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At least this guy didn't hack some toddlers to shreds with an axe - which is the preferred modus operandi.
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Jul 20, 2013 14:38
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GuestBob posted:At least this guy didn't hack some toddlers to shreds with an axe - which is the preferred modus operandi.
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Jul 20, 2013 14:40
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Yeah it's good to remind ourselves from time to time that civil unrest happens every day in China, the world just never hears about most incidents.
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Jul 20, 2013 15:01
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this happened here a few weeks ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen_bus_fire now there's some guards halfheartedly checking people's bags at the bus stations
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Jul 20, 2013 18:25
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ReindeerF posted:I'm sure he wanted to do something that would actually cause concern among the ruling class. It really doesn't do well to eulogise the attempted suicide-murderer. These are disturbed, desperate people, their circumstances suck, but they aren't heroic revolutionaries.
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Jul 20, 2013 18:27
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Fangz posted:It really doesn't do well to eulogise the attempted suicide-murderer. These are disturbed, desperate people, their circumstances suck, but they aren't heroic revolutionaries.
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Jul 20, 2013 18:32
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Do any of you guys think china will crash? I been thinking about this for a while and wanted to know what you guys think since you seem to know a lot more about china. I don't know much about economics but when I heard about the recent credit crunch, china's economy cooling, the "Ghost Cities" that no one will move into, how housing prices are too high and how wages are too low for people to afford to buy them, low consumerism and all the massive corruption, it doesn't sound good at all. Please correct me if I'm wrong because I really don't know about what is really happening in china.
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Jul 25, 2013 04:33
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Berith posted:Do any of you guys think china will crash? I been thinking about this for a while and wanted to know what you guys think since you seem to know a lot more about china. Granted, I have been a pessimist for years, but yes. I don't think Chinese growth will disappear but a bad debts as large as what happened in China are very difficult to disappear without much lower growth. One thing is that Chinese growth/gdp is already overstated by virtue of political necessity, in China to keep up that appearances an local governments have been spending very liberally. Technically, if you build a giant provincial party building it counts as a part of economic growth but in reality it isn't a useful resource. The same thing with ghost cities. China has had productive growth from manufacturing from the 1990s/early 2000s. that is undeniable, but probably since 2005 the numbers have been mostly made up or artificially created through the aforementioned spending. The media, especially the American media, of course continued to promote the idea Chinese growth was absolutely real and unstoppable because it got people to tune in and made them money. In addition, it was useful politically. Remember this ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM ? Granted, there is now the real question of what will actually happen, and I think the most likely the thing that the PRC tries to inflate its numbers as much as possible while slowing admitting that that growth won't be as high as they thought. Eventually, it will settle in the mid-lower single digits.
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Jul 25, 2013 04:52
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Berith posted:Please correct me if I'm wrong because I really don't know about what is really happening in china. Nobody knows what is really happening in China - all the statistics are lies except you don't know how much. There's lying at every level basically. Whether there's going to be a crash is really hard to say, but this 10% growth every year is going away and may have gone away almost 10 years ago.
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Jul 25, 2013 05:31
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I think someone upthread said it best: China is in a very slow downward slide with a great deal of inertia.
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Jul 25, 2013 05:38
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It doesn't exactly help that Xi Jinping has been doubling down on the "remember the good old days" rhetoric. If one were being pessimistic, one might say he's laying the groundwork for a potential crackdown if people get restive about slow growth.
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Jul 25, 2013 05:38
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TheBalor posted:It doesn't exactly help that Xi Jinping has been doubling down on the "remember the good old days" rhetoric. If one were being pessimistic, one might say he's laying the groundwork for a potential crackdown if people get restive about slow growth. To be honest in some ways it is already going on but you just don't hear about it much, and growth was what they build their entire legitimacy around.
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Jul 25, 2013 05:49
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It'll be interesting and sad to see what happens once people realize that fast, unsustainable growth is no longer possible.
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Jul 25, 2013 06:12
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This thread certainly is making me doubt the popular notion that China will overtake the US in GDP and economic size by 2020.
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Jul 25, 2013 06:52
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Arglebargle III posted:Nobody knows what is really happening in China - all the statistics are lies except you don't know how much. There's lying at every level basically. Whether there's going to be a crash is really hard to say, but this 10% growth every year is going away and may have gone away almost 10 years ago. Are the power consumption stats considered to be cooked at this point as well? I remember reading that you could observe discrepancies between the manufacturing numbers and power consumption at one point, and make some inferences about what might actually be going on from that.
