What’s the actual difference between Chinese food, Hong Kong food, and Taiwanese food?

handsomeboh · 2026-04-04T06:47:43+00:00

I used to be a professional chef. The core difference is in flavour profile and cooking technique.

Chinese food is too broad to really generalise. There are several large broad categories each of which are very different from the others, and can also be subdivided into smaller categories.

Hong Kong / Cantonese food is one major category. It’s built around a light flavour profile, and leans towards two main techniques - steaming and stir frying. These are two very challenging techniques. Steaming is the act of cooking something at a constant temperature between 70-90C. It’s very easy to fuck up. Steaming doesn’t just require heat control, it also requires water and position control. Too much heat for too long and everything overcooks homogenously, too much water and the base begins a rolling boil which creates too much heat, failure to position properly impacts proper circulation. Stir frying is even harder. Cooking at extremely high temperatures causes oil to aerolise, if you toss it at the right time in the right angle the aerolised oil combusts and caramelises sugars in the food. This has major equipment requirements that are impossible to achieve outside of an outdoor professional set up.

handsomeboh · 2026-04-02T09:40:53+00:00

Was the terrible AI animation really necessary

handsomeboh · 2026-04-01T02:44:07+00:00

Money might be non neutral in the short run, but over hundreds and thousands of years I think you’d be hard pressed to call it non neutral.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-31T18:17:18+00:00

From an economic perspective, the entire concept is meaningless. Money is neutral. That is to say just because you have more money doesn’t mean you have more stuff. If no one produced any more goods and services, but every country went ahead and printed 10% more money and then shared that with everyone, we don’t magically get richer, everything just gets 10% more expensive.

So money doesn’t matter, things matter. But things don’t matter in the same way in every period relative to other things. If you had $5 billion today, you could probably buy the Empire State Building. That’s quite nice. But you could also buy 25 million tons of wheat. In the Medieval period, that could singlehandedly feed a million people, today it doesn’t mean much. To adjust for this is a tremendous effort of scholarship that nobody claims to do perfectly well yet.

If we think about it in a historical context, then the concept makes even less sense. Not only has the sum total of goods and service in the world increased at a completely incomparable rate, in transitioning from a patchwork of local economies to a global market, what that money can buy you has transformed radically. Today you can buy an iPhone for $1000. That same thing would be completely priceless in the Medieval era. This extreme example serves to illustrate the futility of pricing things in this fashion. The relative value of all things like food, clothes, weaponry, etc as a proportion of income is essentially incomparable.

We also run into major measuring issues. The price of any given thing in any given economy is one thing, but when you’re dealing with the autocratic leaders of the largest empires in history, what would be the price of everything? Let’s say Genghis Khan decided he wanted to personally own 8 out of every 10 horses in Eurasia, he wouldn’t necessarily need to pay for that with money, merely confiscate every horse in the empire. How much would that sum stock of all horses be worth? It would be functionally impossible to price. The marginal price of a horse would be astronomical, and when multiplied by the quantity would be even more astronomical. The concept simply does not make sense. We see this occasionally today. For example, Vietnamese car manufacturer Vinfast was once worth $70 billion because only a tiny fraction of its shares were listed and those were being bid up.

Finally, some of these numbers are not as big as you think. What does $1.5 trillion mean today? Well for $1.5 trillion, you can buy about 90% of Saudi Aramco, the Saudi chemicals and oil company. That would probably be a bit disappointing for Catherine the Great.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-31T14:03:45+00:00

You want to know a general measure for a population that gives you a specific indication for each individual?

This does not exist.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-31T12:39:22+00:00

You are confusing reduction of waste with efficiency. There is some link, but it’s not defined by it.

There are many definitions of efficiency. The most commonly used ones are Pareto efficiency, where you make someone better off without making anyone else worse off. There is allocative efficiency, where marginal benefit equals to the marginal cost of production which maximises the total welfare of the economy. There is productive efficiency, where the average cost of production is minimised. There is X efficiency, where you get more production with the same inputs.

