To get people eating more healthily you have to get them accustomed to eating healthy dishes. In India a go-to meal might be various curries with legumes and vegetables. In Japan an everyday meal might include grilled fish and tofu soup. In America many people default to foods like fatty ribs and butter-laden mashed potatoes.
They may want to eat healthier but people turn to foods out of familiarity and convenience. People don't have time to always think of new ways to eat vegetables. When you encourage Americans to eat more vegetables many will instantly think MORE SALAD. I mean salad is great but it's not enjoyable all the time.
You can think of different food cultures as providing different proportions of nutrients. American schools should introduce kids to food from other parts of the world early on that taste great and are great for the body. If they default to tried and true "American" foods like burgers and pizza, they prepare young people for a lifetime of unhealthy eating.
Sure, the man himself seems beyond reproach, and I admire his courage. But in another sense that's just what I mean, that we can sit here, read this news, and nod approvingly at this man's actions.
But beyond our own consumption of this narrative, his efforts are pretty much irrelevant to any eventual democratization in China.
You ever get the feeling this Nobel Prize and the western media's fawning coverage of Liu Xiaobo is really just about westerners making themselves feel better?
China will get democracy one day. It will be because a large swath of Chinese people want it. Although there have been some high profile dissidents in China over the last 30 years, including Liu Xiaobo and the 1989 students, most Chinese are probably not ready for their message of political openness. They're still focused on lower levels of the Maslow hierarchy like shelter and food.
These dissidents have the bad luck of poor timing. In another 30 or 40 years when China is fully developed, their ideas may be well accepted among citizenry and party reformers.
The argument for trade hinges on competitive advantage. Each country should produce what it is most efficient at producing based on its resources.
In this way China has indeed rode the wave of globalization because its bountiful cheap labor made it suited to manufacturing small goods for richer economies.
The capital accumulated through these activities were reinvested so that Chinese companies could move into more value added industries like electronics, automobiles, aerospace, and services, which is possible because China has a deep well of human capital (i.e. people) who have a strong work ethic and are eager to learn new skills.
Moreover, because China has both a gigantic internal market and vast human resources, it's possible that Chinese suppliers can have a competitive advantage in virtually every industry, making the benefits of external trade less obvious. (This was China's attitude towards Europeans during colonial times too - that trade was unnecessary because they had nothing of value to China).
Or if Chinese suppliers currently don't have a competitive advantage in terms of price or quality, the government can use protectionist policies to shield those industries until they do have an advantage.
You might say that China has played all the right cards in the game of globalization. Donald Trump had been saying it for a long time.
They have a certificate management system where you can register for a free one from TrustAsia, or buy an expensive one from another authority like Symantec. I just got a free one.
You could just as easily bring your own or deploy a LetsEncrypt certificate to a bare machine though.
My service is not subscription oriented, but I take Alipay and WeChat pay, which together probably account for >80% of potential customers. But you need a registered Chinese business entity.
I use Tencent Cloud for a small China-oriented SaaS. The SDK APIs are kind of a mess/lacking, but the service is otherwise pretty reliable and easy to use.
By far the biggest reason why Chinese tourists act the way they do is because most of them are not even one generation removed from the villages. Most have not gone to university, maybe not even high school. Westerners can look down their noses all they want but when their countries were 70% agrarian, most people were pretty uncouth too.
Culture changes. Once two generations of Chinese have lived in affluent urban settings, their manners will converge with those of other developed countries.
The amount of information available to westerners about the Chinese economy is pretty pitiful. Here in the U.S. there's like four or five talking points that echo around the media about the Chinese economy and those are the only tidbits people bring up.
I've seen a few NHK documentaries about China. Kudos to them for chasing down interesting angles.
The documentary is about fintech innovation driving funds to SMEs. Their examples are a kiwi producer, a fish farm, and and a steel welding company. What they probably mean is that 12,000 businesses are started in China every day, not necessarily all tech related.
They may want to eat healthier but people turn to foods out of familiarity and convenience. People don't have time to always think of new ways to eat vegetables. When you encourage Americans to eat more vegetables many will instantly think MORE SALAD. I mean salad is great but it's not enjoyable all the time.
You can think of different food cultures as providing different proportions of nutrients. American schools should introduce kids to food from other parts of the world early on that taste great and are great for the body. If they default to tried and true "American" foods like burgers and pizza, they prepare young people for a lifetime of unhealthy eating.