Yiqin Fu
@yiqinfu
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No more envy bc I know what I want No more fear bc I know the cost of trying to get there @empiricalchina
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New post!
[The Ever Changing Theories of China and AI]
I revisit the many theories put forth in academic, policy, and tech circles in the past few years to explain the relative lead or lag China had vis-a-vie the U.S. and discuss implications.
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This is the coolest visualization of Chinese dynasties I've ever seen! It shows both the time and the territory dimensions.
Made with Excel by the OP here:
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It's a shame that neither the academic publishers (Oxford, Cambridge, Yale) nor the big commercial ones (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins) regularly commission translations of Chinese academics' work.
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The UK is giving all recent grads of "the world's top 50 universities" a 2-3yr visa (all levels & fields).
If I'm reading the rules correctly, China's Tsinghua and Peking U grads are also eligible. Huge implications for global talent competition if true?
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On Chinese social media people are sharing photos of their moms from the 1990s.
I’m no fashion designer, but I hope historians digitize these photos!!
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WeChat, by not allowing external links and not allowing content published on their platform to be indexed, did permanent damage to at least two generations of Chinese people.
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Why do some Chinese people pick weird English names?
In China, family names are concentrated (20% of the people are Wang/Li/Zhang), whereas given names are unique. The opposite is true in the U.S. and the U.K.
TLDR: Because Chinese people distinguish themselves by given names.
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One of China's most prominent technocrats Huang Qifan gave a speech last month on the "five changes in China's development strategy between now and 2035."
The end goal is for China's GDP to exceed $30 trillion by 2035, adding 1.4b to the world's high-income population of 1.1b.
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A while ago I was playing around with some Chinese names data and found that people preferred shorter (one-character) names before the 1990s but that the trend was quickly reversed in more recent years.
I didn't think much of the finding, because it seems easily explained by..
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Wow these photos really make you feel the passage of time, at such a visceral level
Assassinated, jailed and disgraced, dead, jailed and pardoned
Feel like they're from the last century or your last life, but not even 10 years ago
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Something I just came to realize:
Today's China has the widest within-country distribution of absolute living standards (and values) in the history of mankind.
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The Chinese magazine Renwu just published a long feature on “algorithms and food delivery drivers”.
Apparently the delivery platforms ask drivers to follow ***walking*** rather than driving directions, so drivers have no choice but to go against the traffic, run red lights, etc.
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Most jarring is that Chinese intellectuals are talking about the country’s best-case scenario as 1990s Japan and worst as 1970s Soviet Union (Only ~5 years ago the talk of town was 1870s U.S.)
Yet their American counterparts think of it like it’s 2020s U.S. or even 2050s U.S.
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The fact that Mandarin doesn’t have inflections for the subjunctive is really going to lead to some grave international incident, isn’t it…
Please don’t exoticize any language or style of writing. Yes, American insurance claims are hard to read but it can be learned.
If USG hung its case on what appears to be a mistranslation of 每当这时 by a state department pol officer I'm going to be fucking pissed
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WeChat has long restricted the use of external links on its publishing platform, allowing one per article at the bottom of the page (no inline hyperlink).
Now Weibo says starting in August, it will only redirect URLs that link to an approved list of websites.
Both platforms...
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More charts about Chinese names!
Here are the five most common given names for the years 1958-2008.
50s and 60s: 军 military 华 China
70s: 勇 brave 娜 beautiful
80s: 磊 resilient 静 peaceful
90s: 鑫 $$$ 悦 happy
2000s: 俊 handsome 婷 beautiful
2010s: 子涵 皓轩 (romcom leads?)
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Frequently mentioned words in Xi's speech today celebrating the CCP's centennial.
Not reflected in this table: ~1/6 of the speech was devoted to the topic of territorial integrity.
Full text available here:
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Under this "High Potential Individuals" scheme, visa holders don't need to come with a UK job offer, can work without employer sponsorship, can bring family, can switch to other visas leading to permanent residency.
Previously only UK grads or those w job offers have a path.
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Didn’t know elite institutions (aka the richest universities in human history) manage scientists like commercial real estate analysts monitor a 7-Eleven
All about “$/net square footage”
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Today's most intellectually ambitious Chinese academics (I know of) are Lan Xiaohuan at Fudan and Shi Zhan at Foreign Affairs University.
