Prática de Shadowing: The REAL reason China built so much - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
Escolha um modo de prática
Cada modo abre uma sala de prática em tela cheia.
742 frases
Se as frases estiverem muito curtas ou longas, clique em Edit para ajustá-las.
1
Okay.
2
Hey, um.
3
Hey.
4
I got your package.
5
And I'm not sure what I'm doing here or looking at or what I'm supposed to do next.
6
So your task is to use some of these shapes, not all of them, to, from memory, assemble the Chinese flag.
7
Okay.
8
Okay, wait, why am I doing this?
9
This all began with some videos.
10
China is next level.
11
This might be the biggest building I've ever seen.
12
If they tried to build something like this in America, it would take at least two decades.
13
Okay, this is insane.
14
This city does not look real, bro.
15
It looks 4K.
16
Videos that started appearing on my feed a couple years ago.
17
Every time I come to China, I just realize how far behind my country is.
18
China's doing some things.
19
I don't understand how the architects were able to build a city like this.
20
Brain stations in China are absolutely insane.
21
Videos of people, most of them from the United States, experiencing something that felt genuinely brand new and exciting.
22
Next to is one of the most impressive modern marvels of engineering.
23
Modern China.
24
Look at the twinkles!
25
Look at the twinkles!
26
Oh, they've gone off!
27
Ah!
28
It's all coordinated!
29
China is decades ahead.
30
I read an article about these videos, spoke to the guy who wrote it.
31
They're just surprised by like technical innovation essentially.
32
A tray to go into a building.
33
These videos are fun and they're awe -inspiring, but they also made me start to wonder, what am I actually looking at here?
34
What is this?
35
How did China build all of this stuff and what does it say?
36
No, you cannot make this video.
37
No, but I just need to look into this.
38
You are in the middle of producing a documentary series that releases in a few weeks.
39
It's true.
40
In a few weeks' time, you will see
41
The Human Element, my new adventure show where I travel all around the world to find human stories
42
that teach us about the most important issues happening around the world.
43
I can't wait to share it with you.
44
It's coming soon.
45
Anyway, the fact
46
that this new series has been all of my focus pretty
47
much all year is actually part of why you've seen so much of this guy lately.
48
This is Adam.
49
Adam is my producer, and he has been diving deep into many of the things
50
that I've been deeply curious about and would make a video about, but I haven't had the time or focus to actually dive deep.
51
So Adam has dived deep, and he's very good at it.
52
I would actually argue that you should spend more time talking about how awesome I am, I think I would say.
53
So when I started fixating on China and its infrastructure and why it looks like this, I turned to Adam for help.
54
I can imagine an explainer section that's like, let's get to the bottom of how
55
China, how China's government and society actually works.
56
How decisions are made, who controls power, how the economy works.
57
That could be interesting.
58
Adam and I made videos this year about fascism, oligarchy, democracy.
59
So I knew that
60
if we worked on this together we'd have to get into
61
it from a specific angle to look at what the system is behind all of this stuff.
62
What are the systems that made
63
China look like this?
64
And a central question for me is, is this communism?
65
Like China's communists, right?
66
And to be totally clear, I know that what we're looking at in these videos is a snapshot of a very specific slice of China.
67
That's what a lot of you are thinking right now.
68
This isn't all of China.
69
This is rich coastal cities that don't represent most of China and Chinese people's experiences.
70
China is obviously not a perfect society.
71
And yet, they're able to build a lot of things very quickly.
72
And my main hypothesis that I think a lot of us share is, well, they're able to do it because they're a dictatorship.
73
They've got one leader who calls all the shots.
74
When you're a dictatorship, you can just wave your magic wand and stuff gets built.
75
If a leader wants a bridge, they build a bridge.
76
But that turns out to not quite be it.
77
The truth, as we learned more, turned out to be much more interesting and surprising and informative about what modern
78
China actually is.
79
And so that's what we are going to talk about today.
80
What is the system that produced the China we see today?
81
What do we call it?
82
Where did it come from and how has it been able to so quickly make all of this?
83
Okay, so why did you make me make a flag?
84
So we're going to get to that in a second, but first I know that one of your biggest questions was like, is China actually communist?
85
Yes.
86
Modern China, to me, feels very clearly capitalist and not communist.
87
Right.
88
So one of the first things we're going to talk about is why that distinction gets complicated, right?
89
Because we have been taught our whole lives to think of economies in terms of either state -run,
90
like the Soviet Union, or market -driven, like the United States.
91
So in the Soviet Union, where the state ran the economy, businesses were owned by the state land was owned by the state
92
and the decisions behind what the economy was actually producing also
93
decided by the state whereas in a market -driven economy like
94
ours businesses are typically privately owned most property typically privately owned
95
and what gets produced it is determined by the market to me
96
that was the model that i always understood you know capitalism versus communism
97
and china completely upends that right so in china you have multiple entire industries that are state -owned,
98
like oil, like airlines, like telecommunications.
99
They also, though, have an enormous private sector.
100
Think about Huawei.
101
Think about Alibaba.
102
Land in China is always publicly or collectively owned.
103
So it's either owned by the state or owned by collectives of citizens.
104
But individuals and developers can lease land.
105
And factories and houses and apartments can be owned.
106
So you can own your house in China, but you don't own the land that it's on.
107
China's government has poured tons of money into sectors of the economy, like electric vehicles, batteries, solar, semiconductors, AI.
108
But also, there are huge parts of their economy that are market dictated.
109
Like, they didn't make WeChat.
110
There are tons of industries and very successful companies in China
111
that did not get help from the government in the same way at all.
112
They do not have a communist, Soviet -style, centrally planned, state -run economy.
113
Wait, Max is in this video?
