YouSaid · the spoken record

Yasheng Huang

lines on the record: 58
first: 2023-03-08
most recent: 2023-03-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so I am collaborating with a number of professors and some of them are based in China on a book project looking at the history of Chinese technology using the data set that I already used for the fourth fourth.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China look at the Great Leap Forward, look at the decentralized organization of the economy even before the economic reforms in 1978.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“empiricist and good system thinker to be critical of the central planning. And we didn't have that kind of language until Janusz Kornai provided that language, the investment hunger, the soft budget constraints. And now soft budget constraints are being used not just by people who study central planning, but also by people who study other types of economic systems. And that was remarkable. And it also helped us help a lot of Chinese students think why China was different from other centrally planned economies in terms of soft budget constraints. China seemed to have harder budget constraints as compared with Soviet Union. And there were a lot of debates about why this was the case. That led us to look at the history of reforms.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Yanderskorn and I taught generations of not just Chinese students but many students from East European countries from Russia that there is a basic logic with socialism and so before Yanukovych we tended to think about socialist system in vague general and sometimes ideological terms Janusz Kornai taught us that it is rooted in the system right the investment hunger the soft budget constraints right it really gave us a new way of thinking about the socialist system and central planning system in that particular perspective and that really was revolutionary because you don't have to be ideologue to be critical of central planning you can be a good”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, for young people in China, even today, despite the tensions between US and China, US is always the dream country to come to. So I never really asked myself that question. Of course, if you want to get educated, if you want to achieve, accomplish something, you try to go to the United States. Although, you know, a lot of my friends have decided to go back to China because they see commercial opportunities there. They typically get a Western education and then go back to China to start businesses. And they have been extremely successful. I have chosen to stay because I'm an academic and I don't think China is the right country for an academic. Not for a social science academic. Maybe if you're a scientist, you get support from the government, but not as a social scientist.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have the prediction that Xi'an is going to give. And I think the economic side is going to win rather than the political side. And it's not automatic. It's not the view that economics automatically advances political progress. It is also because of a lack of political progress. The regime tends to make mistakes. It is those mistakes that will have a bigger educational effect on the Chinese middle class, on university students, in how they think about whether or not the current political system is viable and desirable.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a sustainable period of time. My own view is that these two things cannot coexist with each other for long periods of time. One of them has to give.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I was talking about one week. And then I will send them to Xinjiang just as an incredible contrast. Shenzhen was basically created by economic reforms. It is the economic capital of private entrepreneurship, of innovations, and of the incredible supply chains that China has been able to create in the last 30 years. And to understand the economic side of China, you need to go to Shenzhen, close to Hong Kong, just next to Hong Kong. And then I would argue that you go to Xi'an first to understand that political mentality, and then you go to Xenjiang, and then ask yourself the question, can these two things coexist with each other for a long period of time? And under what conditions can they coexist with each other?”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's heavily influenced by natural disasters, by flooding, by arid environment, very harsh environment that doesn't grow, doesn't cultivate agriculture very successfully, right? So it is very maybe a little bit like Ohio or places like that, very inward looking. And no matter how modern Chinese economy is, the politics is heavily colored by that particular perspective, right? It is a little bit paranoid. It is sort of suspiciously looking at the rest of the world. And it also has this very fond memory of China many centuries before when China was a unified empire. That part of the country be the capital of The country to understand Chinese ideology and political mindset, we need to go there.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would urge them to go to CAN, the city that has the famous terracotta sculptures. But it's not just because of that. I think what's very interesting about Chinese economic geography is that the political geography is heavily northern. The economic geography is heavily southern, right? So think about Shanghai, you think about Guangzhou, Shenzhen. These are economic heavyweights. They're in the southern part of the country. But Beijing is the northern part of the country. It's a political capital. Xi'an used to be the capital of imperial China for many, many centuries, right? And by the way, Xi Jinping has very deep roots in that province. To understand the political mindset of China, you need to go to that part of the country. It is a part of the country that”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need to convince people who disagree with you to come to your point of view. We didn't grow up in that society. Whereas Indians operating in a democratic society, very noisy Amatrasen calls argumentative society to get people behind you, you need to convince them of your point of view, right? to be able to do that, you need to rely on some sort of framework that both sides rely on and that usually is logic, evidence, and the systematic way of thinking. So I think Indians are better than us, Chinese, in part because of that.