this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.

Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.

Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn't make a country communist.

Their land use rules... that makes them communist-ish. But that's a small part of a far larger picture.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (27 children)

Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish

Wouldn't go that far...

It's hard to pretend China is in any way communist when they have rampant wealth inequality and the wealthiest run the government.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

To view a text only version of CNN pages, replace "www" with "lite". https://lite.cnn.com/2023/07/26/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk/index.html is about 50 kB, whereas the original is about 2.7 MB.

BBC article.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You need to find Chinese parents first.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Or parents. Period.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Excess infrastructure spending" I've spotted the republican.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an article in 2018 about China making it harder to build new mass transit:

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-07-14/china-makes-it-harder-to-get-ok-to-build-subways-light-rail-101302749.html

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Please go read the article and don’t try to get triggered by things I didn’t say. JFC.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Shit, I've been in the wrong industry this whole time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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