I'm old enough to remember when everyone was trying to learn Japanese back in the 80's.

It would be difficult to work in China, their green card equivalent is difficult to obtain.

The economic conditions in China right now are very bad for the average person, pretty high unemployment.

It's really hard to get anywhere with. I was in Hong Kong a while and gave up. I tried Cantonese and Mandarin. That's another thing with 'Chinese' - there are actually about 200 versions spoken although the written symbols are the same.

At least with Japanese if you read a phrase from the guide book they understand but with Chinese if you don't get the intonation right they can't figure what you are on about.

They are mostly happy to do business in English though - it's not a bad place to cultivate business ties.

Decades ago I had Chinese coworkers and decided to ask them to teach me a word or two a day. I immediately discovered I could not tell the difference between the five tonal sounds of "ma" and so never got very far at all.

Why shouldn't you? You learn 3 new characters a day with no effort whatsoever via SRS and pass the HSK1 in 2 months. If you like it, you keep on studying and improving, if you don't like it, at least you will be able to greet the taxi driver when you go there (but won't understand their reply).

Probably good to have to pad it under language skills in resume but not a very important concern.

Even if you don't learn Chinese, I've been consciously adding http://v2ex.com to my doomscrolling regimen and running it through Google translate. It's a popular Chinese webforum, and while I wouldn't say it's exactly Chinese HN, it's a close enough approximation. It's interesting to see I have some of the same concerns and questions as someone halfway around the world in a totally different language and culture.

Here's an example from the front page, English title is: As a backend programmer writing front-end with the help of cursor, what is the most suitable front-end framework/solution

The comments mentioned all the usual suspects, Angular, Vute, React, next, etc.

https://www.v2ex.com/t/1165949

One thing that some users here would appreciate is their footer:

• Please do not copy and paste AI-generated content when answering technical questions

It is incredibly hard.

China has mostly decoupled from the US (both for imports and exports) [1]. They will automate around their demographics issues (they build and install more robots than any other nation in the world) [2]. They export cleantech to the world [3]. What does the US build besides systems of rent seeking?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580229

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/business/china-factory-ro... | https://archive.today/RoygE

[3] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

Please let's not dip into the cosmic hashtable. It's boring and offtopic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722096 (June 2015)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622773 (March 2020)

Predictions are wrong more often than observations, I expect.

McKinsey advised AT&T that the total market for cell phones would be just a handful. McKinsey is going strong.

You're right, he missed that one. Do you think his total track record is poor?

Oh no, he made a mistake one time... When I was in 5th grade I added 2 numbers wrong, that must mean my whole career has been a lie.

The original Paul Krugman quote

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

The USA got where it is via slavery, imperialism, also child labor, environmental devastation. Hydraulic mining inspired the first environmental laws.

How you got there and where you are are different.

Ah, we should be glad the MAGA movement is doing 2 of those things to catch up to China then... which senator do I talk to about child labor? Oh they're mostly sitting on one side of the chamber?

China is installing solar capacity at three times the rate of coal. What exactly is your point?

There's no "wonders of china", just the fact that we are falling further behind because of dumb policy which is justified by non sequiturs like "china also installs coal" or "china uses child labor".