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bewbies posted:Regardless of his actual intentions (which I think are 1) consolidate his own power and 2) smooth out business dealings with the west) he actually has taken serious anti corruption actions, even against long term allies in the CCP. I don't think anyone is under the impression that corruption in China is going to be rooted out entirely - it is far older than the CCP, and most of the world's nations for that matter - but that doesn't mean the entire thing is for show. In any case it is proving thus far to be a very useful tool in his apparent scheme to become Most Powerful Chinese Guy. Given China's environmental problems and their political impacts, I can understand why cutting down on corruption is a necessary step to addressing it, so I can understand how it is smart politics, even if it is in service of becoming the Big Chinese Guy.
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Jul 6, 2017 16:08
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Cyrano4747 posted:China, meanwhile, survived its generational transition (perhaps due to the example of the USSR in why you should avoid reformers), I can't remember who it was that said about Gorbachev "Glastnost let people complain, and Perestroika gave them something to complain about." Nebakenezzer posted:Given China's environmental problems and their political impacts, I can understand why cutting down on corruption is a necessary step to addressing it, so I can understand how it is smart politics, even if it is in service of becoming the Big Chinese Guy. China is looking into addressing the environmental concerns as well - they have installed as much solar as the US has currently just in the past 2 years. India is doing something similar.
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Jul 6, 2017 16:57
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Nebakenezzer posted:Given China's environmental problems and their political impacts, I can understand why cutting down on corruption is a necessary step to addressing it, so I can understand how it is smart politics, even if it is in service of becoming the Big Chinese Guy. Given their social, economic, and environmental problems that are coming to a head right now and going to be approaching disaster levels in the next 10-15 years, you might see the South China Sea and other "power projection" initiatives going the wayside as the PLA is re-tasked into the role of a disaster relief and rural pacification force (more so than it is now). Rising lea levels are going to be hitting China's most densely populated areas really hard, and their declining fresh water reserves* and arable land area is going to be putting an even larger strain on their already precarious food supply. The CCP might try a number of different options to save face and their own necks, by doubling down on keeping its people in line Another (scarier option) is the CCP going for broke by making as much land (resource) grabs as possible. Currently the CCP is trying to offset declining private investment by shoring up their economy with their savings (or borrowing) which is not a sound long-range plan. Also China has been subsidizing oil for so long (so that their citizens can afford to enjoy cars and other luxuries) that a natural return to higher oil prices will further exacerbate the problem and result in them blowing through their cash faster than they currently are now. Add to that the continued flight of the upper class with as much money as they can move to Vancouver, and you have (pardon the analogy) a party that is rearranging the deck chairs as the ship is going down. You might make a comparison to Germany in the late 30's where they have risen so fast and so much that they are no longer sustainable economically, and feel the need to try a military option since they see themselves as having no other option (not a great comparison, but a possible similarity). (IMO) These next ten years are going to see China trying its best to buy up as much of the west's stable companies and infrastructure as they can, while trying to also secure overseas food production. These investments will require them to continue building up their navy to take and consolidate territory. These next few years are going to be interesting as we see a world power trying to prolong its death-throes and lashing out at those it sees as trying to destroy it. [/clancyrant] *China's sources of clean drinking water are rapidly either drying up (glacial melt-water from the mountains) or being rapidly made undrinkable due to pollution. When you have a few hundred million people who are unable to drink clean water and who have been told that their daily caloric intake is going to be less than half of what it currently is, that's grounds for another revolution or some manner of North Korea style oppression.
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Jul 6, 2017 17:05
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China's not going to run out of drinking water or food, for the simple reason that it is now wealthy enough to build water treatment plants and buy grain.
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Jul 6, 2017 17:14
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Mortabis posted:
The rest of the country is proper hosed, and that's going to be the issue that China has to deal with. They are wealthy now, but that's a temporary state, if they want to try and prevent (more likely lessen) the things I mentioned before, they have to give up on being "flashy rich" and start spending on things other than ghost cities and useless vanity projects. Doing that will mean that they have to lose face, and that's going to be a tough pill for them to swallow.
