RE: What's the Truth about China?
June 5, 2019 at 12:46 pm
(This post was last modified: June 5, 2019 at 1:23 pm by Anomalocaris.)
Like all stories crafted to achieve an effect, it has many elements of truth, but those are admixed with falsehoods, distortions and irrelevant appeals to sentiment to create a story to advance an agenda rather than describe an accurate overview.
We Americans are so steeped in the mythology of American exceptionalism that nothing could appear to us to be more sentimentally true than the notion that anyone who is so forsaken as to not live in an America like system must crave what we have as soon as they catch a glimpse of what we have. This seems as automatically and indisputably true to most Americans as genesis would have seemed to an medieval peasant.
In fact most of what we think we have that makes us great and the rest of the world would crave, we don’t have, or no longer have in much abundance, while the part of the rest of the world do have, often in vastly greater abundance.
This is the case with China.
As far as access to material wealth and abundance, there is already little to choose between a coastal slice of China comparable to all of the US in population. That part of China has perhaps 1.5 times the population of the US, and has material economic output roughly equal to the US. There is little an average person can afford to buy, and have access to buy, in the US that the average person in those parts of China can not afford or have no access to buy. Rather the reverse is true. So for the parts of China that matter, that makes china influential in the world, they do not on the hole crave the material goods we have that they don't. Because on the whole they have most of what we have, and some that we don't.
But it is not just material abundance, it is also the expectation that however the present is, the future will be better. Here we think we are always the greatest. They looked down at what we have and snicker in contempt. Majority of Americans have not seen meaningful increase in standard of living since around 1973. In so far as we seem to be able to afford more gadgets, that is largely because the Chinese, not Americans, have made the gadgets cheaper. Yet in 1973, when our average standard of living had first attained its present level, Chinese standard of living was perhaps 1/10 what they are now. In the past 30 years, the average Chinese had seen his purchase power increase by an order of magnitude. Things previously unimaginable, such as routine foreign shopping sprees and yearly vacations to exotic spots are now common for the middle class. Not only have the dominant parts of China for all practical purposes caught up to the US, but they continue to grow at 3 times our rate, with no end in sight. For Chinese people less than 40 years old, it is simply unimaginable, inconceivable, that their income next year would not be much greater than this year, the year after that higher still, or their access to material goods and leisure will be ever greater, from now to in effect forever. Our hope for the future resides with "USA Fuck Yah" after 45 years of income stagnation mitigated only by Chinese ability to make what we use to make expensively here cheaply there, while theirs is based on unbroken growth at 3-5 times our rate for 30 years.
It is true that China is 5 times larger than the US, and although 1/4 of it nearly first world in wealth and prosperity, 3/4 of it still agrarian and poor. But those 3/4 have seen those amongst them who broke away into the big cities have been caught up in the rapid rise in wealth and prosperity. They have realistic hope that within this generation, China's wealth will spread to them
We Americans are so steeped in the mythology of American exceptionalism that nothing could appear to us to be more sentimentally true than the notion that anyone who is so forsaken as to not live in an America like system must crave what we have as soon as they catch a glimpse of what we have. This seems as automatically and indisputably true to most Americans as genesis would have seemed to an medieval peasant.
In fact most of what we think we have that makes us great and the rest of the world would crave, we don’t have, or no longer have in much abundance, while the part of the rest of the world do have, often in vastly greater abundance.
This is the case with China.
As far as access to material wealth and abundance, there is already little to choose between a coastal slice of China comparable to all of the US in population. That part of China has perhaps 1.5 times the population of the US, and has material economic output roughly equal to the US. There is little an average person can afford to buy, and have access to buy, in the US that the average person in those parts of China can not afford or have no access to buy. Rather the reverse is true. So for the parts of China that matter, that makes china influential in the world, they do not on the hole crave the material goods we have that they don't. Because on the whole they have most of what we have, and some that we don't.
But it is not just material abundance, it is also the expectation that however the present is, the future will be better. Here we think we are always the greatest. They looked down at what we have and snicker in contempt. Majority of Americans have not seen meaningful increase in standard of living since around 1973. In so far as we seem to be able to afford more gadgets, that is largely because the Chinese, not Americans, have made the gadgets cheaper. Yet in 1973, when our average standard of living had first attained its present level, Chinese standard of living was perhaps 1/10 what they are now. In the past 30 years, the average Chinese had seen his purchase power increase by an order of magnitude. Things previously unimaginable, such as routine foreign shopping sprees and yearly vacations to exotic spots are now common for the middle class. Not only have the dominant parts of China for all practical purposes caught up to the US, but they continue to grow at 3 times our rate, with no end in sight. For Chinese people less than 40 years old, it is simply unimaginable, inconceivable, that their income next year would not be much greater than this year, the year after that higher still, or their access to material goods and leisure will be ever greater, from now to in effect forever. Our hope for the future resides with "USA Fuck Yah" after 45 years of income stagnation mitigated only by Chinese ability to make what we use to make expensively here cheaply there, while theirs is based on unbroken growth at 3-5 times our rate for 30 years.
It is true that China is 5 times larger than the US, and although 1/4 of it nearly first world in wealth and prosperity, 3/4 of it still agrarian and poor. But those 3/4 have seen those amongst them who broke away into the big cities have been caught up in the rapid rise in wealth and prosperity. They have realistic hope that within this generation, China's wealth will spread to them
