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ReindeerF posted:I'm a quasi-conversationally fluent white guy who goes out of his way not to overstate my expertise on the countries I live and travel in, so I sympathize with the eye-rolling at the fly-by jackasses. Still, when was the last time you saw Chinese media send a white English speaker to America? There are plenty of American journalists of Asian descent in Asia and I'm guessing the same goes for Europeans of Asian descent. Just a couple of years ago some of them got detained in North Korea trying to sneak in and report a story. Kristof has made a career off of glomming on to all kinds of issues all over the world, including Africa, because he's Kristof. This is one of the reasons I respect AJE over places like the NYT. They tend to find culturally attuned, often local reporters to do the work. Still, the world isn't perfect and the fact that we have even a large smattering of journalists from the West who even speak the language and understand the culture is fantastic. Unfortunately, the big name outfits are more interested in building branded personalities than reporting. Yeah no, there is no reverse racism going on here noted expat ReindeerF. Also where the hell outside of Hong Kong are you going to find journalists of European descent in China? The burden rests on America precisely because this country is ostensibly a multiracial and multilingual nation.
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Mar 4, 2013 18:12
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To anyone that watched the 60 minutes story last night, was there anything particularly wrong that stood out to you? I've seen the bubble-burst warnings in the news for a while now, but there was still some surprising information in the broadcast. I'm probably wrong about the exact statement, so somebody please correct me, but they said that 20-30% of economic activity is tied to the real estate bubble.
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Mar 4, 2013 18:29
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G. Hosafat posted:To anyone that watched the 60 minutes story last night, was there anything particularly wrong that stood out to you? I've seen the bubble-burst warnings in the news for a while now, but there was still some surprising information in the broadcast. I'm probably wrong about the exact statement, so somebody please correct me, but they said that 20-30% of economic activity is tied to the real estate bubble. Citation needed. The figures I've seen are closer to an estimate that 20-30% of *growth* is related to the real estate bubble. Having that large a share of GDP seems implausible.
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Mar 4, 2013 19:37
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If anything I wish someone produced a flow chart to show all the moving parts in this equation, since national banks, the national government, the local government, developers, the middle class and working poor seem to be all tied together. I wonder how much of construction is fueled by speculation by just the middle class, or the wealthier party-tied elite but ultimately you only get bits and pieces of what is going on in the Western media. If everything collapses who is the ultimate fall guy besides peasants/working poor in this case? In the United States, it was the federal government that had to fail out the big banks. In China, there are national banks who very different but are basically the "commanding heights" of the banking industry? I seem to remember the national banks don't do much direct lending at all, but is it local governments that do it? Besides the economy taking a massive hit (construction is going to stop which means unemployment, and consumer spending is going to go down because the middle class is going to be wrecked), who is going to be absorbing the losses if developers just completely fold? There are going to be titanic losses that have to be passed along somewhere. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 19:40
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Fangz posted:Citation needed. I posted the video on the last page. The quote is at 2:50. The way he phrases it doesn't seem out of line. Ardennes posted:If everything collapses who is the ultimate fall guy besides peasants/working poor in this case? The government from the sound of things. There were severe protests in reaction to the ruling that each person could only buy one apartment. A bubble of this scale popping might just blow the Arab Spring to the east. Bout that time of year. Volkerball fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 19:40
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Volkerball posted:The government from the sound of things. There were severe protests in reaction to the ruling that each person could only buy one apartment. A bubble of this scale popping might just blow the Arab Spring to the east. Bout that time of year. In this case, I would assume the central government would marshal every resource possible to capitalize new loans since they need more construction to keep economic growth up. While the central government has vast foreign currency reserves, it can't borrow against the Yuan and I don't know if they could honestly use those reserves in a pinch or if they would be enough of a back stop. That leads to one scary option, that the PRC would turn to the IMF and I think we all know how problematic that is.