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Jul 25, 2013 06:55
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Fojar38 posted:This thread certainly is making me doubt the popular notion that China will overtake the US in GDP and economic size by 2020. It depends on who's measuring it. But China's gonna overtake the US in economic size sooner or later. It's a consequence of having a population three times the size. It's kind of embarrassing that they haven't accomplished it yet. Now when will China overtake the US in per capita GDP? Oh like never.
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Jul 25, 2013 07:02
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Paper Mac posted:Are the power consumption stats considered to be cooked at this point as well? I remember reading that you could observe discrepancies between the manufacturing numbers and power consumption at one point, and make some inferences about what might actually be going on from that. I heard a lot of provinces will actually setting up aluminum smelters with the expressed purpose of increasing electric demand in order to juke the statistics (even though that aluminum wasn't needed). http://www.steelguru.com/metals_news/Chinese_aluminum_smelters_suffer_overcapacity/316566.html quote:It depends on who's measuring it. It will eventually happen but the trajectory will be much much slower than journalists and economists were predicting a couple years ago. Of course, one thing is that PPP gdp statistics completely useless because there hasn't been an established basket of goods for ears, so the PPP is rather broken when talking about China. In addition, that number is based on government statistics and basically who knows what they actually say. So when people start talking about "when China will surpass the US", it should be very difficult to give a real answer. The mechanics of China being larger by GDP is unavoidable in the long term, but it most likely be quite a long term thing. China in nominal terms is little more than half the size of the US.
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Jul 25, 2013 07:34
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Longanimitas posted:I think someone upthread said it best: China is in a very slow downward slide with a great deal of inertia. I said that about the party/state though, not the economy.
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Jul 25, 2013 09:25
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Even if we're talking about the long term, that seems to assume that the US GDP will remain stagnant or go into decline and that China would be able to capitalize on globalization like the US has (which seems unlikely as globalization is the result of the US integrating the world economy into its own, something that nobody else will really be able to emulate since it only works once.) Not to mention China's ability to project influence in all but the most superficial ways seem to be severely limited by deep-rooted cultural traditions from what I've seen of this thread.
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Jul 25, 2013 09:29
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Fojar38 posted:Even if we're talking about the long term, that seems to assume that the US GDP will remain stagnant or go into decline and that China would be able to capitalize on globalization like the US has (which seems unlikely as globalization is the result of the US integrating the world economy into its own, something that nobody else will really be able to emulate since it only works once.) I think it might be more of a case of US and China both stagnating in the very near future. In many ways, China needs a helpful prosperous West to fuel its economy, its domestic consumption will never be enough to fuel considerable growth. Limited markets plus bad debts not to mention environmental damage and an aging population isn't a great combination even if at some point Chinese gdp eventually surpasses the US. The way Chinese growth, even its likely inflated figures, has been dropping, I could the "closing gap" only through attrition where they might only gain a few points on the US per year if that. Granted, that is assuming that China doesn't enter a prolonged lost decade like Japan. Also, as it has been clearly shown by recent events China is actually fairly diplomatically isolated in the region and outside of Laos and Cambodia isn't really on favorable terms with any of their neighbors. Relations with Russia are in reality much cooler than some pundits might let on. The safe bet is that the US will continue to sit on the world for most of this century as humanity buckles under its weight but the conflict of the future really isn't even between states but ideologies.
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Jul 25, 2013 09:48
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What ideologies? China doesn't really have an ideology, I mean Chinese people complain all the time that Chinese society lacks any guiding principles beyond anxiety materialism. Yes I just made up that term  but I think it describes the vast majority of Chinese's(ezezz?) attitude towards wealth right now. You hear 22 year old women say "I need a house and a car for stability" but it's Mom&Dad's words coming out of her mouth. Then men have to scramble to have those things and they are anxious about money and the women are anxious about finding a guy with money and the parents are anxious about their kids getting married and popping out little retirement plans and little Wang is anxious about his gaokao so he can grow up to make money to find a wife to have kids and...I dunno I just feel like conversations about wealth in this country are overwhelmingly dominated by the anxieties of the middle-aged.
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Jul 25, 2013 10:35
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The anxiety materialism is an ideology. I assume Ardennes wasn't referring to a West/China conflict, though you could plausibly look at that as Western neoliberalism vs. national corporatism on the Chinese side.
