r/Economics • u/GuestFromBudushchego • 1d ago
News China’s Weakening Economy Is Creating a Lost Generation
https://www.wsj.com/world/china-economy-gen-z-f9058941107
u/Baxter9009 1d ago
Young people were taught hard work guaranteed a bright future. They feel burned out and betrayed as good jobs become harder to get and the milestones of adulthood slip away.
This sounds too familiar for this subreddit.
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u/Lalalama 1d ago
It’s everywhere. I feel bad for young people in America too. I know people who graduated at good universities and are working at coffee shops.
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u/gs87 1d ago
Wait, isn't China supposed to be communist?
Did nobody teach these kids about the horrors of late stage capitalism?
Marx would be rolling in his grave, and Mao would be spinning in his mausoleum !!!
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u/jayfeather31 1d ago edited 1d ago
China's complicated. My understanding is that China follows something called, "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", which basically involves adopting elements of market economics to create what is referred to as a socialist market economy.
The idea is that it's supposed to later transition into socialism proper, and the Chinese are arguing from the position that the private sector is beneficial as long as it improves productivity and modernizes the means of production.
Ultimately, it all stems from China historically being underdeveloped compared to other nations, which has only really recently changed from the 1980s onward.
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u/Good_Air_7192 1d ago
This is what you say when you're communist but really want to become a capitalist fat cat. Put a bit of spin on it.
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u/FeatherlyFly 1d ago
An interesting facet of this is that while China was not one of the early industrial countries, it was still the third biggest economy in the world in 1900 and not especially poor per person. It had a civil war from 1927 until the Japanese invasion and WW2, but the Japanese were really good at industrializing their conquests so China was almost in a good position to get rich after the war ended in 1944, except that their civil war had never truly ended. The CCP won within a few years and Mao set about impoverishing the people en route to centralizing control and it wasn't until his death that the reforms that let China return to its historic prosperity got underway.
If not for the CCP, China's development might have looked a lot more like Japan or Korea after ww2, if they were about the size of the US.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
Completely false historiography wtf?
In 1900 China had been invaded, plundered, and colonized by European powers for a century. Theyd lost territory (that's how Hong Kong happened), been forced to allow terrible trade agreements (like being forced to allow open opium sales), had literacy rates below 5%, almost 90% of the population were rural peasants. They lost the first sino Japanese war (leading to Japan brutal occupation of Korea and mongolia), they had the boxer rebellion as a populist precursor the Chinese civil war which led to literally 8 European nations occupying the capitol and forcing executions of over 100,000 officials and ordinary folk suspected of anti-european sentiments. Their estimated GDP per Capita had been cut in half from 1700 (while UK grew 3x). This was literally called the Century of Humiliation.
The civil war was driven by peasants being brutally exploited and plundered by the nationalists (who became the KMT in Taiwan), who also failed to prosecute the war against Japan despite having lots of support from the US and Europe (who also embargoed Japan immediately since they took other European colonies, like Taiwan and the east indies).
Like what are you talking about best case outcome if communists lost was being a slowly freed colony like India.
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u/FeatherlyFly 17h ago
There were European outposts. It was not colonized in the same framework as India, if you want to talk about false histories. Foreign powers had influence over a weak central government and did indeed get the right to build outposts in the swamp land that was Hong Kong and even had some presence in Shanghai.
The nationalists had major problems, but the sort of starvation and murderous reforms devastating societal cohesion that Mao promoted has only ever been seen under communist regimes, but has showed up under three of those.
Perhaps I am overestimating how well off China would have been without the CCP, but you're underestimating how badly the CCP devastated China when it came to power.
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u/Iron-Fist 15h ago
Post civil war famines have only ever happened under communists?
And the nationalists literally had a 50 year period called the white terror on Taiwan...
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u/FeatherlyFly 1d ago
Mao manipulated the gullible of the youth into killing the educated and responsible adults who made the base of his opposition within the Chinese Communist Party. Mao starved to death tens of millions of peasants in order to pay off a debt to the Soviet Union years before it was due. Mao permitted a plan for industrialization that had peasants melting down useful pots and pans into useless scrap, deforesting the nation to provide the fires to carry out that farce.
I don't think Mao would be bothered about much of anything unless it threatened his personal power.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
Mao took a country that had endured a century of colonization and occupation, was 90% peasants with 5% literacy, under threat of invasion from all sides, and navigated a very narrow road to prosperity and sovereignty, without the benefit of hindsight... Hard to argue with the score board at this point.
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u/BrokenManOfSamarkand 1d ago
Hard to argue with the score board at this point.
Yeah, it was hard to argue because the millions of people that got the rough end of his policies died horribly
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
In China today there is no hunger or extreme poverty, they have education and sovereignty. Many former colonies are not so lucky, their revolutions crushed.
I find it interesting you blame mao and not the European colonial powers he was cleaning up after.
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u/BrokenManOfSamarkand 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean that's because Mao's policies were directly responsible for killing like 30 million people? The Great Leap Forward was like a decade and a half after WW2, and many decades after things like the Opium Wars. There's no blaming the West for that.
Also China really became prosperous after Mao left and economic liberalization policies were instituted. All of those people didnt have to die. It was madness. Stop defending it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward?wprov=sfla1
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u/Iron-Fist 23h ago
The great leap forward ended with China doubling their urbanization rate, just about quadrupling industrial output per Capita, 20x as many college graduates, became a friggin nuclear power after the grind of the Korean war... They literally jumped ahead. Keep in mind they were literally under threat of invasion and nuclear attack directly before.
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u/Better_Story727 20h ago
Don’t romanticize the painful past. It’s no different from the old propaganda that claimed impossibly high crop yields—like harvesting tens of thousands of pounds of grain from just over a tenth of an acre.
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u/Unpossib1e 1d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
Mao is basically a fucking moron
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
Across the world pests including rats, flies, and mosquitos are controlled. China eliminated malaria that in 1940 caused almost 300k deaths annually. That's tens of millions of lives saved, if you're counting.
There is very sparse proof that the targeting of sparrows actually even contributed to the Chinese famine, with a American single study (from an anti communist UChicago economist, not an ecologist) from the 50s using vague proxies to postulate that. Even they said it contributed up to 20% in the worst effected counties.
Good try though. Now check out how things were in British India.
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u/BrokenManOfSamarkand 1d ago
These guys are tankies or bots. There's no point in engaging with this. Defending policies that killed tens of millions of people on an economics sub is just perverse and speaks to the low quality of this place.
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u/STC1989 1d ago
The philosophy championed by a useless, good for nothing random German guy is probably a philosophy not to be taken seriously.
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u/theuncleiroh 1d ago
but enough about Austrian Economics, we're discussing Marx
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u/HypocrisyWarrior 4h ago
The unemployment rate for 25-29 years has hovered around 7% for a decade now so means young people are tempering their expectations of landing their dream job right out of the gate and “settling” for something less grandiose.
A 7% rate is not great by any stretch but it’s not society collapsing either.
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