nurmie posted:

executions didn't really help in stopping the endemic corruption in the late-ish ussr

nurmie posted:

i mean, one would hope; however, iirc this is sadly an exception rather than the rule (even in china) and corruption generally tends to run deeper than just one ceo or boss who's chosen to be made an example of

(also, executions didn't really help in stopping the endemic corruption in the late-ish ussr. of course, arguably, modern china is much less dysfunctional than the late ussr)

Corky Romanovsky posted:

ah, drat, guess we gotta nuke china

Corky Romanovsky posted:

ah, drat, guess we gotta nuke china

HiroProtagonist posted:

Someone seems oddly fixated on the fact that just because corruption happens that it should be accepted as a fact of life

I wonder why a westerner would think that

exmarx posted:

the only thing i find weird about their covid response is still treating fomite transmission (on like imported frozen goods) as a serious threat lol.

nurmie posted:

why am i not surprised seeing such propositions from someone who voted for Joe Biden

exmarx posted:

the only thing i find weird about their covid response is still treating fomite transmission (on like imported frozen goods) as a serious threat lol.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I'm currently reading "How China Escaped Shock Therapy" by Isabella M. Weber and it's so chock-full of new stuff for me to learn and dig in that if I tried to report about it I'd end up just posting whole chapters of the book, but here's something that's small and digestible:


...


I shouldn't be surprised that the Americans hosed over Chiang Kai-Shek, but it's still at least a little shocking that it was so intellectually bankrupt of them. Shades of Paul Bremer in Baghdad

sexpig by night posted:

lol the D&D thread is really trying to do something huh

exmarx posted:

the only thing i find weird about their covid response is still treating fomite transmission (on like imported frozen goods) as a serious threat lol.

fart simpson posted:

the former head of china's version of the fda was executed after some embarrassing bribery related health crises too

Throatwarbler posted:

FDR's silver purchases of 1933/4 basically destroyed the ROC economically.

Friedman and Schwartz wrote on this extensively.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138806

China had since the early Qing had a monetary system based on silver, which wasn't all that common in China itself and usually came from mines in Japan. I would posit that a large part of the economic boom of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors came from the influx of Spanish silver dollars via Manilla. Modern testing finds that a large percentage of the silver from that period came from Latin America. Similarly the opium induced foreign outflow of silver led to monetary depression that crushed the peasantry while enriching the landlord class - landlords horded silver while the price of farm and industrial products plummeted in silver terms. This would eventually lead to peasant revolts and the Taiping Rebellion. Throughout the late Qing and early ROC, the de facto unit of currency was the Spanish silver dollar, or 大洋， literally a "big foreign dollar". Since China maintained a silver backed currency and not gold like most other economies it was relatively insulated from the Great Depression and the senators from Nevada in their successful lobbying for a US silver purchase program basically sent Republican China into economic ruin.

HiroProtagonist posted:

it truly owns how the TFR cold war thread is obsessed with jerking off over imaginary scenarios where china invades taiwan or the philippines (or both) or the DPRK just randomly decides to nuke the US because there's no war scenario conceivable other than asian countries just going insane for unfathomable reasons

one of the posters referenced me asking itt if there was any new consensus on katyn being an act of nazi germany because new evidence may have changed the historical consensus as "jaqing off"

Some Guy TT posted:

why were the americans surprised that the nationalists lost having actively worked to sabotage their economy

HiroProtagonist posted:

Those are state run labs so if there's a scam being run there's going to be some consequences

I don't know how it would be worth it

gradenko_2000 posted:

I shouldn't be surprised that the Americans hosed over Chiang Kai-Shek, but it's still at least a little shocking that it was so intellectually bankrupt of them. Shades of Paul Bremer in Baghdad

BULBASAUR posted:

imagine if a handful of billionaire bankers got executed after the last American banking crisis

or some corrupt government idiots from Flint Michigan got 10 years hard labor

gradenko_2000 posted:

you can do this when your cases are so low that fomite transmission represents a greater-than-1% proportion of them

genericnick posted:

Where outside of China would you be able to tell? It seems weitd, but if you handle a lot of freight

R. Guyovich posted:

there was a new case in beijing and the patient hadn't traveled outside the city/province in the past 14 days. he did receive an international parcel from canada, though. they took environmental samples from it and they all came back positive. so i don't think the possibility is as remote as one might think

Some Guy TT posted:

https://i.imgur.com/72o7gty.mp4

:butterfly meme: is this genocide?

gradenko_2000 posted:

thinking about Chinese Bobby Axelrod making a "play" like this

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

busting speculators by being the biggest commodity trader is pretty ingenious

Some Guy TT posted:

why were the americans surprised that the nationalists lost having actively worked to sabotage their economy

gradenko_2000 posted:

thinking about Chinese Bobby Axelrod making a "play" like this

quote:

China has become a victim of its own success and is now struggling to find a way out, the U.S.-based Eurasia Group said in a report earlier this month.

"The initial success of zero COVID-19 and Xi's personal attachment to it makes it impossible to change course," it said.

"China's policy will fail to contain infections, leading to larger outbreaks, requiring, in turn, more severe lockdowns," it said, predicting greater economic disruptions and rising public dissatisfaction.

That provoked an angry response from the official China Daily on Friday, which described it as "a ridiculous conjecture full of political bias".

Homeless Friend posted:

american quarantine camp:

Tankbuster posted:

That little boy is doing the floss dance.

Hedenius posted:

vyelkin posted:

One thing that's important to remember about American advisors throughout history and also today is that most of them are diehard ideological true believers in the master narrative of American capitalism and democracy. Even the things they do that they know are wrong in a vacuum, like overthrowing elected officials or crippling developing economies, they usually justify by claiming it's for the greater good and the long-term interests of capitalism and democracy. They legitimately believe that to be true and think they're just the ones who have to make the hard decisions to break a few eggs in order to make the omelet in the long run.

Without having read any more on it than the excerpts gradenko posted, I would hazard a guess that the American advisors to Nationalist China legitimately believed that they were offering good economic advice and that if the nationalists had gone through with things like the salt monopoly it would have made things worse, because the advisors were almost certainly true believers in laissez-faire economics. They weren't actively working to sabotage the economy, it just so happens that sabotaging the economy was the end result of what they would have insisted to their dying breath was well-intentioned advice based on the most up-to-date free market economics research available to them.