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Mar 4, 2013 20:07
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Peven Stan posted:Yeah no, there is no reverse racism going on here noted expat ReindeerF. Also where the hell outside of Hong Kong are you going to find journalists of European descent in China? The burden rests on America precisely because this country is ostensibly a multiracial and multilingual nation. I dunno about NY Times but Reuters' Beijing head is a Chinese-Filipino American at least... I don't know a lot about journalism but in academia at least, you see a similar trend of old white guys but the up and comers are much, much more diverse in terms of gender, ethncity, national origin etc.
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Mar 4, 2013 20:43
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G. Hosafat posted:To anyone that watched the 60 minutes story last night, was there anything particularly wrong that stood out to you? I've seen the bubble-burst warnings in the news for a while now, but there was still some surprising information in the broadcast. I'm probably wrong about the exact statement, so somebody please correct me, but they said that 20-30% of economic activity is tied to the real estate bubble. I'm not an expert on China, but from my background in Finance, by the time they showed those half completed towers in Tianjin, I just couldn't do anything but gawk. The signs are all there for a...I don't think it would be just a liquidity crisis..just something completely more epic.. the likes of which I don't think we could even conceive of. Its just amazing to me that the Chinese middle class would keep buying them. Its a losing proposition to anyone who's studied the average wages for a person that could be interested in buying property. The whole situation is untenable.
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Mar 4, 2013 23:09
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Peven Stan posted:Yeah no, there is no reverse racism going on here noted expat ReindeerF. Also where the hell outside of Hong Kong are you going to find journalists of European descent in China? CCTV's English channel has a number of European reporters. I live in Zhengzhou, the city in the video. They exaggerate a bit but most of what they say is true. The CBD, which is on the edge of the city, is a ghost town. There are some stores and restaurants on the edges of the district but nobody actually lives there. It's apparently been like this since 2010 and the prices keep going up.
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Mar 5, 2013 00:33
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CIGNX posted:Do you have examples of this or can you elaborate more on this? I've seen expats who do the fetishization, but I can't connect the "malevolent feelings while justifying their own privilege" to something I've seen before in expats. What finally made me swear off Korean-expat blogs altogether was a very explicit case of this. Some guy made a comment on a blog (which I had never seen referenced outside this one event) being critical of white guy - Asian chick relationships because of the way Asian women are fetishized in Western media. A giant dogpile ensued where all these other writers from more well-known blogs addressed his comments on their own blogs. They were extremely offended by the perceived anti-White racism in his comments, and where they did acknowledge his broader point, it was pretty much as a footnote so they could devote more time to "all racism everywhere is equally wrong," with copious complaints about how mean Korean culture is to White people because some Korean people somewhere express less than a 100% awesome reaction to Korean women dating men who don't even speak the language. One in particular really disgusted me, as part of his rebuttal was literally a picture of his attractive Asian wife flipping the bird while holding a sign that said "gently caress you". The irony about these kinds of people is that they're politically liberal- the guy with the bird-flipping wife identifies as a feminist. But absolutely nothing inspires their rage so much as the suggestion that they benefit from their ethnicity. They often avoid discussing racism against any other ethnic groups even though it would be a much stronger argument simply because it would make it painfully obvious how easy we have it when compared to non-Westerners. It's also worth noting that the commenter who provoked all this was actually Asian-American. Actual Asians don't normally visit these sites, and when they do they don't stick around long. I don't want to link it because it was spread over so many sites, and also it was this horrible discussion that no one should ever have to read under any circumstances. If someone had tried to make an SA thread on the subject it would have been gassed within the first day. Sorry for the long not-China related post but it's a good question and I doubt the ones in China are much different.
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Mar 5, 2013 00:43
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The severity of the bubble must be significant because there's a lot of Chinese fob cash buyers in CA buying 2-3 half million dollar houses at a time and dumping all their relatives here. If they can swing that sort of dough and the upper-middle crust are going out of their way to avoid it by going out of country then there must be little value in Chinese real estate these days. I bet it's sort of like major real estate in Thailand..it's the playground of the very rich who are usually gambling with other people's money buying and flipping over and over again until it all blows up. I do think the banking system in China is well aware of this and they have been trying to keep a lid on the easy liquidity for the past couple of years.
