Chinese Economics Thread

[solarz]

One child policy I guess, although it's not limited to women.

On the one side, you do have the "little emperor" syndrome, but I think that gets disportionate coverage relative to the size of the issue. Instead, for the overwhelming majority of Chinese, knowing that they are the only child, and that the hopes and dreams of the entire family is solely on their shoulders, provides an extremely powerful motivational force and personal drive.

For the younger generation, yes, I agree. However, for the self-made women billionaires, most of them are of an older generation.

 

[Franklin]

Nice write up of a trip with China's HSR during the Chinese New Year. You can travel about 600km in China's HSR for just the equivalence of 28 dollars!

On the Ground Ushering in the Year of the Monkey at 180 mph on China's bullet train

Packed to capacity, the Harmony No. 1 bullet train slides out of West Rail Station into Beijing’s crisp, snow-dusted suburbs on the first day of the Year of the Monkey. A bright morning sun perches high in the blue February sky, given a holiday reprieve from the belching of smokestacks and car tailpipes on the Chinese capital’s oft-clogged highways.

The city stands still with a preternatural calm, as if stunned by the sudden exodus of millions of its sons and daughters.

We stragglers on Train G609 are among the last to depart. By the window in Car 13, Row 6, slumps a fiftysomething migrant construction worker who introduces himself as “Old Wang”; he had waited too long to buy a ticket and found all the New Year’s Eve seats, for the day before, sold out.

Along the aisle sit 2-year-old Lulu and her mother, Yang Mei, whose travels had been delayed by her husband’s work obligations at an accounting firm.

Like nearly everyone aboard, they are heading to their hometowns for Spring Festival, a holiday freighted with such deep family obligations that it touches off what is known as the greatest human migration on Earth. By air, by road and by rail, Chinese are expected to make 2.91 billion trips over the full 40-day period that began Jan. 24 this year. Some 332 million of them will be by train, up almost 13% over last year.

Nearly half will be on trains like the Harmony No. 1. Nine years ago, China had not one such bullet train in service.

A cartoon woman pops onto the onboard TV screens and begins reciting some statistics. “By the end of 2015, China had 19,000 kilometers of high speed track in operation, the most in the world,” she says in a school-teacher voice. “That is over 60% of all high speed rail in the world….”

An orange digital display at the front of the car tracks our acceleration: 290 km/h, 291 km/h, 297 km/h. (That's 180-181 mph, by the way.)

Old Wang sits up, takes a swig of peanut milk and glances at his mobile phone. It’s his first time on Harmony No. 1, and there are only two numbers that matter to him.

“Five hours to Houma,” he pronounces with a smile, revealing his nearly toothless bottom jaw. “Before, it used to be 16.”

My destination, the ancient walled city of Pingyao, 444 miles southwest of Beijing, will come an hour before Houma. Along the way, we will gain almost 2,800 feet of elevation as Harmony No. 1 sails through the barren cornfields of Hebei province, into the notoriously polluted city of Shijiazhuang, up through the Taihang Mountains and onto the dusty yellow plateau of Shanxi province, the heart of China’s coal country.

As we leave Shijiazhuang, an attendant in a pink uniform pushes a cart down the aisle. “Beef noodles! Snacks!” she calls. The cartoon lady on the TV launches into some train etiquette tips. “Don’t throw food waste into the toilet…. Don’t hog seats in the station waiting area by lying down across them and sleeping.”

China’s bullet trains are affordable enough to attract passengers even from society’s lower rungs. They offer business-, first- and second-class seats, and while fares for second class are typically at least twice what a “slow” train would cost, they are not out of reach for workers like Old Wang.

During the Spring Festival travel peak, a one-way fare from Beijing to Pingyao costs about $28 and takes four hours. The slowest, cheapest train, whose journey can stretch 15 hours, costs $14.

Shortly after noon, Lulu breaks into her third chocolate snack of the trip, an egg-shaped confection from Germany. Old Wang needs a sugar fix himself. He cracks open another bottle of peanut milk and pulls a plastic bag of muffins from his rucksack. “Want one?” he offers.

Not far out of Shijiazhuang, Harmony No. 1 begins to decelerate. The orange display ticks downward: 297 km/hr, 249 km/hr, 218 km/hr, 179 km/hr. On the horizon, dusty beige hills materialize.

