China Overwhelming the West in Cities Over a Million People 112
This decade began just after a historic inflection point, with 51% of the world's population living in urban areas. From a report: By the numbers: That proportion has continued to rise steadily, reaching 55% as of 2018. It's climbed faster in China, up from 48% to 59% -- meaning an additional 180 million people are living in Chinese cities. China now has 130 cities of at least 1 million people, more than the U.S. (45), European Union (36) and South America (46) combined. India, which won't become majority-urban until the 2040s, has 61 such cities. There are 63 in Africa. Nigeria just became majority-urban in 2018, but urbanization in the West African giant will grow even more dramatically over the next decade. Nigeria's 10 largest cities are home to 32 million people as of 2018, with 13 million of those in Lagos. The UN projects their combined populations will rise to 50 million by 2030 -- just over a decade away -- by which time Lagos will have over 20 million residents.
China has lots of people (Score:3)
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There are also cultural differences.
The American dream is a house with a big lawn, some trees, and a white picket fence.
The Chinese don't want that. Even in the countryside, you will see wide empty spaces and then a dozen homes all crammed together.
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My wife's family moved from a fairly rural town to big cities. Or at least some of them did, some stayed behind and built a huge new 7 story house right next to their old stone one. It's not even the biggest or grandest there by far.
The ones who moved to the city live in apartments. They look like show homes, really well finished and very tasteful.
Re:China has lots of people (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of the world is the way it is due to unintended side effects or other unforeseen consequences. When left to their own devices people will tend to gravitate towards solutions they think best suit their needs, but more often than not there are a lot of constraints that we forget about. Are the house arrangements in rural China truly a reflection of the desires of the people? I’m guessing it’s not as simple as that.
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The countryside in the U.S. is the way it is due to the Homestead Act
Most big American lawns are in suburbia, not in rural areas.
China has few areas like American suburbia. The transition from city to countryside is much more abrupt.
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A 'dozen homes all crammed together', I think, is commonly referred to as a village. :p
A village of a dozen homes may be 5 acres in America. In China, it fits in half an acre.
Even in rural areas, homes are often directly adjacent, with shared walls to reduce construction costs and retain heat.
Chinese have very different concepts of community and very different expectations for privacy. They are extremely nosy people, and will bluntly ask very personal questions and give unsolicited feedback on personal behavior that is none of their business (from an American viewpoint).
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In my experience it's the exact opposite. Chinese people keep to themselves as much as possible. If it's nothing to do with them they will ignore it, e.g. shared areas in apartment blocks.
It's a bit different in villages because everyone knows everyone else and is probably related to them in some way.
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The Chinese don't want that. Even in the countryside, you will see wide empty spaces and then a dozen homes all crammed together.
What do you mean they don't want that? They rip off suburbia houses and designs from here in Canada and the US, and rebuild them over in China all the time. They sell like hotcakes. There are places where if you didn't know which country they originated from you couldn't tell the difference, everything down to the utility ped and width of the sidewalk are the same.
Re:China has lots of people (Score:5, Informative)
You need about 2 acres to feed a family of 4 [treehugger.com], or about 2 square km per 1000 people. The world overall has plenty of room. A population of 8 billion needs about 16 million km^2 dedicated to raising food. The world's land area is 197 million km^2, so only a bit more than 8% of the land needs to be dedicated to raising food.
But a disproportionate fraction of those people are concentrated in China. With a population of 1.4 billion, China needs about 2.8 million km^2 of land dedicated to raising food. China's land area is only 3.77 km^2, so they need almost 75% of their land devoted to raising food.
Re:China has lots of people (Score:4, Informative)
Also not all (or even most) land is arable. Agriculture needs lots of fresh water.
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From driving/riding the train through Netherlands a few times, I'd say a vast majority is farms.
Can we put this under the duh category? (Score:4, Insightful)
Country with 1 1/3 billion people has more cities with more than a million people? How did this become a news story?
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Country with 1 1/3 billion people has more cities with more than a million people? How did this become a news story?