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Mar 5, 2013 00:44
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Some Guy TT posted:
Not all expats in asia are like this of course but a really high percentage are. It's pretty easy to figure out what the attitudes are when they initially mistake you for a local too or just casually listen in on what the side bar conversation is.
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Mar 5, 2013 00:53
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Modus Operandi posted:The severity of the bubble must be significant because there's a lot of Chinese fob cash buyers in CA buying 2-3 half million dollar houses at a time and dumping all their relatives here. If they can swing that sort of dough and the upper-middle crust are going out of their way to avoid it by going out of country then there must be little value in Chinese real estate these days. I bet it's sort of like major real estate in Thailand..it's the playground of the very rich who are usually gambling with other people's money buying and flipping over and over again until it all blows up. I do think the banking system in China is well aware of this and they have been trying to keep a lid on the easy liquidity for the past couple of years. I think they have tried, and when things start really slowing down they back off and turn the faucets back on. Obviously, many officials in high positions in China realize that construction has been untenable for a while, but there isn't any way to resolve it easily while keeping growth high. Also, I think there is a real worry of mass default or simply unpaid debts from all these projects that have been passed a long. Granted, I don't know how much it has been split between local governments, state banks and developers but obviously most of the iceberg worth of debt is below the surface somewhere since all these projects had real costs and their current values are only on paper. It is very difficult to predict because the central government's most important object is to keep the show going on as long as humanly possible. That said, Japan tried to do that as well.
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Mar 5, 2013 00:56
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Pulling about half of this out of my rear end: once the global economy starts to warm up again the pace of new construction in China is going to slow substantially. The construction industry was used as a way to keep money circulating at pace during the last few years and when exports pick up again there'll be more security for the government. It will leave alot of people holding on to empty flats though. Roll on 2049.
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Mar 5, 2013 01:20
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I love real estate bubbles. I love watching them burst. I love telling speculators and real estate agents in Hong Kong how this exact thing happened in America in 2008. I love hearing their excuses. I'm going to love the vindication when it all goes down. Then I'll buy a couple floors of some of these luxury condos and make a sky mansion. That'll be fun. I wish I could say I knew where the top of the bubble was. It certainly feels like we've gotta be close to it in Hong Kong, the way prices are. But I maintain that a huge part of this is mainland official corruption, and the market is going to be buoyed by that for as long as it's A. As easy as it is to get away with right now B. Ideal to put money into real estate as a hedge against inflation C. Difficult/inconvenient to move money out of China But once it bursts, oh boy is there going to be huge money to be made in the cleanup.
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Mar 5, 2013 02:21
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I pretty much hate all of the expats here except for a select few. I've got a small group of mates, that's good enough for me, all of the other horrible expats can do whatever the hell they please as long as they don't tell me about it. I keep to myself mostly, and spend time with my Chinese friends or foreign friends. I think I only have one or two friends that are English teachers...the rest all work for Spanish or German companies, or are studying Chinese. I'm sure we all have awful expat stories that we could pass around, but I'd guess they'd all be the same. That or they'd be about you.