114
Oh, you mean our colleague
115
Max Fisher, host of the New Press channel, The Bigger Picture, a former
116
New York Times correspondent who has spent a lot of time reporting on China.
117
A zillion conversations with people who are from China, China experts, China economists, China political scientists.
118
Okay, so China is communist and capitalist then, right?
119
It has features of both.
120
But for an ordinary Chinese citizen, a lot of their life would basically look completely familiar to you.
121
You earn a salary, you have money in a bank account, you shop at privately owned businesses,
122
you order food from restaurants that are competing with each other.
123
You could buy a car, you could buy an apartment, you could invest your money.
124
If we're asking if China is communist, if we look at only their economy, that's going to give us a really strange answer.
125
That's what this graphic, that system of thinking about communist versus capitalist that I've always had, this is looking at the economy.
126
But then where is communism in everyday life then?
127
Is it even there at all?
128
Okay, so now you can show me your flag.
129
This is what I did.
130
Yeah, not quite.
131
You came very close.
132
China flag.
133
Oh, so it's not this.
134
It is a big old star.
135
Yes.
136
So it's one big star and four small stars, basically.
137
You came close.
138
My question for you is, do you know what anything on this flag represents?
139
No clue.
140
Okay.
141
So the four small stars on the flag represent what, back in the 1940s, they considered to be the four social classes.
142
And if you're looking at the actual flag, you'll notice that they are not all upright.
143
Those four small stars are kind of like pointed.
144
They're turned around a little bit.
145
The tops of them are all pointed towards the big star.
146
And the big star is the Chinese Communist Party.
147
And the reason we are looking at this is that the party is not just in charge of China.
148
China is actually built around the party.
149
But I have a kind of a dumb question here.
150
What is, quote, the party?
151
Like we talk about China's Communist Party.
152
And I know what political parties here are.
153
Like here in the West, we have the Democrats, the Republicans whatever, but this feels different.
154
I don't think this is the same.
155
The Chinese Communist Party seems like a different thing and I do not understand it.
156
Yeah, so I have been thinking about it like the population of China is like, you know, one and a half billion, right?
157
Only about seven percent of these people are members of the party.
158
So small slice, but in China that is like 100 million people.
159
Now, these party members are members of a club, basically.
160
It's not a job, right?
161
They are members.
162
And they join for different reasons, right?
163
You can join because ideologically you feel very aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.
164
Maybe you just want to serve your country.
165
Joining the party can help you get a leg up in your careers
166
because the party is so woven into the different institutions of the country, private and public.
167
And that gigantic membership of people who are just
168
Communist Party members, that is the pool from which the party recruits this even smaller group of professional party officials.
169
Got it.
170
It's a small fraction of total party membership, which is to say it is still millions of people.
171
These are the party officials, and they are part of a hierarchical organization that functions kind of like a corporation, even more than, you know,
172
state -owned industry or public land ownership.
173
What we're looking at right now, the party, this is the most communist thing about China.
174
So, let's talk about China's government.
175
Like most governments, it exists at a lot of different levels.
176
At the top, you've got like president, prime minister, and as you go down, you have things like state council,
177
provincial government, municipal or city governments, county governments, township governments.
178
Fine.
179
That's easy to understand.
180
That's basically every government.
181
But at the same time, what makes it unique is that right alongside that government, there is this thing called the Communist Party.
182
It's like a parallel structure.
183
For every town government, there is a corresponding town party committee.
184
And this continues all the way up the ladder.
185
Party offices that mirror the government office.
186
And the most important thing to understand about this mirror structure is that all of the power is here with the party.
187
At any level, the party leader, the party organization is in charge.
188
So if you have a city mayor and a city party leader, on this diagram, it looks like they're kind of on equal footing.
189
Like they hold positions at roughly the same level.
190
But that's actually not true.
191
The party leader is actually the one in charge.
192
They're the ones who decide what happens.
193
They make the big decisions.
194
And the mayor mostly just makes them happen.
195
They're the administrator.
196
What's really important to understand is that there is the party, which is the backbone of the entire government, and then there's the government,
197
which does a lot of the policy implementation.
198
Okay, but people in the government, like that mayor we were talking about, he's actually a party official too.
199
Basically anyone with any power in the government is a part of the Chinese Communist Party.
200
The party is both in charge of and woven into the government itself.
201
Which means if we follow the party structure all the way to the top, this is where real power lies in the country.
202
It's like here, this pyramid.
203
This is a diagram that you'll see if you search Chinese Communist Party hierarchy or whatever, but we're going to make our own.
204
You've got this group of around 200 decision makers.
205
This is the central committee.
206
And within that, 24 of these people are members of even the more elite decision making group called the Politburo.
207
Within that, currently, there are seven people that belong to the Politburo's Standing Committee.
208
These are effectively the people running China.
209
There are seven of them.
210
And there is one guy who holds the title of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.
211
Today, that is this guy, Xi Jinping.
212
He is also the president.
213
But remember what we said, the governmental role.
214
President is actually less powerful than the same role in the party.
215
The general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party is the way more important role.
216
That's where Xi Jinping gets his power.
217
If you're struggling with this, I don't blame you.
218
Just think of these two systems, the party and the government, as two parallel entities, but they're wrapped around each other,
219
but with one indisputably in charge and more powerful.
220
There's a name for this system.
221
It's called a party state system.
222
And this is the reason why
223
China is communist.
224
It's not just because they call themselves a communist party, but this party state system is a Leninist concept, like Vladimir Lenin.
225
Lenin's contribution to communism was the role of having a vanguard party, both in the revolution to lead the revolution.
226
But once that party is now in power, it actually runs the state in ways that are different from other types of states.
227
All these positions of leadership are controlled by the party to make sure that its priorities, its policies are being followed.