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Jul 6, 2017 17:27
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MikeCrotch posted:China is looking into addressing the environmental concerns as well - they have installed as much solar as the US has currently just in the past 2 years. India is doing something similar. Not really, they're planning on canceling about 100 new coal power plants in China, but that's 100 out something like 200 coal power plants they were originally going to build and that's only taking place at home, abroad they're still scheduled to build 500+ coal power plants around the world by 2020.  E: That's not even the tip of the iceberg if you take into consideration their mega dam is well on it way to becoming inoperational in the coming years and is causing all these massive environmental problems. Back Hack fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jul 6, 2017 |
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Jul 6, 2017 17:37
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This NYT article from the weekend addresses this issue. Basically, Chinese companies have diversified by shifting to green energy inside China where that is a concern, but moving into new foreign markets to build plants where they had limited/no previous coal use. They're also still planning 560 new coal plants inside China over the next decade. quote:By HIROKO TABUCHI
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Jul 6, 2017 18:09
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Before I had to cut contact with them, I had some Chinese friends who while they didnt know the first thing about communism, Marxist theory or Maoism, were 100% into what President Xi Jinping was doing and backed him up like the second coming of Mao (or Deng, not sire how popular Deng is). At the very least, Xi is making serious efforts into fighting corruption for the first time in a long time, but ever since the Glorious Revolution, every Chinese strongman has claimed that fighting corruption is their top priority, and we can all see how well that worked. Also as someone said, China is hurtling full speed into a demographic crisis. The one child policy and the cultural preference for male children has created an entire generation of spoiled, single men who are graduating college in large numbers and are finding they have no job prospects. I swear like every other month there's a news report on CCTV somehow relating to the large amount of single chinese men compared to women, and Taiwanese news seems to delight in doing special reports about social issues that for decades have been swept under the rug. I'm no historian, but I've never read anything good coming from millions of angry, jobless, sexually frustrated men.
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Jul 6, 2017 18:35
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Blistex posted:
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Jul 6, 2017 18:37
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Mortabis posted:China's not going to run out of drinking water or food, for the simple reason that it is now wealthy enough to build water treatment plants and buy grain. I'm curious how parts of the US would stack up to this using the same methodology.
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Jul 6, 2017 18:40
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Blistex posted:The rest of the country is proper hosed, and that's going to be the issue that China has to deal with. They are wealthy now, but that's a temporary state, if they want to try and prevent (more likely lessen) the things I mentioned before, they have to give up on being "flashy rich" and start spending on things other than ghost cities and useless vanity projects. Doing that will mean that they have to lose face, and that's going to be a tough pill for them to swallow. China's got BAD problems when it comes to pollution and what that means for their food issues. The Economist did a really great article on it a while ago Headline stats from that article: 20% of all of China's arable land has dangerous levels of industrial pollutants 20% of their waterways are too polluted to irrigate crops. Of course they really don't have much choice other than use all that polluted land and water which leads to . . . 30% of rice samples have higher than safe lead levels, 10% have higher than safe cadmium levels. These issues are compounded in some rural areas that are truly hosed, with some villages in Hunan showing 30% of the population with excess cadmium in their urine and 10% needing specialist treatment for chronic cadmium exposure. Note that these are official chinese government or government approved NGO figures. The land pollution figures in particular were classified as state secrets until relatively recently. Now, what this means long term is up for debate. On one extreme you have the potential for widespread civil unrest as poo poo gets worse leading to major reforms or revolution. On the other end it might be enough just to keep the educated middle and upper classes happy. Get them the clean food, clamp down on the rural poor, and who gives a gently caress if they're dying at 50? This is China, and they have a long history of being able to commit whatever awful human rights abuses they want and ignore the international outcry because they're 1) too big to gently caress with militarily and 2) too economically important to cut out of that loop. Personally I'm leaning towards them just loving the rural areas and buying off the coastal cities. The US is a great example for how this can work in practice. No one really gives a poo poo about the plight of the poor beyond some symbolic measures as long as the stock market is doing OK, and this is in a system where one whole party is ostensibly concerned with their well being.
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Jul 6, 2017 18:51
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Don Gato posted:I'm no historian, but I've never read anything good coming from millions of angry, jobless, sexually frustrated men. The men who matter will get jobs and wives. No upper middle class dude with a good income is going without a woman, even if he has to marry "down market" from what his parents might prefer. The places where you're seeing masses of dudes who can't get a wife are rural villages where all the women are heading out to the cities and using their newfound value to nab a husband a bit better in the prospects department than a pig farmer. The poor dudes who can't get a wife and whose factory/farming/etc jobs are kind of hosed? Yeah, they're going to be pissed but this is China. Short of them somehow getting a major revolution off the ground (hard to do without the support of the middle class) nothing is going to happen. If they revolt the PLA will go in, massacre the gently caress out of a bunch of people, and it will either be explained as suppressing disruptive <insert local minority ethnicity> elements or just whitewashed out of the national history in 10 years a la Tienanmen. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Jul 6, 2017 |
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Jul 6, 2017 18:55
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Historical point: if there is a large group of people hosed over more regularly and thoroughly than Chinese rural poor I'm unsure who it is.