The train plunges into a tunnel. On the TV, the broadcast has switched to a propaganda segment extolling “Core Socialist Values.” Old Wang reclines his seat and closes his eyes.

The darkness seems to be stretching on forever. We emerge, briefly, into the sunlight, only to delve again into darkness. This time, I set my stopwatch. One minute goes by, then two, then three.

A brief flash of light, and we are back underground yet again. This darkness feels interminable. Staring at my stopwatch, my mind drifts back to my fourth-grade math class.

A train is traveling at 179 kilometers per hour through a tunnel. The train takes 9 minutes and 20 seconds to pass through the tunnel. How long is it?

I double-check my stopwatch. I do some mental arithmetic. If we really are going 179 km/hour, that’s 111 miles per hour. Which means that this tunnel is 17.29 miles long.

That’s farther than going from downtown L.A. to LAX on the 110 and 105 freeways.

The TV is playing a video of China’s most recent rocket launch. Lulu and Yang Mei are sleeping now, too. No one aboard Car 13 seems to take notice of China’s feats in space, or underground.

Amid China’s breakneck development, one mind-blowing accomplishment quickly blurs into the next. Yes, Taihang Tunnel is currently China’s longest rail tunnel, but it won’t be for long. It will soon drop to No. 3 with the opening of the 20.28-mile Xinguanjiao Tunnel in Qinghai province, and the 17.54-mile West Qinling Tunnel in Gansu.

As we near Pingyao, I start to gather my things. Old Wang wakes up.

“We went through a really long tunnel,” I mention as I stand up to disembark. “Nine minutes.”

Old Wang shrugs. “Really? I don’t know,” he says. “I just know I’m getting home faster.”

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[Equation]

How about her mom?

How about her mom?

Meh...I'll passed.

 

[solarz]

Nice write up of a trip with China's HSR during the Chinese New Year. You can travel about 600km in China's HSR for just the equivalence of 28 dollars!

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And to think when China was building those HSR, western pundits were saying they would be too expensive for ordinary citizens.

I first experienced China's high speed train back in 2008 and I knew immediately how revolutionary the HSR will be. The ticket prices were twice that of ordinary slow trains, but it was well worth it as it shaves the travel time by more than 60%. It used to take more 2-3 hours to go from Shanghai to Hangzhou by train, which meant that if you wanted to enjoy yourself, you need to find a hotel for the night. With the HSR, that travel time was only 40 minutes, about equal to the time I spend on the subway going to downtown Toronto! This means you can go visit Hangzhou in the morning and return to Shanghai for supper. Well worth the 20-30 yuan price difference, I'd say!

I still remember visiting Beijing with my dad in 1997. We took a 13-hour train from Shanghai to Beijing. Nowadays, the HSR gets there in only 5 hours.

 

[B.I.B.]

The job market is about supply and demand, not about fairness.



Why do Chinese women feel the need to achieve more? Why do women from other countries not feel the same way?

As Osnos suggests, it's still very much a mans world in China and the pathway to senior positions in the corporate world is either blatantly closed to them or made very difficult.However there will be some very capable women who will think "Stuff it, you can stick your job where the sun does'nt shine,I'll show you"

While I cannot say for other Western countries,in comparison with China, gender disparity in Nz is huge for people studying subjects like engineering and the computer sciences that often lead to a higher earning capacity. I believe the number of women engineers in China make up to 40% of those in the profession.

Friends who studied engineering at Auckland University told me that most of the females in their classes,were first generation Asian immigrants.
One Caucasian girl told me that she was the only female in her class studying computer programming.(she might have been referring to Caucasian)

Only in medicine(intake about 550) and law , do we have a greater number of female students some of which will go on to achieve multi million dollar status by mid career.

I think the reason why China has more wealthy women is because of cultural background which encourages a desire to be successful. There are also more opportunities as it continues along its modernisation process.
While getting rich in China is lauded,it has been quite the opposite in Nz.Only in the 1990's have some sections of our society become money orientated. For the best part of a century, getting rich was a dirty word and even if one did achieve that status, it was rarely flaunted.

Anyway Australia with a similar sized population to Canada and equally well endowed with natural wealth has a self made women billionaire, why hasn't had which has less disparity between the genders in the workforce not got one?

