Backwater? Growing power?
Same thing happened with Japan.
This is before my time but I’ve known lots of older people who born in the 50s and grew up in the 60s and 70s.
Products made in Japan were once considered cheap things. I ride motorcycles so I talk to a lot of people about the history, especially with Honda and Yamaha. North American motorcycles were first British, German and American. When the Japanese started in the 50s and 60s, everyone laughed at them … a common racist thing to call them back then was ‘rice cookers’ … but within a decade, they took over and by the 80s they were dominating.
The same thing is happening in the EV market. Right now everything is even and the market is still new. But in a decade or two or less, the Chinese will dominate everything.
Not gonna lie though. The honda cub looked all kinds of fun as a buzz around bike. Nothing to prove, just 'here is a little city road burner.
Postwar Japan motorcycles were literally old Harley Davidson toolings. They weren’t that good to begin with.
A place with lots of suspicious bath-drownings if a baby had the misfortune of being born a girl during the one child policy.
Unfortunately, the harsh truth was more often a doctor who was tasked with second pregnancies whose job details made all the other hospital staff realise he was a monster.
While that definitely happened, the thankful reality is that many families raised their daughters unofficially.
The demographic charts suggest otherwise.
China, and maybe some other Asian countries have a household registration ( hukou 户口) system.
Only people born into the system get to exist for things like schools, national insurance, etc.
So any unofficially born second children (or hidden first born daughters) didn’t get to legally count under this.
Also; children born out of marriage don’t exist for state schools or benefits, either.
Where your hukou is limits your options for access to housing, claims on social security and health insurance, and the like. Mostly if you were born into a very rural area your only pathway to legally having a place to live and for your children to go to school in another part of the country is via university graduation.
There are pushes to change this system, and smaller cities are removing their requirements for non-rural hukou. But Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities you have probably heard of are yet to do this.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-hiding-population-secret-1926834
The 2000 census came up short, so officials launched a campaign to add tens of millions of “missing” people, bringing the official population close to initial estimates, Yi said. But a closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.
They killed so many girls the population fell more than expected.
Did you read that article, or just post the first news link you found with a headline that agreed with you?
‘No Evidence’ “Dr. Yi is an early and courageous individual to criticize China’s harmful birth control policies,” said Feng Wang, sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
But Wang disputes Yi’s conclusions. “Scholars in China and at the U.N. have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has ‘discovered’ such a huge discrepancy.”
Everyone agrees to not accept China’s figures, but no one can find anywhere near such a big gulf. And you’d think that if they could, more US and Taiwanese sources would be reporting on it, wouldn’t they?
My point was more that some people did the right thing, not that it’s enough to eliminate a statistical slump.
Some people of the time would think the Chinese were heartless people to do what they did, and some quietly raised their other children, that’s all.
And if even that isn’t true, so be it, as I could have fallen for propaganda and cannot locate the original source, but here is another showing that some people didn’t just fall in line.
Really? That’s the most wholesome thing I read about China
Starving Chinese kids were why I had to gag down my peas.
For me it was Africans but to each their own I guess.
Indians. It’s why I still finish my beer to this day. " There’s sober kids in India"
90’s teenager: Corrupt government that was a maker of cheap goods and claimed to be first in everything ever and had the most bestest smartest refined cultureal history compared to us heathen backwater westerners.
THere’s reasons I struggle with looking past my own mindset whenever anything china related in the sciences pop up, as my first thought is ‘is there independant verfication there to prevent it from just being government propaganda bullshit?’
…kinda like i’m having to start doing with any ‘official’ anything here stateside now.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s: “Oh, that’s where all the toys come from!”
70s and 80s were before my time so that could be why i am mistaken, but i kind of thought it would have been Japan?
I’m OP’s age and don’t remember having any toys from Japan. Dad fought in the Pacific Theater, didn’t have a positive outlook on Japanese people or products. Funny thing though, we would hunt flea markets, antique shops and garage sales for “Made In Occupied Japan” stamps. Wonder if that’s still collectible?
Japan too, but mostly it was the stamps “Made in China” or “Made in Taiwan”.
They made cheap low quality goods and had a lot of rural poor people. Through the 80s and 90s their reputation for making knockoff versions of things improved.
In the 90s it was seen as a backwater with growing power. There was a sense that China’s economic growth would push it towards democracy. Tiananmen Square seemed like proof of that.
I remember a 90s Newsweek issue centered around China becoming the tiger in the next century. Believed that since then, and history seems to be bearing that opinion out. I just didn’t see America crashing so hard, only China slowly overtaking us.
Early aughts in international relations class they were still teaching students about China being a “sleeping giant” just beginning to come into its own economically speaking. At the time it was emphasized that they had a huge army but it was not well trained in combat. Tianamen and the transition of HK were in the very recent past so it seemed China was more interested in managing internal divisions than challenges on the international front.
I read China watched the US invasion of Iraq (2003) and shit their pants how easily Iraq fell.
Nixon going to China was huge.
As a sweatshop, where civilized at all.
And that mostly went for Asia as a whole in the average American portrayal.
80s into 90s it was starting to become obvious that economic might would shift from the West to China. Mostly because they sold us all of their shit plastics at first, then some good stuff along with even more shit plastics.
No, 80s were hardcore taiwan and south korea for crappy toys, maybe Japan early on.
Even the early 90s were Taiwan and SK, then China came in and swallowed everything whole.
In the 90s, my dad and a lot of other guys in my area lost their machining jobs because the work was being done in China. My perception of China (only what I learned from people around me talking about it) was that it was a dirty place where everyone lived in squalor and worked in sweat shops for pennies a day.
