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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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It looks like there is two different things happening.
First is that the one child policy is causing problems with several grandparents being supported by one grandchild. In this case, it seems like the grandparents are paying a salary to their grandkid to support them in elderly care. It may not be a lot of money, but it seems to be enough for the adult grandchildren to live for what is effectively a part time job.
Second is that the economy going through issues, and grandparents are acting as unemployment insurance.
brb moving to China
You need to find Chinese parents first.
Or parents. Period.
Li, 21, now spends her days grocery shopping for her family in the central city of Luoyang and caring for her grandmother, who has dementia. Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.
That just sounds like a caregiver. Laura He and Candice Zhu can eat shit if they do not think that is a real job. Caring for someone with dementia is not a walk in the park.
"Excess infrastructure spending" I've spotted the republican.
It sounds strange, but it is something that the Chinese national government has made policy to rein in. This includes a national ban on new skyscrapers and subway lines. If the national government has to ban different types of infrastructure to be built, it can be a sign of excessive spending.
As far as I know, the ban on skyscrapers is due to safety concerns and a sense of identity which make sense, vertical urban planning is good but the best middle point is buildings that are neither too small (because you are not taking advantage of the vertical space) nor too tall. This is not much different from US zoning laws, which work to appease to the car industry lobbyists.
Regarding subway lines, I can't find any information about that, just that they banned drinking in such places.
Here is an article in 2018 about China making it harder to build new mass transit:
Here is an article in 2021 about China effectively no longer building subway lines in cities without an existing system, mainly due to trying to corral the real estate bubble:
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008813
The Chinese national and regional governments don't operate on the same economics or politics of Western governments, so the actions of one may not fully map to the actions of another.
Ad hoc and poison the well while being very wide of the mark, too.
Nicely done.
My politics align more with Sanders than anyone well known politician. Surplus is surplus and the left needs to retain the right to call a spade a spade.
Not all infrastructure spend is good. I'm both envious of what they have and stymied by articles documenting unused cities.
For ease of research, I recommend "China ghost cities." Maybe those cities will make sense and not every idea has to work, but that is surplus, ergo excess.
Most of the things that you mention as "ghost cities" and so on are simply they building in the long term, for the people, so that they can be in a later time be populated. Here's a good example of a YouTube channel who made a video about "ghost" metro station a few years ago, recently they did an update, and it is no longer a place without a purpose but actively being inhabited.
I get that they're attempting to master plan and be ahead of things. I also know infrastructure is an investment - and sometimes it's partially a jobs program.
Not every investment works out.
I'm not down on them.
I'm down on low-effort, glib and smug responses and I'm hitting more of it on Lemmy than I hit elsewhere. I'm not sure if this is the result of reddit leading to a population swing or if lemmy already had a lot of "smart" people who could be better than they are.
If I plan to smear someone. I click their post history. I've stopped myself from many errors and found a way to build a common ground. I've also found fools and decided they weren't worth it.
But if I plan to be dismissive, I do the research.
If you’re getting consistently rolled in the place with all the smart people, have you considered the possibility that you say dumb stuff?
Really weird phrasing by cnn, and strange that the Chinese youth take it upon themselves online, since they're performing work that is very common in China, being a nanny or a housekeeper, and getting paid in room and board. They aren't "professional children," they are professionals who happen to be the children of their employer.
Despite the youth working at home and being paid, the article keeps using the phrase" professional children" as if they're being paid to act like children.
Totally aside from that, what makes you think the land use laws in China make China more communist? The US has essentially the same rules, that if you don't name a beneficiary, your assets are often allocated to the state.
As far as I understand, as long as you name a beneficiary in China, the 70-year lease on your property/ real estate can be renewed indefinitely by any directly named beneficiary.
Is that correct as far as you understand real estate laws in China?
This is basically my understanding.
Got it. When you get down to the individual level, this is what real estate law is like concerning land ownership that I'm referring to.
"Each buyer registers his/her real estate title at the local registry and obtains a real estate certificate (or a land use right certificate and a building ownership certificate in transactions closed before 1 March 2015) in respect of the residential property he/she purchased. The buyer will enjoy ownership of the residential property for the remaining term of the 70-year land grant. Under PRC law, the buyer’s title will be automatically renewed at the end of the 70-year initial land grant (although the legal procedures for title renewal have not yet been legislated"
I'm a little lost here. By posting a section of what I linked... are you thinking you're making a point?
I read it. I also know that the 70 year thing has only recently meant anything (the rule is slightly older than 70 years). As a practical matter, what you extracted is what makes sense.
Some will make more note of the parenthetical: "although the legal procedures for title renewal have not yet been legislated."
That can also mean, stay in our good graces and things can go smoothly. In most other countries that specific concern isn't a thing.
Officially owning the land and needing to re-authorize is different from eminent domain.
I don't know about lost , but you do seem high-strung.
"As a practical matter, what you extracted is what makes sense."
Yes, that's why I extracted it, to clarify for you the 70-year real-estate law I had mentioned.
Chill out.
I remain a bit lost on why you think quoting my citation helped, but I have a theory. I see a lot of glib on lemmy. Are your usual sparring partners here that inept or clueless?
Honest question: are they? I'm still getting the hang of lemmy and so far it seems like a lot of self congratulatory wannabe-edgelord stuff.
Like it's puffery with just enough citations for posters to think they're smart?
And along the way, no citation is the right citation. I'm not lumping you into all this, I'm wondering if that's what this is right now.
I don't see people having discussions. I see people correcting each other on secondary points and missing the forest for the trees.
Edit: I didn't need my citation clarified to me. That you think that's what you did by quoting it is odd. If you added context, a link to why you think it's a richer topic, I'm good with it and I enjoy learning.
But I had read it and did not need it read back to me.
