anthonyleecook

Some other disturbing signs from China: increasing military budget https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/03/06/china-splash-us175-bil..., kidnapping relatives of the reporters in other countries that exposed the uigher concentration camps http://m.dw.com/en/chinese-authorities-detain-relatives-of-r..., China literally banned words and letter n in social media https://mashable.com/2018/02/28/china-bans-n-xi-jinping-term..., China propping up dictator in Maldives and angering India https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/w..., China threatens to invade democratic Taiwan over us ties https://www.google.com/amp/amp.abc.net.au/article/9503126

There's censorship, and there's kidnapping/threats against citizens in other countries

"After U.S.-Based Reporters Exposed Abuses, China Seized Their Relatives"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/world/asia/china-xinjiang...

"Chinese Police Are Demanding Personal Information From Uighurs in France. Officials have threatened to detain relatives of those who don’t comply."

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/02/chinese-police-are-secre...

A reddit post from a student in China.

“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.

A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.

sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/80xttj/silence_this_...

And another one post from a student in China

"I’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :("

Here is another post

“’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :(”

Native American 150 years ago

Are you seriously whataboutism events from a few hundred years ago? Wow. Just wow.

People in China cannot speak. We have to speak for them somehow. Here is a snippet from a reddit post from a student in China.

“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.

A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.

sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“

We need some investors to band up and recreate the hardware environment in Shenzhen. There would be a lot of money made that way too so not sure why there wouldn’t be one in Nevada or Arizona or something.

I know there are a lot of clamoring here about ‘oh we are becoming this too and that too’. And it’s a natural reaction: we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people, so we try to stigmatize our own government. But the truth of the matter is US government is nowhere near the heavy handed ness of China, and we can deal with China to some degree. We can hold China to its actions. After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China, I feel like it’s time to take a stand. It’s time to stop supporting such a bad regime. Time to voice my concerns about China to my government, and vote with my wallet. No more Chinese products if I can. No more trips to Shanghai. I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.

Are you seriously whataboutism events that happened few hundred years ago???? Wow. And you work for google. God help us all

If we look back to WW2 and Nazi, US did still conduct trade with Nazi Germany, but the trade volume fell between 1929 to 1938, when US started putting up protectionist policy (soooo eerily similar to China today). when Nazi invaded Czechoslovakia, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on Nazi (but it wasn't an embargo).

Let's hope this time if China invades any country (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam), we contain and hopefully counter right away.

But with the (official) dictatorship in China, is this concentration camps reincarnated? Nazi reincarnated? Xitler is a real thing?

I would need my European/Asian food.....(especially great sushi and some Michelin caliber restaurants), easy beach access, good weather most of the year, and some tech meetups to go to.

Probably not for me.

interesting!! will take a deeper look

I saw it here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-starting-salary-fo...

On second thought, this might not be accurate as there's no direct references.

Indeed says senior software engineers is around $187,000 https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Computer+Programmer-Salaries...

It's no wonder that high-earning individuals are moving into California. A few numbers I ran across on the web:

- Bay Area economy is growing 3X (!!!) faster than average in US.

- Santa Clara region has an income average of $98,000, top 5 amonst the nation

- Average salary for Software Engineers for San Francisco is $210,000

This of course doesn't bode well for mid to lower income citizens, who now have to move out as far as antioch or stockton to afford a home. Bad for a family of 4, still doable for singles that can room with roommates near work. We really do need to have more housing in regions that are underdeveloped and soon will be served by the BART extension, google's building foray in downtown san jose, buildout in the caltrain stops between Redwood City and South San Francisco, etc.

Like you mentioned, the problem is that China promised an open market 15 years ago to wto. What we got instead is forced local 50/50 “partnership” and tech transfers. With the Chinese state enterprises winning at the end.

It’s not that big of a market compared to us or eu. Wouldn’t make sense giving up your secret sauce so you can lose in us and eu as well.

You are talking about something eons ago, before we had wto, which arbitrage against intellectual property theft.

Nintendo, Microsoft Xbox

It’s interesting that companies are willing to risk losing their lead to a copycat chasing a 10T economy when us + eu + japan is 40T.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, github, Pinterest, rakuten, slack, Dropbox and many others are all doing fine without China.