There are people hard at work wheeling out every little morsel of 'scary foreigner' data they can find in order to maintain the ongoing xenophobic mania in the right wing voter base in the West. As long as the Chinese communist party isn't handing those billions of people AK-47s and sending them off to enslave the rest of humanity I don't care how big Chinese cities are. I just hope they'll be intelligent about planning them because many Chinese cities (not all of them obviously) are an urban planning disas
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Where are you getting this? I'm right wing and the issues I have seen talked about in 'right wing' media about China have been around human rights abuses, trade imbalance, social credit scores, IP theft, forced technology transfers, belt and road, and South China sea militarization. I haven't seen anything xenophobic, perhaps you are consuming different media sources than I am?
I interact with people from China on a pretty much daily basis and I've never encountered anyone that was concerned about being atta
Re: Can we put this under the duh category? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: Can we put this under the duh category? (Score:4, Insightful)
He's getting it from Rachel Maddow, Vox, MSNBC/NYT/WAPO and the rest of the extreme left propaganda sites that tell him what right wingers think. He doesn't actually know or talk to any right wingers. Mostly because they're too polite (or worried about being physically assaulted or losing their job) if they engage with a crazy violent leftist, so they remain quiet while he rants at his coworkers over lunch waiting patiently for a topic change. Then they do what matters: show at the voting booth.
I'm getting it from the Trump administration and the effects they are having on the thinking of the Chinese military in particular:
... an attack on two of the U.S. Navy’s steel behemoths would claim upwards of 10,000 lives."
... ever ... changes, especially the way right wing nuts think.
"What the United States fears the most is taking casualties
Rachel Maddow Rachel Maddow, Vox, MSNBC/NYT/WAPO and the rest of 'the extreme left propaganda sites' didn't say that. Those words were spoken by China’s Rear Admiral Luo Yuan, the deputy head of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences during a Dec. 20 speech to the 2018 Military Industry List summit. This is what the Chinese are really thinking and Yuan is far from being the only one who thinks like this. You would know this you had done some basic research on the subject instead of limiting yourself to asinine pre-baked talking points about the 'extreme left' from https://www.snowflakevictory.com [snowflakevictory.com]. This is the same basic bullshit that was going on during the Cold War with the Soviets. The US was convinced that the Soviets were hellbent on starting a war with the US when the Soviets were mostly just paranoid about the US attacking them first. Nothing
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The Soviets loudly proclaimed their destiny was to cover the entire world with their great gift, communism.
The idea that the US would attack the heavily armed Soviets is ridiculous. The Soviets for their half wanted to take the West intact, so they concentrated on subversion. Unfortunately they had many, many true believers in the West. They couldn't understand why people would betray their own people in favor of an evil philosophy, so they just scratched their heads and called them "useful idiots". T
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Had a brief look at their comment history. They are either a paid shill or a useful idiot. Either way they are a disingenuous bigoted shitposter and impossible to debate with.
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There has been a LOT of subversion from within. Enough that I'm not convinced that the Cold War didn't end exactly the way the communists wanted it to.
Among people significantly younger than myself (early 50s), I don't encounter even 5% who understand why leftism, socialism and communism are awful, awful ideas. Even at my age, it's hit or miss. The healthy desire to improve one's self and one's family's circumstances is nearly universally regarded as "greed," while the envy, theft, and murder required to
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The US was convinced that the Soviets were hellbent on starting a war with the US when the Soviets were mostly just paranoid about the US attacking them first. Nothing ... ever ... changes,
Well, you're right about nothing ever changing. The Left never meets an expansionist communist dictatorship empire that it doesn't like.
Re:Can we put this under the duh category? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are you getting this? I'm right wing and the issues I have seen talked about in 'right wing' media about China have been around human rights abuses, trade imbalance, social credit scores, IP theft, forced technology transfers, belt and road, and South China sea militarization. I haven't seen anything xenophobic, perhaps you are consuming different media sources than I am?
