Exhausted by the pressure to succeed as a photographer, Litsky Li accepted a better offer: quit work to become one of China’s growing legions of children paid by their families to stay home.

A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.

Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.

Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.

Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
      82·
      11 months ago

      It sounds strange, but it is something that the Chinese national government has made policy to rein in. This includes a national ban on new skyscrapers and subway lines. If the national government has to ban different types of infrastructure to be built, it can be a sign of excessive spending.

      • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlEnglish
        64·
        11 months ago

        As far as I know, the ban on skyscrapers is due to safety concerns and a sense of identity which make sense, vertical urban planning is good but the best middle point is buildings that are neither too small (because you are not taking advantage of the vertical space) nor too tall. This is not much different from US zoning laws, which work to appease to the car industry lobbyists.

        Regarding subway lines, I can’t find any information about that, just that they banned drinking in such places.

    • APassenger@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      76·
      11 months ago

      Ad hoc and poison the well while being very wide of the mark, too.

      Nicely done.

      My politics align more with Sanders than anyone well known politician. Surplus is surplus and the left needs to retain the right to call a spade a spade.

      Not all infrastructure spend is good. I’m both envious of what they have and stymied by articles documenting unused cities.

      For ease of research, I recommend “China ghost cities.” Maybe those cities will make sense and not every idea has to work, but that is surplus, ergo excess.

      • ghost_laptop@lemmy.mlEnglish
        73·
        11 months ago

        Most of the things that you mention as “ghost cities” and so on are simply they building in the long term, for the people, so that they can be in a later time be populated. Here’s a good example of a YouTube channel who made a video about “ghost” metro station a few years ago, recently they did an update, and it is no longer a place without a purpose but actively being inhabited.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR4EYQ6JFUI

        • APassenger@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
          33·
          11 months ago

          I get that they’re attempting to master plan and be ahead of things. I also know infrastructure is an investment - and sometimes it’s partially a jobs program.

          Not every investment works out.

          I’m not down on them.

          I’m down on low-effort, glib and smug responses and I’m hitting more of it on Lemmy than I hit elsewhere. I’m not sure if this is the result of reddit leading to a population swing or if lemmy already had a lot of “smart” people who could be better than they are.

          If I plan to smear someone. I click their post history. I’ve stopped myself from many errors and found a way to build a common ground. I’ve also found fools and decided they weren’t worth it.

          But if I plan to be dismissive, I do the research.

          • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
            21·
            11 months ago

            If you’re getting consistently rolled in the place with all the smart people, have you considered the possibility that you say dumb stuff?