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Cpt_Obvious posted:Where are you getting this "massacre of millions" bit? Are you just assuming that China is going to slaughter the entire island of Taiwan? Wouldn't they rather just have business as usual with their newfound cornering of the microchip sector? Taiwan will more than likely defend its independence and freedom. Fight urban areas causes massive casualties. Invading free independent nations is bad you know.
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 19:28 |
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It appears Bathtub has been probated, but it seems quite absurd to me to argue that Taiwan should be a part of China because it was colonized by the Kuomintang when Taiwan only became part of China by colonization under the Qing. During said colonization, there were a number of rebellions and intercommunal violence with the native peoples. Whether the people of the PRC want Taiwan to be part of China is irrelevant. If the people of the UK in a majority wanted the US to be part of the British Empire again, would that claim suddenly be valid because the US is a colonial settler state? How about we just go with what the majority of people in Taiwan want (especially their native, non-Chinese population) and go from there.
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no hay camino posted:How about we just go with what the majority of people in Taiwan want (especially their native, non-Chinese population) and go from there. uh legit question, does the indigenous population of taiwan have political self-determination, or are they drowned out by the legacy of the KMT's imperialism?
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There is a mandate for aboriginal representation in the Legislature (6 seats of 113), and the tribes themselves vote overwhelmingly for the KMT.
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Ironically the native aboriginal voters tend to vote for KMT because of said imperialism https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/1/9/always-campaign-time-why-taiwans-indigenous-people-back-kmt quote:That is because as the KMT attempted to “modernise” Taiwan’s indigenous groups – a policy that began under the Japanese – the party was able to develop deep roots in many communities that have persisted into the democratic era.
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no hay camino posted:Whether the people of the PRC want Taiwan to be part of China is irrelevant. If the people of the UK in a majority wanted the US to be part of the British Empire again, would that claim suddenly be valid because the US is a colonial settler state? No, the US gets to remain independent because of its larger population. Just like if most Americans decided they owned Canada, they'd be right, and it would actually be the Canadians who are wrong for denying those hundreds of millions of people the land that they rightfully own because they said so. ![]()
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You can't fight imperialism with imperialism.
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Bathtub Cheese posted:Helping the reactionary faction that lost during a civil war steal land from the legitimate government of China is imperialism. If your argument is that the CCP is the legitimate government of China because they won a war, then by that exact same logic Taiwan does not belong to them because they never managed to conquer it during that same war.
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no hay camino posted:You can't fight imperialism with imperialism. then what do you fight it with?
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I just don’t like imperialism no matter who does it sorry you decided that it’s cool. all other things being equal, the taiwanese state is also an imperialist state also, china should obviously not invade taiwan
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I really doubt PRC will ever invade Taiwan. It's not like the status quo is that bad for either of them. It's a shame that Taiwan is so excluded from the world stage, and I think it's generally lovely to live in a constant adversarial environment. But Taiwan is hardly struggling otherwise. In the nearish term, it is concerning whenever PRC cranks up the aggression towards Taiwan, but mainly because of the risk of accidents that cause poo poo to spiral out of control. And lately Xi has really been stoking nationalism and emphasizing the return of Taiwan. I really hope that things relax a bit once he is settled into his third term and less anxious about breaking the two-term precedent. But he could just as well amp things up even more at that point. Longer term, PRC will continue to do what it can to undermine Taiwan internationally and within Taiwan. The Party has staked too much of its legitimacy on returning Taiwan to the PRC. That's hard to step back from, even though I think that (very) long term the Chinese people wouldn't really care, especially without propaganda telling them to care. That's really just my assumption, though. Additionally, letting Taiwan go has domino-effect implications for other regions like Tibet and Xinjiang. I personally don't think that easing off Taiwan would lead to independence for Tibet or Xinjiang, but the possibility alone adds another factor. Internationally, they'll block Taiwanese inclusion in global institutions. They'll chip away at the few states that do recognize Taiwan. Within Taiwan, they'll exercise influence to try and push politics and society towards PRC. They'll keep occasionally beating the war drums. However, I just don't see any of that working, at least not for a long-rear end time. PRC is just clumsy at hell at exercising that type of power, and Taiwan is just way too different now politically and socially. I expect it will just reinforce Taiwan's identity. In the very long term — which ostensibly is how the Party thinks — I don't see a way out of the status quo, absent dramatic political changes (maybe even regime change) in one or both of the countries, and probably significant social changes as well. Things would have to get way better in the mainland and/or way worse in Taiwan.
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Smeef posted:I really doubt PRC will ever invade Taiwan. It's not like the status quo is that bad for either of them. It's a shame that Taiwan is so excluded from the world stage, and I think it's generally lovely to live in a constant adversarial environment. But Taiwan is hardly struggling otherwise. I’m guess my thing is there are things China can do to encourage Taiwan towards its sphere of influence (economic leverage, political, investments, a PR campaign, etc) without needing to threaten military force. If the CCP wasn’t so brazen in what it was doing in Hong Kong it would probably have more political leverage as well but welp.
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Regarde Aduck posted:then what do you fight it with? care bears and the power of love
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I don't understand why tankies are allowed to troll this thread.