228
A state controlled by a communist party, a vanguard party is what he called it.
229
Which is what Lenin says is the vehicle necessary to reach communism where a society has no classes,
230
where the things that produce wealth are collectively owned by everyone.
231
This is something that the Chinese Communist Party states as its goal still.
232
So they aren't just communists because they call themselves the Communist Party.
233
They actually have real governmental machinery that comes from the communist tradition.
234
This is a Marxist -Leninist idea.
235
And what turns out to be really interesting is this question, right?
236
If this thing is the system that created the China that we see today, how did they do that?
237
How did it happen?
238
How did it make that happen?
239
Because there is a reason that we are making this video about China and not like
240
North Korea or another communist country, right?
241
Why are we so interested in how
242
China works specifically?
243
And the answer is kind of in this chart.
244
Over the last 40 years, extreme poverty around the world has fallen by a ton, right?
245
And that drop has been driven by several countries that have had a very dramatic drop in extreme poverty.
246
So there's India.
247
This is Vietnam.
248
This is Bangladesh.
249
And then you have China.
250
Wow.
251
Jeez.
252
And that's a big part of the question that we're asking here.
253
The real question is, what was it about this structure that made this miracle look specifically like this?
254
And I think an easy answer would be, China is a dictatorship.
255
There's one man at the top.
256
He can do whatever he wants.
257
And that includes lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, if that's what he wants.
258
But it's not quite that easy.
259
For this part of the story, we're going to actually start at the end of an era, the end of Mao Zedong,
260
the founder of communist China.
261
He was the leader of China for about 30 years.
262
Now, we're not going to get too deeply into Mao in this video.
263
We're not going to litigate his legacy, partly because by the time he died in 1976,
264
China almost could not have possibly looked more different than it did today.
265
Like, I can't emphasize this enough.
266
China was poor.
267
Economically, it's in chaos.
268
Politically, it's in chaos.
269
The country is not remotely in a state of order.
270
And that's here on this chart.
271
Mao dies in the 70s, and there's a power struggle on who's going to be the next leader.
272
And the one who emerges is this guy, Deng Xiaoping.
273
He's going to have an enormous impact on China's future, but in a very different way than Mao did.
274
Mao was kind of this crazy romantic.
275
He was a warlord.
276
He was a poet.
277
What exactly is the opposite of a poet?
278
Deng coming into power is… he's a pragmatist.
279
He's not a hardliner.
280
I mean, there's really no way to tell the story of how
281
China got the way it did without talking about Deng Xiaoping.
282
He was a party guy, but he was also a pragmatist he saw that
283
China had a big problem, that China's poverty was actually a threat to the Communist Party.
284
It is not clear that the Chinese experiment is going to work at this point when Mao dies.
285
Deng looks around at China at the end of Mao's reign,
286
and he knows that the future of the Communist Party is tied to the future of China's economy.
287
The people need to eat if they're going to continue to let the Chinese Communist Party rule them.
288
So he begins to make changes that are going to completely transform China.
289
And one of the most important changes he makes is probably one of the most boring, but we got to talk about it.
290
Let's go back to this diagram of government and party.
291
There's actually something kind of misleading about this.
292
It shows the hierarchy, but it doesn't show the organization.
293
What do I mean by that?
294
What I mean is like, it makes it look like there's just kind of like one ladder
295
and there's like the same amount of people in each of these rungs.
296
But remember, as you go down, you're getting to like the state level, then the city and the town level,
297
each of these have large groups of people who are leaders of each of these gajillion cities around China.
298
So you have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of local governments, like millions and millions of local officials.
299
And like any big hierarchical organization, among all of these millions of officials,
300
there are lots of ambitious people who are motivated by the very rational thing of wanting to be promoted.
301
They want to move up, their job.
302
They want more money, more power.
303
Totally normal, reasonable impulse.
304
But multiply that by several million huge population and suddenly you have this big beehive.
305
Okay, so how do you get a promotion?
306
Well under Mao, the main thing that these worker bees were rewarded for was revolutionary credentials.
307
How deeply committed they were to like the ideology of communism, loyalty to the party, your fervor, your might for the communist revolution.
308
And Mao kind of wanted to all centralize around him.
309
There was a cult of personality around him.
310
But Dung, the pragmatist, starts to tweak this.
311
He decentralizes power away from him and his central government and makes loyalty to a single leader less important.
312
He wants younger, better educated, more technically competent officials to come up through the ranks.
313
To try to emphasize a a little bit more practical knowledge, rather than straightforward occurrence to Mao Zedong thought, Marxist -Leninist thought.
314
When you think of China technocratic governance, that is a Deng Xiaoping thing.
315
Technocratic governance, what does that mean?
316
Let me just put it this way.
317
What Deng does is he changes the way these officials are graded, what they're judged by, how they're able to move up in the party.
318
He lays out new priorities.
319
At the bottom of the system for like county level people or city level leaders, their key task is to is to make the economy grow.
320
To make the economy grow.
321
Economic development.
322
It's a little bit like a computer game that to get out of one round you need certain skills.
323
It's very mind -boggling when we think about it from the western especially American context.
324
Every government official in China is graded, like literally graded with a grade sheet and I've seen these grade sheets
325
and it has like you know a hundred items on it.
326
But right at the top in big letters is economic development.
327
This is now dictating the decisions of millions of powerful officials all across the country who know
328
that if they want to move up in the Chinese Communist Party, make the economy grow.
329
It's really predictable who gets promoted based on increases of GDP,
330
increases of tax revenue, increases of investment into the economy.
331
And suddenly local officials in a number of places have a
332
huge new way to please their boss by finding creative ways to stimulate economic growth.
333
That's very strong motivation because, you know, you want to move up.
