If you have a chance to talk to Chinese grad students or postdocs, just ask them about what it’s like back in the country.
xiaohongshu
joined 11 months ago
Only ～5% of the population (～70 million people, or ~9% of total workforce) have to pay personal income tax, because most people don’t even reach the minimum income needed (5000 yuan/month, or ~$700 USD/month) to qualify for income tax payment. The wealth disparity is huge.
Actually China is already trying to take advantage of the situation and offer positions to American scientists.
But read my comment here - the Chinese academia is way harsher for foreigners to survive the environment and work culture. Most Americans are probably more suited to the more relaxed European academic culture than in China.
Depends on your perspective. It’s great for productivity and overtaking the West, but the entire neijuan (involution, or extreme competition) is already happening at a pace that cannot be easily stopped, even with the government initiative promising to do so.
Think about this: the major tax base of both central and local governments are value-added tax, followed by corporate income tax. Besides, nearly 1/3 of local government revenue comes from land premium. As the property market is imploding, the reliance on the industrial/manufacturing sector becomes even more critical for the local governments, and that means the industries have to work harder to churn out more value-added goods and services to add to the local government tax revenues, without which it could not finance its operating expenditures (the city has to run the subways, rails, various infrastructure and public utilities, and paying the civil servants etc.)
While there may be an intention to stop the extreme competition from happening, there is no incentive for the government to actually do so. You don’t want to be the first one to lose out among your peers, and so it becomes a race to the bottom. The entire system needs to be revamped.
To Understand the Economy, This Fed President Is Ditching His Desk WSJ
When the conversation turned to inflation, the Richmond Fed president extracted an uncomfortably honest answer about how President Trump’s tariffs have some firms thinking about their power to raise prices.
“You can probably appreciate this from your McKinsey background: We’re raising prices where we can,” said Jim Datin, a Chapel Hill-based life-sciences executive and partner at a private-equity firm.
And what convinced Datin his company still had pricing power, Barkin asked, when conventional wisdom said it had evaporated?
“Some of it’s opportunistic with the supply chain right now,” Datin offered.
“In other words, tariffs,” Barkin said, translating the corporate-speak. Then the management consultant-turned-central banker cut to the chase: Are those price increases for tariff-related costs or are his businesses using “tariff noise” as “air cover to raise prices”?
“It’s both,” said Datin. “And I feel a little guilty saying that.” A regional banker chimed in: Some of his customers were reporting the same thing.
It’s this kind of candor that is keeping Barkin on edge—businesses raising prices not because they have to, but because they think they can get away with it. For Fed officials who fought hard to bring inflation down, such admissions make them uneasy.
There you have it, folks. Tariffs are not inherently inflationary, especially since the US runs on a free-floating exchange rate system.
The price hikes come from businesses thinking they can get away with it, not because they have to.
Bold of them to admit it.
Chinese academia is way too competitive and exhausting for your American scientists. How many American grad students and postdocs are willing to work 6-7 days a week and have their lab meeting held on Sunday, which is becoming a common occurrence now?
These are some of the most hardworking people out there (and you can see them carrying their work ethic overseas as grad students and postdocs in Western universities) and churning out top tier scientific publications every year. These are the people you are going to compete against. If you think the “publish or perish” pressure is bad in Western academia, then in China this is ramped up to the next level.
Finally, connections are very important in China, even more so than in America and Europe. Much of the institute’s funding is going to be received by the heads of the departments, who then distribute the funds to the individual labs underneath them. Unless you are already a well-renowned scientist, you are going to be competing against your peers who have actual connections to the senior figures in the department.
Chinese science is very well funded, but the competition is also extreme, just like most industries in China. You don’t publish well, you won’t survive. Europe may be lacking in their funding, but their work culture is also more relaxed and suited to Westerners.
I have several friends with PhD who emigrated to the US and loved it there because, according to them, at least it is nowhere near as exhausting as they had it in China. They actually have the time to enjoy their weekends, a luxury you won’t get in Chinese academia.
What is the range of the F-16s? I suppose they take off from Western Ukraine, and could potentially conduct a very short period bombing run before returning to base? Clearly they cannot do mid-air refueling on the Ukrainian airspace.
To be clear, I don’t disagree with you.
However, you have to understand that China has no permanent allies. Its only two allies are the People’s Liberation Army and the PLA Navy.
China has no problem allying with the imperialist America to destroy the USSR when it perceives itself to be under threat from Soviet encirclement, and it has also no problem with helping Russia but only to the extent of turning Russia into a cannon fodder while distracting the US empire attention away from China itself.
Say whatever you want of China, but the strategy of playing both sides and win has served China very well over the past 50 years, and turned it from one of the poorest countries to one of the wealthiest in the world.
How the heck did the Ukrainian Air Force manage to make a come back? Didn’t Ukraine receive the old F-16 variants and had trouble with their pilot training? How did they manage to evade Russian air defenses?
