Could we stop talking about the fucking layout and talk about the article?
China's culture, people, and most of all economy is opaque to most outsiders and I think it's fascinating. They built an entire city from nothing in just a few years, just... on a whim. Because the leaders thought that would be best for the country as a whole. It's fascinating and scary and amazing, and I can't think of another place that works even similar to this.
Yet it seems that us westerners largely ignore China except in terms of imports and exports. Why? Is it the language? The lack of widespread cultural exports? I mean most people know very little about China as a country compared to how important they are on the world's stage. In fact you could pick almost any other country with a respectable GDP and I could tell you a whole lot more about it.
Well, it was probably also built because massive construction projects are an easy way to boost the GDP of administrative sub-regions and the career prospects of the CCP officials in charge of those administrative units depend upon whether or not they can show that they boosted GDP.
The motivations and dynamics at play are not really all that alien.
Its great when you actually need to get shit done (see San Francisco), but rather terrible in the case you don't (see multiple empty million unit cities in China). In the very best case, this sort of spending is merely wasteful. I'm reminded of the crazy incentives in the Soviet Union.
EG, from SSC [1]
> A tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. They learned that the tire-making-machine-making company had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances and destroy their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and was back in the same quandary they’d started with.
By the way, the cities are empty because they built them to be used later, and many are not empty anymore.
The Chinese government is slowly moving people from some places, to already built cities (while building other cities).
For now they can keep what they are doing, but I believe they will have to someday stop (otherwise they will build faster than the population increase), then is a matter of seeing how they will handle that stoppage.
But for now they have plenty of people to move, For example example the article here has a graph showing that in 2015 only 51% of the population is urban compare that to Brazil, Brazil is a country with a economy that relies on rural exports much more than china does, industry in Brazil is very weak, yet Brazil has 85% of the population being urban according to the World Bank, in some naive calculation, assuming China wants to match Brazil urbanization, this means they still have 462 million people to move... Projects like the one in the target aim to house 200.000 people, this mean they can do 2310 of such projects without wasting money on unused capacity.
EDIT: Running those numbers made me realize how China is mind-boggling huge and populated. China population that they intend to move, is bigger than Brazil + Russia summed population...
I did not mean to imply a motive to building a brand new, mostly empty city. Just that it's incredibly foreign, yet fascinating, and I can't imagine another country doing anything like that.
Regarding that last sentence, given that most such countries would be European countries, or one of the US or the Canada, it is clearly normal what is the reason you would have more words about it, it is simply a familiar culture. China's culture is fascinating because it is opaque, or rather, because it was opaque, but by now less so. By time, as westerners get to know it more and more, it will be less relevant and/or fascinating, and contemporaneously rot. As westerner tourists are fascinated by some places, these places quickly become fake, they become parodies of themselves and ultimately tourist traps. Eminönü, Venice, Napoli, others, southeast asia, in these places there has been left nothing authentic. The fascination and interest of westerner tourists is such a plague that it has killed some of the most characteristic and beautiful parts of the world. So I'd rather be happier if china went undiscovered, than it be discovered and used up.
It's funny you say that. I just spent about a month in China, particularly Beijing. Because Beijing is probably the center of tourism from overseas in China, you might think it's very touristy, and it is. But the domestic tourist market is so much larger than the foreign one that it's already, as you say, "discovered and used up." Other tourist sites in China are similar, though less so.
China is big enough that foreign tourists are but a blip on the radar, despite frequent and cheap flights (I once flew Singapore-Beijing for SGD 17 return on Air Asia). You're talking about a place where even second rate "countryside" cities have the population of London or Paris.
Venice and other so called "traditional" cities have failed not because of the rush of tourists, but because they have attempted to freeze their prosperity in time. The Venetian Republic once was a world leader in trade, culture and prosperity, and today's historical monuments were yesterday's cutting edge skyscrapers. "Authenticity" merely represents a people's local solutions to the problems of survival and population growth, the cultures that have survived hundreds of years of competition; "foreign" habits are rapidly adapted if they are superior to the local option, which is why you don't see many ox carts left in Bali.