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I’m guess my thing is there are things China can do to encourage Taiwan towards its sphere of influence (economic leverage, political, investments, a PR campaign, etc) without needing to threaten military force. I mean wasn't that basically what they were doing before Xi messed it all up?
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Slow News Day posted:I don't understand why tankies are allowed to troll this thread. Probably the mods are afraid C-Spamers will shoot them. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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therobit posted:Probably the mods are afraid C-Spamers will shoot them. Very normal post very cool fantasy of yours.
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SoggyBobcat posted:I have completely lost the plot. I have no idea who is sincere and who is shitposting. Mate, we can only hope they're shitposting. Goddamn the last few pages have been a trip.
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freeasinbeer posted:This reminded me of the time China tried to take an island right off of the Chinese coast and one of the major reasons it failed was: Why do we never the cool history taught in school? This is the poo poo that would have made me care about the subject.
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Clarste posted:If your argument is that the CCP is the legitimate government of China because they won a war, then by that exact same logic Taiwan does not belong to them because they never managed to conquer it during that same war.
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Why do we never the cool history taught in school? The island in question is right off the Chinese mainland, and we’ll within artillery distance. Apparently after another dust up a few years later both sides settled in to taking turns shelling the other on even and odd days for almost two decades. Edit; the KMT narco state within a state in Burma is also crazy as hell.
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freeasinbeer posted:Edit; the KMT narco state within a state in Burma is also crazy as hell. I think there are even some communities of KMT descendants in northern Thailand. I once took a wrong turn on the Mae Hong Son Loop way up near the Burmese border and ended up in a dusty old village where they only spoke Mandarin.
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https://twitter.com/BloombergAsia/status/1445786854817628163?t=4fK3ldyJPsBou66SIW4vcQ&s=19 Okay this is just farcical, come on
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I could only read some of the article before the site demanded I pay for the privilege, but can you elaborate as to the article's point, and why it's farcical? I'm not really seeing it.
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Raenir Salazar posted:I could only read some of the article before the site demanded I pay for the privilege, but can you elaborate as to the article's point, and why it's farcical? I'm not really seeing it. The united States has zero credibility on this subject https://twitter.com/ChorzempaMartin/status/1445827950830575616?t=B_bs2J0BNXO3t2bpQ07Ung&s=19
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A big flaming stink posted:The united States has zero credibility on this subject Can you elaborate why you think that is? The tweet you posted doesn't really answer the question.
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Raenir Salazar posted:Can you elaborate why you think that is? The tweet you posted doesn't really answer the question. As the tweet indicates, the us has written the book on exactly what not to do
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A big flaming stink posted:As the tweet indicates, the us has written the book on exactly what not to do And how do these circumstances relate to each other? What did the US do, or not do; vis a vie what China is doing or not doing, for the SoS's words to be "farcical"? Can you provide a detailed explanation to substantiate your point? You seem to be operating under a number of assumptions and they aren't obvious to me.
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Raenir Salazar posted:And how do these circumstances relate to each other? What did the US do, or not do; vis a vie what China is doing or not doing, for the SoS's words to be "farcical"? Can you provide a detailed explanation to substantiate your point? You seem to be operating under a number of assumptions and they aren't obvious to me. Listen, the USA is bad, okay? You really don't need to think beyond that.
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Raenir Salazar posted:And how do these circumstances relate to each other? What did the US do, or not do; vis a vie what China is doing or not doing, for the SoS's words to be "farcical"? Can you provide a detailed explanation to substantiate your point? You seem to be operating under a number of assumptions and they aren't obvious to me. It's probably a reference to bailing out banks while homeowners got foreclosures during the 2008-9 housing crisis.
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Cpt_Obvious posted:It's probably a reference to bailing out banks while homeowners got foreclosures during the 2008-9 housing crisis. That seems to be a bit of a stretch though to construe the situation like that; I don't think Blinken is suggesting China do exactly what the US did, only that China take care not to cause accidental harm to other nations economies by pursuing potentially reckless policies, note that Blinken didn't specify what these were, and given the scale of the crisis and the complexities involve it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to urge a general purposes caution; I don't see it productive to meme it up and make mountains out of molehills.
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A big flaming stink posted:Okay this is just farcical, come on Look, what do you want him to do? He can't stare them down.
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Raenir Salazar posted:That seems to be a bit of a stretch though to construe the situation like that; I don't think Blinken is suggesting China do exactly what the US did, only that China take care not to cause accidental harm to other nations economies by pursuing potentially reckless policies, note that Blinken didn't specify what these were, and given the scale of the crisis and the complexities involve it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to urge a general purposes caution; I don't see it productive to meme it up and make mountains out of molehills. Exactly, the US is more worried about capital than citizens affected by the housing crisis. As always.
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Exactly, the US is more worried about capital than citizens affected by the housing crisis. As always. That's a weird way to interpret that, like we're talking about large economic sectors that employ hundreds of thousands of people; the world's economy is interconnected, no one expected the stock market crash of 1929 to be as catastrophic as it was; that wasn't hurting only "capital" or whatever, it hurt millions of people. Similarly, the worst case scenario could be just as bad, it isn't just fiddling with numbers on a spreadsheet, lives can be shattered. Again, I really can't fathom how one makes the jump from "other nations economies" to "only cares about the interests of capital" that seems like a disingenuous misreading.
