This article looks like a goldmine, but I don't have time to read it all and won't be interested in doing that once I have the time. Here's my favorite paragraph of the part I read:
Today the party’s propaganda machine is spinning stories about young people making a decent living by delivering meals, recycling garbage, setting up food stalls, and fishing and farming. It’s a form of official gaslighting, trying to deflect accountability from the government for its economy-crushing policies like cracking down on the private sector, imposing unnecessarily harsh Covid restrictions and isolating China’s trading partners.
When the population is aging and people are waiting longer to have kids, this would make sense.
But also, you have more and more people moving into the cities in China, so there can be labor demand in rural areas AND a labor glut in urban areas.
Naturally... :parenti:
You CAN'T move up socially if you live in a rural area, according to the NYT.
Living in the rarified air of a NYT office where Silicon Valley and Wall Street are the only two acceptable career paths.
This shit is so infuriating. It's deliberately invoking the bad parts of the Cultural Revolution when a close reading suggests it's basically "uhh have you considered working outside of a major city?" You get the exact same advice throughout much of the U.S.
See my other comment, but the CCP has been actively building infrastructure for more rural areas and building up local micro industries. Everything from pearls, to costume princess dresses, to expensive digitally tracked chickens for wealthier urban people to conspicuously consume.
So while in the US, "move to the country" means you move to a place where the hospitals are closing and infrastructure rotting as mental health declines, a lot of areas in china are seeing the opposite happen.
I don't know how many times I've seen people say shit like "if you can't afford to live in LA you should just move to Montana"
NYTimes should write an article about how dystopian it is that entry level coders should consider looking outside of only Silicon Valley where they have to compete with Standard, Berkeley, MIT, etc. grads
Last year I read a book called "Blockchain chicken farm". It was an american-chinese person going to china to meet distant relatives and generally travel around to learn about how tech is changing the landscape of business in general in China.
The government is putting a lot of effort into getting high speed internet out to rural areas and sending out someone that teaches them how to open stores on Ali Express to sell their goods.
The author even interviewed a few people who came back to the rural areas after working in the city, finding equal or better success in various small local industries. It honestly made me sad, thinking about how in the US we're allowing vast swaths of the country rot because their old industries no longer profit. The government makes zero effort to help these communities besides a smarmy "lern 2 code".
These NYT people seem to have no interest in learning about china on the ground and they never will.
They will rediscover China in twenty years, when the behemoth of industry has gobbled up the Amazons and Microsofts of the West and these are the people you need to suck up to in order to stay in business.