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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   20748 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Modern Chinese are becoming less materialist, less pro-democracy and more nationalist, even as life satisfaction falls, so I really don't think they're attributing their woes to the CCP.

it's not a secret that the Chinese youth are being screwed over by the CCP intentionally depressing wages and an additional issue of huge unemployment

Isn't this pretty much an obvious conspiracy theory? They simply don't have enough high-paying white collar jobs for an enormous surge in overqualified university graduates. Why the hell wouldn't wages be stagnant if supply outstrips demand.

Hell, if you want me to give you a list of my complaints about America I will gladly list them here, but they just won't be that America is poor with a government funneling people's money into a tech race that it's not fit to compete in

I think that's proving his point. Like, this kind of framing strikes me as deserving of very harsh criticism, it's basically barbaric gibberish. But it's part of your culture, your "civilization", such as there is.

I’m really not sure about the less materialist part, but definitely less pro-democracy and more nationalist. The rise in nationalism is actually a bit awkward for the party, because while it would love to derive (and is deriving) its legitimacy from Chinese nationalism, there’s always tension between nationalists and genuine believers of communism and that communism meme keep propagating inside of China. Honestly it would be nice if they just changed the name to avoid confusion, both internally and externally.

From your article:

To measure the level of postmaterialist values, we adopted Inglehart’s 12-item measure in the WVS. Respondents in the survey were asked to prioritize the 12 value-laden choices. Among these choices originally designed by Inglehart and his associates, six are considered post-materialism-oriented values: more say on job, more say in government, freedom of speech, less impersonal society, ideas count more than money, and more beautiful cities. The other six are deemed materialism-oriented values: maintain order, maintain stable economy, economic growth, fight rising prices, fight against crimes, and strong defense forces.Footnote21 We follow Inglehart’s approach and create an index of postmaterialist values ranging from 0 to 6.

I don't think that's actually measuring materialism anyways, but I guess there's different interpretations of what materialism means.

Isn't this pretty much an obvious conspiracy theory? They simply don't have enough high-paying white collar jobs for an enormous surge in overqualified university graduates. Why the hell wouldn't wages be stagnant if supply outstrips demand.

No, it's just a simple economic policy to increase export driven growth at the expense of people's quality of life.

https://treasury.gov.au/publication/economic-roundup-issue-4-2012/china-prospects-for-export-driven-growth

https://www.paftad.org/files/34/01_YANG%20YAO_Growth.pdf

To be fair, China didn't invent this. Japan and Korea used similar policies to drive export led growth, but China's internal passport system is kind of unique (I think the soviets had a similar system, but the effects are quite different in an export led economy), and one of the largest barriers to wage growth.

This doesn't also cover the huge subsidies for industries that act as an indirect tax on local consumers.

The first is a 2012 article, and I don't see its relevance. Likewise for the second, it's some mush about export-led growth in principle.

I wonder if you've ever tried to check your claims with simple arithmetic and googling.

Chinese annual wages in manufacturing, far as I can tell, have increased 2.3x between 2013 and 2024. Similarly for all wages (2,38x). Chinese GDP in RMB grew by 2.37x, for a discrepancy of <<1% for all wages and 3% in manufacturing. Chinese labor productivity increased in lockstep with wage increases, resulting in flat pseudo-unit labor costs. Inflation was low and decreasing over most of this period, resulting in 2024 108K wage being worth ≈90K of 2013 RMBs, an increase in purchasing power of 93%.

The nominal hourly wage of an American worker, over the same period, grew 47%, and real purchasing power, owing to inflation, only ≈11%, while GDP grew 72%. Admittedly employment increased and so did total number of Americans, but that's of no consolation to individual worker.

Labor share or GDP:
USA = [58.8, 58.9, 59.2, 58.4, 58.2, 58.5, 59.1, 60.3, 58.6, 57.4, 57.1, 56.8]
PRC = [[47.5, 48.2, 49.0, 49.8, 50.3, 50.7, 51.1, 51.5, 51.8, 52.0, 52.2, 52.4]

What exactly is the theory for claiming that this is evidence of wage suppression in China? Why should they have already caught up if not for Xi's evil wage suppression to nefariously boost export competitiveness?

This doesn't also cover the huge subsidies for industries that act as an indirect tax on local consumers.

This presumes that subsidies are inefficient, rather than efficiently suppressing costs of living, which in China are indeed absurdly low.

Look up the savings rate for China vs the US to see where wage suppression comes into play. The government forces large amounts of money into capital investments instead of wages which shows up in the data as a high savings rate.

This is economically illiterate. Citizens can's save nor invest what they don't earn. You're confusing two separate lines of China Criticism. Wages and thus real income, as I've shown, are growing just fine and proportionately to GDP. Savings rates are genuinely high on the level of private citizens, precisely because they do not trust or cannot access investment channels (other than housing, which is collapsing).

I'm an economist. I know what I'm talking about lol. Many national saving rates include both private and public investment. Maybe I should've clarified, but what I said is a pretty basic irrefutable fact.

I think you are, first of all, insufferably smug. @Amadan is this report-worthy? I don't know. I think it's bad manners to say something like this without providing a citation. I am not an economist and it's timesome [auspicious typo] to deal with not even Eulering but an appeal to its possibility.

Anyway, I was talking of actual household savings. You said:

Look up the savings rate for China vs the US to see where wage suppression comes into play. The government forces large amounts of money into capital investments instead of wages which shows up in the data as a high savings rate.

IMF 2018:

https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/wp/2018/wp18277.pdf

Household savings in China have been trending up since the early 1990s and peaked at 25 percent in 2010 and moderated slightly in recent years. Globally, household savings have been falling (from 14 percent of GDP in 1980 to about 7 percent today). The diverging trend has led to an increasing gap between China and the rest of the world. At 23 percent of GDP, today China’s household savings are 15 percentage points higher than the global average and constitute the main drivers of higher national savings in China.

In the 1990s. China’s corporate savings were relatively low and comparable to the global average. They surged in the 2000s, resulting in an increasingly large gap compared to those of other countries. After the GFC, this gap narrowed significantly, reflecting both the decline in China’s corporate savings and the rise elsewhere. Currently, China’s corporate savings are in line with the global average.

Government: Fiscal savings have been volatile over time, and, on average, constitute only a small portion of national savings. In the past, the fiscal savings level was similar to those of other countries, but in recent years, China’s fiscal savings3 have been higher than the global average, reflecting high capital spending

Quantitatively, demographic shifts alone account for half of the rise in household savings, suggesting that it has been the most important driver

Chinese households save more at every income decile, but the gap is largest at the bottom. Compared to other countries, the household savings rate is higher at every income decile, but the gap is particularly large for the poor.12 In many countries, the savings rates for the bottom 10–20 percentiles are often negative, indicating that substantial social transfers are used to support the basic consumption. In China, however, the savings rate for the poor is still positive and quite high at 20 percent. This points to inadequate social transfers, a lack of progressivity in taxation, and a limited social safety net

etc. So yes there is a state capital spending component, but the main story of the divergence with global trends, as of 2018, was literally private household savings. Maybe you have some newer data.

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