That Straits "kopi", the thick, overroasted, sweetened brew you have with kaya toast? It's like this because extremely poor Chinese immigrants bought low quality beans, the only ones they could afford, and roasted them with butter and sweetened them with sugar to try and mellow the bad taste. Nobody does it anymore as the region grew economically and coffee beans got comparatively cheaper vs, say, labour costs and real estate. In Vietnam, bicycles have been replaced by mopeds. In Mumbai, motorised autorickshaws have completely replaced the people-drawn ones (which I'm told still exist in places like Chennai). Does that make both cities less "authentic"?
Paris is my favorite example of a city that is so stuck in its past it refuses to acknowledge its own philosophy. Haussmann's razing and rebuilding of the entire city had purely modern ambitions: clean up the sewers that most of the badly built streets had become, reduce fire risk, accomodate higher population density, encourage trade via better transport infrastructure, and so on. But Parisians have arbitrarily decided that Hausmannian architecture - which was motivated by practical considerations - is "pretty" and refuse to approve anything that would help make Paris a more modern city (at least outside the Defense, and the Tour Montparnasse), forcing real estate prices through the roof and Parisians to endure hour-long commutes. One side effect is that the city is popular with tourists who can travel in time, of course. But would you rather be a Venetian or a New Yorker?
What makes China (and, to be honest, modern Southeast Asia outside the American party towns like Phuket) so fascinating is that it is rapidly opening to the world and attempting to pull several hundred million people into the middle class by any means possible. This, not the pretty grey hutongs or "characteristic" street meat sticks is what makes it an interesting place to see and do business in. In my humble ang moh opinion.
Could we stop talking about the fucking layout and talk about the article?
But what if people here found the technology more interesting than the contents of the article. I understand your frustration, but it comes off as being impolite. If people are interested in talking about the font or the scroll than what gives you the right to tell them what to write about.
Now that being said, it does seem that Westerners know very little about China. That is due to many reasons I believe: 1) most people are not interested in learning about their own history, economy, geography, so it is hard to expect them to want to learn about another country. 2) the lack of role models or ambassadors; growing up in Africa we all knew a lot about the US mainly because of its economic strength, its history, but perhaps more importantly its ambassadors: pop stars, Michael Jordan and other NBA players, etc... I do not know many Chinese actors. I love Asian movies, I just re-watched IP Man I and II yesterday, but I am not even sure those actors are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc... China could do more to further promote its Arts and Culture. I suspect many people think most Asians to be Chinese, similarly to how most people will never know the difference between a Liberian and a Nigerian and a Senegalese. 3) Distance: China seems (mentally) just far from everywhere; far from Africa, far from Europe, far from America. I know it is not that far, but it just seems so. 4,5,6...n
Edit: 4) Honestly Asian seems un-approachable, or at least not very approachable. I could strike conversations with a European, a Southern American, an American, an Indian, a Turkish, but most Asians seem to not want to talk to you. Now this entirely something I was either fed to believe, or it is my own false assumptions. I just have this belief, but I know its enirely wrong because I can count at least 4 to 5 truly awesome Chinese, Korean, I have known in the past 5 years. Heck I even lived with a Chinese family in the US. Lovely family, but from the outside had you told me this I would have laughed at you. I hope I can truly undo this, and I fear many people are not engaging Chinese and learning more about them because of they have this entirely false belief.
I will differ from most of the comments here, I enjoyed they layout and thought it added to the story. I am on a desktop with FF.
As for the story it is a solemn reminder millions of people work hard jobs and make life easier for others. I hope Xiao Zhang's life will continue to get a bit easier as the years go on.
One of the things I liked best about this story is that it is based on reporting that has been following the same family over time for many years. That gives the before-and-after aspects of describing development of rural towns in China a lot of coherency and visual impact.
I too had no technological problems viewing the story, using desktop Google Chrome on a Windows PC with a lot of script blocking running.
Definitely following on from the format that the NYT pioneered. IT's wel done, if you have a high-res modern desktop interface. Reminds me of trying to read WIRED in the 90s. Actually worth the extra effort.
I don't like the politically uncritical boosterish content, however.
I don't think it was “brushed off”. The main storyline in the article was the differences in lives and outlook across three generations of women: the main character, her mother and her daughter. The husband was a part of this story. The story of his father much less so. It was already a long article; the writer can't afford to branch out into the stories of all the surrounding relatives too.
Ditto. Normally Ghostery will block at least one script site that is necessary to view pages like this. But this one worked fine, even though Ghostery blocked ChartBeat, DoubleClick, iPerceptions, NetRatings, and ScoreCard.