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, maybe they're fellow academics, but they are not academics strictly in your discipline. If you want to be a leader, you have to learn how to communicate with all sorts of people, not just with other people in your own discipline. And my view is that we Chinese have a lot to learn in this regard. And I think one reason is that we grew up in a homogeneous society. And in a society that does not place very high premium on trying to convince others of your point of view. Xi Jinping doesn't need to score points on debate to get his policy preferences executed, right? He may execute people, but he doesn't need the communication. He can just order. He can just issue commands, right? So it's a command-driven society.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that systematic in a way that they describe the world, in a way they analyze the world, right? So if you ask them to analyze food, analyze sports, analyze politics, analyze international relations, analyze economy. The way that they approach these topics is not that different from someone who has not gone through a PhD program in physics and PhD program in chemistry. Whereas, you know, when I talk to my Indian friends who are in science and technology, they apply the same scientific mindset and methodology to social issues, right? To political issues. And that gets you a lot of mileage in America where you need to communicate with a broad spectrum of the people, not just your fellow academics.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's a running topic among Chinese American professionals like me and many others. So I actually have a colleague, Jackson Liu, who systematically studied this issue. And his conclusion is not surprising, but his method is quite innovative. His conclusion is basically everything comes down to communication. The Chinese Americans are less able to communicate their ideas, place less value and premium communications. They are technically very competent, very capable, you know, very accomplished academics. But this is something I have noticed among my friends who are engineers and who are scientists. They are very systematic when they are talking about chemistry, when they are talking about physics. But once you take them out from their discipline, they are”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, opinions differ on that. I like Yunan food. My parents one came from Hubei, one came from Hunan, and they eat very spicy food. But I grew up in Beijing. I didn't eat very spicy food. So Yunan food is a little bit too spicy for me. I like food in the Yangtze Delta area. It is a little bit gentle on your tongue. And I also like Cantonese food. There's more variety. The problem that I have with spicy food is that it overwhelms every other sense that you have. It's a little bit homogeneous, whereas the Cantonese food is very rich. Yangzi River Delta food is very, very rich. You can have spicy food, but you can also have salty food. And so I like variety. I like the food from that area.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's at least in part related to the ancestor worship, essentially backward-looking way of looking at the world rather than kind of forward-looking way of looking at the world. So you always think about what happened in the past. It could be your ancestor, it could be Confucius, and goals is a kind of a negative version of that because ghosts typically emerge from dead people. That will be my very simplistic explanation why Ghost story is popular. I'm not a fan of Ghost Story.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The emergence of any liberalizing forces, women being one of them, right, but also liberalism, also other ideas, it was going back to our earlier discussion, the civil service examination system contributed to the male dominance of Chinese politics and society.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can see the evolution of Chinese art from sort of painting women in relatively free style, in the Tang Dynasty, to a very, very paternalistic portrayal of women beginning in 10th century, 11th century. And then the civil service examination system chose one of the most chauvinistic versions of Confucianism as its curriculum starting around 14th century, maybe even 13th century, and then that curriculum continued until the civil service examination system was itself dismantled in 1905. I think it was really because of the ideological hold of the stringent version of the Confucianism that prevents”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so let me answer that question by relating my answer to your prior question. During the period we were talking about Buddhism was a formidable ideology competing with Buddhism was actually quite friendly to the female half of the population. The only female emperor of China formally, there were some female regents, but the only formalized emperor who was female was a Buddhist. And also during that period of time, there were other East Asian states that had female rulers. And then Confucianism took the control and weaponized by the civil service examination system. Confucianism was extremely hierarchical, extremely hostile toward women and a very rigid in terms of the social hierarchy, in terms of gender treatment, and a marginalized women. So you can actually see that according to art, historical”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and legitimacy of Confucianist ideology. It was also a period of enormous creativity in terms of poetry, in terms of humanities, and crucially in our measure, in terms of technological creativity. China reached its peak in terms of inventions divided by population during that period.