In the past few years, both published highly original books on Chinese/global history and economics that sold millions of copies.
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Spotify publishes the coolest research!
Facts from this paper:
1) Everyone listens to music released in their adolescent years.
Also from we know that the peak influence age for women is 13 and men 14.
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Every time a tragedy happens in the US/China, some say, but remember we’re so much better than China/the US!
Nationalism can be a force for good, but the reference point shouldn’t be other countries. It should be the counterfactual had your country adopted alternative policies.
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Don’t have much memory of him but won’t forget the fact that he cycled to different publishers to help his wife, a junior English lit academic at the time, get her translation of Yes, Minister published
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Daily precipitation in Zhengzhou, China:
2000 - 2020 average: 20mm (0.8 inches) between July 17 and 20
2021: 617mm (24 inches) in the same three days
How do we design our cities so that they're resilient to 30x shocks?
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Consumer goods companies' exposure to China are nothing like what I expected!
China as a % of net sales:
H&M Group: 6%
Apple: 15% (was 20% in 2018)
Nike: 19%
Estee Lauder: 24% (mainland only; was 13% in 2018)
Would be cool to automatically tabulate these %s every quarter.
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Interesting discussions going around the Chinese Internet re the power WeChat wields as a super app that rolls your work, social, financial life into one.
Apparently when you get suspended, it becomes logistically difficult to pay back the loans you took out on the platform.
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If you'd like to chart a global narrative that both countries find acceptable, or if you simply want to understand how the CN business and intellectual elite think of themselves, these books are your go-to.
I should add that they're more Tooze/Harari/Mazzucato than Wolf Warrior.
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Wow this is real if you Google 09/20/2023
Ironically the PRC’s tight content regs demand that everything AI-generated be labeled (with tough political if not legal liability for the platforms)
This was my first google result when I googled "tank man" lmao seatch engines are gonna be totallybuseless within the decade
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If the U.K.'s scheme does commence as described and the U.S. Congress ends up including the STEM/green card language in its final legislation (merged from the Senate's USICA and the House's COMPETES Act), we could be seeing the biggest skill-based immigration reform in years.
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China's central bank just published results from its "most comprehensive urban household wealth survey to date."
Key findings:
The top 1% of urban households have, on average, 50 million CNY (or 7 million USD) in assets, accounting for 17% of total urban wealth.
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Some of Shi's blog posts are translated by the great "Reading the China Dream" blog (). But the project simply doesn't have enough resources to translate his three books in full.
I find his podcast also terribly interesting and worthy of translation.
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Tentative solution
To talk to mom: Skype/FaceTime
Chinese friends with whom I don’t discuss politics: QQ/Wecom
Chinese friends with whom I do discuss politics: Signal/Telegram
American friends: WhatsApp/iMessage/Messenger
Colleagues: Slack
— the internet we deserve!
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Tables and charts have been going around this site showing the total extinction of Chinese unicorns.
Purportedly China added 14 in 2020 (U.S. 73), 3 in 2021 (U.S. 126).
I checked Chinese-language sources and found 40+ more for 2021 alone!
New post:
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Generous folks on the Internet have cleaned and visualized the 2020 census report from China's ~300 prefectures.
1) Population change from 2010 (same data; diff resolutions)
Provincial capitals drain from nearby areas, except for the Yangtze Delta where population📈everywhere
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NYU admit rate: 38% (2014) --> 8% (2023)
Penn: 10% --> 4%
Harvard: 6% --> 3%
U.S. population change in this cohort was flat. So is the rise in number of applicants a result of 1) relaxation in standardized testing req? 2) aggressive uni marketing? 3) many more intl applicants?
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Rankings:
College ranking metrics are bad. But here they really matter. "Top unis" are defined as those landing in the top 50 in 2 of the 3 rankings below.
Tsinghua, Peking U, Hong Kong U, CUHK all "top"
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People with these skills are either in demanding jobs (finance, tech) or are never rewarded for translation (academia).
I read their books in my spare time, and even then I was constantly worrying that I was wasting time because their work wasn't going to help me write my paper.