And there are still Ukrainian MiGs and Sus with their pilots around? I don’t know if that’s an indictment against the Soviet air defenses system (often boasted to be the best in the world) or a commendation to the build quality of Soviet jets.
China doesn’t need Russia lol. But Russia would be useful as a cannon fodder to keep the imperialist attention away from China.
On Chinese internet, a popular phrase is “a half-dead bear is a good bear”. Understand what it means?
I have never met a Trotskyist irl before in my life.
My friend, the Trotskyists have long been integrated into the US government in the form of neocons.
The whole regime change strategy was derived from Trotsky’s exporting revolutions to the third world countries to foment world revolution, except here they want to export regime change to the third world countries to ensure America’s interest in the region.
Michael Hudson talked about the Fed actively recruiting Trotskyists in the 20th century to fight the USSR:
MICHAEL HUDSON: You always had to be aware that most of your followers are going to be FBI plants pretending to be people who they weren’t and would be writing up reports that were not usually very accurate, as I later found from the FBI files on my father and my friends.
They wouldn’t talk so much about the future change. They talked about where things went wrong. Especially how Stalinism had really destroyed Russia and what Russia really would have done if it would have been a truly socialist country as it set out to be instead of the way that it actually went.
So it was really where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t how to do it right. It was an awareness of all the things that can go wrong and all of the dangers.
KARL FITZGERALD: Just on McCarthyism — what was it like living through that period?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, none of my friends or people we knew were attacked. That was basically against the Stalinists at that time and gradually, by the time I wrote Super Imperialism, as I mentioned before, I was amazed when I was given a top-secret security clearance, because the FBI said they’d gone over my report and they knew for sure that I wasn’t Stalinist and wasn’t pro-Russian.
So all of a sudden all the McCarthyism sort of knocked out the Stalinists, and many of the liberals I knew were all standing up to the Stalinists, imagining that they were wrongly prosecuted like the Rosenbergs, and yet it was the Rosenberg’s cousin that had introduced Trotsky’s assassin, Jackson, to Trotsky, as his girlfriend.
So I was not very sympathetic with the Stalinists who were being attacked at that time.
…
spoiler
All you have to do is set up a group of non-governmental organizations to begin grooming future leaders like Ms. [Annalena] Baerbock in Germany. You set up something like the World Economic Foundation that appoints leaders like presumably the George Soros Foundation. And you’ll get people that look like they’re very smart but also very corruptible and basically who want a really good greedy life.
In the early 1970s the Catholic Church had sent me around the country. They were one of my first backers, for various reasons. I had gone to New Mexico and had a plan for state and local finances. And a man came up to me afterwards and said, “I’ve never heard a banker talk like that. That’s wonderful. Will you come to the Ford Foundation? I want to meet you next week. Let’s have lunch.”
He explained that he worked with the CIA and the Ford Foundation basically was a front for the CIA to recruit people. So I went and met with him and I found it was quite cool. I found that he was quite cool. I found that his demeanor had suddenly changed.
This was early in the 1970s, before the Carter election by about five years. He began by trying to impress me, and he said, “We’re trying to create future presidents of the United States. When I first met you I thought that you could be material. But we decided that a southern governor is basically the kind of person that fits. Somebody who’s progressive. Somebody who can sort of not be an anti-Black racist, but somebody who, being southern, has all of the ways of thinking that a southerner has.”
Today we would call that neoliberal, basically. Non-socialist.
He said that he had been brought up by Malcolm Moos who had written the part of the (unintelligible) Eisenhower farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex. And so of course that’s what we’re doing, we’re all here [at the Ford Foundation] to support the military-industrial complex.
And I could see that I was not going to have any future with the Ford Foundation and it was obvious to me that he’d gone to the FBI and said, “Look I think I got someone here, could you give me his file?” and then he read the file on me and said, “Uh oh.”
So his advice to me was that if I wanted, since I was at a PhD in economics, that if I wanted to rise in economics I should attach myself to some prize winner — a Nobel Prize winner ideally — it was just beginning to be given — and try to just jump up and find a backer among the prize winners.
I realized that, wait a minute, the Nobel Prize is going to be given to people who — what we know now is neoliberalism, in the Chicago School, the one thing that I don’t want to do is take this guy’s advice, and indeed the only Nobel Prize winner that I ever was friendly with was the Swedish prize winner of the second Nobel Prize who wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, [Gunnar Myrdal].
He invited me to come and work in Sweden and be his successor, but it turned out that almost all the Swedes in that group were mainly into disarmament and tended to fall asleep in an alcoholic daze at the end of each meal, so I never did follow him up there.
So I wasn’t groomed, to make a long story short.
Protests against surging mass tourism in Mexico City end in vandalism, harassment of tourists AP
Interesting development. It used to be that developing countries want to attract as many foreigners as possible to stimulate the local economy with their strong currencies, now people are even fed up with American tourists.
Doesn’t look very welcoming for those who want to flee from Trump as well.