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people may say that's my European bias. That period was quite similar to Europe after Western Roman Empire collapsed. China at that time was more of a federation of states rather than a unified empire. It had multiple governments rapidly replacing each other or simultaneously existing parallel with each other. There was a lot of human capital moving around. The intellectual environment was quite free and there was not a one dominant ideology lording over other ideas and other ideologies. Confucianism was powerful, but it was first among equal rather than a monopoly ideology. And in fact, there were many intellectuals at the time who openly challenged the authenticity.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alsized, charisma, all sized prestige, and unshakable political capital. Now we have one leader who doesn't really have that. He relies mostly on formal power. And that's why he has accumulated so many titles, whereas he's making similar succession errors as the previous two leaders. So obviously we don't know because he hasn't chosen a successor, so we don't really know what will happen if he chose a successor. But my bet is that the ability to contain the spillover effect is going to be less rather than more down the road because Xi Jinping does not match even in a remote sense the charisma and the prestige of Mao Zedong and Zheng Xiaoping. There's no match. There.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the PRC, of the CCP, and they highlight the prestige in using Max Weber's term charisma that they could do whatever they want. And while being able to contain the spillover effects of their mistakes, right? So the big uncertain issue now is whether Xi Jinping has that kind of charisma to contain future spillover effects of succession failure. And this is a remarkable statistic. Since 1976, there have been six leaders of the CCP. Out of these six leaders, five of them were managed either by Mao or by Zheng Xiaoping. So essentially the vast majority of the successions were handled by these two giants who had, you know,”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So there's another sort of way to talk about stability, which is stability at a system level. And that, you're absolutely right. Despite all these problems with these successions, the system as a whole has remained stable. The CCP is in power, right? And there's no coup. And there were even demonstrations on the street associated with the succession failures. So we do need to distinguish between these two kinds of stability by one criterion. It was not stable by the other criterion. It is quite stable. The reason for that is, I think, although it's a little bit difficult to generalize because we don't really have many data points. One reason is the charisma power of individual leaders. Mao and Zheng Xiaoping, right? So these were founding fathers of”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I do want to modify the word that you use stable, right? So there are two ways to use that term. One is to describe the succession process itself. If that's the situation we are trying to describe, it's not stable at all. So if you look at the entire history of the PRC, there have been so many succession plans that failed at a catastrophic level, right? One potential successor was persecuted to death, another fled and died in a plane crash. Others were unceremoniously dismissed and one was put under house arrest for almost 15 years and he died. But no civil war, right?”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single issues, right? So usually in the 1990s it was about the land that the government took away. And then it was about the salary that the employers were late in paying my salary. So there were protests about that. Very single issue, very focused. But this time around, you're talking about people demanding the CCP to step down, demanding Xi Jinping to step down. That's just something entirely different from what we saw before.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pollution, things like that, right? Zero COVID, the difference there, the big difference between zero COVID and these other issues such as traffic and pollution is that so many people are affected by the policy simultaneously and to a similar extent. Therefore, they can relate with each other much, much more than the previous situation when you think about your own treatment mostly as a isolated individual situation rather than something that you can generalize. And that, I believe, is the main reason why you see this level of demonstrations and protests. And yes, China has had a lot of protests, but those protests tend to happen in rural areas, in less urban settings, in isolated situations, and on”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for the citizens to get organized, right? So if you think about all these opinions you express to the government through the government control portals, you are doing it as an individual. You're not doing it as a member of a larger group. The CCP has no problem with that. And sometimes those opinions can be quite negative. The CCP has no problem with that, right? The beauty of the system is that once you express”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but that's a different framing, right? So this is about a government, even though it is autocratic, that is still reasonably responsive to the demands of the citizens and therefore the argument is that you don't really need organized civil society to press their demands, to press their policy preferences. I think in some sense that's correct, right? So if you look at what the CCP has been doing, it is actually quite clever. So it's not the case that they don't take input from the society. They create portals, they create websites, they create phone numbers for the citizens to call in. They also do surveys. What they want to do is they want to solicit opinions and information from the citizens without creating”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about large scale social movements here. These are individual actions. These are spontaneous actions. The complaints on WeChat, these are not organized. These are essentially individuals expressing their frustrations. They are not really using WeChat to coordinate their actions. Maybe they are implicitly coordinating their messages by supporting each other. But we don't really see any evidence of organized activity, right? In that sense, the civil society is quite weak.