I took a recent trip to China and just today put my thoughts on my blog.
Thank you Tphuang, for an interesting and enlightening commentary about your visit home to mainland China.
I found the comment by you relative highly intriguing,
Tphuang Relative said:
"Unlike America, China is not a law based society. All the rich people send their family abroad because they are worried this system will turn against them. They want to have the option to leave the country if things turn against them or if China goes back to its former communist system. If I can send my family abroad, I would do so too."
That's an amazing insight from a local Chinese citizen, and probably as clear a statement on the overall issues facing China today as could be made.
Other comments from your blog that caught my attention were these:
tphuang said:
Chinese public has no trust toward their government but do have very high regard for the American systems. One of the people I talked to was surprised that I also have no clue how my local government is spending my tax dollars. Even with all of the reported corruption in the American political system, it's still child's play compared to the complete black box of the Chinese system.
When traveling aborad myself throughout the 1990s and early 2000s to Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Romania, and elsewhere, I noticed that such conditions are rampant. And in some cases,it is simply impossible to carry on business with companies there without having to resort to actually budgeting money to cover the bribery and corruption. Taiwan at the time was the least impacted by this so several of the products I was managing ended up getting built there, or in Honkg Kong or Korea at the time. But still, a very sad state of affairs.
tphuang said:
Food counterfeiting has become so professional that even the lamb that people eat in hot pot are often pork soaked with lamb oil. The Chinese public have very low trust toward consumer products. When people buy brand name products, their biggest worry is not cost but fake products.
While I was there, YouTube, Facebook and twitter were all blocked (Google services were inconsistent). According to the locals, there is a Chinese equivalent of every Internet service that I can find in the West. In the case of Weibo, it's probably even more popular than Twitter is here. While censorship is the official reason for the blocking of these Western websites, my feeling is that protecting local Internet industry is an equally strong reason. When counterfeiting is this far entrenched inside the country, it's not surprising that Western companies find their stuff getting copied in China
We have heard a lot about this in America from the perspective of American products (like Apple) having this issue, but I did not realize ot was so rampant locally too. Goes back to that statement by your relative, which I believe is equally applicable to this sitauation.
tphuang said:
Similar to their American counterparts, the Chinese government has been printing money like mad in the recent years. While outsiders generally think RMB is undervalued, most Chinese people think RMB is overvalued. While the skyrocketing real estate prices have been widely reported, grocery, restaurant and consumer goods prices have also gone up a lot. While I was in a famous mall in Beijing, I checked out some stores (including Coach, Swarovski and Espirit) just to compare them to American prices. They were generally anywhere from 2 to 5 times to how much these things cost in America. It's not surprising that when Chinese tourists come to America, they spend mass amount of money buying brand name products here.
This is a huge issue...no matter what country does it. Sooner or later, economically, you have to pay the piper. The US will reach a point where it has to control its spending, not cover up that problem by manufacturing paper money. If it does not, then ultimately, as we saw in Greece and are seeing elsewhere, the real wealth will not be able to afford the spending systems that get established and then all of those systems will fail. It's simple economics 101...don't spend more than you have or more than you make. If you do, sooner or later your debt will crush you. Applies to the US just as surely as it will apply to the People's Republic sooner or later.