Backwater? Growing power?
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.
Not gonna lie though. The honda cub looked all kinds of fun as a buzz around bike. Nothing to prove, just 'here is a little city road burner.
Postwar Japan motorcycles were literally old Harley Davidson toolings. They weren’t that good to begin with.
A place with lots of suspicious bath-drownings if a baby had the misfortune of being born a girl during the one child policy.
While that definitely happened, the thankful reality is that many families raised their daughters unofficially.
The demographic charts suggest otherwise.
My point was more that some people did the right thing, not that it’s enough to eliminate a statistical slump.
Some people of the time would think the Chinese were heartless people to do what they did, and some quietly raised their other children, that’s all.
And if even that isn’t true, so be it, as I could have fallen for propaganda and cannot locate the original source, but here is another showing that some people didn’t just fall in line.
Starving Chinese kids were why I had to gag down my peas.
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?
Japan too, but mostly it was the stamps “Made in China” or “Made in Taiwan”.
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?
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.
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.
As a sweatshop, where civilized at all.
And that mostly went for Asia as a whole in the average American portrayal.
In the 90s, my dad and a lot of other guys in my area lost their machining jobs because the work was being done in China. My perception of China (only what I learned from people around me talking about it) was that it was a dirty place where everyone lived in squalor and worked in sweat shops for pennies a day.
80s into 90s it was starting to become obvious that economic might would shift from the West to China. Mostly because they sold us all of their shit plastics at first, then some good stuff along with even more shit plastics.
No, 80s were hardcore taiwan and south korea for crappy toys, maybe Japan early on.
Even the early 90s were Taiwan and SK, then China came in and swallowed everything whole.