334
The people who led those places saying, my route to personal success within the Communist Party is to really knock it out of the park economically
335
and I'm going to color outside the lines to do that and that being rewarded.
336
So Deng the pragmatist has just changed the incentive structure of all of China
337
and this is going to determine basically the next 30 to 40 years of what happens next.
338
It'll be a major engine to China's economic miracle.
339
He also creates special economic zones,
340
basically a sandbox where people who have been indoctrinated in communist economics can start to play around with capitalism.
341
Essentially that's where this side of the ledger begins.
342
Private companies that are taking investment and trying to make money in a free market,
343
but only in a few parts of China, not everywhere at first.
344
Dung is not done yet.
345
There's one other thing he does that's kind of wonky, but it's also super important.
346
He changes how the country's finances work.
347
For a lot of the Mao era, all the provinces and local governments basically sent their revenue right back to the central government.
348
And in return, the central government would give them each a fixed flat budget.
349
This was known as eating out of one big pot.
350
And while it offers a kind of fairness across all the regions,
351
Dung realized that it doesn't really incentivize local governments to try to earn more revenue.
352
You get the same budget no matter how much tax revenue you bring in.
353
So he changes it.
354
So now the local governments only have to send to the
355
central government an agreed upon amount of their tax revenue every year.
356
And anything above that, they get to keep for themselves, for their government.
357
Dung called this eating in separate kitchens.
358
So eating and separation is a gigantic deal for the Chinese economy, right?
359
It means that not only do all these local officials in all these places have this personal incentive for generating economic activity,
360
the governments themselves can now benefit from it.
361
In other words, it's not just individuals wanting promotions.
362
It's now governments that get money to play with.
363
What it kicks off is local officials in rural areas, they start to go into business.
364
They start factories that are owned by these towns.
365
Towns and villages start to open factories.
366
They're called Township and Village Enterprises, TVEs.
367
It's a factory that might be owned by the local government.
368
Government might choose the managers of the factory.
369
They might get a bank loan.
370
Government can get the land.
371
And the government collects the revenue when the factory succeeds.
372
And TVEs are hugely profitable.
373
They make tons of money.
374
China's very rural.
375
It's agricultural.
376
And it finally starts to industrialize.
377
Farmers across the country are now becoming trained factory workers.
378
They're basically in the country, out in the country, is becoming industrial.
379
And they have a phrase for it that is called leaving the land but not the countryside.
380
So you have like
381
Western media noticing these small villages that are getting rich through a strange blend of communism and capitalism.
382
Then it's the 90s, and instead of Deng, we have this new guy in charge, and Beijing realizes that they have kind of a problem.
383
Since the switch to eating in separate kitchens, they're like, we kind of miss the old days of having all this money
384
that we used to get from the local governments.
385
And so they switch it up again.
386
It's complicated, but the very, very summarized version is that the local governments now owe a ton more money to the central government.
387
They get to keep a lot less of their tax revenue.
388
And what that means is that these TVEs,
389
these factories, have been one of the best ways for local officials to get promoted for spurring economic development.
390
Rural factories, they generate tons of tax revenue.
391
They become less financially rewarding for local governments because Beijing is taking a bigger share of those taxes that they generate.
392
So the officials in those places start looking for another way to get their promotions via economic activity.
393
And another way that the local governments actually can benefit from directly.
394
So remember how we said that land in China is publicly owned?
395
It's a little bit more complicated.
396
Urban land is state -owned.
397
Rural land is owned by a village collective, which is not the same thing as the government's collective of the people who live there.
398
So this is a town center.
399
This is on state -owned urban land.
400
And then this is the outskirts of the town.
401
It's rural land owned by a village collective.
402
The state does not own it, but also that land is not very valuable yet.
403
What the government will do is they requisition some of that land.
404
They compensate the people who live there, but it's not buying it.
405
They forcibly take the land, basically.
406
So now it's state -owned land.
407
They develop it, they build infrastructure on it, and now the value of the land goes up because it has roads, it has whatever.
408
And now that they've made that land so valuable, they can lease the rights to use the land, not sell the land itself,
409
but they can lease the rights to the land to a developer.
410
And now that they've made that land so valuable,
411
they can lease those rights for a much higher price than it costs them to acquire and develop it.
412
And the money they make this way, they don't have to send to Beijing.
413
They keep it.
414
So the developer builds, and that increases the value of the land even more and the surrounding parcels.
415
So now the government, which still owns this land, now owns land that is way more valuable than it was.
416
And now they can even borrow money from banks using that land as collateral.
417
And that gives them even more money to build.
418
This, after this change in the way that
419
China's finances work in 1994, becomes a huge new engine of China's economy called land financing.
420
So now it's the new best way for local governments to make money
421
and for local officials to generate that economic activity that they need.
422
And this is unusual.
423
In a normal market economy, development, like what gets built, is determined mostly by demand demand.
424
A private developer will see that people want houses or offices or factories, and they say, we can make money if we build these things.
425
That's true in China too, right?
426
That's not there.
427
But there's this other huge incentive in the mix, which is that the act of building itself is good for the local government,
428
and it's good for the people who work for the local government and for the party.
429
It brings in revenue, it juices economic activity, and by this time, the 1990s,
430
that goal of economic activity has taken a very particular shape at the top of the scorecard, an increase in the gross domestic product, GDP.
431
This is how it gets formalized and it becomes what's known in the evaluation system as a hard target.
432
Things like providing health care, providing education, and cleaning up the environment, those are nice things to do, but not sufficient to get promoted.
433
What you really need to do is make the economy grow.
434
How high can you push economic growth?
435
And there were periods of time when economic growth in China was very high indeed, in which particular poor provinces might be growing at 15%,
436
20 % in the earlier years of economic reform.