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Mar 5, 2013 02:27
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Rich people can afford to flip houses and pay real life monopoly because mortgage payments mean nothing to them. Even if they lose the game when the bubble deflates, they can just hold onto another 10 years and wait for inflation to take its course. It will be like having a new holiday home or some rental property. Bloodnose likes to snicker when I say this but Hong Kong is a parachute place for rich mainlanders and with the appreciation of the Yuan, buying anything in Hong Kong seems like a steal when everything is 20% off. And even if China crashes and burn, there is a notion that HK will be a "safe haven" for the rich to funnel their money. Heck, mainlanders are so freaking rich with their mysterious money that they use to buy a flat in Hong Kong as a locker for their shopping trips  As long as Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the USD, and the US Fed does quantitative easing, Hong Kong's prices will float up for a while. It might not spiral up, but it will sure as hell float, especially with the artificial supply of land.But thankfully, that was more of 2008 thing, it's funny to say this but year after year mainlanders are not as trashy as before. Sure you can still see dudes fully dressed in designer label clothing yet squatting down and hunching their shoulders like a troll while smoking nasty cigarettes, but there is a small minority emerging from the masses. They are chasing other goals besides material wealth. Looking into social issues, art, culture, health, self nurturing all that jazz. The people who lose the most are the middle classes, or those who just got a new hot job and want something fancier. I knew a guy who got a job in Morgan Stanley and within 2 years he started buying a Porsche and wants to live large in a fancy high rise apartment. Then came 08, he lost his job and he had to fofeit his down payment and everything  Yes, houses are definitely over priced but one thing I would like to take note is China's (lack of) urban planning. You really don't see "white flight" or "urban flight" to the suburbs. There really isn't much of a urban decay. Zones either turn into generic lifeless fake historical tourist districts like the gazillion style suzhou places, or rebuilt fake hutong in Beijing. Or the dirty, poor housing in the city centre just gets demolished and you get massive subway lines and new developmental condos on top of the stations to prop up land value (thanks Hong Kong MTR, you really taught China all the horrible real estate business practices). It's the dead malls and empty land in the suburb which is a real joke, but I think prime land in the city centre can still be a prize.
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Mar 5, 2013 03:10
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Yeah but wait till the Fed jacks up interest rates. That's the other hilarious side of Hong Kong not controlling it's monetary policy. Mainlanders dump money here, sure. But there are also plenty of idiot middle to upper middle class people here who think prices go up forever. They take out adjustable-rate mortgages (SOUND FAMILIAR, AMERICANS?), in fact fixed-rate mortgages are almost unheard of in HK, because they think they need to get on this train now or they'll never be able to own homes. Because wages have been stagnant here for a decade (they've gone up like 9% in the last decade, compared to 30%+ inflation), a lot of new buyers are using their parents' money for down payments. Until recently, banks were allowed to give mortgages to people who would use more than half their income to make payments. Even now, the amount is 40%. It's madness. And it's almost exactly what happened in America that led to the big crash. The thing is, America could drop its interest rates to try to deal with this stuff. Hong Kong can't. When the Fed jacks up rates, roughly one billion Hong Kongers will be underwater on their mortgages. Sixty billion if (when) housing prices crash. Mainland money can only buoy so much. They aren't actually that much of the market. They're just exacerbating the madness and providing a talking point for the real estate agents: "OF COURSE YOU SHOULD MAKE THE DOWN PAYMENT, SOME MAINLANDER WILL COME BUY IT FROM YOU FOR TWICE THE PRICE BEFORE THE DEAL IS EVEN DONE LOL."
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Mar 5, 2013 03:36
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Ardennes posted:
In the United States the working poor were being handed loans like they were candy. I'm not sure that's the case in China, and most of them, if they're buying houses, aren't buying them in the major cities. They won't be the convenient scapegoat for assholes that they were in the US. GuestBob posted:Pulling about half of this out of my rear end: once the global economy starts to warm up again the pace of new construction in China is going to slow substantially. The construction industry was used as a way to keep money circulating at pace during the last few years and when exports pick up again there'll be more security for the government. The Chinese labor market (in terms of "gently caress you, unions, they'll work for your beer money and don't complain about repetitive motion injuries") is close to tapped out. A property market collapse would free up some workers, but they're not going to see growth like the last 20 years. Rising Chinese wages make Indonedia, India, Malaysia, etc. more attractive. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/07/24/now-apples-manufacturing-is-leaving-china/ Also you're assuming the west will start buying crap again. VideoTapir fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Mar 5, 2013 03:39
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VideoTapir posted:In the United States the working poor were being handed loans like they were candy. I'm not sure that's the case in China, and most of them, if they're buying houses, aren't buying them in the major cities. They are in Hong Kong! Except they're not the 'poor' here. They're the middle to upper middle class. Still way too poor to afford homes here though. People making 30-60k US a year. I mean if I tell you a family of two with an annual income of $45,000 should probably not buy a home that costs $1.5 million, you'd probably say something like "loving, duh. Stop saying obvious poo poo, you obvious poo poo." This is not what people say in Hong Kong. They say "Yep you'd better hurry up and buy that house before it costs $2 mil!!!"