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In this interview (), Lan said he didn't want a translation bc his book would need a heavy re-write to make sense to a non-Chinese reader. Then a British Alibaba employee offered to do a one because he thought the outside understood so little about China.
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Every time I reconnect with my extended family back home, they ask to which work unit I’d be assigned after graduation.
A reminder of how much our lives have changed in just two generations...
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The social returns to having their work translated could be quite large (although hard to quantify).
The problem is that there's ~0 career incentive for people with the right portfolio of skills to do a translation. I'd imagine there's no incentive for publishers either.
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I'm not sure what any of this means, but it certainly gave me a fresh perspectives on names.
Who knew that one or two characters could connote not only one's lineage, social class, family aspirations, gender identity, but also the rise and fall of dynasties!
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Greater openness of society/marketization leading to more expressions of individualism.
But a friend pointed me towards a Chinese economist's blog post looking at name lengths in Chinese dynasties. Turns out that Ming and Qing saw similar trends!
(Chart credit goes to Chen Qin)
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We can, if I may, make the future a bit less uncertain by commissioning translations of (serious) Chinese academics' work?
The first step is to recognize that translating these kinds of books takes a lot more skill than visiting DeepL in the browser!
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Zhang Shuai was asked how come Chinese women peak later in their tennis careers. She gave a super honest and inspiring answer: she trained with 20 others growing up, had little fitness/physio/mental support, went to the U.S. Open not knowing where the stadium was.
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Two resources that helped me understand the politics of China today:
1) The Central Discipline Commission's documentary ft 10 corruption cases
2) The State Council's investigation into a flooding that killed 380
The takeaways are relevant for managing any organization really.
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Been talking to lots of Chinese entrepreneurs, and books/ideas by Thiel/Graham/Wilson/Systrom/Chesky/etc came up a lot even among those that didn't speak English.
It'd be really sad if America sees this competition as zero-sum.
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Favorite songwriter
Liked her for the grungy protest songs, edgy vibes: Smoking, getting tattoos, rebelling against (senior Taiwanese politician parents) by dropping out of school!
Now she's in her 40s, sharing how to live when you know there are things that can't be fixed and
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One of my inspirations for writing these tweets is .
Since most Indian intellectuals speak English, I can get a glimpse of their discourse without having to cross the language divide.
With China the various many divides sit on top of the language divide.
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Interesting (but not surprising) that you get opposite answers if you ask in English vs in Chinese.
So future warfare will be decided by how good the human engineers are at cleaning the training data? Influence ops = flooding the web w content that aligns w your values?
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Given the questionable practices of Columbia, UChicago, etc. re US News, we can expect more universities to game the rankings and the ranking publishers gaining more de facto power.
Curious to see what the "Global Britain" future holds!
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Every day, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people read and take action based off of these docs written in said “secret” code. The writing could be clearer, but it’s not intractable.
Check out people doing great EN analysis of official CN docs:
@NPC_Observer
@ChinaLawTransl8
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China’s former finance minister Lou Jiwei warns of over-investment in 5G: We are getting ahead of ourselves. The 5G technology isn’t ready, but tens of billions have already been invested, raising costs for users and debt for public institutions.
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A translator would need to speak both languages, have a solid grasp of the subject matter, understand the context in both countries (Chinese and Western history/history of political thought/contemporary business environments), and gain the authors' trust.
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New post:
I was intrigued by the apparent differences in American & Australian attitudes towards lockdowns and decided to check the World Values Survey, which asked this exact question ("liberty or security")
Surprise: China & U.S. are polar opposites!
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Thus, when people get the chance to name themselves (in another language), they adopt the same "find-a-unique-word" approach and call themselves Pizza, Lucky, Creek, etc.
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Drivers say it’s impossible to deliver “on time” if they follow traffic rules.
And as the algorithm gets trained on past delivery times, there’s a race to the bottom — the platform makes ever more unrealistic estimates, and drivers take on greater risk in order to stay in.
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Coco Lee, the happiest person on screen and the dancer-singer every girl from the 1990s looked up to has left us…
Turns out she had been depressed for years and committed suicide recently.