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of people. We're talking about maybe 10,000 people or tens of thousands of people. Contrast that with Yong. In the case of Iran, one woman died in the hands of the moral police, and there were other grievances, but that was the trigger. The protests are still going young. Millions of the people took to the street, right? And Iran, the religion played a big role. If you look at the color revolution in Tunisia, it started with a peddler whose assets were confiscated by the government official. And then he committed suicide. That sparked the color revolution. Those kind of brutalities toward small peddlers happen almost on daily basis in China. So it's very important to specify relative to the grievances and the level of the misery. We are not”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That means you are essentially locked up in your home sometimes for weeks. In some cases for two months, okay? So that's the level of the suffering. And sometimes you can't get food, sometimes you cannot get patients into the emergency room because the hospital also shut down, refused to take in patients who tested positive or who cannot show a negative test on COVID. Some people have died. They are suicide. There are fires and all these collateral damages from the zero COVID control. Relative to that, China experienced a wave of protests by one estimate in 17 cities. And I don't really have a good idea how many people were involved. But we are not talking about...”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm sure that if you apply Western benchmark, it is a very weak civil society. So there's a difference between a civil society consisting of isolated individual actions and a civil society that consists of organized activities that have a program, that have financial support, that have the capability to operate independently. By the second criterion, China has none of that, right? So if you look at the recent protest against zero COVID controls, let's keep one number in perspective by various estimates in 2022, there were probably 400 million people under some sort of long-term quarantine, right? And let me just concretize that word quarantine.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not wrong at all. It is one of my essential points in the book is that the power of the Chinese civil service examination system was that in a very narrow sense very meritocratic, very well proctored. There was public corruption, but the corruption was not endemic and there were guardrails making sure that the integrity of the exam was at the level sufficient to attract the interest and the participation from the masses of the people, right? So we show that family background, and this is from data from the”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By 17th century China was already not very inventive as compared with 6th century. The level of inventions declined dramatically in the 17th century. So I tend to lean toward the view that by 17th century China was already quite backward.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are debates about whether in 17th century China was really on the par with Europe. There was a famous California school that made that point. And their argument was it is not right to compare the whole China with Europe. You need to compare the most developed part of China with Europe. And if you do that, the level of economic development was comparable with each other. I think there are some recent research that challenges that view using better data, more fine-grained data that shows that per capita GDP by 17th century in China was much lower than per capita GDP in Europe, even among the most developed regions of China. Our own data do not support the view that China in 17th century was comparable to Europe. We don't use economic data, but we use invention.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a loser system of the Chinese system as compared with China in 19th century, which responded to the challenges from the West from a very, very rigid system that China began to consolidate around the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there were less watertight as compared with the Chinese system, and they're probably less well organized as the Chinese system. Also in Japan, they also had a version of the civil service examination system, but they didn't really continue the system beyond the 12th century, 13th century. So essentially, in the 19th century, when Japan embarked upon modernization, it was a Japan similar to China. At the very beginning stage of the civil service examination system, rather than toward the end of the civil service examination system, when the exam system was extremely watertight, was extremely homogeneous, was extremely well organized. So Japan kind of evolved into a modern society.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of naturally disposed toward making transformational changes toward coming up with revolutionary ideas toward coming up with a new religion, new way of thinking. So in that sense, the civil service examination system was incredibly successful, even though the number that eventually made it is not that big, but the bottom of the pyramid is big. And the people who are most at risk of making societal ideological breakthroughs are completely homogenized.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I didn't quite say in my book, but I think this is a plausible explanation. What the examination system did was it was homogenizing the smartest people. So essentially the smartest people were socialized and their ideology was homogenized into this very stratifying Confucianist ideology. If you begin with a world view that smart people are the people who begin to make breakthroughs in ideas, in the organization of the politics, in the organization of the economy, those people in China, the smartest people in China, were completely homogenized. So yes, you have a lot of other people that were not able to be part of this system, but they were not the ones that were”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but the norms are shared beyond the select few who eventually succeeded at the exam, right? It's kind of the bottom of the pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid, it is not the people at the bottom of the pyramid didn't aspire to become a bureaucrat, didn't expire to excel at the exam. They all wanted to become a bureaucrat. They all wanted to be educated in Confucian ideology.