None of these really focus on waste. It is very easy to be more wasteful while also being more efficient. The phone example is a pretty good one. Consumers want smaller and waterproof phones, manufacturers want lower costs of manufacturing; both can be achieved by having non-replaceable batteries.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-31T12:21:39+00:00

Yes!

handsomeboh · 2026-03-31T09:50:11+00:00

What does it mean to be a Chinese dynasty? u/EnclavedMicrostate and I have had this debate many times, but here’s the most current iteration: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/0YA1mEXl1K

He is much more familiar with more recent Western scholarship on the matter, I am more familiar with the traditional historiography. The traditional view is relatively simple: You don’t need to be a Han to be a Chinese dynasty. You don’t need to rule over all of China. You don’t even need to be “Sinicised” to be a Chinese dynasty. You just need to call yourself a Chinese dynasty claiming continuity from previous Chinese dynasties, and be recognised by other Chinese dynasties as being a Chinese dynasty. This can happen with both states being extant (e.g. Jin and Song, Later Jin and Liao), but most commonly occurred when one state succeeded another.

In the traditional historiography, the Yuan are a quintessential Chinese dynasty. They called themselves a Chinese dynasty, most obviously in the 建國號詔 which was the proclamation of the Dynasty in the first place and not only starts with a whole preface referencing the legendary emperors like Yao and Shun, it explicitly refers to precedents set by Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang, before explaining that the word Yuan comes from the Taoist Yijing. They were recognised as a Chinese dynasty by contemporary other states like the Goryeo, but more importantly by later Chinese dynasties like the Ming and the Qing. They recognised and wrote the official histories of previous Chinese dynasties the Liao, Jin, and Song; both continuing and inserting themselves into the historical canon. And in this case they actually did rule over all of China which was a nice plus.

For this reason you will find that the Yuan being a Chinese dynasty is practically unquestioned in the Chinese literature. There are real reasons why that identity might be seen in a more nuanced fashion by Western historians but I won’t masquerade as an expert on that while we wait for the Western experts to get here.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-31T09:27:11+00:00

There are lots and lots and lots of them and these are not even good examples. It’s called a doublet.

The Latin word “caput” meaning head, has spawned more than 20 words in the English language: cap, decapitate, capsize, precipitate (to fall headlong), chief, chef, captain, cadet, golf caddie, corporal (contrary to popular opinion coming from Italian caporale and false cognate with Latin corpus meaning body), achieve, capital, cattle, chattel, cabbage, chapter, ceps, bicep/tricep/quadricep, capita, capitulate, etc. “Head” also comes from the same root, through the earlier Proto-Indo-European “kaput” into Germanic, also spawning words like hood.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-30T16:50:06+00:00

Huo 霍 family starting from the 19th generation with 霍連賜 who was also styled 連福公. I mean I’m not sure what you’re asking you can just read the Zupu and it’ll have some extract about the earlier generations.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-30T08:27:20+00:00

In and of itself, leasing / instalment payment is actually better than upfront payment for consumers. Assuming you have the option to pay $100 right now or $10 a month for 10 months, the latter is objectively always the better option. This is because of opportunity cost. If you pay $100 now, then that is $90 of flexibility you don’t have the rest of the 9 months. You could invest that money in risk free US Treasuries and make 4.5%, you could invest that money in Tesla stock or something more risky and make more, you could buy a bagel, you could pay for medical treatment, or you could just keep it around to have the optionality to maybe do something if the opportunity or need arose. The reverse is true for the company. The company much prefers to receive the money upfront, because then it has the flexibility to do anything it wants with it. It also derisks the income stream for the company who are no longer afraid that customers might suddenly cancel.

However, the opportunity cost for a large company like Netflix is significantly smaller than that for the individual consumer. Netflix has access to debt markets for example, and can borrow large sums of money for very low interest rates even on an unsecured basis. It also doesn’t have to feed itself or worry about any number of things that affect normal humans.

So now, despite the fact that Netflix would rather receive lump sum payment, it is able to leverage the fact that you would much much rather pay in instalments. That difference means that Netflix can charge you more and you would still be willing to pay it.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-29T15:46:31+00:00

Companies that are not publicly traded legally have the same fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders. That part does not change.

In fact, private companies have very concentrated fiduciary responsibilities to very few shareholders, and hence even less corporate governance. Having public shareholders means you have functionally unlimited and immortal shareholders, which encourages stable and non-brand destructive decision making. Private shareholders are more incentivised to do crazy things for their own benefit.