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Mar 5, 2013 03:48
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Bloodnose posted:I mean if I tell you a family of two with an annual income of $45,000 should probably not buy a home that costs $1.5 million, you'd probably say something like "loving, duh. Stop saying obvious poo poo, you obvious poo poo." Well, NOW, yeah.
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Mar 5, 2013 04:01
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VideoTapir posted:In the United States the working poor were being handed loans like they were candy. I'm not sure that's the case in China, and most of them, if they're buying houses, aren't buying them in the major cities. They won't be the convenient scapegoat for assholes that they were in the US. Granted, the working poor in China ultimately rely on construction and consumer consumption in order to get their meager wages. I guess you could just tell them to move back to the village but an actual deep recession would put a lot of people with not much money out of work. Also, consumer/food prices are always sticky so drastically reduced wages/mass unemployment will be problematic. Ultimately, the People's Bank of China has reserves of 3 trillion, which is a substantial amount of money (even in regards to the extend of the future crisis) but who knows what that actually means. The Chinese banking system seems very opaque and it is difficult to get a hold on exactly how much money is owed and by whom. (If anyone has any info on this, feel free to share). If I had to guess, I think property prices in HK/Macao will probably stay elevated just by virtue of the SARs acting as sort of a grey-market conduit. If a real crisis happens, I suspect there will be a lot of mainland officials that would like to move their assets in a more "secure" location that is also far more open to international finance. I think as long as the Mainland sees Hong Kong (and Macao) as a way to secure their gains, I think it is going to be hard for people who actually live there.
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Mar 5, 2013 04:08
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Bloodnose posted:Yeah but wait till the Fed jacks up interest rates. You have a long time to wait before interest rate armageddon then, if American fiscal policy keeps going the way it does. Bernanke won't dare raise rates with the government cutting the goddamn budget year after year because it's the "responsible" thing to do. The private sector isn't doing too terribly as the President said (badly) last year, but the fiscal drag is going to continue for the foreseeable future because the Republicans locked themselves into the House with redistricting shenanigans.
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Mar 5, 2013 05:48
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Ardennes posted:The Chinese banking system seems very opaque and it is difficult to get a hold on exactly how much money is owed and by whom. (If anyone has any info on this, feel free to share). I remember being surprised when I first saw this: Wikipedia posted:Non-performing loans Western banks ain't the only ones who need government help it seems.