437
And now, because basically those TVEs, those factories, they're not giving the local governments the revenue stream they once did.
438
Real estate and land development are doing that.
439
And so something shifts dramatically.
440
They pour money into infrastructure.
441
So new roads, new port facilities, new telecommunications, a new airport.
442
Short -term gains because you're creating jobs, you're creating value that way.
443
There's genuinely so much more I wish I could have included in this video.
444
This one, the oligarchy one, the fascism one, all these videos that we've done on these big topics.
445
Luckily, that's why NewPress .com exists, where we can go beyond the video and talk deeper about these topics.
446
If you are watching this before October 20th, our producer Adam is going to be doing a live Q &A for NewPress members.
447
You can go sign up at NewPress .com.
448
Being a member supports this work, but it also gets you in on these types of Q &As,
449
as well as letting you watch the videos early and ad -free.
450
My documentary series
451
The Human Element is coming out soon.
452
The members made that happen.
453
And so because of that, I am putting the episodes up early and ad -free on NewPress.
454
Thank you everyone who supports.
455
I really appreciate it.
456
Back to the video.
457
By now we've established that all over the giant country of China, local officials are competing with each other.
458
They're juicing the economy however they can.
459
And now, one of the most important tools in their toolkit is building stuff.
460
When your boss arrives from Beijing or from the provincial capitals in your local city,
461
you can bring them around and say that this is what I've achieved.
462
Look at the high -rise building.
463
Look at the five -star hotels that we have built.
464
So those are kind of ostentatious legal achievement that they can sell to their superiors which will look good.
465
on their CV, then they get promoted very quickly.
466
Okay, but hang on a sec.
467
This competition among officials around the country to move up in the party can't possibly explain all of China's infrastructure development.
468
Like, there are huge projects, like this massive dam.
469
It's like the largest dam in the world.
470
It's called the Three Quarges Dam.
471
Or China's trains.
472
They've got these rail networks that looked like this in 2008.
473
And then by 2020, they looked like this high -speed rail all over the country.
474
This wasn't just some province leader trying to like get a win.
475
These are nationally coordinated projects.
476
No single local or provincial official could have made all of these happen.
477
But here's the thing, because if you look at something like where the high -speed rail network got built,
478
local officials in each of these cities and all of the stops along the way,
479
each of them benefit from having a station built in their city.
480
They wanted that for the reasons we've already talked about.
481
The land value would increase, economic development and activity would increase.
482
And that's what they're scored on, remember.
483
Which brings us back to some of those images that we saw at the beginning of the story.
484
A train going through a building, an incredible skyline built over the course of just a few decades, high -speed trains.
485
China's infrastructure today is the envy of the world.
486
And when we wonder how
487
China got these things, what we just explained is a huge part of the answer.
488
This enormous nationwide competition among officials all over the country to develop, to grow, and especially to build.
489
But let's talk about some of the flip side here, because this system also produced its own kind of weird outcomes.
490
Guizhou province in China's southwest is a poor, inaccessible, heavily mountainous province.
491
It's about the fourth poorest province in China.
492
When I was traveling around in Guizhou.
493
I spent about five days cycling through the province.
494
What I noticed was that it has much better infrastructure than essentially anywhere in New York or California.
495
Guizhou, which is only slightly larger than the state of New York, but for some reason has twice as many highways.
496
Look at some of these bridges.
497
These bridges go over massive gorges.
498
They're some of the tallest in the world.
499
This is the Wajang Canyon Bridge in Guizhou, China, and it's just another reason why I LOVE CHINA!
500
But weirdly, if you look around, you see that these are kind of bridges to nowhere.
501
You might remember that 15 years ago, news started going around of these Chinese ghost cities.
502
Ghost cities.
503
Ghost cities.
504
Ghost cities.
505
Ghost cities.
506
Ghost cities.
507
Like this one, Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia.
508
Look at Zhongdong here in Henan province.
509
Entire cities built not necessarily for people, but to juice GDP totally empty.
510
Okay, but it's not that simple because look at Kangbashi today.
511
Look at Zhongdong.
512
People eventually did move into a lot of these places.
513
They did start using those bridges to nowhere.
514
So these ghost cities or these bridges to nowhere don't necessarily show us that
515
China built too much or in a stupid way.
516
Sometimes when you're looking at a ghost city, what you're looking at is that they were just building so fast that they outpaced demand.
517
But this does show us that this whole operation, this whole system depends on a kind of unlimited demand,
518
that there will always be more people to come move into your city or use your trains.
519
And that has been a decent bet in a country that has one and a half billion people.
520
But unlimited demand is not real.
521
China becomes, and they see this coming, they know this is coming for many years, very literally a victim of their own success.
522
So if we go back to the chart of China eliminating poverty, the percent of China's population in poverty, if you look at it,
523
you do see a kind of inflection point, right?
524
In the early 2010s, where it almost gets to zero and then kind of slows down a little bit, right?
525
Again, incredible accomplishment, but it does slow down a little bit.
526
Close to zero, not quite there.
527
And if you look at a chart of their GDP growth, in other words, like how much higher was their GDP than last year?
528
For decades, this version of the chart shows like 1985 to 2010, China's GDP growth was like around 10 % every year, which is crazy, right?
529
Like places like the US have been lucky to hit four or 5%.
530
But if you expand the chart past like 2010, you see that at that same moment in the early 2010s, China's GDP growth slows down,
531
right, at that same inflection point.
532
And those two things are related to each other
533
because what they represent is basically like a magic trick that you can only do once.
534
The children of factory workers go to college.
535
They get better jobs.
536
Standard of living goes way up.
537
People buy nice apartments.
538
People start owning smartphones.
539
You cannot lift your whole country out of poverty two times.
540
You can build your way from poverty to a kind of prosperity.