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Jul 25, 2013 10:42
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Ardennes posted:The mechanics of China being larger by GDP is unavoidable in the long term, but it most likely be quite a long term thing. China in nominal terms is little more than half the size of the US. Just to give some numbers to this. US GDP: 15.6 trillion US PPP: ~50k USD China population: 1.35 billion So how big does the PPP of China need to be to get a GDP greater than the US? 15,600,000,000,000 / 1,350,000,000 = 11,555 Which puts it in the illustrious company of such well run countries as Kazakhstan, Brazil and Argentina. 11.5k PPP is also below the world average of 12k, and only 2.5k above it's current level of 9k. So, in short it's pretty easy to have a GDP greater than the US if you have a large population. But alot of the things ppl associate with the previous #1 GDP country will not transfer. The average man on the street will still be poor compared to the first world countries, China will still be seen as a horribly run country and the economic and diplomatic might that the US enjoys won't be changed much either.
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Jul 25, 2013 13:53
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So long as my country gets to make cash off of the Middle Kingdom before it publicly shits itself, I couldn't care either way.
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Jul 25, 2013 13:59
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To be fair, a decent chunk of the US GDP might be accounting bullshit on paper from the finance sector and not "real" production.
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Jul 25, 2013 14:28
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WarpedNaba posted:So long as my country gets to make cash off of the Middle Kingdom before it publicly shits itself, I couldn't care either way. This. Everyone enjoys making $$$ of something making GBS threads itself. Has anyone read George Friedman's "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century"? I know it's all just some guy's predictions, but he was getting at China and its economy imploding for various reason by the 2020's, which depending who who you ask seems possible. Is that more likely to happen (not necessarily in the 2020's) than say long term political and economic stability? Also, any book recommendations? I have read Kissinger's "On China" as well as "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers" by Richard McGregor, and am curious to read some more on the country.
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Jul 25, 2013 16:42
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Fojar38 posted:This thread certainly is making me doubt the popular notion that China will overtake the US in GDP and economic size by 2020. To do this, China doesn't have to do well. It just needs to do less badly than the US. That's certainly possible. I don't think China will crash. Probably more some period of stagnation for about 20 years or so. A few locations will backslide. But it'll probably be lost in the overall pattern of bullshit that will hit most countries in the world in the future. Fangz fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jul 25, 2013 |
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Jul 25, 2013 19:42
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Arglebargle III posted:What ideologies? China doesn't really have an ideology, I mean Chinese people complain all the time that Chinese society lacks any guiding principles beyond anxiety materialism. Materialism is a sort of ideology of its own that easily dovetails with neo-liberalism, just as long as they are consuming and not asking questions, they are "doing their part." The question is when things fall apart and consumerism is no longer sustainable. quote:I assume Ardennes wasn't referring to a West/China conflict, though you could plausibly look at that as Western neoliberalism vs. national corporatism on the Chinese side. At this point I see state capitalism and neoliberalism as easily on the same side, especially now there is talk about "qualitative reforms" to promote private enterprise. It is likely, as time goes on the Chinese government will become even more neoliberal as they struggle to find a solution to the growing woes of Chinese society. That said, Chinese state capitalism really isn't that far away from bog standard Western capitalism already at this point. quote:hich puts it in the illustrious company of such well run countries as Kazakhstan, Brazil and Argentina. 11.5k PPP is also below the world average of 12k, and only 2.5k above it's current level of 9k. As I was saying PPP is sort of broken in regards of China because there currently isn't a accurate calculation of the price of a basket of goods. Basically, rampant price inflation isn't being accurately taken into account which makes finding "price parity" impossible. In nominal terms, China is about 6k versus 50k per capita, which means they will have to more than double their GDP per capita to reach gross parity. While it still quite probable there is a price parity above nominal terms, we just have no way of knowing at this point. In addition, since the numbers are exaggerated on top of that to a rather extreme degree and the statistics very opaque it is very difficult to get a real sense of what is going on. Anyway, there was a report from China released a while back estimated the GINI index was around .60 and China also obviously has a much of financial speculation on top of everything else. Today's China is as capitalism as they come at this point. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jul 25, 2013 |
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Jul 25, 2013 19:49
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Haha explaining speculation o my Chinese Econ class is the easiest. One sentence explanation and they all go "oooh like houses!"
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Jul 26, 2013 03:08
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ReindeerF posted:I'm sure he wanted to do something that would actually cause concern among the ruling class. I have to give the Chinese government some credit - they saw the internet's effects on perception management and were proactive about it - I doubt we'll see one of these guys become like Mohammed Bouazizi.
