Yes, but it’s an uphill battle. You’re fighting against the best Harvard-trained economists who already have their own set of ideological beliefs.
The easiest way to describe this to a poster is like being mass downvoted in reddit. You can post information with evidence attached, but if it challenges their beliefs, they’re not going to listen.
You too! Keep the good LatAm posts coming in 2026!
Chinese cities face subway delays as Beijing targets wasteful spending, high debt levels SCMP
Rich hubs, including Ningbo and Suzhou, are hitting regulatory roadblocks as the central government prioritises fiscal discipline over infrastructure-led growth
China is tapping the brakes on some subway expansions, including in certain affluent cities – a decision that analysts said reflects a shift from the debt-fuelled infrastructure boom of the past to a new era of fiscal discipline and investment efficiency.
Rich eastern hubs such as Ningbo and Suzhou are among those facing regulatory roadblocks in securing Beijing’s approval for new lines as policymakers scrutinise loss-making projects.
In an online response to public inquiries, the Ningbo Municipal Development and Reform Commission said this month that the city’s ridership metrics “need further improvement” and currently fall short of the conditions required for submission to the country’s top economic planner for approval.
The local commission noted that Beijing had issued stricter standards and was requiring previously approved but unbuilt projects to be resubmitted for vetting.
“Since subway operations in most Chinese cities are loss-making and require subsidies, the fact that their funding sources are now extremely limited means the government has to tighten up,” said Zhao Jian, director of the China Urbanisation Research Centre at Beijing Jiaotong University.
This stricter oversight, once more common among smaller or less-developed cities, has been extended to economic powerhouses. Suzhou, located in Jiangsu province, west of Shanghai, has a population of nearly 13 million and boasts one of the nation’s highest gross domestic products.
Those who have seen my posts will know that I have said for months that the outsized local government debt is eventually going to affect public services.
In fact, back in 2021, the central government has already stopped approving construction of subway systems in cities that do not already have them, so the total number of China’s subways will stay at 54 cities for the foreseeable future. Back in November, Harbin, Qingdao and Yinchuan have just been denied their subway expansion plans, and other projects under construction are being halted. This signaled the end of rail/subway expansion in China, especially for Tier 2/3 cities and below. Now this restriction is reaching even the rich economic hubs, which tells you the true financial situation of many local governments across the entire country.
Since public transits companies are not profitable, many of them also double as REITs to extract profit from the rise in land value. Now that the property prices are plunging, it is becoming increasingly difficult maintain the expansion of public transits given the rising upkeep costs and the diminishing profits.
A very prominent example right now is the Shenzhen Metro who had been transfusing blood (more than 29 billion yuan) to the dying Vanke, one of the biggest property developers in China once hailed as a successful model just 2 years ago when Evergrande was imploding under the weight of its own hyper-financialization.
If you ever wonder why your average Chinese worker does not reap the benefit of its rapid industrialization, why they have to work harder for less wages, why there is low consumption problem, when the increase in productivity should bring the opposite, this is why. This is where a lot of the wealth is going into - to plug the massive debt taken out by local governments to fuel property speculation frenzy since the 2010s.
The solution is actually very simple. The central government simply has to run the deficit spending to directly finance these infrastructure projects. However, this was not done over the past 15 years during the booming infrastructure investment phase, because the government wanted to balance the budget per IMF recommendation. As a result, local governments had to borrow massively from shadow banks (before 2015) and through direct municipal bond issuance (after 2015) to build housing and infrastructures, which ends up with an outsized debt bubble that has become very difficult to service. This is where the “zombification” of the economy starts as the government continues to bail out these unproductive investments because the alternative is the collapsing finance in the local governments and with their bad loans, the entire banking sector as well. This is why neoliberal ideas are so dangerous.
And yes, make no mistake, this is the end of the infrastructure building era in China.
By the way, comrades, anyone got a favourite old Soviet movie at this time of year?
The movie to watch is Irony of Fate, a romantic comedy from 1975. It’s shown on Soviet television every New Year’s Eve around dinner time and has since become a tradition, even in today’s Russia.
Meanwhile, I don't think economy should be driven primarily by consumption in the first place. Thinking that consumption has to be at the core of the economy is just capitalist brain rot.
A state produces to consume. If there is no demand for consumption, there is no production. This has nothing to do with consumerism or capitalism, it simply is how an economy works. People want to eat, live and enjoy life - these are all consumption and in order for the people to have that, you have to produce.