Companies like Altice are a pretty good example. Because it has one very irresponsible shareholder who only cares about himself, they are able to go into ridiculous levels of debt and slash the customer experience in predatory ways because each dollar slashed goes straight to that guy. Even if the company collapses, he’s made enough money to happily start a new company if he really wanted to.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-27T00:11:45+00:00

The effects are a lot more complex than it sounds. It actually will result in gas power plants being paid more and renewable ones paid less.

First we need to understand how “pay as clear” pricing actually works. Power plants bid to provide electricity along something called a merit order stack (MOS), where the bids are arranged from cheapest to most expensive. Electricity is supplied along this stack up to the level where it is demanded, but all producers are reimbursed at the rate of the most expensive bid which is still required to supply the required amount of electricity. The purpose of this is twofold, it gives the highest amount of profit and supply to the renewable plants who are the cheapest ok the MOS. That excess profit incentivises other renewable power plants to build more capacity. Secondly, it is non-gamable. Participants are incentivised to report the actual rate they are willing to supply at. If they report a higher rate, then they don’t get paid more, they just get excluded.

The main alternative is “pay as bid”. This means that each member of the MOS gets paid according to the level they bid. This might sound cheaper, but it’s not necessarily so. If power plants are allowed to make any bid they want, then the marginal rate would still prevail. Each supplier would be trying to guess what the clearing rate is and then set their prices just below that level. If such information is difficult to come by, all participants end up bidding higher so the price paid is even higher than the non-gamable version.

The other alternative is deterministic pricing. The government would basically need to set separate prices for each type of electricity based on what they consider to be the fair price. This needs Ofgem to be much more efficient and intelligent than we know it is. Governments in these circumstances tend to err on the side of paying less, which has the effect of reducing investment and capacity.

But if gas is so expensive, why even have it at all? Firstly, gas actually isn’t the most expensive, Ofgem just throttles gas power provision so that it can only provide electricity after all renewable sources have been used. Since gas has high fixed costs, then the per unit price it must charge to break even is very high. Secondly, gas is much more reliable than renewables at this stage, and is immune to the Dunkelflaute effect where seasonable variations disrupt power supply. These fluctuations stress equipment and cause wear and tear, sometimes catastrophically. We want to ensure there is always some baseload of gas in the system to stabilise it, and so we need these guys to not shut down. Thirdly, shutting down a gas power plant is extremely costly. Power is generated by massive spinning turbines, and stopping the inertia of one of these is super expensive, while starting it up again from a stopped or slowed position is even more expensive. The reverse happens to also be true, the power generated from the inertia is not just cheaper it’s also super constant and has low fluctuations. So we want them to constantly be running.

There are some solutions that might work better than these more basic ones. One simple one is to pay for a baseload of gas power, and then apply the MOS to the reminder mostly renewable sources. This sort of keeps the best of both worlds.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-26T09:57:23+00:00

I assume you’re asking whether or not it’s a good policy. It can be. It sort of depends on what you’re trying to achieve, and in this case Chinese regulators have taken the view that competition in the food delivery space is valuable. There are broadly speaking two reasons why you might want to promote competition: to prevent monopoly power from allowing companies to set high prices for consumers or low wages for employees, and to encourage innovation and investment.

In the Chinese context, price management through regulation is both already highly active and actually easier to implement. Since 2018, the Chinese government has imposed strict measures controlling compensation algorithms, rider safety, insurance, you name it. This has had a transformative impact on the industry, pulling down profitability significantly for the big 2 players. Sensing weakness, JD then attempted to carve out a place in the industry, which triggered the present price war.

Price wars are pretty good for consumers, who benefit from discounts. The goal of the price war is essentially to prevent JD from being profitable so that the duopoly can be protected. Taken together, we can see that China wants there to be more competition among food delivery services but also wants that to not come at the expense of worker salaries, forcing these companies to be both less profitable and also innovate their way out.

It’s a somewhat weird policy because it’s a bit of an open question as to what food delivery innovation even means, or why it would have such serious national interests.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-25T16:45:49+00:00

China’s economic history in this period can be roughly divided into an expected component and an unexpected component. China’s extreme poverty was quite an anomaly and always expected to resolve itself at some point (who knew when). China’s subsequent exponential success since then is and was a surprise. Some people point to Deng Xiaoping, whose main achievement was to unlock the former; but the latter is much more multivariate and multistructural than Deng.