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Jul 26, 2013 05:19
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ReindeerF posted:I'm sure he wanted to do something that would actually cause concern among the ruling class. Edit: Betamax double post
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Jul 26, 2013 05:24
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Cream_Filling posted:To be fair, a decent chunk of the US GDP might be accounting bullshit on paper from the finance sector and not "real" production. This is not, in fact, the case.
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Jul 26, 2013 06:46
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dilbertschalter posted:This is not, in fact, the case. I think the idea is that some fraction of the FIRE sector is unproductive drag on the economy and shouldn't be counted as GDP, which would make US GDP overreported by a small percentage.
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Jul 26, 2013 07:04
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Arglebargle III posted:I think the idea is that some fraction of the FIRE sector is unproductive drag on the economy and shouldn't be counted as GDP, which would make US GDP overreported by a small percentage. Yeah but you would have to do that for every country wouldn't you? Looking at the French or Chinese banking sector, it isn't really an uniquely American thing.
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Jul 26, 2013 07:09
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I don't really know about other countries' banking sectors so I couldn't say. I guess? I'm just explaining what I think the other guy meant.
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Jul 26, 2013 07:19
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Fojar38 posted:Even if we're talking about the long term, that seems to assume that the US GDP will remain stagnant or go into decline and that China would be able to capitalize on globalization like the US has (which seems unlikely as globalization is the result of the US integrating the world economy into its own, something that nobody else will really be able to emulate since it only works once.) China probably will overtake the US in GDP within 10-20 years, but that is the only way they are likely to pass the US. China will never have political or cultural influence that even comes remotely close to the US due to their own cultural viewpoints that make some things... difficult for them. The more China feels it is back to what it thinks is its proper place as the "#1 power" in the world, the more apparent it will become that they, in fact, will punch far below their weight in the diplomatic arena because nobody likes dealing with those who have that kind of sense of entitlement. Will they crash? Inevitably. It might not be this year. It may not even be in our lifetimes, but it will happen. If history is any indication, China tends to self-destruct every ~200 years or so, with the most recent being in the late 19th/early-mid 20th century.
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Jul 26, 2013 14:06
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Yureina posted:The more China feels it is back to what it thinks is its proper place as the "#1 power" in the world, the more apparent it will become that they, in fact, will punch far below their weight in the diplomatic arena because nobody likes dealing with those who have that kind of sense of entitlement. Explain America then.
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Jul 26, 2013 14:17
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VideoTapir posted:Explain America then. Pretty poo poo as well. I'd say that the difference between the two, and why the US will always do better than China diplomatically/politically, is ultimately cultural. The US, for all its faults and BS when it comes to race issues, is much more accepting of foreign cultures. China prefers to keep to their own, and they have never been very good at dealing with foreigners. There's a good reason why (almost) none of China's East Asian neighbors are fond of them. The history between China and its neighbors has been one of tribute, intervention, and outright conquest. It was that way for thousands of years and there isn't much indication I see that the attitudes that drove such behavior will change.
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Jul 26, 2013 14:32
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Yureina posted:Pretty poo poo as well. I'd say that the difference between the two, and why the US will always do better than China diplomatically/politically, is ultimately cultural. The US, for all its faults and BS when it comes to race issues, is much more accepting of foreign cultures. What does that have to do with diplomacy, and uh, not really. quote:China prefers to keep to their own, and they have never been very good at dealing with foreigners. There's a good reason why (almost) none of China's East Asian neighbors are fond of them. The history between China and its neighbors has been one of tribute, intervention, and outright conquest. It was that way for thousands of years and there isn't much indication I see that the attitudes that drove such behavior will change. The only difference between the US and China on this count is that it's only hundreds of years not thousands. Also the US's offenses are mostly more recent.
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Jul 26, 2013 15:27
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I think economically/militarily, the US-China contest is a tossup. Culturally, I think in China's current incarnation won't top America for a multitude of reasons. First, because per capita GDP is so different, most people in the world won't look at the life of the average citizen and say "I want to be that". And that's not even counting all the awful bits of Chinese society right now like rampant corruption and baby formula poisoning. Even people in Hong Kong won't look at a typical Chinese citizen in aspirational terms. Compare and contrast with S. Korea and Japan, who have considerably higher standards of living and their relative cultural penetration. Second, the way that culture is being produced and obviously talented artists like Ai Wei Wei are being suppressed, it's difficult to imagine that what comes out in terms of movies, culture, music and anything requiring high levels of creativity would even have any artistic merit. It's just going to be bland bullshit that some people will like but never appeal to a mass worldwide audience like a Beatles, Bob Dylan, or even Kanye West.
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Jul 26, 2013 16:07
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