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Jul 6, 2017 18:56
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The Kurds.
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Jul 6, 2017 18:59
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Since I'm thinking about it a bit, I think the potential for revolution caused by screwing the poor gets widely exaggerated. The simple fact is that if there is even the slightest chance of advancement to a working middle class that poo poo doesn't happen. if you look at successful revolutions that change governments (as opposed to breaking away as an independent state) they tend to have immense gaps in wealth with near-zero chance of going from the bottom to the top. We can talk about how awful the income gap in the US is, but it looks like nothing compared to Tsarist Russia or the Republic of China. Even then both of those examples needed MASSIVE wars to turbo-gently caress the incumbent governments in unrecoverable ways.
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Jul 6, 2017 18:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:The men who matter will get jobs and wives. No upper middle class dude with a good income is going without a woman, even if he has to marry "down market" from what his parents might prefer. The places where you're seeing masses of dudes who can't get a wife are rural villages where all the women are heading out to the cities and using their newfound value to nab a husband a bit better in the prospects department than a pig farmer. This will work only until the being an army wife isn't such a great deal. Hope that Chinese BAH is good!
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Jul 6, 2017 19:13
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LingcodKilla posted:This will work only until the being an army wife isn't such a great deal. It won't ever get to that point. The gender imbalance is bad, but it's not catastrophic bad. It's at about 700 million men and 667 million women. It's an ongoing issue, incidentally, with about 1.15 male births per female birth. That's the sort of thing that's going to gently caress up your rural villages something fierce, and maybe junior NCOs won't have wives, but anyone with more pull than a E3 is going to find someone. Again, you don't need to compare favorably to a business tycoon, you just need to be more attractive than saying in BumFuck Hunan and marrying a dirt farmer. Plus, the Chinese are buddying up to the Philippines. If anything we might have to worry about them stealing our source of lance corporal army wives.
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Jul 6, 2017 19:18
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_UdqZdFr-w Environmentally speaking, they're pretty much beyond hosed at this point.
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Jul 6, 2017 19:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:
But where will AAFES get their employees from now  On a more serious note, the rich loving off out of China probably represents a bigger problem to the Party than anything the rural poor are suffering through. Probably the only group historically who had it as bad as Chinese peasants were Russian peasants, and I'm not familiar enough with Russian history to say for sure The only time my job concerns itself with the Chinese political side much except for when it interferes with the military, so I don't have any particularly unique insights about the myriad problems the CCP faces, but I can feel like I can say that the reason they are flexing their muscles in the South China Sea and East China Sea is because it is a distraction to all their domestic issues. The rural poor might be as shat upon as they were under Mao and the economy actually hasn't been growing nearly as quickly as we say it is and this is bad because all of our economic policies are based on a 7% GDP growth, but! The Western powers are poking their noses into an internal Chinese affair and the US brazenly keeps sailing ships and flying planes in our ancient and sovereign territory. Also something something Japan/South Korea the Diaoyu have always been China's. Unrelated, but I do remember how around this time last year a reporter asked the Chinese foreign minister about China's human rights abuses, and the minister's response was literally "Are you familiar with China's situation? How can you criticize our internal affairs without knowing our internal situation?" It's hard to get across in text, but it was more like a petulant child having a temper tantrum than a smooth deflection. Wish I could find the video but I'm phoneposting at the moment. IIRC it was at a Chinese/Canadian trade meeting. I was in chinese class at the time and the teacher had a good laugh describing the minister as the finest example of Chinese diplomacy he had ever seen, and also told us he was approached to be a diplomat by the CCP right before he graduated from Beijing University, despite having no other relevant qualifications other than knowing English.
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Jul 6, 2017 19:55
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Isn't the Chinese government sitting on gigantic piles of money? Why don't they build a bunch of wastewater treatment plants, subsidize industrial exhaust filters, stuff like that?