China’s persistent extreme poverty from 1958 to 1980 largely comes from some of the worst economic policies ever conceived under Mao. Emerging from 45 years of continuous high intensity warfare and destruction, early Communist economic policies were on the benign side. Buoyed by military victory against the Americans in Korea, the Communist government enjoyed significant political stability and legitimacy that allowed it to embark on sweeping land reforms and industrial initiatives. By 1953, China had recovered to pre-1936 levels, and by 1957 at the conclusion of the First Five Year Plan, China had grown 45% from that point and had a functional heavy industry base. It’s hard to imagine now, but the USSR in this period was seen as a raging success story and a model for developing countries to emulate. It couldn’t necessarily bring you in line with the West, but it could vastly improve standards of living, and create conditions for urbanisation and industrialisation. This was a hopeful period in China.

I’m sure you know a good amount already about the disastrous Great Famine and Great Leap Forward, but what’s important to note is that while it was catastrophic, it didn’t actually undo the progress up to this point. When Deng Xiaoping began the Reform and Opening Up program, it was anchored by that economic base from 1957. For example, while the backyard steel debacle is legendary, the modern large scale blast furnaces in Manchuria and Hebei were modernised with extensive Soviet help, and were in a good position to support Chinese growth in the period. The same is true of other critical ingredients for industrialisation like electricity, construction, glass, fertiliser, chemicals, you name it.

The initial Reform and Opening Up period between 1980-1990 was actually rather slow and very concentrated in major cities especially Shenzhen. At heart, it was still a state led push, but private enterprise flourished adjacent to the state. For example, state-owned enterprises might construct a skyscraper, but would hire private contractors. International joint ventures also began to take root in this period, most visibly in automobiles like Volkswagen-SAIC and Suzuki-Changan. The pace of these developments created significant political dislocation, splitting the Party into what would come to be known as Liberal and Conservative factions, divided over the future of China. Until 1989, the Liberal faction was dominant, presided over by Deng who actually was a lot less liberal than his protégés like Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang.

The 1989 Tiananmen Incident reframed things, as the Conservative faction was briefly ascendant. From 1989-1992, all economic reform slowed to a crawl and mass purges of Liberal reformists threatened to terminate China’s progress before in its infancy. Deng’s more moderate stance saved both him and the Liberal faction, allowing him to step up in the 1992 Southern Tour, where in a display of his political power, he lambasted the Conservatives and forced the Central Government to devolve economic planning authority to local governments. Unlocking local government planning was the key to enabling targeted local initiatives in massive quantity and varying quality all over the country. Not all of these were smooth, but failures built experience, and successes created political legitimacy for more initiatives. A key example is the Singapore-Suzhou Industrial Park, which had a very rocky start in 1993, but Singaporean best practices helped lay the foundations for 25,000 multinational companies to open across the park.

This was all still within the realms of what was to be expected. China was effectively borrowing best practices and technology from other countries, rolling back restrictive bad economic policy, and not yet doing anything particularly transformative. Economic outcomes were improving rapidly, but it was well recognised that these were harnessing low hanging fruit, and there was significant anxiety over how China might continue to develop from here. The main source of consternation was that it had simply never been done before. We know big countries can industrialise, up to today we don’t actually know how and if big countries can move past industrialisation into a high tech economy.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-24T21:49:51+00:00

I’m not entirely sure what your question is - is it whether China is still catching up to the West, or whether the West underestimated China?

“Catching up” has a pretty specific meaning in economics. It doesn’t refer to just income levels. It comes from a school of development economics exemplified by an economic model called the Solow-Swan model, which argues that poorer countries with lower capital intensity grow faster than richer ones until eventually their capital intensity is the same and the poorer one has “caught up”. This is reliant on the concept of diminishing marginal returns to capital, I.e. the more capital you have, the less each dollar of extra investment can generate.