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“thou thou we saw in Europe, and that didn't really increase the demand for human capital, for basic skills. If you run a bureaucracy, you know, for a country the size of China, you may need 10,000 people, 20,000 people, 40,000 people, 100,000 people.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was never any kind of liberalizing value that came from road memorization, memorization of the Confucian texts, and those texts were usually extremely conservative and backward-looking. So not only the female half of the population didn't benefit from that, there was no kind of liberal value that came from this apparatus of education that would sort of over time advocated for universal education beyond the male half of the population. So there was almost like a self-contained restriction on the scale of the literacy to the male sector of the population. I think the third reason is economics. And Chinese economy didn't develop commercialization, didn't develop at a scale.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read and write. So they have all the conditions for further literacy and even universal literacy. A number of factors hindered the further development of literacy. One of the bigger factors was that this entire system was designed for half of the population only, for the male half of the population. And so the females didn't have access to the preparatory schools and they couldn't take the civil service examination system. Also, there were some spillover from the male to the female in terms of basic literacy, but the scale was not that big. The other was that the entire education was organized around memorization rather than teaching people how to think. And one problem with that was that”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So this is a deeply puzzling development. So let me make the argument why there was a potential for China to raise its literacy. They implemented the examination system back in the 6th century. And the state began to provide not universal education, but something closer to universal education. It was more like a preparatory education for boys and men to be able to take the civil service examination. And the costs were subsidized by the state and the apparatus, the infrastructure was quite widespread and developed. And there was a cultural premium placed on being able to”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not a historian per se, I'm not a historian of that particular phrase, but there is at least this belief that that phrase originated from China in the sense that there was a European belief that the meritocracy, the Chinese meritocracy, conferred a lot of autonomy on meritocrats. They could do the things that they wanted to do without the close supervision from the emperor. And so one version of the origin of that word is the Chinese meritocrats, the Chinese court officials, the Confucian Mandarins enjoy a lot of operational autonomy, and they could do whatever that they wanted to do. And we know for a fact that's just not true. The Chinese court officials Didn't have any autonomy operating, nor did they have any ideological autonomy.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“chain and China used to be a factory for the world. Now many companies are rethinking about whether or not they should rely so heavily on supply chain in China. And for example, if you look at the recent iPhone 14 parts of it are made in India rather than in China. I have heard from many companies that they are going to move out the part of the production that caters to the world market to other countries. They are going to have the production catering to the domestic market stay in China. So China increasingly is becoming factual for itself rather than factory for the world. So I think from the immediate economic perspective the reluctance of foreign capital is a bigger concern than the lack of immigration. In the long run probably the labor supply is becoming an issue and they may reap Think about the immigration policy”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not a very attractive country to go now, right? So look at what happened during the COVID public health crisis and this erratic policy from zero COVID to essentially no policy in place to control any kind of various transmission and now China is reporting 60,000 deaths related to COVID and most people believe that's a vast underestimate of what the true number is. The erratic policy on economic management is also incredibly jarring. It undermines the credibility of the policy management of the government. I think that the bigger worry is the foreign capital ahead of foreign migrants. Foreign capital, reorganization of the supply chain.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know. So that's the point I was trying to get, right? Japan didn't have a one-child policy. Japan has a very low fertility rate. So something that is comparing Apple with orange, Japan is much more developed society. The per capita GDP is much higher. So essentially the fertility rate would probably be lower. Naturally as a result of that difference in per capita GDP. But I think it's probably more than that. The nature of the Chinese economy and Japanese economy is very land intensive. So the urban cost of living are very high because of the very high housing costs. So the common complaint we hear from young people in China is that they cannot afford children. And there's a cultural norm that you need to have your own housing to be able to get married and that may also deter family formation and therefore Production of children”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, this is an East Asian phenomenon as well. So part of it is the socialization of the norm because of the one-child policy that they instituted in the language.”
2023-03-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source