541
But once you are there, you hit diminishing returns.
542
And China's economy slows down.
543
But they still have all this stuff.
544
Like all the stuff that came out of this period of rapid GDP growth and insane building, it's all still there.
545
They have this incredible looking country, but a lot of it comes out of this what we now understand as a specific period in history.
546
This 40 -year boom that they had.
547
But that most people agree we have kind of moved on from at this point.
548
I talked to one of our New Press members.
549
Her name is Vivian.
550
And she has spent a ton of time in China, mostly in Shanghai.
551
And she has tons of close friends who are Chinese citizens.
552
I talked to her because she was posting on the New Press site under your post about this video.
553
And she had a lot that was really, really interesting.
554
I really wanted to talk to her.
555
And we had this long conversation.
556
One of the things she told me was that the friends of hers who are Chinese citizens, they find it legitimately funny that,
557
like, Americans have these reactions to the way China looks.
558
When we, like, gawk at it, we're like, this is amazing.
559
They're curious why we have this opinion from an outside view.
560
Like, foreigners always think China's great.
561
Why do you think that?
562
I think she was born in the UK.
563
So she's not from mainland China.
564
And her parents, who lived in the UK for many years, they actually have retired to a city in mainland China.
565
They're probably more British than Chinese in some ways.
566
They're also doing the influence -y thing of being like, China's great.
567
And the point of that stuff is that it is very, very common for outsiders to see the best in China,
568
for us to notice specific things about it.
569
But among citizens, and especially among young people there right now, we have seen actually kind of a malaise takeover in the last few years.
570
I love this phrase from a few years ago, this idea of lying flat, that Chinese young people sometimes talk about, like as in lying down,
571
like disengaging from the rat race that is supposed to make them wealthy, but maybe no longer necessarily is.
572
You know, you can't not mention that the way
573
that the country handled COVID was really unpopular and alienated a lot of people.
574
But the point is that there's like a powerful sense right now in China
575
that the era that we've been talking about in this video of dramatic, generationally, almost instantaneous increases in living standards, it's gone, it's over.
576
Wait, but this is a big deal because Deng Xiaoping, when he changed the whole system to make it more economically minded.
577
He did that because he was afraid that they actually had to deliver economic prosperity in order to remain in power.
578
Is that still in play?
579
Is that still a worry among the party?
580
100%.
581
You know, Deng's perspective on this, remember, was not like, we're going to lead our country to prosperity
582
and then our job will be done and you won't need us anymore
583
and we'll have done exactly what you want us to do.
584
No, like, that was a warning of like disaster.
585
If the prosperity machine slows down, that's bad news for the party.
586
But if you remember what
587
Max said before, they see this coming.
588
They know this is coming for many years.
589
And that is why the scorecard, the grade sheet that we've been talking about with economic development or GDP, like as the top thing,
590
there actually is one other thing at the top of
591
that list alongside economic development that is just as important to understand if you want to know basically how
592
China's system works.
593
The Iron Curtain between
594
East Germany and West Berlin has come tumbling down.
595
Okay, so we've kind of told you this story up to present day.
596
We've obviously left out a lot about China, for simplicity, but there's one more thing we cannot leave out.
597
Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last ruler of the Communist Empire founded by Lenin, announced he was quitting.
598
It's the late 1980s, early 90s.
599
Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communist Party are facing some truly existential threats.
600
First, they're looking over here at Russia, the original model of their entire political system, the Soviet Union, and it's declining.
601
And this was a warning sign that a communist regime could rule for 70 years and then poof.
602
And in China itself, this really starts to feel like a threat.
603
There was a growing middle class that had aspirations that went beyond economic growth.
604
All of this led to student -led and worker -led protests, especially in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
605
Deng is really the force behind the decision to send in the military
606
and massacre what we think is probably a few thousand of his own citizens in order to violently suppress this
607
because he was looking at communist countries falling in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
608
And he said, that's not going to be us his preoccupation with stability also had a real dark side to it.
609
Remember, this is Deng Xiaoping.
610
This is the guy who, like, decentralized power away from himself to rescue
611
China's economy from Mao's ideological excesses.
612
But here we see that Deng wasn't doing this just to be, like, a nice guy.
613
He saw this as a survival tactic.
614
If you're satisfied with the way things are going for you and you're optimistic about the future,
615
you you're less likely to be frustrated and be supportive of change.
616
Look at this article from 1997.
617
It's about America's China policy.
618
And it says that, quote,
619
it is almost a religious belief that democracy will come to the world's most populous country after it gets richer.
620
This was the 90s.
621
We had just, quote, won the Cold War.
622
Democracy and capitalism were going to take over the whole world.
623
China was the last communist bastion that was going to fall, and all it needed to do was get connected to the world,
624
make a lot of money, and democracy would come to China.
625
But that's not what happened.
626
And part of the reason why was because by the 90s, a new priority item had been moved to the top of the local official's scorecard.
627
Remember the scorecard?
628
The second big metric was how much can you tamp down on what they call mass incidents, which essentially means protests.
629
Maintaining social stability.
630
Maintaining social stability.
631
Now remember, economic development was like a hard target, something you can easily measure with a number.
632
You can see if it goes up, you can see if it goes down, by how much.
633
But social stability, it's what we call a veto target.
634
It's a yes or no question.
635
Do you have social stability in your province or your town?
636
What even is that?
637
For China, social stability is like protests, making sure that people aren't angry or frustrated, making sure there's not like crime or terrorism.
638
It's a bunch of different things, but it is now an important marker on your resume if you want to move up in the party.
639
The city that you preside over needs to have zero protests.
640
People are extremely happy.
641
They've got nothing to protest about.
642
So as of the 90s, these were the two most powerful pressures on local officials across China.