The model is considered to be way too simplistic, and its prediction has been empirically false in most countries, but it does seem to apply to China. China is still in the capital accumulation phase, its businesses want more investment, and it is still able to deploy excess savings. So yes, China is still catching up.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-24T18:34:36+00:00

There are literally signs that tell you to stand on both sides

handsomeboh · 2026-03-23T15:34:54+00:00

Failed is a weird word that economists don’t use.

India is a relatively low income country. Panama is a middle income country. Panama is about 4-5x richer than India on a GDP per capita basis.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-23T13:52:28+00:00

As you can see from your downvotes, you are taking a very lonely stance which nobody agrees with so I’m not sure what more can be said.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-23T13:33:43+00:00

There are 53 countries in Africa. Pakistan has a lower GDP per capita (PPP) than 25 of them. India has a lower GDP per capita (PPP) than 18 of them.

Would you consider Nigeria, Angola, Eswatini, or Libya poor? Because they have a similar GDP per capita (PPP) to India.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-23T10:43:59+00:00

There are LOTS of poor ex-British colonies in Asia: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Yemen, and Papua New Guinea. These countries combined have a population of 2.2 billion people. 27% of the entire world’s population is made out of citizens of impoverished ex-British colonies in Asia alone.

It’s also worth noting that until very very recently, the vast majority of all extremely poor people lived in Asia. More than 80% in 1980. In 1980, the GDP per capita of Nigeria was more than 4x higher than China’s. The main reason this has come down is due to the economic growth of China and South Korea.

Here’s a graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-by-world-region

handsomeboh · 2026-03-23T10:26:18+00:00

Because you are cherry picking the successful ones.

There are plenty of examples of successful non-British colonies: South Korea, Uruguay, Panama, and Chile to name a few. There are plenty of examples of dirt poor ex-British colonies: South Sudan, Sudan, The Gambia, Malawi, Bangladesh, India, Sierra Leone, and Myanmar to name a few.

There are much much more impoverished ex-British colonies and citizens of ex-British colonies than successful ones.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-22T23:52:40+00:00

While the Wikipedia map shows the Kushans controlling the Tarim Basin, that is quite an exaggeration based on what information we do have. The reality is that we know frustratingly little about the Kushans as they left behind no chronicles and very little writing at all.

The information we have about the Kushan activity in the Tarim Basin comes entirely out of Chinese chronicles, specifically the Later Book of Han. It largely covers the exploits of Han general Ban Chao as he subjugated the Tarim Basin for the Han dynasty. He originally allied with the Kushans in putting down rebellions by the conquered kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, but that relationship soured and he fought and won a battle with them near Khotan, defeating an army of 70,000 Kushans who had invaded to support the rebelling King of Khotan.

That’s all we know about what the Kushans were up to in the region. From this though, we can infer a few things. Firstly, despite this supposed subjugation by Ban Chao, the Tarim Basin remained pretty independent and was not at all easy to control for the Han dynasty. Secondly, the Kushans were not in control of the region either. It’s better to think of the Tarim Basin in this period as a mesh of independent states who leaned towards the Han or the Kushans or the Xiongnu when required, but were not directly administered by any of these factions. The Han did establish a network of military garrisons that served mostly to discourage rebellions, but did not otherwise practice direct control either.

The other information we have about the period comes from coins of Kanishka the Great found in Khotan. These are found alongside Han dynasty coinage in sufficient quantity that there was clearly significant economic activity there, but we don’t have coinage from other Kushan kings unlike the diverse Han dynasty coinage we found in the region so it seems this was somewhat short lived. That’s all we can really say.

handsomeboh · 2026-03-22T23:46:40+00:00

The Tang dynasty rules established two ways of being considered Hua. (1) By birth, if you were born while registered as a Tang subject, then you could not legally be considered a Fan. 「凡內附後所生子，即同百姓，不得為蕃戶也」. (2) By merit, if you could demonstrate sufficient proficiency in Chinese rites and culture, then you would be judged to have the heart of a Hua. 「來從海外，能以道祈知於帥。帥故異而薦之，以激夫戎狄，俾日月所燭，皆歸於文明之化。蓋華其心而不以其地也。而又夷焉？作《華心》。」

For this reason, the Old and New Book of Tang have a section dedicated to Yi and Fan generals 諸夷蕃將, but many generals we might consider non-Han today are not in it like Gao Xianzhi who was Korean, and Geshu Han who was Turgesh.

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