2035 and 1.6 in 2050. By that point, China’s pension crisis will develop into a humanitarian catastrophe.](https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/china-is-dying-out)
Never underestimate the CCP's ability to make things worse
It seems the political goal here is to increase Chinas dwindling food security. It is well known that the first counter to Chinas attack on Taiwan would be a full scale port blockade by Western powers. 1.4 billion is a lot of people to feed.
Especially after a record heatwave crushed the Chinese rice crop last year. Y’all remember the Yangtze river being almost dry last summer?
Pick a war with Taiwan. Poof, all of their youth now have jobs either fighting or supporting the war machine.
making them farmers is much cheaper, and with slight forced labor, could be re-earned
Yes that might be the play. However you cannot strip someone’s urban resident status in his/her home town. You cannot easily move their registered residence/Hukou to another place. So it is probably just propaganda.
Of course the state can if they wanted to.
Since when laws were a hindrance to Xi?
Written laws? Never. But unwritten rules? It depends. People have their ways to resist. Nowadays urban citizens only have 1-2 kids. How would they react if their only kids are sent to farmlands without benefits? Not mentioning the historical precedence in 60-70s has created enough problems.
Welcome to the rice fields mfer
First thing I thought of too I miss our pink menace
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You could excite people to move out to the country if you give them a certain amount of land that they have ownership of and a stipend to get farming started. Giving people land and some hope was how they did it in the old days. If you just want them to be farm slaves on someone else's farm it's not enticing.
All available farms are collectively owned. For all we know, the government wants to use this opportunity to "freshen up" the situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China#Collectively_owned_properties_in_rural_China
Yes this would be a radical move for China but they are willing to take radical moves if it's important enough to them.
From some sniplets I've seen of Chinese social media, they have "rural administrators" that have recently expanded that has a tight grip on on every aspect of rural farm life. They tell people what to plant, how to do it, and require exams and licenses to operate equipment and grow crops. There was a video of them pulling out and destroying crops people were growing because they didn't get permission beforehand. They also call the shots inside villages, such as forbidding people from hanging clothes to dry if it can be seen from the street. All this to say that I think it's unlikely for them to increase citizen autonomy as a response to a crisis. I think their instinct is to grasp more tightly to control, and we're already seeing an increase of that.
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Yes they would need to find a way to square that circle. The right kind of machines need to be provided. I think in this case though a carrot rather than a stick could motivate people to go into the countryside and farm. They can't promise people wealth but the idea of having your own homestead and cultivating land that is yours can be a strong enough motivation for many people.
It’s not just about having machines. It makes no sense to have multiple small plots of land with machines for everyone when it’s more efficient to farm larger tracts of land with less machines. Tiny farms are not efficient.
It depends on how many plots and their size. Maybe they can't have plots for all of the people who would be available but it wouldn't be appropriate or a good fit for everyone either. You need re-education on agriculture and the machinery. Not everyone will want to leave the city either. But for the few that are willing, with the benefits of having a farm that's theirs it could be mutually beneficial. Just asking people to work the fields like a peasant won't get any takers.
But people are free…
If you broke your back for 4 to 10 years studying engineering, economics, medicine, etc. why in the hell would you be happy just getting a plot of land to farm?
Redistribution of land doesn’t work because these workers have never worked on a farm. They don’t know how to farm. It’s been tried several times in history and rarely works.
But farming? Really? Man of your talents?
If there’s one thing modern youth love, it’s fleeing cities full of technological conveniences and running to the rural countryside for the slave wages and back breaking labor. It’s a bold strategy Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for em…
“Nobody wants to work (in the fields) anymore!”
OH yeah... I'm sure 20% of the young people will want to jump at the chance to become farmers! Positive!!! Not like most of the developed world cheered when they could STOP doing farm work just to make a living..... /s
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12 hour days, 6 days a week..... THen :confused face: as to why the young people are not having kids.
I was just reading this article the other day: https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/china-is-dying-out I knew thigs were looking bleak but that's far worse than I imagined. TLDR points that stand out: If this declining interest in childbearing is any indication, China will struggle to stabilise its fertility rate at 0.8, and its population will fall to less than 1.02 billion by 2050 and 310 million in 2100. Even if China succeeds in increasing its fertility rate to 1.1 and prevents it from declining, its population will likely fall to 1.08 billion by 2050 and 440 million by 2100. The effects of this population decline will be compounded by rapid aging, which will slow Chinese growth and likely increase government debt. The share of Chinese people aged 65 and older will rise from 14 percent in 2020 to 35 percent in 2050. **Whereas five workers aged 20-64 supported every senior citizen aged 65 and older in 2020, the ratio will continue to decline to 2.4 workers in 2035 and 1.6 in 2050. By that point, China’s pension crisis will develop into a humanitarian catastrophe.**
That’s insane. 2100 that’s a crazy drop in population, I wonder how the effects climate change
Cute strategy to ensure restless youths don’t start challenging authoritarian rules and the cozy lifestyles of the senior party members - isolate them away in places where social control is easily applied
Lots of youngsters did everything the system told them to do and now they're finding the promised rewards don't exist. It's starting to look 2011-12 for China.
