Backwater? Growing power?
60’s and 70’s had the term junky japanese as their products tended to be crappy. china was not even on the radar outside of ping pong diplomacy from nixon.
That’s who I saw things growing up in the 70s-80s. China was full of starving farmers and not much else. And yeah, Japanese products went from having a well-deserved bad rap to Americans going, “Holy shit! They’re out competing us! Make it stop!” (In cars and electronics anyway.)
Same thing happened with Japan.
This is before my time but I’ve known lots of older people who born in the 50s and grew up in the 60s and 70s.
Products made in Japan were once considered cheap things. I ride motorcycles so I talk to a lot of people about the history, especially with Honda and Yamaha. North American motorcycles were first British, German and American. When the Japanese started in the 50s and 60s, everyone laughed at them … a common racist thing to call them back then was ‘rice cookers’ … but within a decade, they took over and by the 80s they were dominating.
The same thing is happening in the EV market. Right now everything is even and the market is still new. But in a decade or two or less, the Chinese will dominate everything.
In the late '80s, I remember people being pissed at Japan as its economy looked to overtake that of the US. They felt somehow betrayed because the US, and its monetary policy, had helped Japan get to where it was. With the effects of the Plaza Accord and following things, Japan’s bubble would pop. In something young me could never imagine, I’ve been living in Japan a decade now.
But Japan won by heavily improving the quality and reliability of their products, and that’s not what China is doing.
That’s not true at all, China makes both high quality and incredibly cheep at the same time. Look at brands like Anker, Ecoflow, Hisense, Xiaomi, Dji, Lenovo, Chery, BYD, etc
I mean, they are, but not in the way you’d think.
They don’t care much about quality, but they have the data (the critical part) to improve quality anyway, with a fraction of the zealous dedication Japan applied.
A database that shows 1 part always fails for a specific reason is hard to argue against, just change that part.
Technology makes innovation easier.
Nah man.
Chinese automotive tools are improving massively (Harbor Freight ICON is amazing for the price) and the electronic diagnostic stuff is streets ahead of any place else for the cost.
Chinese watches are really coming up. Sugess is beating the hell out of Japanese watches (using a Seiko movement) and the in-country movements are nearing parity.
RISC-V: 'nuff said.
I remember the late 90’s saw a trend of making bad guys in movies Chinese instead of Russian like they typically were previously. It probably would have continued well into today, but 9/11 made it so the bad guys were now middle eastern.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s: “Oh, that’s where all the toys come from!”
70s and 80s were before my time so that could be why i am mistaken, but i kind of thought it would have been Japan?
I’m OP’s age and don’t remember having any toys from Japan. Dad fought in the Pacific Theater, didn’t have a positive outlook on Japanese people or products. Funny thing though, we would hunt flea markets, antique shops and garage sales for “Made In Occupied Japan” stamps. Wonder if that’s still collectible?
Japan too, but mostly it was the stamps “Made in China” or “Made in Taiwan”.
They made cheap low quality goods and had a lot of rural poor people. Through the 80s and 90s their reputation for making knockoff versions of things improved.
Starving Chinese kids were why I had to gag down my peas.
For me it was Africans but to each their own I guess.
Indians. It’s why I still finish my beer to this day. " There’s sober kids in India"
As a sweatshop, where civilized at all.
And that mostly went for Asia as a whole in the average American portrayal.
In the 80’s it was a poor backwater that was starting to take American jobs making cheap plastic crap.
A place with lots of suspicious bath-drownings if a baby had the misfortune of being born a girl during the one child policy.
Unfortunately, the harsh truth was more often a doctor who was tasked with second pregnancies whose job details made all the other hospital staff realise he was a monster.
While that definitely happened, the thankful reality is that many families raised their daughters unofficially.
The demographic charts suggest otherwise.
China, and maybe some other Asian countries have a household registration ( hukou 户口) system.
Only people born into the system get to exist for things like schools, national insurance, etc.
So any unofficially born second children (or hidden first born daughters) didn’t get to legally count under this.
Also; children born out of marriage don’t exist for state schools or benefits, either.
Where your hukou is limits your options for access to housing, claims on social security and health insurance, and the like. Mostly if you were born into a very rural area your only pathway to legally having a place to live and for your children to go to school in another part of the country is via university graduation.
There are pushes to change this system, and smaller cities are removing their requirements for non-rural hukou. But Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities you have probably heard of are yet to do this.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-hiding-population-secret-1926834
The 2000 census came up short, so officials launched a campaign to add tens of millions of “missing” people, bringing the official population close to initial estimates, Yi said. But a closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.
They killed so many girls the population fell more than expected.
Early aughts in international relations class they were still teaching students about China being a “sleeping giant” just beginning to come into its own economically speaking. At the time it was emphasized that they had a huge army but it was not well trained in combat. Tianamen and the transition of HK were in the very recent past so it seemed China was more interested in managing internal divisions than challenges on the international front.
I read China watched the US invasion of Iraq (2003) and shit their pants how easily Iraq fell.
Nixon going to China was huge.
In the 90s it was seen as a backwater with growing power. There was a sense that China’s economic growth would push it towards democracy. Tiananmen Square seemed like proof of that.
I remember a 90s Newsweek issue centered around China becoming the tiger in the next century. Believed that since then, and history seems to be bearing that opinion out. I just didn’t see America crashing so hard, only China slowly overtaking us.
With the rise of reformists like Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, it all looked like China will turn around the corner and become a democracy. Even after Tiananmen, which was a direct consequence of Yaobang’s death, it looked like the old guard was loosing ground and we would see a free China in the XXI century.
It is strange to consider that most of what is now working in China, was thanks to people like Zhao Ziyang, whom are forgotten and forbidden.
Now I’m worried if it will be the end of democracy as we know it instead.
90’s teenager: Corrupt government that was a maker of cheap goods and claimed to be first in everything ever and had the most bestest smartest refined cultureal history compared to us heathen backwater westerners.
THere’s reasons I struggle with looking past my own mindset whenever anything china related in the sciences pop up, as my first thought is ‘is there independant verfication there to prevent it from just being government propaganda bullshit?’
…kinda like i’m having to start doing with any ‘official’ anything here stateside now.
