Yes
But you won't get millions of innovative engineers and biotech experts if they spend too much time playing computer games or exam cramming
Chinese Economics Thread
- Thread starter Norfolk
- Start date
Yes
But you won't get millions of innovative engineers and biotech experts if they spend too much time playing computer games or exam cramming
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
As someone else already pointed out, it's a one-use tactic and China knows better than anyone how to backfire a rival's ban. So, having won the trade war without using the RE card, would it make sense for China to play it anyway? None whatsoever. This card is to be reserved for one critical strike in dire times, perhaps a trade war where China finds itself losing or a hot war. And when it is to be truly used, there should be no foreshadowing and no warning, just a sudden and immediate stop of all RE exports to the target country.
I go for the second. The US is the one who threw everything including the kitchen sink trying to prevent defeat in the trade (and tech) war; China's obviously very reserved and careful about what cards to play and which to save for the future.
Help to buy will be a catastrophy in the UK and it will be a catastrophy in China. You are essentially creating more artificial demand for housing. What you need are higher mortgage rates to ease demand and prices will come down. And when prices are low enough people will come into the market. Higher mortgage rates will not be a big issue for people wanting to buy a house to live in but its going to make speculation less attractive. That is the way forward.
These schemes to help people afford stuff have been going on in the West for many decades and they all have unintended consequences. China simply failed to learn from that and therefor in the years ahead China too will face the same problems as the West.
Chinese co-ownership schemes typically apply only to new housing projects built by the government specifically for the program. This is the case of Dongguan. Such schemes, unlike the UK version, are unlikely to increase housing prices.
Chinese local governments are already easing demands for housing as investment vehicles by requiring a high down payment and 20% higher mortgage rates for second homes. In Beijing, for example, the down payment for a second home is between 60% to 80% depending on the property type. China is still urbanizing so there are a lot of real demand for urban housing that shouldn't be artificially depressed.
Government subsidies into housing will tend to increasing pricing and yes that is unfortunate, but the increase will be less than the benefit felt by people receiving benefits, and the increase will also raise incentives for more construction. The worst possible policy is price controls, because those will destroy incentives for supply and create shortages that make everything worse in the long run.
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Singapore experience say otherwise with 95% of homeownership and compare to SFO, LA, Tokyo, Beijing still cheap You can have HDB 3 bd apt for $300,000 US
Students are of different types. Those talented and willing to become engineers and biotech experts, most likely are self-motivated anyway.
For some of the others, even if you prevent them from playing video games, they are not going to the library and become nerdy all of a sudden.
Those in the middle, they may need some extra motivation, like some parents sending them to after school remedial classes. But then they have banned after class tutoring as well. So you go figure, whether these measures are counter productive.
Banning bitcoin mining and restricting video games, are counter to the development of fast GPUs, AI related software and Immersive metaverse, which are the next innovative areas.
The greater emphasis in GPUs needs be on more efficient processes rather than computational brute force, especially given how energy intensive bitcoin mining is and the massive heat output of fast GPUs and the related growing climate instability. Gaming can be a constructive thing in terms of developing critical thinking skills and problem solving, of which encouraging cooperative realistic simulation (such as driving and flying), strategy and puzzle games (such as biomolecular folding for example) would be a lot better than the hypermonetized gacha of the day type games so prevalent in the mobile sphere.
Dear God.
You have a twisted idea of what constitutes learning and what drives innovation.
If you're restricting children to 3 hours of video games per week and banning after school cramming in core subjects, why would you want children to spend more time in the library??? All you get are more exam drones.
There's classroom learning and formal learning in core subjects.
But then there is a world of other topics and activities available that builds unique skillsets in children.
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Cities are innovative powerhouses precisely because they contain people who think differently or have different experiences.
These people then interact with each other to drive new insights and therefore innovation.
Encouraging Chinese children to explore many different non-academic experiences is a good thing for the children, society and innovation.