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Raenir Salazar posted:Again, I really can't fathom how one makes the jump from "other nations economies" to "only cares about the interests of capital" that seems like a disingenuous misreading. That's how an economic crisis travels across the ocean: foreign investment. Evergrande issued hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds that got bought up by foreign (and domestic) investors like Black Rock. It is large investment groups like them which will suffer if those bonds are not repaid. Edit: at least, that's how I read it. It sounds too vague any other way. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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China has been pretty good at defusing financial crises since the 1990s. Great at finding creative new ways to generate them, too, but good at defusing them nonetheless. I think Chinese policymakers have a much better understanding of how the economy is embedded in and shaped by politics than pretty much any other country in the world. The economy — especially the financial economy — is not some exogenous force that we react to, but rather something that can be molded with a great deal of freedom. At times this leads to mind-blowingly weird messes, like when savings accounts were paying rates interest higher than borrowing rates. But it also means they can do bolder stuff and the public pretty much accepts it at face value. In the late 90s when all the banks were insolvent, banks were turning retail customers away at their doors, and no one freaked out. Bank staff literally told people "we're closed for political training" or something along those lines, and people accepted it. Through actions like that, they eventually cleaned up the banks using more conventional financier techniques (debt-equity swaps and 'bad banks'). I have to constantly remind myself this, though, because it seems like every year China has some financial anomaly that seems poised to blow up and take down the half the world with it.
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Cpt_Obvious posted:That's how an economic crisis travels across the ocean: foreign investment. Evergrande issued hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds that got bought up by foreign (and domestic) investors like Black Rock. It is large investment groups like them which will suffer if those bonds are not repaid. You're still downplaying that this could lead to severe economic hardship for millions of people depending on how those bonds were structured and that depending on how China acts, can significantly alleviate the down stream effects; foreign investment and its instruments are generally good, especially internationally since it allows for developing countries to receive the capital it needs to build infrastructure and provide for its citizens, like how China benefited from foreign investment in its SEZ's allowing it to become the economic titan it is today. In the 2008 financial crisis it wouldn't be only be large banks and similar that got hurt, millions of jobs were on the line. You're just assuming that the "right people" get hurt and seem to be wilfully ignoring that this isn't going to be the case.
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Raenir Salazar posted:You're just assuming that the "right people" get hurt and seem to be wilfully ignoring that this isn't going to be the case. Fair, but you are also downplaying how much the burden of those solutions rested on "the wrong people", the taxpayer. When the banks got bailed out, it was with our money. Those investors have a bajillion ways to dodge taxes. poo poo, Amazon doesn't pay federal taxes, and cuts deals to avoid state taxes too. We don't. We pay our fair taxes, and they spend our money to pay off their risky investments while we get poo poo. So many homeowners lost their houses while all the cheap loans went out to the banks. In other words, we paid for those bailouts and we barely got any of it. So the effect of the American-style bailout is to manage the corporate losses using tax-payer (disproportionately non-corporate) money while the tax payer gets pennies. Not nothing, but compared to what finance we got it was pennies. And we are watching this happen again through the Covid crash. In this case the tax-payers are small businesses, who are getting absolutely crushed while they pay for the bailouts for massive corporations who get all the tax breaks. We're all watching the local bar get replaced by Chili's. It's more obvious in the food service industry because we interact with it all the time. But it's happening in most of the others as well. Just to be clear, this method works. Forcing the little guy to pay the big guy's gambling debts does indeed stop the dominoes from falling. For now. But if China wants to try a different way to handle financial crisis, the United States has no business telling them what to do when the American method fails to help the little guy Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Fair, but you are also downplaying how much the burden of those solutions rested on "the wrong people", the taxpayer. When the banks got bailed out, it was with our money. Those investors have a bajillion ways to dodge taxes. poo poo, Amazon doesn't pay federal taxes, and cuts deals to avoid state taxes too. We don't. We pay our fair taxes, and they spend our money to pay off their risky investments while we get poo poo. So many homeowners lost their houses while all the cheap loans went out to the banks. In other words, we paid for those bailouts and we barely got any of it. Stopping a financial crisis before it starts or once it's underway does not mean that policymakers can't subsequently punish financiers errant or provide relief to ordinary citizens. The methods for stopping a financial crisis are probably pretty similar whether it's China or the US. It's in the subsequent reforms (or lack thereof) where the US fucks it up. I haven't read Blinken's full comments. I can't even imagine a way that China could stop the financial crisis within China yet somehow be irresponsible and allow it to continue elsewhere.
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 19:28 |
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Smeef posted:
If the government seizes Evergrande assets and does not repay those bonds, that would trickle into foreign markets through foreign investors. IMO there's nothing coincidental about the timing. That's what all this saber rattling by both sides is about. I think the US is using Taiwan as a front to intimidate China into paying back those debts. And China is telling the US that it's not afraid. Which not a lot of countries are willing to do.
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