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Jul 6, 2017 20:07
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aphid_licker posted:Isn't the Chinese government sitting on gigantic piles of money? Why don't they build a bunch of wastewater treatment plants, subsidize industrial exhaust filters, stuff like that? It's a little more complicated than that. Foreign capital reserves are handled by nations differently than cash on the balance sheet of a corporation. They use it to backstop central banking principles (solvency, currency valuations, etc.) and it also provides a measure of protection for any national debt - that's why certain countries effectively can't get financed by anyone at rates that aren't usurious (see: Argentina circa 2000). They could spend that cash, but it would have a destabilizing effect on their own currency and financial situation, while simultaneously limiting their ability to pivot in the future should the international situation change drastically. Contemporary China is rather flexible, but they need to maintain a posture that allows them to stay flexible for the forseeable future, should there be a major war in Asia, another international financial crisis, a significant internal problem (famine, rebellion), etc. So yes, they could. But they're not doing it today and it's unlikely they will in the immediate future without significant turmoil of some sort forcing them to.
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Jul 6, 2017 20:23
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Answered partially above by Blistex:Blistex posted:The rest of the country is proper hosed, and that's going to be the issue that China has to deal with. They are wealthy now, but that's a temporary state, if they want to try and prevent (more likely lessen) the things I mentioned before, they have to give up on being "flashy rich" and start spending on things other than ghost cities and useless vanity projects. Doing that will mean that they have to lose face, and that's going to be a tough pill for them to swallow.
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Jul 6, 2017 20:25
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Back Hack posted:Not really, they're planning on canceling about 100 new coal power plants in China, but that's 100 out something like 200 coal power plants they were originally going to build and that's only taking place at home, abroad they're still scheduled to build 500+ coal power plants around the world by 2020. Fun fact about coal power plants: they *really* make any sort of water problem you have worse, because coal needs to be washed in clean fresh water before it can be used by the plant. aphid_licker posted:Isn't the Chinese government sitting on gigantic piles of money? Why don't they build a bunch of wastewater treatment plants, subsidize industrial exhaust filters, stuff like that? That ties into corruption. You can have the resources to build these things; but then you need to have effective enforcement of their use, too. Namely you need to be able to say, "Hey, Honkqi paint plant! Spent $50 million on a new painting facility to keep runoff out of the water table and to reclaim your evaporation" and not have the atomically rich plant owner just bribe his local CCP chair, or just pay the inspector two years of his/her salary to STFU, or pay the CCP to have the inspector reassigned to Tibet, etc. There's also cultural factors: this is the place that will happily make a lake of toxic rare earth tailings in the middle of a city as long as the foerigners don't see it, and get rid of toxic waste by injecting it into the local water table. Oh, another thing: China's environmental problems have been allowed to fester for so long to actually fix them you would have to spend crazy money removing contaminates from the soil, purifying water, etc. Imagine if you will spending 1% of GDP on climate change mitigation in the states. Obviously, a tough sell right now. Now imagine China spending 15% of its GDP just to unfuck all this environmental damage it did to itself. I mean, China might actually need those "Nausicaa and the valley of the wind" bio-engineered terraformers just to purify their soil and water. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jul 6, 2017 |
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Jul 6, 2017 21:13
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So at what point does Britain's ability to defend the isles from Russian aggression actually matter? Surely if there is ever an actual threat of Russian invasion Britain's military power doesn't actually matter because we are all part of a glowy glass plate?
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Jul 6, 2017 21:17
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Marxist-Jezzinist posted:So at what point does Britain's ability to defend the isles from Russian aggression actually matter? Surely if there is ever an actual threat of Russian invasion Britain's military power doesn't actually matter because we are all part of a glowy glass plate? Would you destroy the world to preserve East Anglia?
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Jul 6, 2017 22:00
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aphid_licker posted:Isn't the Chinese government sitting on gigantic piles of money? Why don't they build a bunch of wastewater treatment plants, subsidize industrial exhaust filters, stuff like that? In addition the problems people already mentioned, a HUUUUGE part of the problem they are dealing with is legacy pollution. Read that article I linked above about their hosed soil situation. If you shut off an offending factory eventually the air and rivers will clear up. In fact, one of the reasons that lakes can be so nasty to get clean is that you have the same situation as you do with soil: immobile sludge at the bottom that just sits there until you process it manually. Soil doesn't fix itself and the contaminants can stay there for centuries, if not longer. Cleaning it up is also ruinously expensive and frequently involves stripping away the top layers of soil. Take a look at the expense spent on cleaning up Love Canal, for example. A bunch of the area was essentially just roped off wit ha "do not enter" sign, and the area that was cleaned took a lot of time and money and didn't actually clean that much. IIRC it was something like 16 acres of land cleaned and took 21 years and half a billion dollars. This is something that can be done on a single site, but you can't do it to a fifth of your farm land.