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Mar 5, 2013 05:58
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Was just reading the economist guide book "Doing Business in China". What does China do with its bad lones? It just packages the debt packages and sells it off to some magical asset dealing company. Sometimes, financial transactions are just really really shady. If the stock market ever goes haywire, the government can just put a price ceiling or price floor on prices, or just stop the index. Heck at least in Hong Kong the Monetary Authority just dumps money into the market to maintain market stability. Since we all love to talk about housing crisis, bad debt, shady government deals. Enjoy a slice of  Best part of this story is that the person coming up with this idea is not the land lord. He's doing it to pay for his mortgage. To me as a privileged person wondering out loud - If housing is so expensive, and people like living in chopped up rooms, why not pay the same amount and share with one room mate so that everyone gets more space? By adding more artificial walls, you lose out on a lot more space  I suppose sharing with strangers is just a hassle and people rather have their own places?Now back to something more dire. Photos from society of community organization. http://www.soco.org.hk/artwalk2009/index.htm  cagemen posted:"In the old days, the life of a hawker was easier. I sold all kinds of animals' entrails and fish balls!" When he reminiscences about the golden years of a hawker's life, Jiang Shaojiu always becomes excited; however, the entire hawking business began to decline after the Hong Kong government stopped renewing hawker's licenses in the 1980s. Since blood nose did cover about the cagemen, they recently did a new photo op. It's pretty creative and is a top down http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671933/think-your-homes-small-look-at-hong-kong-s-illegal-microapartments#2 This is a website linking to the original photos from the society.  But those are considered "big". Smallest ones are coffin style - hey you get privacy  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKf08vWTkKA ***** Shower/bathroom is probably right next to the kitchen. Yeah, just found another English documentary. It's more in detail and shows how people live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4jjdRzy3w So why is the government not doing anything to alleviate the situation besides the usual line "GET IN LINE"? In more reduced terms, it's to avoid people from abusing the system. lovely housing situation is not a new thing to Hong Kong's history. During the 50's when the shanty towns burned down, the government made cheap "temporary housing" (for 55 years) and tried to move all the homeless people into public housing. Or people lived in chop-shop housing where a room is just divided into sections with a wooden board. Times were tough for everyone and my mom lived with 12 other people in 600 square feet. But "everyone was poor and could bootstraps their way into a private home" so living in a shoe box was considered ok. When the population is swelling from the touch base immigration policy until the early 80's, there were still people who left in the old urban areas. To fast track into public housing, families moved on purpose from the urban areas to wooden makeshift housing in the fringes. Lo and behold, they got settled in too. However, the wooden shacks still exist and the people who moved to public housing in turn rented the shacks to illegal immigrants. I'm not exactly sure how the story goes from then on, but think the government just got tired of people appealing to humanitarian grounds and got fed up with poor people. Plus by the 80's, most people have settled into sub urban government housing. HK has become a financial center for professional white collared folk or a play ground for real estate speculation instead of a cheap manufacturing base (where they need to treat poor people well to avoid mass riots and another cultural revolution fiasco in Hong Kong). Apparently, there's even stacked coffin style housing - It‘s like capsule hotels but on a permanent basis   I know China isn't much better for housing right now, but talking to random mainlanders, 70 square meter (700 square feet) is considered the standard size for a single person. Geeze, in Hong Kong that's fancy housing for a family of 5. I do love this city, its fast internet, and relative freedom but I really want move to China. But Beijing/Shanghai has horrible air and slow internet  caberham fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Mar 6, 2013 |
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Mar 6, 2013 11:32
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Man I love tiny apartments but that video gives me claustrophobia every time. Where is the shower?!
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Mar 6, 2013 15:25
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Down the hall and to the left. Can't miss it. There is probably a community bathroom for each hall or floor.
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Mar 6, 2013 17:08
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caberham posted:
This is exactly it. It's why an acquaintance of mine (in Beijing) moved from a big apartment open shared with like 7 or 8 other people to a subdivided room less than 4 square meters. Except it was less hassle and more violent physical conflict. quote:I know China isn't much better for housing right now, but talking to random mainlanders, 70 square meter (700 square feet) is considered the standard size for a single person. Where is that? Christ, that'd be big for one person in Arizona.
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Mar 6, 2013 17:32
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VideoTapir posted:This is exactly it. It's why an acquaintance of mine (in Beijing) moved from a big apartment open shared with like 7 or 8 other people to a subdivided room less than 4 square meters. Except it was less hassle and more violent physical conflict. Um, like everywhere. The tiny apartments are usually only starter apartments and unless there's some great deal that they want to trade up for, it's far more common to just hang onto the first one, rent it out and get another one that has enough space to raise a kid in. The other tiny apartments near schools and whatever are not intended for actually living in anymore, they are to secure access to better schools. Tiny little apartments are basically for the non-residents looking to maximize savings. The vast majority of hukou-resident families own their own homes with the exception of those who transferred their hukou in like, the past 10 years or so. Other reasons to rent is when the residency is temporary or at least not planned to be long-term in the first place.