Her
#1
hit was “Good Mood.” Incredible how the packaged human differed from her self :(
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Prof Lan’s pithy diagnosis of problems in the Chinese and the American economies
(Machine translation)
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Video of Huang's speech:
A rough version of the transcript ()
Would be great if more of these technocrat speeches are translated in to English! The various annual econ forums (Fudan, Bund Summit) produce a lot of good material.
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Beijing LLM regs are out! Public provision of compute and data.
We're definitely on the accelerationist timeline here.
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New blog post!
Global attitudes towards science, tech, surveillance:
Optimism in S&T
- 1 China, 2 Indonesia, 4 Japan, 6 Germany, 8 U.S.
"Important to know science myself"
- 1 China, 2 Ethiopia, 3 Germany, 4 Japan, 6 U.S.
Largest gender diff: U.S.
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1) Had cancer
2) Multiple grant rejections
3) Fired from job
4) Family visa issues (in addition to own)
All in one year!
You really have to find something you truly love to persevere. And thank god for the neurosurgeon and the department for giving her a home
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Friend 1 was laid off and had to leave the country in 4 weeks. Under stress, she fell for a scam and wired all her savings
Friend 2 is leaving his wife and 1yo, also for visa reasons
People are suffering much worse, but when sth hits you you still feel 100%
My learning from
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Not in a good place mentally/emotionally today, likely because of too much war news and CN politics/history readings I did. Tried exercising, getting sunlight, talking to friends outside of this line of work, but the powerless/doom and gloom feelings are still there. Any
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In China, the typical naming process involves opening a dictionary and finding (often esoteric) characters that embody the values the parents wish to impart on the child.
(Sometimes fortune tellers, fengshui masters, and astrologists are involved too.)
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Excerpt taken from the Chinese Internet:
(Without any scientific investigation I can't say how widely shared this sentiment is, but it's definitely not a fringe view.)
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My takeaway is that there's so much I don't understand about China, both at an intellectual level and at an emotional/intuitive/visceral level.
It also puts the tasks facing the Chinese leadership in a new light. How do you govern a country like this?
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Taiwan's visa application has a dropdown for place of birth. If you select "mainland China," you see 49 options, many of which I've never seen in the same context
Turns out they did an outer join on ROC and PRC admin divisions!
Territorial disputes as git merge conflicts :)
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Some amazing gymnastics from Chinese stats reporting:
YoY recovery 同比恢复
A yoy reduction of 30% = a yoy recovery of 70%!
Excessive growth reined in 过快上涨的势头被遏制
If prices are going up, you can say the “excessive growth rate” has been “kept stable”! (2nd derivative)
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Despite censorship fears, I enjoy writing on Weibo much more than on Twitter. I think it comes down to the char limit. If Twitter removed it:
- I'd spend less time worrying about being misconstrued & staying within the word limit
- All replies will be nested under the main post
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What a lovely story 🥰 Wish I had the privilege of meeting her!
Events described in this long thread are emblematic of so many families’ lives in the 1980s and the 1990s
Long letters of affection punctuated by Latin acronyms of immigration and travel documents
Soon after we started dating, I received a fellowship from Harvard University to be a graduate student.
The US-China relation has always been as temperamental as that of young lovers. We decided to marry.
I went to meet her parents.
We got marriage license on 10 June 1986.
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Some highlights (from my vantage point):
ECONOMY
1.1 Self-sufficiency in energy, agriculture, and manufacturing
1.2 Greater openness to foreign investment; greater involvement in international orgs
1.3 Import/export's share of GDP down to 25%; disposable income💹 to 50%
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Justify the restrictions on anti-phishing grounds, but suppressing external links is also a classic anti-competitive move.
Driving users to content/e-commerce platforms not owned by Tencent/Alibaba is hard.
Responsible journalism, or just info sharing in general, is dead.
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A question frequently raised in the discussion on Chinese overseas investment is whether Chinese firms hire local labor.
In 2017, SOAS led a survey of firms in Ethiopia and Angola (n=1.5k). They found that 80-90% of workers at Chinese firms were locals as opposed to CN expats.
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Tencent (and ByteDance, iFlytek) have amazing speech to text products. Better than their U.S. counterparts IMO.