I interact with people from China on a pretty much daily basis and I've never encountered anyone that was concerned about being attacked by the US. I have met quite a few that were concerned with the urban planning disaster you talked about though. I also hear them talk about pollution, economics, college, transportation, family, jobs and other benign subjects that anyone else talks about. Frankly the concerns of the average person from China sound a whole lot like the concerns of the average American.
The American right wing today is basically the Trump party and I watch Trump rallies. What is left of the conventional American right wing that has not become a simpering Donald J. Trump fan club has been marginalised to the point of unimportance. As for China, what do you think the whole building airbases bristling with missile platforms in the South China Sea thing is about? Because they are afraid Phillipino fishing boats might poach Chinese fish? It's mostly about unsinkable aircraft carriers and missile platforms. What are they there for? Five words: The United States Pacific Fleet. If you have completely missed that you need to do some boning up on what Chinese government and military types have been saying since they watched the US disassemble the Saddam Hussein regime in a matter of days back in the 1990s. Ask the Chinese which country they are most afraid of finding themselves at war with and it's not Britain, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, ... its the US and Donald Trump's trade wars have done little to dissuade then of that perception.
1 Word: OIL (Score:2)
You are a troll and an idiot. But you criticized DJT so bonus karma for you.
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It's not so much the issues being raised as the conclusions you are lead to.
China does bad stuff. Okay, what are we going to do about it? Trade war that hurts both us and the average Chinese person who has no idea about and no control over any of it? Be fearful of Chinese products when we know for a fact that our own governments spy on us and are a much bigger threat to us? Trust Cisco and Microsoft's great security instead?
Ask yourself why they suddenly care about all this and not all the other bad things
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"Obvious" is not a synonym for "true".
Note that the proportion of cites over 1 million to total population is less for China that for the United States, and previously it was even lower.
Furthermore, the answer is very depending on the definition of "city" used. Whatever metric used here is not specified, but it comes up with 45 cities for the US. According the US Census Bureau metrics, the US only has 10 cities larger than 1 million. Bother other metrics Russia has 10, 12 or 15 despite having half the popul
Re:Work, Consume, Die, Obey. Tracked by social cre (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a bit solipsistic. Just because you don't know about, say the Cynical Realist movement, doesn't mean things like that don't exist. And engineers in China don't just copy western technology. The US had a similar position in the Industrial Revolution, in that it has very weak patent protection that allowed American inventors to "steal" ideas from abroad and build on them. It wasn't until the US became a significant invention power that it got serious about IP law. Chinese companies clearly copied ("stole") technology from the west, but they're also filing lots of patents in the west on their own inventions.
I would not want to live under the Chinese regime; I don't like their system at all, and I think it limits them reaching their full potential. But it's wishful thinking to treat them as insignificant or somehow mentally inferior.
China, despite the dysfunction of its system, is becoming a formidable rival to the US in economic, technological, military and soft power. They may not be more powerful in any of these areas yet, but they are not negligible -- not anymore. And as for dysfunction, that's the pot calling the kettle black. I think they look at Western regimes and think, "We have our problems, but at least we're not *them*."
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I wouldn't say that. In fact, China is actually having people who are the flagbearers for science fiction.
Art? Just watch a YouTube video of people on the mainland. China actually tends to fund art projects, as opposed to "if it doesn't make money, it shouldn't exist."
Invention? Guess who is either #1 or #2 (it switches), leading the world in industrial, engineering, and chemistry. Guess who spends 15% of its GNP on recruiting talent? While the US and Europe are squabbling amongst each other, China h
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Psst, that "fusion plant" isn't energy-positive.
decade? (Score:2)
Decade begins next year.
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Decade begins next year.
Depends on how you define decade [wikipedia.org]. A recent poll suggests that Americans prefer the definition that says we are now in a new decade.
Re: decade? (Score:1)
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Math is not what people say in a poll. The first decade ended in 10. Unless you want the first decade to have only 9 years.
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Depends on how you define decade. A recent poll suggests that Americans prefer the definition that says we are now in a new decade.