 

[solarz]

As Osnos suggests, it's still very much a mans world in China and the pathway to senior positions in the corporate world is either blatantly closed to them or made very difficult.However there will be some very capable women who will think "Stuff it, you can stick your job where the sun does'nt shine,I'll show you"

While I cannot say for other Western countries,in comparison with China, gender disparity in Nz is huge for people studying subjects like engineering and the computer sciences that often lead to a higher earning capacity. I believe the number of women engineers in China make up to 40% of those in the profession.

Friends who studied engineering at Auckland University told me that most of the females in their classes,were first generation Asian immigrants.
One Caucasian girl told me that she was the only female in her class studying computer programming.(she might have been referring to Caucasian)

Only in medicine(intake about 550) and law , do we have a greater number of female students some of which will go on to achieve multi million dollar status by mid career.

I think the reason why China has more wealthy women is because of cultural background which encourages a desire to be successful. There are also more opportunities as it continues along its modernisation process.
While getting rich in China is lauded,it has been quite the opposite in Nz.Only in the 1990's have some sections of our society become money orientated. For the best part of a century, getting rich was a dirty word and even if one did achieve that status, it was rarely flaunted.

Anyway Australia with a similar sized population to Canada and equally well endowed with natural wealth has a self made women billionaire, why hasn't had which has less disparity between the genders in the workforce not got one?

I'm sorry, but none of what you said has anything to do with the disparity in self-made female billionaires. While China certainly does have a cultural background to be successful, that applies to both men and women.

As for the rest of your post, I don't see any relevance to the issue at all.

 

[B.I.B.]

And to think when China was building those HSR, western pundits were saying they would be too expensive for ordinary citizens.

I first experienced China's high speed train back in 2008 and I knew immediately how revolutionary the HSR will be. The ticket prices were twice that of ordinary slow trains, but it was well worth it as it shaves the travel time by more than 60%. It used to take more 2-3 hours to go from Shanghai to Hangzhou by train, which meant that if you wanted to enjoy yourself, you need to find a hotel for the night. With the HSR, that travel time was only 40 minutes, about equal to the time I spend on the subway going to downtown Toronto! This means you can go visit Hangzhou in the morning and return to Shanghai for supper. Well worth the 20-30 yuan price difference, I'd say!

I still remember visiting Beijing with my dad in 1997. We took a 13-hour train from Shanghai to Beijing. Nowadays, the HSR gets there in only 5 hours.

For me long train trips are part of the holiday. On the way back from Europe I flew into Toronto and caught the Via rail to Vancover .despite it being the third time over a span of about 8yrs I still enjoyed it immensely.
Excluding China there wouldn't be too many long train trips I haven't tried.

 

[B.I.B.]

I'm sorry, but none of what you said has anything to do with the disparity in self-made female billionaires. While China certainly does have a cultural background to be successful, that applies to both men and women.

As for the rest of your post, I don't see any relevance to the issue at all.

Well I think there is too much emphasis on the billionaire aspect rather than wealth on its own.
I merely replied to your question from a NZDERS perspective where there is little desire to be filthy rich. I find it rather puzzling for you to find it rather hard to understand?

 

[solarz]

Well I think there is too much emphasis on the billionaire aspect rather than wealth on its own.
I merely replied to your question from a NZDERS perspective where there is little desire to be filthy rich. I find it rather puzzling for you to find it rather hard to understand?

Ok, for the sake of the argument, let's assume that only China is interested in becoming billionaires, and the rest of the world are not (or not as much).

Logically, that means self-made male Chinese billionaires should also occupy a great percentage of the world's self-made billionaires, yet that is not the case. The percentage of male Chinese billionaires is less than 50%, while the percentage of females is 75%.

For your argument to work, you would have to argue that in other cultures, women are less interested than men in becoming super wealthy.

 

[B.I.B.]

Unfortunately I left it too late to make additions to my post.
There are many women who run private business and are very wealthy in their own right.they could do what the Chinese women have done and list their enterprise on the stock market And also become overnight billionaires.I know of two women and a husband and wife team who could do that, but have public ally stated that they weren't interested.
I'm sure that is replicated in many Western countries, and if they were to do so, the disparity in billionaires could be rather marginal if any.