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Jul 6, 2017 22:11
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Arglebargle III posted:Would you destroy the world to preserve East Anglia? As a northerner I would kill my own mother to inconvenience any Anglian. E: I just thought our position on the arse end of Europe would be some protection. Can't imagine Germany or any Baltics would be happy with Russian operation sealion passing them. ContinuityNewTimes fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jul 6, 2017 |
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Jul 6, 2017 22:17
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bewbies posted:Historical point: if there is a large group of people hosed over more regularly and thoroughly than Chinese rural poor I'm unsure who it is. The American blue collar middle class, according to my Facebook feed.
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Jul 6, 2017 22:39
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Nebakenezzer posted:There's also cultural factors: this is the place that will happily make a lake of toxic rare earth tailings in the middle of a city as long as the foerigners don't see it, and get rid of toxic waste by injecting it into the local water table. I for one can't wait to see forty years of successful western environmentalism absolutely destroyed by two billion Chinese reaching the industrial revolution en-masse, with all the care for the environment that would have been exhibited by a western country in the 18th century. That is to say, none at all. By the time China reaches ecological awareness, it will most definitely be too late.
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Jul 6, 2017 22:57
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They're not completely ignorant of it, especially in the coastal cities. There is growing pressure on the government over air quality, for example, and there have been some pretty significant scandals over some of the worst urban contamination incidents. There was one relatively recently about a boarding school or something that got built on the site of an old chemical factory to predictable results. The situation is a lot more complex than "durr Chinamen don't give a gently caress" edit: if anything I would expect the government to make some really extravagant efforts to clean up the coastal areas and just export as much of the dirty side of the economy as possible out to the sticks. College educated people in Shanghai can cause a fuss, but who really gives a poo poo about the peasants?
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Jul 6, 2017 23:03
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Smiling Jack posted:The Kurds. The Kurds at least have agency, and don't have a superpower intent on holding them down.
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Jul 6, 2017 23:22
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China is also using most of that cash pile to defend its currency and the floor that they can hit before reaching a crisis is a lot higher than "zero."
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Jul 6, 2017 23:33
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Just a reminder that large parts of the Middle East are equally hosed economically and ecologically, and I'm sure India will hit that point on its current trajectory. Should be a fun next 50 years.
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Jul 7, 2017 01:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Read that article I linked above about their hosed soil situation.  quote:The second big problem is that land is being poisoned by “sewage irrigation”. Wastewater and industrial effluent are used in increasing amounts for irrigation because there is not enough fresh water to go round. In the north of China there is less water available per person than in Saudi Arabia, so farmers use whatever they can get. China produces over 60bn tonnes of sewage a year and in rural areas only 10% of it is treated. Most of the sludge goes into lakes and rivers, and thence onto fields. 
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Jul 7, 2017 01:54
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Chinese cities also flood with wastewater every time it rains heavily (which is a lot in southern China) because functional sewer systems aren't sexy headline grabbers
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Jul 7, 2017 01:57
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Fojar38 posted:Chinese cities also flood with wastewater every time it rains heavily (which is a lot in southern China) because functional sewer systems aren't sexy headline grabbers What is wrong with you, Abu Fojar?
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Jul 7, 2017 02:03
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Fojar38 posted:Chinese cities also flood with wastewater every time it rains heavily (which is a lot in southern China) because functional sewer systems aren't sexy headline grabbers Well, so does New Orleans.
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Jul 7, 2017 02:09
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New Orleans, that pinnacle of hydraulic engineering. That's about as good as it gets in the world, so no one in China has done wrong.
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Jul 7, 2017 02:13
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Arglebargle III posted:New Orleans, that pinnacle of hydraulic engineering. That's about as good as it gets in the world, so no one in China has done wrong. Yes, indeed, those are the words that I said.
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Jul 7, 2017 02:22
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MrYenko posted:I for one can't wait to see forty years of successful western environmentalism absolutely destroyed by two billion Chinese reaching the industrial revolution en-masse, with all the care for the environment that would have been exhibited by a western country in the 18th century. That is to say, none at all. This is going to entirely depend on whether anyone can build awareness internally in China and develop some sort of ground up, grass roots movement to push environment policy to the forefront. Given the CCP's control of politics in that country, I doubt it will happen unless there's an actual violent uprising, which may or may not happen if we see mortality rates approach that of Industrial Age England, but otherwise I see as pretty drat unlikely.
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Jul 7, 2017 02:49
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