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Comment by smalltalkcoder | Hacker News Reader

You didn't read the article. Latana's Democracy Perception Index for 2022 shows that the Chinese believe their country is democratic.

Stats do show at least 120 million Chinese have travelled outside the country every year (except, of course, during the pandemic years). This is not speculation requiring optimism.

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Do you have a cite for that. The most I can find is that 120 million Chinese had passports in 2016. According to https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-07-09/Chinese-passport-holde..., they still had 120 million in 2019, and were expecting 240 million by 2020 because of a price cut in the passport fee (and then the pandemic comes, so I doubt they made those numbers). According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107607/china-number-of-..., it might be up to 170 million now?

But if what you say is true, that means most Chinese with a passport are taking international trips every year. If we discount Hong Kong (which doesn't require a passport, and anyways, is part of China, though it does count as an international trip from the airport's perspective, and you have to go through emigration, you also didn't say if you were counting HK residents also, so I guess we could have a bunch of different numbers there), I don't see how that could be true given the dearth of people with passports who are even capable of taking trips abroad.

Hong Kong's population is only 7 million or so, a tiny fraction of 120 million travelers, assuming every Hongkonger went on international tours.

Hong Kong is a city state however, so it is probably true that most of their residents travel abroad each year (if we count China as traveling abroad, but even if we don't, > 50% is probably about right).

I assume you know that the majority of Hong Kong citizens live in poverty. They can barely afford a roof over their heads, much less international travel.

But perhaps you've never experienced poverty, so you may not know.

Although there are a lot of poor people in HK, it isn't true that most of them live in poverty:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-02/hong-kong...

1.6 million out of 7.3 million people is definitely serious, but hardly a majority. I've been to the SAR a few times, and don't think it is especially poor, especially when compared to even China's richest city like Shanghai.

As for my own personal experiences, please don't make assumptions like that. You have no idea what I've been through in my life, and it is rather not relevant to this discussion.

Perhaps I overstated the poverty in HK. But my point was that many people there cannot afford to travel. They live paycheck to paycheck; they have very little in the way of savings. I know people in HK, including family. Most people in HK are not well-off.

When you add these to the people who are living in poverty, that doesn't leave for a lot of travelers.

The ability to afford an apartment (expensive, even rent) and the ability to take a holiday to Thailand are completely different costs. An HK resident could be homeless (unable to afford rent) and still easily have the ability to take a holiday to Phuket. That's how crazy HK is, at least.

Hong Kong statistics are usually separate from mainland statistics. This goes for GDP, trade statistics (Hong Kong is a separate member of the WTO, for example), and many other things. I strongly suspect that it goes for tourism statistics as well.

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