643
And it turned out doing both of these at the same time isn't exactly easy.
644
There are some very beautiful Chinese cities, but here's a couple things that you need to know about how they were built in the first place.
645
There were people living in these places previously.
646
Before these beautiful buildings were built, some of them were adequately compensated,
647
but a lot of people were compensated below what the worth of the land was.
648
And when you don't want to leave because you know the land is worth more, you were forcefully removed.
649
So that happened a lot in China.
650
And that's the source of a lot of societal tension.
651
The source of a lot of societal tension.
652
And so this is the issue faced by local officials, or a big issue faced by local officials all across China, right?
653
The development imperative, GDP, requires local officials to build.
654
But Building can make people mad.
655
That is kind of the reason that it is so hard to build in the US, because building makes people mad.
656
But you don't want people to be mad.
657
You need economic development and you need social stability.
658
So you have to build, but not in a way that makes people mad at the government or the party.
659
You look very bad.
660
Local leaders get fired and lose their position.
661
So those two items can easily be in conflict with each other.
662
And the challenge becomes, for the party, How do you coerce people without it bouncing back on the government or the party?
663
Repression in the West is commonly understood as, let's say, police arrest, you know, ICE agent arresting immigrants.
664
But Chinese -style repression is really under your skin.
665
Lin Anong, who studies this stuff, talked to me about like two of the most common ways that that kind of repression happens.
666
All sorts of demolition and land -grab projects typically involve gangsters.
667
Morbillise a bunch of youth, punks, unemployed people from the street, go do intimidation, which they can turn around and say,
668
you know, these people, we've got nothing to do with them.
669
We don't know who they are.
670
It's random people from the street making trouble.
671
The second strategy doesn't involve violence.
672
These are people in the 50s and 60s who have served in various roles in the community.
673
These are retirees.
674
People know and respect them.
675
And some of them would even volunteer to do these jobs for the government
676
because they think development is actually good for the community.
677
And so why are you resisting, right?
678
And they are retirees.
679
They kind of still believe in the CCP value.
680
So they go out there and convince their neighbours.
681
You are being very stubborn.
682
You refuse to sign different papers.
683
All the people in this community have signed.
684
Your selfishness, self -centeredness has held up other people's future.
685
You become social outcasts.
686
It's the kind of thing that as a visitor, or even like a foreigner living in an expensive city, there's absolutely no reason
687
that you would ever encounter this for the people who go
688
there for the first time expecting a very heavy presence of repression on every street corner, that's not what you see.
689
Especially when you visit, it's easy to come over with a very positive impression.
690
But Chinese citizens all know that this happens.
691
They are fully aware.
692
It is a facet of Chinese life that affects not everybody,
693
but affects enough people that everyone is aware of it and everyone knows someone who has encountered it.
694
You know how in the United States, most people don't suffer from like crushing medical debt that has ruined their lives, right?
695
Like most people have not had to set up a GoFundMe to pay for something but we all know someone who has.
696
Repression in China is kind of a version of that.
697
And so at this point, Xi Jinping has been in power almost 15 years, right?
698
And under him, the security state that oversees all this stuff has expanded tremendously, right?
699
There was this estimate when he took power around 2013 that
700
China had around 30 million surveillance cameras installed around the country.
701
And just a few years later, 2019, a study found that it was over 200 million.
702
Xi Jinping is obsessed with social stability.
703
For a long time, China has had what scholars sometimes describe as a kind of bargain with its people.
704
Everyone sort of knows the terms.
705
The party delivers growth, prosperity, stability, security, and the people do not get to choose who governs them.
706
But the big question, the big debate
707
that no one really knows the answer to is what happens when delivering that growth
708
gets much harder when they're not able to do it like they used to.
709
What we know for sure is that the years after
710
Mao Zedong and before
711
Xi Jinping, that gave us the China that we see today, at least most of it.
712
And Xi is dismantling a lot of what defined that era.
713
GDP growth is no longer as important in party evaluations as it once was.
714
Today, under Xi, things like loyalty and ideology, Those things matter much more.
715
A lot of people think that
716
Xi has decent reasons for moving away from that era.
717
That obsession with GDP and growth did lead to China overbuilding, over -speculating.
718
But China is now in uncharted territory.
719
So much of the China that you and I see today, the ones I see in those TikTok feeds,
720
was created by those 40 years that Dung engineered his beehive of incentives.
721
In other words, these images are kind of an echo and no one really knows what's going to happen next.
722
So these videos don't really show us everything.
723
They don't show us how this stuff got built or why.
724
They don't show us who got displaced.
725
They don't show us what happens next.
726
What I've concluded is that they mostly show us ourselves reacting to a country that has truly surprised all of us.
727
And we wonder, why can't we have that too?
728
And the answer to that turns out to be not dictatorship, authoritarianism.
729
That doesn't explain the whole thing.
730
Because there are plenty of democracies that aren't the US that actually do have great trains, and plenty of autocracies that don't.
731
Which means that the answer to the question of what can we learn from China isn't necessarily
732
that people need to not have rights.
733
It's something else.
734
Remember, at the end of the day, this whole thing has been a story of incentives.
735
What the people in charge get rewarded for and what they're encouraged to do with their power.
736
In a place like
737
China, those incentives come from the top, from a party system.
738
But in a democracy like the one I live in, they come from the bottom.
739
They come from us.
740
We keep our leaders accountable.
741
So the question is, what do we choose to reward?
742
Thank you.
Baixar aplicativo
Tudo o que você precisa para falar fluentemente
Pronúncia com IANota em cada frase
Prática de IPADomine cada som
VocabulárioMonte seu banco de palavras
Jogo de vocabulárioAprenda brincando
Mesmo canal
B21
What I've been working on all year
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B22
1955 vs 2025, who actually had it better?
