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Comment by roy_x | Hacker News Reader

A native Chinese is in :-)

It is always tough for new graduates to find a good job in recent years. Given the housing cost got really high in big cities like Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou, there is a so called "flee-away-from-tier-1-cities-campaign" word made up by new graduates.

When I graduated a decade ago, there are a lot of proud new graduates whom sincerely believed that they have a bright future ahead. But nowadays, most young people seems not thinking so anymore.

It is difficult to change your social status by education and hard-working. That is something really bad and it is more than faltering economy of this year, it is about the meta-rules of how society running. Most of the traditional Chinese dynasties failed because same kind of problems.

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Thanks for the comment from "the inside".

A note for folks who have not been to China before about the sheer scale of the "Tier 1/2/3" cities talked about here. When someone mentions Tier 3 in China, those are cities that are considered big enough to warrant calling a city, but too numerous to know all of them off the top of your head. A Tier 1 city for an American is like NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. For a resident of the UK, Tier 1 = London; France = Paris; you get the idea.

But here is the catch. In America, a Tier 3 city can be in a top-100 list by population, but still be relatively ho-hum and if not unknown, not exactly in the headlines every day. Take the smallest 10 cities in a top-100 list, like Chula Vista, CA, and arbitrarily draw the line for Tier 3 there. These cities barely crack 200,000 in population. In China, I found out Tier 3 "ho-hum" cities (rank 90-100 by population) have no fewer than 600,000 population. That blew my mind when I learned that, and put China's rural-to-city migration into perspective.

Now consider this young work force migrating en masse to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities due to pricing pressures in Tier 1 cities. If they have a critical mass of the right entrepreneurial factors in place, that's like over 100 Austin, TX (the brightest growth story the US can point to at the moment) popping up nearly simultaneously within the next 5-10 years. Pretty exciting times ahead.

Thank you for the background explanation and the optimistic view of China's future.

I must admit that I am a little bit exaggerated in my original reply.

You got to wonder if 7% growth (double what the better western economies are doing) is really such a bad situation to be in.

What do you think a viable solution for the tier 1 cities is?

There is nothing new under the sun.

Public housing, allow villagers to sell their land to market directly... there is a lot of way to achieve it and many other countries have done it successfully before.

It is a technical issue which can not be solved because of corruption/inequality/unfairness under the current political system.

Political reform is needed, or a revolution may come instead sooner or later.

I'm a little skeptical a "revolution" will ever improve things (in the short term). Revolutions are generally costly in almost every way possible. China's growth and prosperity don't seem to justify one (at this point in time).

How do villagers sell their land now? I thought market sales were already being done?

So is this another issue in china that is a result of the "mid-level" corruption?

>I'm a little skeptical a "revolution" will ever improve things (in the short term). Revolutions are generally costly in almost every way possible.

I am not promoting the idea of revolution. In fact, I think it is bad for almost everyone. My point is that any wise man in the current administration should stop it before too late.

>China's growth and prosperity don't seem to justify one (at this point in time).

Maybe I am too pessimistic. Last year, the riot-control budgets( literally called stability-maintaining in China) is almost the same as the military expenditure.

>How do villagers sell their land now? I thought market sales were already being done?

By constitution law, in China, urban lands belong to government, and rural lands belong to villages, however, it is not allowed(by a policy made by government) for villages to sell their land to real-estate merchants directly, they can only sell lands to the government in a price made by the government. In this way, governments become the only provider of available lands, and they can charge as much as they want.

I was under the impression (I could definitely be wrong) that private sales were still occurring despite the constitution. (Government policy, peoples anti-policy?) ;-)

It is a little bit more complicated.

There are a few people buying those privately-built house(literally it is called small-property-houses in China) because it is much cheaper compared to market price.

However, there are some big flaws of those house:

1, It is not protected by law, the house can't be registered under buyer's name. It has been reported that some people living in those house was driven out by the government or the land owner.

2, As a buyer, you can not bind house-registry(namely hukou) with those house, so, children will not have the right to attend nearby school because those house are not belonging to any school district.

3, Also the land owner will be punished for building those kind of houses.

In all, although there are a few private-built house near to big cities like Beijing, generally it is not an option.

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