I had a difference experience to you. Although I didn't get much out of the embedded videos. The still photographs had more impact for me. Just my $0.02. It is a good article.
Maybe the interface is misguided, but it is difficult to pull-off to this level, and I find that it does give an overall feeling of connection to the memory threads of rural chinese life.
I am blocking the flash content; someone else must claim my great uncle's fortune. But it is still a great improvement on what was acceptable content degradation a few years ago.
(edit- So overall I'd say there is far from anything wrong with this article, and it provides an important type of impression that we lacked when I was studying rural china, decades ago.)
Everyone's trying to outdo "What is Code" and so we'll be dealing with this kind of journalistic showmanship for the next few months.
Edit: The article is very well written and truly touching. It feels like reading The Good Earth all over again. In another way, it reads like a story about American Settlers from the 1800s. It's sad to hear about people abiding solely through subsistence farming, but it's heartening to hear they're surviving.
And from the comfort of an office building, I feel obligated to reflect on my relative privileges. They are beyond realistic counting. This imbalance fills me with unresolved guilt.
I dislike the trend towards adding animations to articles, as I find it very distracting, but their continuing popularity makes me think I'm probably in the minority.
Sorry for putting the edit in this comment. I didn't realize how much it would detract from the conversation. Now that I've seen the downvotes, it's too late to edit.
I just tried disabling javascript but it did not have the desired effect of removing the "parallax" type effect when scrolling. I tried one of the two browser extensions I mentioned, Clearly, and it worked well.
These "immersive" stories will disappear once the realization that the ROI on them doesn't work. Expensive to create, but no income generated because no-one reads them because they are annoying.
The only companies left using them will be those with no concern about ROI such as here; the state-funded BBC.
I'm sure it looks good on the designer's CV though. Who cares about the people who have to actually read the content...
That's what I used to think about all-flash websites.
They did go away, more or less, but only because the Web became that same pixel-per-pixel full-designer-control application platform, with all the same obnoxious problems that made us hate Flash, minus the binary blob.
The overwhelming majority of websites would be better served by simple HTML3 with no javascript at all. Or rather, their users would be better served.
> the Web became that same pixel-per-pixel full-designer-control application platform, with all the same obnoxious problems that made us hate Flash, minus the binary blob.
Hasn't that always been possible using JS? I know that Firefox in its distant past once had an option to not allow websites to catch right clicks, but it's been gone for quite a while.
And disable copy&paste in really clever ways so you can't just edit an attribute on a textfield to paste your text. Browsers helpfully expose a on paste event that can be hijacked from various places and text manipulated during paste. I'm an embedded dev and I can't get my head around it so I'm happy for a webdev to correct me if I'm wrong.
Not sure the story would have made it as far on HN if it was presented more plainly. It would be just another long-form piece that didn't draw in enough people.
> they're unwilling to invest any more in the house in case it's earmarked for demolition in the next phase of city development.
This sentence stood out for me. It's interesting that China is pushing for urbanization for its people and that some of those people (like Xiao Zhang in the article) are impatiently waiting for the better life to come, but I wonder about the long-term consequences of this -- how many people will simply be conditioned to not improve/work on their lot in fear/hope that the government will provide?
I couldn't find a feedback link, but there is an employment email address - jobs@shorthand.com - It'd be interesting to hear their response to some of the feedback here.
Why do they feel the need to have stories with the scrolley page css of doom? I want to read the text, maybe with a few intersparsed pictures ... please bring back sane reading format of websites.
Having CSS disabled doesn't help unless you go through the effort of removing images as well, as they are repeated twice (and sometimes 3 times). The paragraph structuring is also terrible.
China's culture, people, and most of all economy is opaque to most outsiders and I think it's fascinating. They built an entire city from nothing in just a few years, just... on a whim. Because the leaders thought that would be best for the country as a whole. It's fascinating and scary and amazing, and I can't think of another place that works even similar to this.
Yet it seems that us westerners largely ignore China except in terms of imports and exports. Why? Is it the language? The lack of widespread cultural exports? I mean most people know very little about China as a country compared to how important they are on the world's stage. In fact you could pick almost any other country with a respectable GDP and I could tell you a whole lot more about it.