Not surprised, for everything else we start at zero and celebrate 10, 20, 30... years of age, being married, since graduation etc. so obviously we want year 2000 to be 2000 years after some significant event. We want to put 2000 candles on a birthday cake, not Jesus Christ becoming 1999 and starting his 2000th year. It's also linguistically superior that "the sixties" are sixty through sixty-nine. Also the lack of a year zero fucks with the simplest of math, 50 AD and 50 BC is not 100 years apart so by ever
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Re: decade? (Score:1)
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Nope [xkcd.com]
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When this issue came up around Jan 01, 2000 I read a pretty insightful comment about it. The comment was that the 20th century began on Jan 01, 1901 because that was the formal definition and at the time popular culture deferred to authority for such things. But the 20th century ended on Dec 31, 1999 because by then popular culture had come to dominate in such things as naming of centuries, decades, etc. Thus the "20th Century" had 99 years and all subsequent "Centuries" and "Decades" start on the year e
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You are correct. Sadly, most people wouldn't understand why.
The year "0 AD" does not exist. So decades go 1-10 AD, 11-20AD, etc.
Of course, that only applies to the Julian and Gregorian calendars. And the Julian calendar had its own problems (which is why we don't use it anymore).
Running Out Of Coal... (Score:2)
China's rapid industrialization is draining the coal reserves [wikipedia.org] fast...
around 100 billion tons in reserves, only half that is high grade anthracite.
4 billion tons annual consumption [chinadialogue.net]
25 years left then..... less so if the industrialization continues. Ouch.
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China has NO INTENTION of stopping fossil fuels.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: So what? (Score:2)
Jamming millions of people into the cities is *the best* option to deal with waste, sewage, and traffic.
1. It is incomparably more expensive to make sewage networks in rural areas than in cities.
2. It is easier to organise waste collection in one place than to have gazillions of suburb communes each with own garbage dump
3. You have no traffic if people live 5 minute walk away from their workplace
Re: So what? (Score:1)
Overwhelming? (Score:2)
Overwhelming is a very poor word choice in this case. Having X number of people living in cities is not a competition, and in fact, in the opinion of many people (myself included) cities with over 1 million people aren't desirable.
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In the U.S., perhaps not. But Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, Santiago de Chile (well, before the recent uprisings), Zurich, and even the safer parts of Mexico City and Rio and London and Lagos and Johannesburg and Istanbul and Metro Manila, all seem pretty desirable to me, especially as judged by comparison to their surrounding regions which offer far less economic opportunity by comparison.
Exponential growth (Score:2)
So the bloody hell *what*? (Score:1)
NEWS FLASH: Chinese breed like rabbits and jam everyone into cities, film at eleven!
That's what this amounts to.
Slow news day much, Slashdot editors? Was there nothing more important than this? Or are you just China shilling again? They paying you to post this or something?
A lot of this is semantics ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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New York has 8 million people because it absorbed its surrounding suburbs in the late 1800s. Boston, DC, and SF didn't do so, so they only have 0.6 to 0.8 million people, even though their effective metro areas have many more people. Maybe China is just more efficient at consolidating municipal governments than we are :)
There are only 10 US cities with at least one million people based on the 2018 Census Bureau estimate. The 45 US cities mentioned in the summary certainly refers to metropolitan areas and are therefore not sensitive to city annexation and strict city limits.
Also per capita, the 130 large Chinese cities for 1.4 billion people are less than the 45 large US cities for 330 million people. While it's certainly arguable that China has a great deal of urbanization, the summary's claim that "China now has 130 cit
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...and I'm not sure where they are getting those numbers either... As you say there are 10 cities (as of the 2018 numbers) that are > 1M in the US (although there are 2 that were so close there are probably 12 by now if not more) BUT according to the same stats the US has *53 metros that are > 1M so their 45 number isn't correct on either count.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Where I live is a good example: Neither of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis + St. Paul in this case) are even 1/2M but our metro
I think you might be asking ... (Score:1)
... questions to china's leaders how they're going to prevent overpopulation?