Exactly! Actually this should be more of a big deal. This is a MASSIVE accounting fraud, the kind that brought down Enron in 2000

Beijing’s air is better because that’s where the emperor is ;). (Or what my Chinese friends call him, Xi baozi - xi dumpling)

China's advantages to a booming economy in the early 2000s are all withering away, however. Demographics: China is actually projected to have less than 800M population by 2100. Foreign direct investment: leaving to higher growth areas like India and Vietnam, partly also due to capital controls. Cheap labor: wage inflation is causing manufacturing to move out of China. Large labor force: China will have one of the oldest population by 2050, with working forces retiring. Tech growth: surveillance, great firewall, pollution, economy slowdown will spur talents to leave China.

If we assume 20-30% of gdp claim from most of the provinces in China are fake, then that reduces their overall GDP from 11.2T to probably around 9-10T, only about double Japan's 5T, and about half of US's 19T and way less than EU's 17T. Nowhere near taking over US/EU anytime soon, and probably falling into a lost decade for China. And with the 3% gdp growth from US recently, US economy is looking very bright.

actually you are correct; local governments in China have been known to fake air data

https://medium.com/@shanghaiist/officials-use-mist-cannon-to...

and this year, Shanghai's air pollution has been worse than Beijing. Some say due to the cold air pushing the pollution down this year.

https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/02/12/shanghai-air-pol...

"In Liaoning Province tax receipts and income from various fees were padded by 20-30% according to counties and cities during the period of 2011-2014. Inner Mongolia has said that 25% of the fiscal revenue stated for 2016 were actually fake."

That actually validates some of the slowdown that I saw while I was in China. Business felt slow, and it seems that there wasn't the fast feel anymore compared to 2007. Very little small company activities, and alot of economic activities seem to involve state-owned companies (and we all know how slow they are).

If we assume 20-30% fake data across most of its local provinces the last couple of years, this would probably place China's GDP growth at around 1% a year (maybe even negative), way below 7% consistently claimed by the government. However, the 1% would be consistent with the drop in exports in recent year.

There are quite a few ways this government is similar....cases in point =>

China 'holding at least 120,000 Uighurs in re-education camps' https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...

Authoritarian regimes shroud their darkest features in euphemism. So it is with China’s “residential surveillance at a designated location.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/in-china-the-brut...

Huang Shike was arrested in 2016 in Xinjiang province, three months after he formed a discussion group about Muslim worship on the messaging app WeChat, according to the official website China Judgments Online https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-jails-muslim-huang-shike-...

AI discovery in cancer drugs is definitely a good trend as it is halving the time to discover. However, the other four I fear are overblown. Old fintech is no close to being unseated by any startups. Lots of new online banks have gone and went in both US and Europe. The only reason wechat pay took off in China is because the credit cards and payment networks Wasn’t there. Plus its a singular entity mostly owned by the states that have no competition, and Chinese consumers are now concerned a lot about their data. As for crypto, Jason calacanis just sent out an email warning everyone about Bitcoin - That’s the top angel investor in Silicon Valley. As for China, tariffs and fines are now starting to hit China, with US, Europe, japan enacting barriers. China was able to get around some of that by setting up factories in Malaysia, Taiwan and other countries, but Europe and US have enacted tariffs around that. China’s trade is going to suffer greatly. And protectionism is going to be the theme going forward

Let's use some bigger, current metrics to measure whether or not US is collapse or not, instead of some random stats about shooting, or observations about US collapse.

1.) US GDP is 19.73 trillion in 4th quarter 2017, best in the world. https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-gdp-5-latest-statistics-and-h... second best is EU, at 17.1 trillion.

2.) US GDP per capita is $57,000, pretty impressive considering it has a population of 330+ million people and growing. compare that with $8000 for China.

3.) US ranked 3rd in GDP per hours worked, pretty productive for such a big nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

4.) Dollar is still the hegemony

5.) US military is the biggest in the world, and has the most combat experiences. It has provoked many wars over the years, some good (toppling dictators, preventing communisms from spreading, advocating democracies), as well as some bad (instilling instabilities in regions)

6.) US innovation is everywhere, in tech (internet, hardware, software), finance, entertainment (games, tv, movies, music), lifestyle, education, services, etc

7.) there's a bigger upper middle class than ever, lower middle class has shrank . http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-cl...

8.) With tariffs punishing China, Apple/Amazon investments of billions into american cities, and fines levied on China for unfair tech transfers, US will revive manufacturing and economies in middle America

Oh I lived in Pudong for a while ;). I will have to disagree with you. It was also very busy for US in 2007, during the housing bubble. And it was busy for Japan in 1989, during the asset bubble. There is little reason for China to be able to escape its massive bubble right now.