Can recognize mixed English+Chinese speech and jargon. Only place where they fall short is when certain English and Chinese words sound alike. (Hard for humans too.)
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He's the most respected western scholar in China for a reason. Both see the U.S. (and global politics) as operating based on power rather than morality. Whether you agree w this view or not, it's the prevailing sentiment among the Chinese public and should be better understood.
New Interview: I talked to John Mearsheimer about the causes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, what Putin will do next, and where he thinks American foreign policy has gone wrong since the Cold War.
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Chen also notes that except for the short-lived Yuan dynasty led by Kublai Khan (1279–1368), all the other dynasties saw their average name length going up as they were about to collapse.
Ming and Qing collapsed when people's names became longer than when the dynasties started.
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In other words, China's income distribution today covers the world's entire income distribution.
And because we have grown so much richer as a whole, the absolute difference between the world's 99th and 1st percentile today is the largest we've ever seen.
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Here's a side-by-side comparing Zhengzhou, China and Cologne, Germany,
Germany is recovering from the country's worst flooding on record.
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URBANIZATION
3.1 Urbanization has peaked in China; urbanization outside of the metropolitan clusters will slow
3.2 Growth driven by real estate and infrastructure will fall from 50% to 10%; real estate development will fall from this year's 1.7b m^2 to 1b m^2 (2010 levels)
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What do people recommend? (So few people study this it would be nice to form a reading group!)
I liked: Chalmers Johnson, Political Institutions and Economic Performance: the Government-Business Relationship in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (chapter)
Robert Wade, Governing the
What are the best books on South Korea 1960s to 1990 that takes both political and economic factors into consideration to explain growth and institutional change?
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Over the years, the Chinese govt did a lot to boost the intl ranking of its star unis, sometimes at the cost of other good schools.
Recruiting intl students has also become a focus bc the rankings use this metric.
Now govt incentives to pick national champions will weaken?
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I’ve also had readers ask for things I directly linked to in the article, as if they didn’t understand that “underlined text” = “links one could click on.”
Would young people who grew up in walled gardens not even realize that the gardens are in fact connected?
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I grew up 4 hours away from where this woman is. I'm not much younger than her. And yet my female friends and I are debating automation's impact on the gender pay gap, marriage as an incomplete contract, genetics' ability to explain differences in individual spatial reasoning...
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INNOVATION
4.1 Funding for basic science will increase from 5% of total R&D spending to developed country levels (15-20%)
4.2 Greater effort in product development - see Germany's Fraunhofer Society
4.3 Greater support from capital markets
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This cycle of low demand <-> low supply of good writing continues to this day.
IMO hyperlinks are one of our greatest inventions (raising the evidentiary standards of writing), and yet at least two generations of people, numbered in the hundreds of millions, rarely get exposed.
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The number of platforms I'm using for class and remote fieldwork is overwhelming...
Learning: Canvas, Piazza, Edstem, Gradescope
Messaging: Email, Slack, WhatsApp, iMessage, GroupMe, WeChat, Signal, Telegram, Zoom
Are we gonna need those "chat aggregator apps" from the 2000s🤷♀️
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ENERGY
2.1 Cleaner development: CO2/GDP reaching EU/US levels by 2050
2.2 Global leadership in clean energy:
#1
in manufacturing, consumption, and "transcontinental supergrids"
Huang makes this analogy:
China:clean energy = UK (Watt):steam engine = US (Ford):combustion engine
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By many twists of fate, this amazing German-trained actor
1. Became the director of the Royal Shakespeare Theater equivalent in Beijing;
2) Stars in propaganda films bc of his stature;
3) Became a meme in the 2023 economic recovery — he played an abusive husband in a hit drama
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COMMON PROSPERITY
5.1 Common prosperity epitomizes the superiority of the socialist system
5.2 The goal is not to eliminate differences, but to reduce the differences between individuals, regions, and urban-rural to a level that everyone finds acceptable
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Things I learned plotting population stats over the past few years:
1) Fertility (child per woman) in China was 1.7 in 2019, but once we take out the births induced by the recent relaxation of the one-child policy, fertility would be around 1.2, on par with Japan/SK.
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