I just hope their answers aren't about acquiring 'lebensraum'. ... china already has the largest army in the world, but what for? ... def
The way it looks today is this:
- huge movement towards (new) cities.
- forced movement from overpopulated area's to underpopulated area's (like Tibet !!)
- using infrastructural projects to gain influence in china's neighboring countries Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.
- growing numbers of military units
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Mod this up. Far too many westerners do not understand that ppl under different culture will accept different things. In America, we used to believe in working together. Now, due to the GOP, we are in-fighting just before (the or perhaps first) civil war)
I had to dig deep into the anonymous trollage to find the buried gem there. I think you should have just quoted the relevant bit, or even restated it on your own behalf with a citation of "someone said". (The "people are saying" attribution deserves to die.)
Just now reading Selfie where he spent at least a chapter on considering the basis of collectivist Chinese thinking in contrast to our worship of individualism. Right now he's discussing the rise of the Libertarian form of insanity. My tentative conclu
Re: China is sinking under its own weight (Score:5, Insightful)
The GOP has forced extremism into our political environment. For example, while it was common in the 60s-80s for the politicians to actually work and even party together, in the 90s, the GOP DEMANDED that their ppl NOT engage with the dems esp in the night time. This was pushed more by newt than anybody. Moscow mitch follows the same BS to this day.
For ppl to work together, they need to trust and even like each other. The GOP is responsible for stopping that in DC. How often do we hear from the GOP that DC is not to be trusted, when in fact, the GOP runs around screwing things up.
Scream all you want and try to point fingers elsewhere, but over and over, it is the GOP that continue to screw things up purposely.
Besides, I am pretty convinced that the dems do not have a single brain amongst themselves that is capable of doing as much evil as the GOP has. Look at their current ideas? Nothing innovative and none that will solve issues.
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For a time the Republicans were at fault but then the Democrats sank to their level and they're about equal for now.
Re: China is sinking under its own weight (Score:2)
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Your statement is like blaming all Russians for what Putin does.
Re: China is sinking under its own weight (Score:1)
Lolololol. Nonsense. The Dems haven't committed the crimes the gop have, and even if they did, so what? It doesn't excuse the gop from being criminals. "Yes, your honor, I'm aware that it's illegal but the other guys did it too, so I should be fine, right? That's how this whole crime thing works, isn't it? If someone else also did it too, then no one gets in trouble." Nonsense. Otherwise, we'd just get murders done in pairs. As far as gun laws go, no one is trying to take your guns. No one, no matter how mu
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That'll last until the food and/or water runs out. Then, and only then, will things change. Maybe not for the better.
Oh, and it will take awhile too. See Mao's Great Leap Forward. Communist China will endure a great deal of starvation without its people complaining too much.
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If the west really wants to stop this, they need to force China to trade fairly like they said
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Basically, China is buying these fools for pennies on the Benjie.
Otherwise, I agree with you. These nations in Africa, South America, etc are getting really screwed badly, even after seeing what CHina has been doing to the wes
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Re: China is sinking under its own weight (Score:2)
The thing today is much more the West and the World wanting to buy into Chinese bonds, than vice versa.
A 4% to 6% notes from top tier companies is something unseen in the West for like a decade
Re: China is sinking under its own weight (Score:1)
Re: China is sinking under its own weight (Score:2)
Those bonds of their are greatly undervalued, and it has been historically so. Simply speaking, out of tier 1 infrastructure contractors, not a single one of them ever went bankrupt.
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Re: China is sinking under its own weight (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. That will not bankrupt china.
Probably not, but take it from someone who has lived in Africa for the better part of their adult life - Africans don't believe in repaying debts. In most places they don't even believe in paying in the first place!
China is handing out stuff to Africa that Africa does not intend to, nor will they be able to, pay back. Africa is unique in that the majority of countries in Africa have in the recent past "nationalised" foreign investments (mining, energy, agriculture) by simply having the state send men with guns to take it.
It may not bankrupt China, but it will damn well hurt.
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At least you only gave yourself a 4 this time.