In a recent video on Twitter, he compared the China of today to 2019 and was completely shocked at the speed to progress and change. Says it’s like stepping into the future.
1 - Automation: From trains to taxis to purchases - everything is done seamlessly with super Apple Pay.
2 - EV: 30%-40% of the cars are fully electric. You can get Teslas but you have Chinese brands that offer sedans for $10k.
3 - The air is much cleaner. Partly due to EVs.
4 - People are more respectful of societal norms. There is better service everywhere you go.
5 - Less foreigners, even in touristy areas. Most white people are actually Russian.
6 - In factories, robots do the work in contrast to the perception people have in the US of China just throwing cheap labor at every problem. Factories set up their own e-commerce platforms and sell directly on China’s TikTok.
7 - It feels like over the past 5 years, everything by in China just got better, while everything in the US just got worse.
Coming to Finland from the US, I was surprised at the relatively higher use of machinery at things like construction sites. For example, using a bulldozer for moving small piles of dirt that I think in America would have been handled by a couple guys with shovels. Environmental question aside, the use of machinery in this way is good for labor QoL and longevity. Americans don’t realize how much harder they work for less pay.
I’d want to see more about this. In the US, automation and technology are used to threaten workers to comply with shitty labor laws, and when they are actually implemented, the human workers are usually never cared about after being laid off. I’m curious to see the differences in attitudes and implementation in China
Well I don’t mean to hijack a c/sino discussion, but I think the behavior and tactics of capital depends on its power relative to labor. Finland has relatively strong labor in part because of the welfare state. Capital can only demand so much before workers strike or quit. There have been multiple large strikes in the past months.
If and when the economy declines in Finland, all the meager social-democratic gains won by the socialists in the 20th century will be lost. And once they are lost, we probably won’t see them again without a revolution. We are already trending this direction as the social entitlements are being eroded by the current center-right government.
Do people in Finland and other Scandinavian countries recognize that their (dwindling) welfare state was the result of the bourgeoisie compromising between basic quality of life and getting stabbed with a sickle? I know in the US people think that we magically got 8 hour work days because the bosses were just so dang nice. Never mind the explicit communists* who fought and died for it.
I'm afraid a lot of them don't realise it. Very few people in the Nordics have ever experienced actual labour struggle up close and it is a widespread belief that the relatively high standard of living for working class people is caused by some racist bullshit about Nordic societies being more civilised and hard-working and intelligent than others. Another explanation that is pushed by the succdems and union bureaucrats is that everything is so good because the unions and the bosses negotiate rather than go on strike, the more bureaucratic and the less radical your union is the better.
When Bernie ran, remember how everyone said Nordic-style socialism only works in the Nordics because they lack diversity?? Like what was the implication there? It didn’t make sense to me but this notion was very common.
I can’t understand it any other way than: social democracy cannot work in the US because a racist social hierarchy is natural; so, if there is only one race, then there can be no hierarchy. (Which isn’t even the case in any of the Nordics, but try explaining that to an American lol)
No these days most don't, but this is a result of a hundred year long very clear bourge campaing to rewrite history completely. Thinking that has also been demonized as "Soviet propaganda", same as anything even bordering a positive thought about our previous neigbour. All sources of history and public discourse about communism has been systemically demonized, the term Finlandization for example is a CIA brain child and so much more.
There are so many layers to this, but the mindset here could be used to define how consent is manufactured, how reds are othered and scared/discredired to silence and how everything is done to affirm and uphold the capitalist "truth". During my lifetime alone they have managed to fully reframe WW2 and nationalism here, without this I am sure things like Nato never would have actually happened. But they have very consistently worked for their goals of demonizing the working class, discrediting class power and turning state power fully into an extension of capitalist power. With incredible violence too that never gets talked about today.