What gets twisted is the IMF promoting an export-led growth strategy that practically forces countries to run trade surpluses (accumulating foreign currencies) to put on their asset side of the balance sheet to keep their deficit low, without which the increase in domestic spending (liability side of the balance sheet) would drive up the deficit number.
As a result, this distorts what trade is actually for - exchange of real goods and services that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to produce in your own country. Instead, countries re-orient their allocation of capital, labor and resources to produce export goods to accumulate foreign currencies - in the case of US dollar, which has a free floating exchange rate, simply something that the Fed types into existence with keystrokes. This allowed the US to extract surplus values from the rest of the exporter countries by simply adding a number to the exporter’s bank accounts instead of providing something real in return.
So, export became the primary means of a developing country to “upgrade” their economy, and this strategy isn’t anything new. Before China, there was Germany and Japan. Then Taiwan and South Korea. Then the Southeast Asia before they were wrecked by the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 (because SEA was where Japan exported its investment, which means they needed to be taken out). Only then did China came to the scene when joining the WTO in 2001.
Finally, this whole talk of debt is not really meaningful. China has sovereign currency and can issue as much of it as it wants the same way the US does. Money supply should be seen as an allocating mechanism and nothing more.
The state bank aka the People’s Bank of China has sovereign currency, NOT the local governments. This was why the local governments borrowed so much with the shadow banks aka LGFVs (before 2015) and from direct municipal bond issuance (after 2015) to invest in the massive infrastructure building.
And the reason why the PBoC isn’t directly financing these investments is because China has listened to the IMF and wanted to keep its deficit low (for the most part, stayed below 3% of its GDP and only after Covid and last year that this was increased to 4%). To keep its deficit low, China needs to accumulate foreign currencies before it is allowed to spend domestically. This is why China has been frantically trying to dump its export goods to the other parts of the world (especially the EU) after Trump launched the global tariffs, because it needed that trade surplus (foreign currencies) to add to its asset side to spend domestically.
The only thing this achieves is that China’s deficit number looks low to satisfy the IMF requirement. There is no empirical evidence that says high deficit will lead to uncontrollable inflation and unemployment. In fact, there is no theoretical foundation for that unless you believe in neoclassical economics. But the Harvard-trained economists in China all seem to take IMF’s words as sacred.
What this means is that even though the Chinese government has sovereign currency, it is not using it to its full advantage, and still relied on accumulating foreign currencies as assets for domestic currency emission.
Agree that they still have places to go (in the US you’d be homeless), but disagree that the property prices falling is a good thing overall.
The local governments have tied their budget to land finances and as you can expect, the plunging property prices are now leading to a deflationary spiral, especially with the US gating their imports from China with tariffs. The property prices falling means less spending from the home-owning middle class (who contributed the most in consumption), and with that low domestic consumption also means business profits being cut and layoffs for the employees, and less value-added tax revenues for the local governments. That’s why you have wage reduction and growing youth employment in China today - unthinkable before Covid!
The deflation also means that local governments that had taken out massive debt for infrastructure building will find it more difficult to service those debt. So, it’s the entire economy that’s getting affected, not just the home buyers.
Remember that deflation is even more dangerous than inflation. I already linked this in another post but read my post here about how the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform was the watershed moment that led to the speculative land finances in China.
You need to understand what 90% homeownership in China actually means.
In China, your hukou (i.e. where you are born, or rather, the residence of your parents) determines your access to housing, education, healthcare, pension/insurance and public utilities in the urban areas. There are ~40% of people with rural hukou registration that are effectively barred from what urban citizens get to enjoy - not completely, but it’s extremely limited.
Currently, there are 300 million migrant workers (农民工) in China (40% of the 700+ million total labor force, and nearly the entire population of the US!) who work in the cities but their rural hukou registration limits their access to housing (and education for their kids - both are connected, see below).
Migrant workers are the true underclass that makes your cheap iPhones and build all those amazing infrastructure across China, yet because of their rural hukou registration, are not entitled to public utilities in the cities they work in, because technically they are not residents of the cities they work in. Your home is tied to the village/provincial town you came from. This allows the municipal governments to exploit their labor while providing minimal services in return. (Remember, there is no personal income tax in China (only 70 million people have to pay income tax), the most important tax revenue is value-added tax, so the more labor hours being squeezed out of the workers, the higher tax revenues the local governments receive).
Similarly, employers are not obligated to contribute to pension funds and insurances (五险一金) so migrant workers usually get screwed the worst because they have little to no safety net if they get sick or become unemployed.
It is class division based on where you’re born.