The parenthetical part that you didn't address was the key part. Being and staying in good graces is likely key to a seamless transition into the next 70 years. That's different from eminent domain.
I asked for your take on real estate law as you understood it in China.
You provided a third-party tl;dr layman's guide to Chinese real estate, indicating you were unable or unwilling to provide the personal take I asked you for. Which is fine, maybe you aren't in the mood for conversation.
I pointed out the 70-year individual property leases I had mentioned as a matter of clarification and left it at that.
As for lemmy, I have had pretty good conversations with people here about music, video games, tech, the communities in general.
Easy to rile; I'm going to hazard a guess that it is your defensive, nervous and rude attitude that is inviting the edgelords to rub elbows with you.
Take a beat.
You don't see the unnecessarily detrimental and argumentative hypocrisy of lamenting the masses "missing the forest for the trees" and then 1)harping on a subjective and contextually irrelevant parenthetical excerpt and 2)arguing against eminent domain existing in Chinese real estate as if you weren't the one to bring up eminent domain in Chinese real estate and are not the only person making the case for or against that concept?
If not, you might be missing the forest for the trees.
One of the themes I've seen here is people saying someone said something they didn't then taking issue with what they heard/inferred.
I didn't say they don't have eminent domain, as an example. I'm saying that the closest thing I've seen to their model is eminent domain - and even then, it's different.
It's as if people here are so keen to land a point that they invent one. I've been on a variety of fora for decades. The frequency of misrepresentation and zero fucks about making it right is... I've never seen it so prevalent. People act like they aren't talking to people.
Straight Dope, people cared. Giraffe board (after the switch), people cared. StumbleUpon, Reddit... people cared that they were seen "arguing" in good faith. They curated their reputation by listening and if they fucked up, many (not all) would try to reset and some would apologize.
I'm not simply describing my experience. I'm describing threads or branches where all I do is read comments.
It's definitely your own attitude that has you seeing this community manifesting the misrepresentation and lack of argumentative accountability so common on reddit. I stayed on lemmy specifically because I don't often have to deal with conversational misrepresentation(that you're currently engaging in), and even when arguments arise, people here(relative to other social networks)seem to accept when a fair or incontrovertible point is made.
You're used to those types of communities and you are importing that sort of misrepresentation and argumentative irresponsibility to this thread and to lemmy.
You are projecting your own insecurities, learned from your decades of fora, into the relative dearth of deliberate miscommunication on lemmy, shoveling dirt into your own toybox and throwing a tantrum about your soiled playthings.
Rather then approaching this conversation with mutual respect and assuming the other party is trying to genuinely connect, you immediately and repeatedly lash out, become fixated on whichever part of my reply you can narrowly contrive as opposing your own dearly-held perspective, and ignore the rest of a comment.
For instance, I just explained to you that this thread started out as a question on your personal take of a situation that you impersonally responded to, attacked the Lemmy community, and then became fixated on your own specific and contextually irrelevant take that eminent domain is different than Chinese real estate law; your direct response to that comment is to ignore that original context, attack the lemmy community, and reiterate that eminent domain is different than Chinese real estare law.
Shit, I've been in the wrong industry this whole time.
Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.
So…they are unemployed?
It says right there there's a salary. She's nepotistically employed as a caregiver.
If you think that's not a "real job", that's basically a cultural judgement, which I guess you can make, but then there's dudes that think only steelworkers have a real job.
Please go read the article and don’t try to get triggered by things I didn’t say. JFC.
I did skim it. If you're not saying it's not a real job that just doesn't apply to you, sorry for bringing it up.
Why would you want for young people to work? Is your idea for a utopia to have 15 year olds working at a McDonalds for minimum wage?
If the youth can focus on studying and improving themselves that is what they should do. Maybe it is because of the strong US "work ethics" but where I live unless you are under extreme poverty you focus on studying until you are 25 at least. We have free healthcare and education, so we have it much easier than people in the US, though.
She's 21
I didn't say she was 15, it was an example because that's the reality in the US.
Nothing wrong with working after school when you're 15, my friend worked a few hours scooping ice cream
Not everyone will use every waking hour studying
Yes, yes there is something wrong, I'm not saying you need to be every waking hour studying, but forcing young people to work is something would only happen under the current capitalist system and it is done to get cheap labour, not because of X or Y.
He wasn't forced to work, he just wanted some spending money above what good parents have him. What's wrong with that?
It's not like scooping ice cream requires special skills
That certainly sounds a lot better than the prospects young people living in US or Canada have. Also, why would you start with 16 years of age? I realize child labour has been noramlized in US, but in civilized countries 16 year olds go to school instead of having to work.
Finally, this seems pretty in line with Europe https://www.statista.com/statistics/613670/youth-unemployment-rates-in-europe/
So, basically this is a lazy propaganda story as can be expected from CNN when covering China.
Let’s not pretend how trust fund babies work in the US
Is everyone just a Capitalist deep down inside?
No, and to paint everything this way serves to delegitimize alternatives to capitalism. China is not capitalist, they are socialist. They have their own problems, because no system is perfect. But there are alternatives to capitalism, and not everything is "secretly capitalism in disguise".
There's no true Scotsman. China is both and neither. The US is both and neither. You need to talk about specific policies as one or the other.
Greed and envy (the roots of capitalism) are basic human drivers that we all have. It takes a lot of discipline, ethics, and an altruistic moral code or belief system to negate that. Some individuals are capable of that, but there is no societal system that has been able to overcome it.
We would never be able to completely move away from a capitalist system because it's in our nature to want more, to be rewarded for our efforts, and to be jealous of others. It's also why alternative systems never work as intended - the greed turns into corruption and ends up ruining the system.
The best outcome is to establish guardrails that limit the extent of the greed that is allowed in the system.
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