China’s PPP GDP is only 25% larger than that of the US? Come on people… who are we kidding? Last year, China generated twice as much electricity as the US, produced 12.6 times as much steel and 22 times as much cement. China’s shipyards accounted for over 50% of the world’s output while US production was negligible. In 2023, China produced 30.2 million vehicles, almost three times more than the 10.6 million made in the US.

On the demand side, 26 million vehicles were sold in China last year, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the US. Chinese consumers bought 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the US. As a country, China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much seafood as the US. Chinese shoppers spent twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers.

In 2023, Chinese travelers took 620 million flights, 25% fewer than the 819 million flights taken by Americans, but Chinese travelers also took 3 billion trips on high-speed rail (and 685 million on traditional rail), significantly more than the 28m Amtrak trips.

It’s not that we think the World Bank has done a bad job. It’s that we believe China’s NBS, contrary to popular opinion, has been lowballing GDP for decades and the World Bank has to work within the confines of the NBS’s reported data. This was politically important decades ago for WTO concessions and it is politically important today to maintain developing economy status as China makes a play for leadership of the Global South.

We believe China’s GDP and PPP GDP are lowballed by an incomplete transition from the Material Product System (MPS) of national accounts, which excludes services by design. The World Bank is likely dutifully doing its sums with goods consumption in China multiples of the US but measuring services consumption as a fraction of the US.

China’s NBS stood its ground on a conceptual level. Rightly or wrongly, the Leninist MPS considers services necessary costs of material production rather than real value creation. In China’s first attempt at converting MPS to SNA in 1985, it tacked on a ludicrously low 13% to the MPS number and called it China’s services GDP.

Adherence to UNSNA [United Nations System of National Accounts] has caused a breakdown in the meaning of GDP. As necessary services become an ever larger share of Western economies, their growth does not appear to result in discernable improvements in living standards.

Are US healthcare and universities twice as good as they were in the year 2000? If US households have not gotten vastly improved healthcare, education, housing and childcare over the past two decades, then inflation has been systematically underreported and GDP growth may have, in fact, been less than 1% per annum (instead of 2%), which equals stagnation given 0.8% per annum population growth. This may go a long way in explaining popular anger and the meltdown of American politics.

China's economy is much larger than everyone says it is (and America's economy is much smaller), but it's beneficial to keep up this ruse. 韬光养晦

https://archive.ph/SYrtO

Ideally in hanzi and pinyin, but not a huge dealbreaker if no pinyin because pleco fucking rocks. It'd be cool to have examples for masc, femme, and gender neutral names. TIA!

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202405/01/WS663186e2a31082fc043c4f91.html

Pictured: Israel Epstein

I want to volunteer and stuff, but that would also make them say "this guy is trying too hard, definitely a spy."

hard mode: Assume I'm already married and can't remarry a Chinese citizen.

I thought i would try to learn to read Chinese characters. I saw a thing somewhere once that said characters are organized by the number of brush-strokes in them, so in the past you kinda had to already know what you were looking up to find anything on it. I got the internet though!

世 - this is the first character I learned, and according to Google translate, it means 'world'. Wiktionary says it means other things to, like 'society', 'generation', even 'woman' and 'marriage'?? those last two feel like they're more contextual.

[stolen from wiktionary]

seeing it written out, it makes me think first of the horizon, with pillars or towers rising above it. shadows extend from them. it makes me think if how people discovered/verified the curve of the Earth by measuring shadows, so it seems fitting.

The next one I've learned is "大", which appears to be a suffix meaning 'big/much/very'. it's supposed to look like a little guy with arms stretched out to emphasis how BIG something is! ...again, going on Wiktionary for this...

Which gives me

世大 - BIG WORLD (google thinks this says university...)

...am i doing this right? Or, at least, not terribly wrong? I kinda wanna hit the point where I can read Mao or Three Body Problem in the original text.