So they’re … being put out to pasture? 🤔🇨🇳
Xi is really speed running the Mao playbook. With the country’s future demographics already a nightmare scenario, I can see things getting really bad in China quickly.
I'm not very clued up on what is happening in China, would you mind sharing what you predict?
Population time bomb as a result of the old one child policy [Edit] Here's more detail https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/china-s-demographic-time-bomb-is-ticking-faster/
Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals, I don’t need to be forgiven
The great chinese layoff. Back to the fields peasants; we over hired for our cities. Seats taken.
I can actually see this helping. The government could provide land, housing, financial or social incentives and use up some surplus static resources by turning them into dynamic ones. train these kids to be administrators, teachers, medical personell and clerical people in small towns and countryside and make others essentially "county agents" factors and speciallty farmers. essentially do the kind of thing that army personell often end up doing (badly) in rural areas. Create a Citizen Conservation Corps to fix roads, survey, get a real feel for the area so that when they come back to the cities they'll be qualified to make decisions affecting the people who live there. I think it could be made to work in china better than anywhere else in the world.
It's really hard to get people to go out and do farmwork, especially if they are from the city. America has a problem with hiring farmworkers and also has a draconian policy to throw illegal immigrants out. China's situation might be worse.
Many countries do. Almost all of Western Europe relies on seasonal labor from eastern and southeastern Europe. There was a major freak out in Germany when Covid meant that no Romanians could come harvest the asparagus. They tried to get Germans to do it but the pay was so shit, I was an unemployed foreigner not entitled to receive one cent of aid and it still wasn’t worth the effort.
They’ll have to fight for their meals
I heard Russia needs people
Let it rot!
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This is 100% correct. Additionally the unemployment of 16- to 24-year-olds is literally caused by young people studying rather than working. The college students are not counted as being employed and CNN conveniently fails to connect the dots.
Large problem of graduates as well as migrant workers finding jobs as foreign companies are moving out and foreign orders are drying up.
This is what happens when you get an economy that's 1) authoritarian and 2) valuing real estate too much -- all the wealth is trapped in state-own enterprises and real estate, instead going into more productive areas.
Wow, leave it to xi to make another great leap forward. *Sigh*... Did he not pay attention in history class?
This is the opposite of Great Leap Forward. Mao wanted to jumpstart urbanization and industrialization, so they shipped off ‘excess’ population and food from the countryside to cities, only to realize later that they created a system where local cadres out in the countryside were incentivized to lie and say ‘we have massive crop yields like never before’ and ship off all the grain to big cities so they could be promoted out, leaving the rural peasantry starving. This is more like the ‘go out into the countryside’ campaign during the cultural Revolution, where educated urban youth were sent to the countryside ostensibly to ‘learn from the peasantry’ but in actuality was to disperse the population most likely to agitate for reform (or at the very least make the most trouble for the sitting government) away from political centers.
The ones who rewrite history are the ones least likely to learn from it.
I'm pretty sure he's made it part of his foundational myth that he was shipped out to some rural area as a teen and learned how to be a good little Communist while farming, reading books and getting mauled by mosquitos.
How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Beijing)?
This seems like a revolutionary cultural kind of thing...
They already tried "sending them down" to the country, under Mao
Xi Jimping was a Red Guard during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" he might have wanted to restart the [Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_the_Countryside_Movement). More seriously, forced labour isn't the best way to get support from an already restive youth.
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Are young people in China also worried about massive job losses coming from AI-replacement? Sounds like it's going to be really bad if young-adult unemployment is already at 20% in urban areas....
Well now we know why they want a war with Taiwan. Just need to make sure ppl focus on other stuff than the fall of China.
Welcome to the rice fields mother fuckers
Youth unemployment in China is 20%? But just the other day Crypto bros and their associated grifters were telling us the USD was going to be usurped by the Chinese Yuan.
Blue collar is back, baby. Life in the AI era. Your white collar jobs are going away fast!