Now, on to housing, more than 60% of them live in rental units, 20% live in company-provided hostels/dormitories (shared living spaces) and a proportion of them (20%) did purchase houses (especially with marriage and kids) but mostly in the provincial towns. A lot of them were scammed into purchasing houses because the local governments, in an attempt to drive up land prices, tied education resources to housing, and effectively coercing these migrant working class families to purchase a house in the county in order to even have a chance of sending their kids to public schools due to the points-based system that prioritizes home ownership:
According to Prof. Wang Ou’s research (see my linked article above):
So, how much does it cost for a migrant worker to buy a home in the county? While staying in newly purchased apartments of migrant workers, I calculated the expenses carefully. In a county in southern Jiangxi, homes cost 6,000–7,000 RMB [$852-994] per square meter; in a county in western Guangxi, 4,000–5,000 RMB [$568-710]. A 100-square-meter shell apartment plus full fit-out costs at least 600,000–700,000 RMB [$85,215-99,418]. This is an enormous burden—often draining the savings of two generations and still requiring loans for ten or twenty years.
And this was back in the 2010s, when the property prices were still appreciating. You can imagine how these migrant workers are now having a much harder time paying mortgage for the next 10-20 years as the economy is undergoing deflation. All of those who bought houses after 2017 are getting screwed.
Also, your linked article was from 2016… when the property prices were appreciating like crazy. That illusion has been shattered since 2021.
It’s simply how the economy works.
I’ve said many times that the easiest way out of this is for the government to run the deficit spending to provide job guarantee and social welfare, but since the party does not believe in welfare (they believe that welfare promotes laziness) and instead believe in the IMF neoliberal model of balancing the books (i.e. keeping the deficit spending low), this is actually one of the optimal ways it can work given the self-imposed constraints.
As I said, a lot of similarities with how the Japanese handled their growth stagnation - sacrificing youth employment to preserve the existing employees and the corporations that have made bad investments. Hence the high youth unemployment in China right now. None of this is a coincidence once you understand how the economy works.
The government is not one entity. Most of the times it’s provincial/municipal governments. For example, the queer fanfic writers that were detained last time, if I remember correctly, were just some local cops.
Nobody really knows why. Sometimes it’s power tripping, sometimes it’s to meet a certain KPI especially now it’s the end of the year, so some departments need to meet their quarterly/annual targets.
I know we have to fight the “anti-CCP propaganda” but people do get detained and disappeared, it’s exaggerated by the anti-communist propaganda but the reality is that it does happen.
As long as you’re not disseminating any anti-government propaganda, bringing up sensitive topics, or touching the interest of the elites, you’re going to be fine. Everyone knows this and has learned how to lay low.
You think a bunch of gamers who just want to play video games want to take that risk?
Not exactly the same. China also doesn’t have welfare (in fact, China doesn’t even have a SNAP/food bank equivalent) but most people can always go back to the villages and their provincial hometowns and stay with family. Life won’t be good but you can still survive without being homeless.
But you are absolutely correct that the migrant workers who are registered under rural hukou (~300 million people) get screwed the worst, and are effectively barred from accessing housing, education, healthcare, pension/insurance and public utilities in the cities they work at. For these people, the last resort is moving back to the villages and lay low.
China also doesn’t really have an unemployment problem since the 2000s and it is only since opening up after Zero Covid in 2023 that there is a slump in the economy. Back in the 2000s and 2010s, as long as you’re willing to work, you won’t find yourself homeless and if you’re willing to work overtime, you can even get relatively good pay. These days, it is getting more challenging and there is a lot of precarity about unemployment, so people are spending less and saving more, leading to the deflationary spiral we are seeing today.
The easiest way (but it’s not clear cut) to think about the difference in the US and China, is that in the US, you are fully responsible for your financial situation, whereas in China (because of the way the economy is being developed), the losses are likely to be socialized.
For example, in the US, if the housing bubble bursts (think subprime crisis), your $1 million home plunges to $500k, you are solely responsible for the losses and in most likelihood, you’re defaulting on your mortgage and the bank takes your home.
In China, because of so much wealth has been tied to the real estate, letting the housing bubble burst would cause unmitigated chain reaction across the financial sectors and even spread to the real economy, so the government has to provide a “soft landing” by any means necessary.
What this means is that if your house price won’t directly plunge from $1 million to $500k, but the fall will be cushioned in a way that you can still sell your house to another buyer at $900k (provided that the illusion of a housing rebound is maintained), then as the price continues to fall, that other buyer can still sell it to another at $800k.
