In both countries, this mass movement of people was paralleled by a rapid growth of cities and an increase in urbanization. In 1860, the US was still mostly a rural country, with an urbanization rate of around 20%. By 1920, urbanization had passed 50%, reaching 75% in the more industrialized Northeast. The U.S. didn’t have a single city larger than 1 million people in 1860, and the population of the 10 largest cities combined was only around 2.7 million. By 1920, there were three (nearly four) U.S. cities with a population of 1 million or more, and the population of the 10 largest cities was more than 15 million. China likewise went from an urbanization rate of less than 20% in 1980 to more than 60% in 2020, as millions of people poured into its cities. Shenzhen had a population of around 30,000 in 1980; by 2020, it had a population of more than 17 million, and was the third largest city in China.
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At the high-end of the income distribution, both the U.S. and China saw the emergence of a new, ultra wealthy class. Osnos notes that “In 1850, America had fewer than twenty millionaires; by 1900 it had forty thousand”; China likewise has seen a rapid increase in the number of billionaires from virtually none before 2000 to hundreds today. By 2014, China was “the world’s fastest growing source of new billionaires.”
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In both countries, this upheaval created huge amounts of opportunity. With the old structures of life falling away, and new ones taking shape, there was much to gain by those willing to take risks, regardless of whether you had the right background or traditional status markets. In both countries new businesses would constantly spring up, fail, and then get replaced by different businesses, and people would quickly move from one opportunity to another. Both nations seemed full of strivers, people who would scramble and scrape to get ahead, and were rewarded for doing so.
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Most surprising of all to me was how much of what seems like a quintessentially American culture seems to have been recapitulated in modern China. In Factory Girls, migrants constantly move from one factory to another for new job opportunities, and many work their way up from assembly line workers to managers of entire factories (people changed jobs so often that mobile numbers were the only reliable way to reach them — office or dorm numbers were quickly out of date). Chang notes that migrants’ “tolerance for risk was astonishing. If they didn’t like a boss or a coworker, they jumped somewhere else and never looked back.” Evan Osnos likewise notes in his aptly titled Age of Ambition that “I had come to expect that Chinese friends would make financial decisions that I found uncomfortably risky: launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job.” Ambition, which had traditionally been cautioned against, became something to be celebrated[.]
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An obsession with self-reliance also peppers Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls: a constant refrain, repeated by migrant girls themselves and in the magazines and media that cater to them, is that “you can only rely on yourself” (not surprising since workers are far from home, with few social ties, and constantly changing factories.) Migrants are constantly taking classes to try to improve themselves and their career prospects: often in English and computers, but also things like injection molding machine operation and how to work in an office.
With institutions constantly in flux and being reshaped, and with culture and social mores untethered, these worlds of immense opportunity also contain an immense number of scams, schemes, and grift.
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China seems to have (or had) both a similar Wild West aspect and an obsession with economic growth. Chang’s factory girls are constantly at risk from being scammed or grifted by opportunists: bus drivers who take their ticket then kick them off, con-men who trick them out of their money, peddlers selling get-rich-quick schemes or dubious training courses, sales organizations which are really pyramid schemes, factory owners who force them to work for less than minimum wage or for more than the legal number of hours. At the same time, they’re constantly skirting the law themselves: using fake IDs to freely move around, lying about their skills and abilities to get hired, and buying counterfeit diplomas.
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The most interesting thing about these parallels, to me, is that the U.S. and China in many ways were starting from very different places. Prior to its opening up, China’s economy was entirely state-owned and state-planned, and its economic expansion was coupled with unwinding much of the state enterprise machinery, letting small businesses form and markets bloom.
The U.S., on the other hand, was on the other end of the spectrum. Prior to its economic expansion it had an incredibly weak state, and economy driven by very small enterprises. Its development was accompanied by the creation of large, powerful companies and institutions, and moving away from the “invisible hand” of the market and towards the “visible hand” of exchanges of goods and services mediated within very large organizations.
Interesting article that does draw a lot of parallels but doesn't fall for the false trope of "history repeating itself". While it often seems like it does, the more you go into the details and...
Interesting article that does draw a lot of parallels but doesn't fall for the false trope of "history repeating itself". While it often seems like it does, the more you go into the details and the context, the more distinct situations can and will be. In other words, “History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”, which this article for the most part does a reasonable job exploring. Although at times it does lean towards repeating rather than rhyming.
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I figured I might want to add why I think the distinction is important. Often, people that repeat the "history repeating itself" trope see it as something to not only draw parallels on what happened. They see it as something to "predict" the future. Which simply isn't possible except for maybe the broadest of prediction making them effectively meaningless or those in the very near future that they are not all that useful either.
At most, you will be able to say how things "might" develop based on the past. But given the different context of in this case culture, period, government forms and technologies that's all you can do.
Yeah, the way I think of it is that analogies are not a way to prove anything, but they are way to add some possibilities that you might not have considered to what you can imagine. Increasing the...
Yeah, the way I think of it is that analogies are not a way to prove anything, but they are way to add some possibilities that you might not have considered to what you can imagine. Increasing the number of possible outcomes (via more imagination) and reducing them (via some kind of process of elimination for things that can’t happen) are opposite operations. They are ways of increasing and reducing uncertainty.
From the article:
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Interesting article that does draw a lot of parallels but doesn't fall for the false trope of "history repeating itself". While it often seems like it does, the more you go into the details and the context, the more distinct situations can and will be. In other words, “History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”, which this article for the most part does a reasonable job exploring. Although at times it does lean towards repeating rather than rhyming.
Edit:
I figured I might want to add why I think the distinction is important. Often, people that repeat the "history repeating itself" trope see it as something to not only draw parallels on what happened. They see it as something to "predict" the future. Which simply isn't possible except for maybe the broadest of prediction making them effectively meaningless or those in the very near future that they are not all that useful either.
At most, you will be able to say how things "might" develop based on the past. But given the different context of in this case culture, period, government forms and technologies that's all you can do.
Yeah, the way I think of it is that analogies are not a way to prove anything, but they are way to add some possibilities that you might not have considered to what you can imagine. Increasing the number of possible outcomes (via more imagination) and reducing them (via some kind of process of elimination for things that can’t happen) are opposite operations. They are ways of increasing and reducing uncertainty.