I bet in 2024 American Democrats will move to be an anti immigration party in a tactic to win over moderate Trump voters in an attempt to fight whatever the new scary term for teabagger/maga/qanon is. It's going to take the form of less overtly racist forms and more economic arguments, (e.g. The housing crisis is because the Chinese are buying up all our houses.)
We will be accused of abandoning POC Americans by not supporting anti immigrant policies. Get ready.

  • Funkydick [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    it would probably make more sense to do real estate in a more financialized way

    Chinese don't understand complicated financial products and don't trust them. What they understand is land. Property. Things they can touch. Especially the older generation that has money. Read Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" to gain an understanding of this. It's an outstanding novel.

    who might actually be buying a home they plan on living in at some point

    They're not. It's just an investment. And it's not just Chinese, that's just because it was in Seattle. People all over the world are buying up our housing stock and they don't mind paying extra. Because the alternative is to keep it in their own countries and watch their awful governments run it into the ground.

    Housing is for people to live in. Not a global investment vehicle, which is what it is now. China knows this quite well, anyone who's not Chinese is limited to a single house, period. And even then good luck getting a bank loan on it.

    • CopsDyingIsGood [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Chinese don’t understand complicated financial products and don’t trust them. What they understand is land. Property. Things they can touch. Especially the older generation that has money.

      Yes, the asiatic brainpan is predisposed to struggling with such abstract concepts as finance. Very left, very materialist and decidedly not racist analysis of the situation.

      • Funkydick [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Nobody said that. It's their culture. China has been through a very bad time these last 100 years and it's understandable that they'd feel that way. Taiwanese aren't like this. Neither are Singaporean, Malaysian Chinese, ABC, CBC, or any other Chinese people.

        Or just go read The Good Earth.

        • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          How is the good earth which was written by a daughter of a missionary in China in the 1930s applicable to modern Chinese investment vehicles?

          • Funkydick [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            It contains many themes that are timeless. I especially liked Wang Lung's relationships with his family members. It really explained a lot about how Chinese families are. You can read works from a thousand years ago and recognize today's China in them.

            Pearl S. Buck was a missionary kid. She grew up in China and spoke Chinese natively. Since she lived with the people, (parents basically 19th century hippies) she didn't get that walled-off expat experience most Americans get. She caught some flak for her novel back then, too.

            One of the isolating factors of my own experience has been that some of the morbidly sensitive modern Chinese, especially those abroad in foreign countries, have not liked it that I have written of the everyday life of their people. In all justice to them I must say that this attitude has changed in the last two years very much, so that I have ardent friends among these, but certainly The Good Earth at first displeased many Chinese in the United States. In China itself it was accepted without dislike except that it was a foreigner who wrote it. It was often said there, "It is a book which a Chinese should have written." But among the Chinese in my own country, who felt they had the honour of their country to uphold, it made distress. They had to deny it, to criticize it, to struggle against it. This also was as astonishing to me as the letter from the Fundamentalist board member. Apparently with the simplest purpose in the world, namely, merely to write novels, surely a harmless necessity for a novelist, and without any sense of wrongdoing, I was able to infuriate an astonishingly large number of people.

            -- Pearl S. Buck, "Advice to a Novelist About to Be Born" (1935)

            Seriously, just read it. It's an easy read that's not too long, and you can find it on archive.org in ebook format for free. Go to the bottom to download, ignore the book image. https://archive.org/details/goodearth00buck_1