The key here is government providing “soft landing” by socializing the costs - using the national wealth to slow the plunging property prices. This way, when the house finally drops to $500k, you are not losing $500k, but that loss has been spread to 5 other buyers, as well as many others’ to prop up/slow the falling price. The cost is thus socialized. This translates to people working longer hours for lower wages, with their wealth being used to provide a soft landing, but at least you won’t see large scale “falling off the kill line”. In this sense, the working class took on the burden experienced by the home-owning middle class, and cushioning their losses.
China’s response is more similar to Japan’s recession in the early 1990s. The government orders the central bank to prop up the bad loans the banks have made, and led to the “zombification” of the economy. You may see this as a failure (true in an economic policy sense), but socially, Japan went through an entire generation of high youth unemployment with extreme social stability.
Of course, there are other examples in different sectors, but the property market is probably the easiest to understand the core mechanisms behind it.
Because you don’t fuck around in China when the cops invite you to “drink tea”.
The problem is not that the HSRs are unprofitable (which is to be expected for public transits), the problem is that the central government does not run deficit spending to finance these large scale infrastructure, so the local governments had to take out loans (with shadow banks before 2015, and direct municipal bond issuance after 2015) to invest in these projects.
And because these public transits companies are not profitable, many of them also double as REITs to extract profit from the land value rise. The most famous being Shenzhen Metro who had been transfusing blood to the dying Vanke, a property developer once hailed as a successful model just 2 years ago as Evergrande was imploding under its hyper-financialized operational structure.
It is a neoliberalized model that shares a lot of similarities to Japan’s. This is why a lot of the local governments are in a massive debt bubble right now as the property prices plunge, a problem made worse by the fact that the People’s Bank of China have seemingly “run out of its tools” after the massive 12 trillion yuan debt resolution policy in November last year.
Read my post here about how all these troubles really started with the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform that forced the local governments to tie their budgets to land finances.
I wish China is the continuation of the USSR, but it isn’t.
The USSR was as close to a worker’s state as we have ever gotten, despite all its flaws. The elimination of class divide took precedence, and the advanced industrialization and technology came as a result of this new kind of society.
China’s post-reform era is, as Deng Xiaoping put it, “let a small bunch of people to get rich first” and “black cat white cat, it doesn’t matter”. China’s reform era follows much closer to the Japan and Singapore models than the USSR. While the first few decades of such NEP had been great, it also exacerbated class divide and wealth inequality, and China finds itself difficult to decouple from the neoliberalized free trade system as we’re now seeing. There is next to no welfare for your average working class people. So, not at all comparable to the USSR. But if you’re top 10%, it’s great living in China though.
Reposting what I wrote a while ago:
The significance is even greater than many leftists who live in the 21st century realize:
The Soviet Union was the ONLY adversary that the United States has ever been afraid of.
Yes, you heard it right. Not even the threat of China today reaches anywhere near the fear that the US had against the Soviet system. I’ll get into that in a moment.
It would be a grave mistake to see the 70-year long epic struggle between the US and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two superpowers vying for global domination. Such thought would be a great disservice to the significance of the 20th century Cold War: an ideological battle for the future of humanity.
Many people go crazy about China’s amazing economic transformation, but understand that what China has managed to overtake the US, whether it is infrastructure, shipbuilding, automation and robotics, cars, advanced electronics etc. all of that had already happened before with Japan more than 40 years ago.
And the rise of China since the reform and opening up through its integration into the global free trade market by producing cheap exports through suppression of domestic wages and demand makes perfect sense for countries/economies that were able to take advantage of industrial policies and the geopolitical circumstances of the time in the decades even before China (e.g. Japan, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea etc.)
What made the Soviet Union truly unique and a fearsome adversary to global capitalism was not its technological advances, rapid industrialization, or winning the space race, BUT that it managed to achieve all that in defiance of the Western economic theory!
A true socialist state where workers were treated with dignity and respect.
A country that is not drawn on nationalist lines but on a supranational identity committing to an ideology that brings together people from all over the world, regardless of nationality, ethnicity and culture.
A society without the oppression of an exploitative and parasitic capitalist class.
A system once thought impossible to achieve progress by capitalist propaganda. No, you see, capitalism is the fastest way to build a nation, while socialism only ends up bringing poverty to all!
The Soviet Union smashed all the capitalist propaganda into pieces.