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Mar 6, 2013 18:06
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Ugh. Real estate is the most boring subject.
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Mar 6, 2013 18:08
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Throatwarbler posted:Ugh. Real estate is the most boring subject. Who'd buy that, Voodoo practitioners?
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Mar 6, 2013 21:27
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http://www.voanews.com/content/north-korea-prepares-public-for-potential-conflict-with-south/1616568.html North Korea is threatening the nullify the US/SK Armistice on March 11th, which happens to be exactly when the administration change in China is finalized.
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Mar 7, 2013 02:01
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The Saga of Chinachem and Nina Wang will never die. Tony Chan is now born-again Christian Peter Chan. SCMP posted:Weeks before appearing in court to face forgery charges, former self-styled fung shui master Chan Chun-chuen has renounced geomancy for Christianity.
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Mar 7, 2013 04:00
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Aw. Christianity doesn't have the same oomph as tasteful furniture arranging /sincere
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Mar 7, 2013 05:06
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Here's an interesting article about Mao Zedong's apparently retarded grandson, Major General Mao Xinyu.Could Harvard be on the cards for the great grandchildren of China's revolutionary leader Mao Zedong? posted:
I never realized Mao Anqing had children. He suffered from something that's just been called 'mental illness' and was pretty marginalized and kept out of the spotlight. According to The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Mao was actually not a nepotist. He regularly insisted that his daughters get no special treatment (although the book never mentioned Mao Anqing, and Mao Anying was dead before Li Zhisui became his doctor. It's another one of the more interesting comparisons between North Korea and China, or Cuba and China. Cuba and NK kept the dictatorship in the family. Whether or not Mao was a 'true believer' in communism is pretty debatable, but I tend to think he was, and the fact that he wasn't a nepotist is some evidence to that end. Another interesting thing from The Private Life of Chairman Mao is how Jiang Qing (Li Zhisui loving hated Jiang Qing) always pretended to be sick, because as long as she was sick, she got to be The Chairman's Wife and enjoyed all the privileges of that. If she wasn't sick, she had to go back to her relatively lovely government job, I forget what it was. Of course, after Mao was dead, then his family got to wave their names around and Jiang Qing took over (see how well that went for her) and apparently this Mao Xinyu got to be a major general. It's just another one of those many, many things that would piss Mao off about what China became after his death.
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Mar 7, 2013 10:34
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Bloodnose posted:It's just another one of those many, many things that would piss Mao off about what China became after his death. The implied nostalgia in this sentence made me sperg all over my keyboard. Wasn't Mao carried in a litter for most of the long march? If you compare him to the Cuban leaders he seems more than wanting. Maybe he was just a crap revolutionary, oh wait no, that was the characteristic he promoted most strongly during the Cultural Revolution. What exactly was he good at again?
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Mar 7, 2013 11:47
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GuestBob posted:What exactly was he good at again? Perfecting a smug rear end grin for his face to be plastered on currency?
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Mar 7, 2013 12:23
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GuestBob posted:The implied nostalgia in this sentence made me sperg all over my keyboard. Forcing nearly a billion people to follow a ideology without personally adhering to its beliefs himself? Killing 60+ million people at a time with his beliefs of how to make China strong? Destroying 4000+ years of Chinese cultural history to make China strong? Seriously, Mao set China back at least 100 years or more, and once the cult mentality breaks in China he will be regarded as the worst Chinese person who ever lived.
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Mar 7, 2013 12:31
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pentyne posted:...and once the cult mentality breaks in China... Don't hold your breath, buddy.
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Mar 7, 2013 12:40
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pentyne posted:Destroying 4000+ years of Chinese cultural history to make China strong? I've heard a great deal about how Mao was a lovely person but this is new. I figured that the decline of Chinese culture began when they were conquered by the British/Dutch and then conquered again by the Japanese and THEN Mao came around and further hosed it.
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Mar 7, 2013 12:40
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