American AccentDaily ConversationWorking Adults
B23
The Internet Didn't Fail. It Was Taken.
American AccentBusiness EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
The Problem With Elon Musk
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B22
At North Korea’s Border
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B22
What’s really happening in the ocean’s “dark zones”
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B22
Your Olive Oil is (probably) a Lie
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B24
Why This Country Was Erased From History
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C12
Why is Russia So DAMN BIG?
American AccentUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
What’s ACTUALLY Happening in North Korea
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B210
How The US Stole The Panama Canal, Mapped
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C14
Why you’re so tired
American AccentDaily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
FOR YOU
Vídeo recomendado
C1324 frases
Exclusive Interview: Jeffrey Sachs on China’s Global Role: Growth, Balance, and Cooperation
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
215 frases
This New Pyramid Theory Explains the Missing Evidence
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C11
284 frases
Is Chongqing REALLY a Cyberpunk City?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C12
356 frases
Life in Vietnam: Why the Country Is Getting Rich So Fast | 4k Documentary
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
331 frases
Dear Higgsfield, I reverse engineered you in 12 hours
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C1291 frases
Why did white men conquer the world?
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
171 frases
My Country Is Choosing Extinction (Korea)
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B23
212 frases
your city is full of fake buildings, here's why
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B210
70 frases
My Dad's a Chinese Food Influencer | Jimmy O. Yang: Finally Home
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C14
76 frases
The Limitless AI Lie. The Bubble Is Slowly BURSTING.
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B21
398 frases
THIS Is Where the Internet Lives
Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição
Esta aula de conversação usa o vídeo “The REAL reason China built so much”. Este vídeo tem 538 frases e 8483 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 49:55. O falante fala em ritmo natural, cerca de 170 palavras por minuto, próximo de uma conversa do dia a dia. 86% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês; vale a pena estudar o restante antes de começar.
Vocabulário principal deste vídeo
15 palavras do vídeo que vale a pena aprender, com pronúncia e significado:
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| communist substantivo | /ˈkɑ.mjə.nɪst/ | comunista, marxista |
| stability substantivo | /stəˈbɪlɪti/ | estabilidade |
| poverty substantivo | /ˈpɑːvɚti/ | pobreza |
| ghost substantivo | /ɡoʊst/ | fantasma, espectro |
| province substantivo | /ˈpɹɔv.ɪns/ | província |
| communism substantivo | /ˈkɒmjᵿnɪz(ə)m/ | comunismo |
| chart substantivo | /t͡ʃɑɹt/ | carta náutica |
| infrastructure substantivo | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | infraestrutura |
| incentive substantivo | /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/ | incentivo, motivação |
| protest substantivo | /ˈpɹoʊ.tɛst/ | protesto |
| ton substantivo | /tʌn/ | tonelada |
| prosperity substantivo | /pɹɑˈspɛɹ.ɪ.ti/ | prosperidade |
| repression substantivo | /ɹəˈpɹɛʃən/ | repressão |
| necessarily advérbio | /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/ | necessariamente |
| essentially advérbio | /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/ | em essência, essencialmente |
Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| slow down verbo | desacelerar | |
| go down verbo | descer | |
| go up verbo | subir | |
| clean up verbo | dar uma limpeza, limpar | |
| come out verbo | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | sair, partir |
| go off verbo | explodir | |
| go out verbo | sair | |
| set up verbo | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | preparar |
Frases que vale a pena repetir
Frases curtas e completas do vídeo que você pode usar na conversa do dia a dia:
- I can't wait to share it with you.
- What do we call it?
- I don't think this is the same.
- If you're struggling with this, I don't blame you.
- What do I mean by that?
Gramática neste vídeo
As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:
| Estrutura | No vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — uma ação que começou antes e continua | has been diving · have been thinking · we've been talking |
| Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora | I've ever seen · they've gone · has been |
| Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz | are made · have been taught · were owned |
| Orações relativas who / which + oração — informação extra sobre uma pessoa ou coisa | guy who wrote · people who are · membership, which is |
Pronúncia para ficar de olho
O falante usa 130 contrações e formas reduzidas, como they're, don't, we're. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.
- Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: repression /ɹəˈpɹɛʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, dictatorship /ˈdɪkteɪtəɹʃɪp/, promotion /pɹəˈmoʊʃn̩/, provincial /pɹəˈvɪn(t)ʃəl/
- Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: stability /stəˈbɪlɪti/, infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, prosperity /pɹɑˈspɛɹ.ɪ.ti/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/
Sons difíceis para falantes de português:
- Consoante final — sem acrescentar um “i” depois: communist /ˈkɑ.mjə.nɪst/, ghost /ɡoʊst/, chart /t͡ʃɑɹt/, protest /ˈpɹoʊ.tɛst/, reward /ɹɪˈwɔɹd/
- /l/ final — a língua toca o céu da boca, não vira “u”: rail /ɹeɪ(ə)l/, provincial /pɹəˈvɪn(t)ʃəl/, parallel /ˈpæ.ɹəˌlɛl/, miracle /ˈmɪɹ.ə.kəl/, governmental /ˌɡʌvɚnˈmɛnt(ə)l/
- /h/ — um sopro suave, diferente do “r”: nowhere /ˈnoʊ.(h)wɛɹ/, hierarchy /ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/, whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, beehive /ˈbiːhaɪv/, hierarchical /ˌhaɪəˈɹɑːkɪkəl/
Como praticar com este vídeo
- Ouça o vídeo inteiro uma vez sem falar e anote as palavras que você não conhece.
- Comece na velocidade 0,75×, faça shadowing frase por frase e volte à velocidade normal quando ficar fácil.
- Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como communist, stability, poverty.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.