It is unfortunate but I have to say this: unlike China today, the Soviet workers enjoyed the full welfare and protection of their rights as workers, did not have to worry about being unemployed, did not have to live paycheck to paycheck, did not have to pay mortgage, received free education and healthcare of the highest quality, enjoyed labor rights including working hours comparable to those of the “wealthier” social democratic Western European working class, and most impressive of all, the Soviet government continued to pay out full pension and free healthcare throughout the entire Great Patriotic War (WWII) even when unthinkable deaths and destructions were happening all around the country and the world.
I know it is hard for people who live in the 21st century to understand, but know that there was a time when workers committed their energy and time not to work to survive, but to build a new society that would benefit all of humanity.
I strongly recommend reading Ostrovsky’s semi-autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1930s) to get a glimpse of what I wrote above meant:
Man's dearest possession is life.It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past;so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world──the fight for the Liberation of Mankind
Seriously, read the novel which was based on the author’s own lived experience. It is impossible to grasp what happened in the minds of the Soviet people with a perspective of the 21st century world.
This is not the say that the Soviet Union did not have its flaws, but that its existence served as a beacon for a different kind of future for many people living in the post-war reconstruction era. That brief period of hopefulness has never been replicated, nor has its conditions emerged again (so far), since the fall of the Soviet Union. It is an entirely different kind of future that we had lost.
Quite possible, but I don’t think the numbers are low. Xenophobia is a very real problem.
Remember that Japan went through 35 years of stagnation with extreme stability that few countries could achieve, even with sacrificing an entire generation of young people aka the Lost Generation, but if there are too many Turkish, Vietnamese, Nepali and Indians in the neighborhood? Sorry we prefer to live poorly than to see foreigners co-exist with us.
I’m going to assume you live in Shanghai and is in the top 0.5-1% bracket? (No need to dox yourself if you don’t want to though, it’s just how I remember it)
I can tell you that the top 1%, even the top 10%, are certainly out of touch with the rest of the working class in China. These are the people who haven’t really experienced the consequences of the deflationary economy, even though the Tier 1 cities have seen the most drop in consumption (guess why that is the case). I know because I am friends with some of them (academics).
the tangping movement has actually been losing momentum because everyone just relocating to back to their hometowns or lower cost cities which are actually no longer miserable and have reasonable cost of living to salary ratios.
Are there job opportunities in the lower tier cities? Remember the property prices plunging is affecting the local government financing much more seriously for the Tier 3/4 cities and below than the Tier 1/2 cities. Not everyone lives in Shanghai you know, which is the wealthiest city in the country.
i would say that the youth, while unhappy about the job market, benefitted a lot from the housing market getting taken down (to give xhs the benefit of the doubt, lets just assume salary growth has been nil over the past 5 years, but housing prices dropped like 30% while durable goods also went down in the double digits. are you really going to be that mad?). it was only really the petit bourgeoisie that had investment properties that got hit hard: it's not like you're going to be losing any wealth if you only have the one house that you're already living in or if you were already renting.
No offense, but you are certainly out of touch with even most home-owning middle class people in China. You’re not describing how people think when they’re buying house and committing to a 20-year mortgage.
Let’s say your house price is inflating. Now if you suddenly lose your job (remember there is next to no unemployment welfare in China) and couldn’t find another in months, you can still sell your house and downgrade your living conditions, then take the price difference as your emergency funds to get through the difficulty. This was why back in 2017-2019, the middle class was spending lavishly, because everyone knew that their wealth was inflating so they could make riskier consumption and investment choices.
However, when the prices are deflating, and if you lose your job, not only are you not able to sell your house (who’s willing to take over a house that’s going to be 10% cheaper next year?), you STILL have to keep paying your mortgage after having lost your income. To put it mildly, you’re practically fucked. That’s simply the reality of many home-owning middle class who bought houses after 2017.
Guess why people are not spending and started saving these days? Because they have to squeeze out every bit of income to service their mortgage, and in the event of losing their job, they’re going to need every bit of that to survive.
Your thinking assumes that people are at no risk of losing their jobs over an entire 15-, 20- and even 30-year mortgage period.
And because the home-owning middle class has reduced consumption spending due to their property prices falling, the economy spirals into deflation as business profits are cut to razor thin margins, production downscaling and workers are getting laid off, which is why the young people cannot find jobs these days. That’s where we are right now.
So, no, it’s not just affecting the petit bourgeoisie, it’s affecting everyone! And that includes the local governments that have tied their budget to land finance. Somebody has to maintain the public transportation and public services, you know.
Also, it’s not just middle class who owns houses, many migrant workers were scammed into buying properties in the provincial towns (with the promise to access high quality education for their kids) by the local governments in order to drive up land prices. Now they’re getting screwed even harder.
Of course, if you live in a Tier 1 city and making income at the top bracket that allows you to live like a king in China, you’re not going to feel any of that.
It’s bad… On the one hand, there is genuine concern about job market competition during economic downturn, on the other, as I wrote to another commenter, the viral internet content has fried everyone’s brains (the whole world). The short form video content platforms have been especially successful in disseminating the worst negative stereotypes and people are being bombarded with the most rage-inducing reactionary content on a daily basis.
As you said yourself, the lionization of the Gang of Four and the insinuation that their reputation has been deliberately vilified by the liberal reformers is a huge taboo.
I don’t have to remind you that most of the liberal reformers were victims of the CR. Deng Xiaoping’s eldest son was pushed out of a window at Peking University and became disabled for life. Xi Jinping’s sister took her own life after constant harassment by the Red Guards. There is no way that the current leadership will allow any kind of rehabilitation of the CR.
You go on to talk about it being co-opted, but what Marxism do kids actually learn in a normal education in the PRC?
They’re practically patriotism class. They teach you the very basics of Marxism then tell you, China is still a developing socialist country and while we strive to become a communist country one day (some lecturers will say, “communist countries with high welfare such as Norway and Sweden”, not a joke) we’re not there yet, that’s why we still can’t have high welfare like the Scandinavian countries. Write a 3000-character essay about why the party is great, those sort of essays. It’s one of those classes that nobody’s into.
If you’re very lucky, you might get a genuinely good lecturer who teaches you the real stuff, but you’re otherwise getting a lecturer who’s half-assing it (and doesn’t even understand theory themselves) and like most kids, you’ll probably ended up hating the entire class.
Viral internet content has fried everyone’s brain, especially with the rise of short form videos that incentivize the most shocking/dramatic contents often showing the worst stereotypes of any country or group of people to invoke rage and emotions. As a result, all anyone knows about a particular country is reinforced by what they’ve seen on the internet. This is what people are being bombarded with daily when browsing social media apps.
Zohran Mamdani Wins New York With a Youthquake
Ridiculous Chinese censorship used AI to change the gay couple in Together (2025) to a heterosexual couple
Average working hours dropped drastically after 1917, due to fear that the Russian Revolution would inspire similar revolutions in other countries
Thanks. I believe that the best countermeasure against Western propaganda is to actually understand the complexity of the Chinese system itself - all its strengths and deficiencies, not blindly regurgitating both the pro/anti-China propaganda points, because you really cannot “defend China” nor are you qualified if you don’t even know how the system works. I am sharing these posts as I am learning about the many intricacies that I never even thought about before too.
Yes, the infrastructures are all amazing, but how many people know what it’s like to work and live there as an average Chinese worker (not a foreigner “expat” who is employed in foreign multinational corporation that pays very good salary with full welfare and employment benefits)?
Like, how are you going to answer if met with “sure, but I don’t want to work 12 hours for 26 days a month with no annual leave”?
How well do you know about the system to defend against arguments like that? What percentage of the Chinese working class have more than 4 off-days per month? Do you know the answer? How does the labor law work there? What legal recourses do one have if being unreasonably terminated? Are there unemployment benefits? Are there legal protections for workers against exposure to environmental pollution at workplace? How does the medical insurance work over there? What happens if one gets sick and have to miss work? Do employers contribute to pensions? How many Chinese people have pension and insurance?
I guarantee you that 95% of the Westerners who are “amazed” at China’s rapid development do not think about these questions, because they assume that the same level of hard-fought welfare in their own country (which is being deteriorated by their own governments’ neoliberal policies) also exists in China and that they will be employed at a high salary job if they ever move to China (which is probably true for a foreigner with advanced degrees).
This is why most of the pro-China propaganda focuses mostly on technology and industries (preceded by many industrial economies such as Japan and South Korea), because they cannot say China is a workers state like the USSR. The labor law in China is actually worse than many developing countries such as Vietnam and Brazil, which many Chinese businessmen are learning the hard way as they shift production sites overseas. It’s actually hilarious to see these people (both pro and anti China online accounts) painting themselves into corners with increasingly bizarre mental gymnastics to “explain” why China “cannot do this or that”.
You’ll notice on the other hand, that I focus a lot on socioeconomic issues, because as a socialist, that’s what I am most concerned about. And it is these issues, such as wealth distribution, that will dictate the principal contradictions of the Chinese economy as we move past the export-led and infrastructure-led investment growth phases.