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https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1729750189034910062 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-28/pboc-s-pan-sees-more-healthy-sustainable-china-growth-in-2024 http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202311/28/WS65660e44a31090682a5f074a.html Pan Gongsheng is new governor appointed in July A while ago I said: ronya posted:My own sense is that this modelling doesn't quite capture the depth of the "imagine Indonesia strapped to Poland" policy problem where the interests of the more vs less developed provinces (basically coastal vs inland) diverge so sharply that the policy mix is not a happy medium for either - appropriate RMB appreciation, debt levels, internal migration vs regional investment as solutions, etc. The inland provinces are unlikely to ever grow as quickly as the coastal provinces have done, and the north seems to have also missed the boat. China may be leaning on the coastal side of the policy dilemma and accepting that, like advanced economies, inland provinces will grow per-capita mainly by domestic migration and will have to be subsidized into a reasonable quality of life via interprovincial transfers Mainly the novelty here seems to be decisively leaning away from the argument that China has plenty of debt capacity left (to subsidize yet more megaprojects in Guizhou) to motivate yet more megaprojects in Guizhouesque places specifically: where "sustainability" has to be a test passed at a provincial, not national, level. Many prospective projects will not make sense when your people can simply leave for richer parts of the country
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Nov 29, 2023 08:02
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ronya posted:Mainly the novelty here seems to be decisively leaning away from the argument that China has plenty of debt capacity left (to subsidize yet more megaprojects in Guizhou) to motivate yet more megaprojects in Guizhouesque places specifically: where "sustainability" has to be a test passed at a provincial, not national, level. Many prospective projects will not make sense when your people can simply leave for richer parts of the country They shouldn’t have reformed the hukou system then! (NB I am definitely joking)
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Nov 30, 2023 00:54
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An old friend of the Chinese people 中国人民的老朋友 has passed: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1730048936172474423 More of a footnote on the increasing irrelevance of the pro-China Republican wing eSports Chaebol posted:They shouldn’t have reformed the hukou system then! (NB I am definitely joking) what years of reform talk could not achieve, the prospect of a real estate bust in the tier 2s will realize, it seems as with many other countries, the interests of incumbent homeowners sways a lot
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Nov 30, 2023 05:54
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ronya posted:China may be leaning on the coastal side of the policy dilemma and accepting that, like advanced economies, inland provinces will grow per-capita mainly by domestic migration and will have to be subsidized into a reasonable quality of life via interprovincial transfers Is this disingenous?, the owner of the big factory that gives 2$ to a hobo may owe to the bank 200M$ dollars. so is 200$ million dollars in the negative. While the hobo is 2$ dollars in the positive. The hobo has 199.999.998 $ more dollars than the factory owner. Debt is repulsive but is how capitalism work. Withouth debt a lot of people would say "gently caress that", and go to the mountains to become goat herder. Less problems, healthier diet. Edit: Ooops.. I am not quoting the right line. I was talking about considering the east provinces "better" for having less debt. Tei fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Nov 30, 2023 |
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Nov 30, 2023 13:59
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Tei posted:Debt is repulsive but is how capitalism work. Are chainsaws repulsive? Debt is a tool and like other tools it can cause a lot of harm or generate a lot of good. Any equipment that is used for a long time and has a high up front cost is a wonderful use of debt. Otherwise if someone wanted to make the chips in your phone they’d have to save up for about 200 lifetimes.
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Nov 30, 2023 14:38
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Tei posted:Edit: I don't think the eastern provinces have less debt in an absolute sense, the point here is that they have more solvency or a higher chance of repayment. The factory owner may have $200,000 in debt, but his debtors are secure that they can repossess the factory in the event of a default. The hobo would never be issued the same debt because he has no collateral. To step away from analogy, the construction projects further from population centers are not guaranteed to have use value - a factory's value is premised on being able to employ people and create saleable products, an apartment building's value requires there to be unmet housing need now or in the near future. To take debt on to pursue these projects is to make the claim that the use value of these resources will exceed the interest rate on the loan such that they have some hope of paying of the principal in the long run. When loans are made for construction projects in the biggest cities they can show a track record of success and demonstrate that existing loans have been successfully paid off. When loans are made for projects in the western regions the track record is spotty at best, and a bunch of smaller governments are competing with each other to capture portions of the shrinking rural population to generate economic activity for them. Put another way, factories (like any tool/technology) are a multiplier to productivity, but you need baseline labor inputs for that. By the same token, housing is valuable if you have more potential jobs than you currently have people, but the jobs have to be sufficiently attractive to get people to relocate, and be compensated sufficiently to pay whatever rent you need to set as your break even point for the loans you take out to build it. As it stands, it doesn't seem like that has been the case
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Nov 30, 2023 15:28
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ronya posted:An old friend of the Chinese people 中国人民的老朋友 has passed: On the other side of the Strait of Formosa: https://twitter.com/Andrew_W_Jiang/status/1730065179369472243
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Nov 30, 2023 16:58
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More in "provinces are on their own, despite being all tied to the same national monetary/fiscal stance": https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1731235819552170440 Nothing really novel there, just more on the same theme. Meanwhile, in the SCS: https://twitter.com/cnnphilippines/status/1731227950199210359 https://twitter.com/jaytaryela/status/1731217688507367837 No temporary mooring for bad weather excuse this time
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Dec 3, 2023 10:35
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BougieBitch posted:I don't think the eastern provinces have less debt in an absolute sense, the point here is that they have more solvency or a higher chance of repayment. The factory owner may have $200,000 in debt, but his debtors are secure that they can repossess the factory in the event of a default. The hobo would never be issued the same debt because he has no collateral. Thanks for your answer, made sense to me.
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Dec 3, 2023 22:39
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BougieBitch posted:
That Racine Foxconn factory will be coming along annnnny day now.
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Dec 4, 2023 01:15
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https://x.com/globaltimesnews/status/1732064918654927302?s=20 Wang emphasized that China will resolutely promote and protect human rights, actively participate in global human rights governance, implement the UDHR, promote the common values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom for all mankind, and promote greater development of the world human rights cause. 
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Dec 6, 2023 16:07
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I'll believe it when the uyghurs are freed from concentration camps, they stop sterilizing them, and Han party officials stop sleeping in the beds of Uyghur women. Until then they can gently caress right off with this talk of human rights
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Dec 6, 2023 18:00
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Mederlock posted:I'll believe it when the uyghurs are freed from concentration camps, they stop sterilizing them, and Han party officials stop sleeping in the beds of Uyghur women. Until then they can gently caress right off with this talk of human rights Heya, quick thing but I'm looking for more info on this, can you link it?
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Dec 6, 2023 22:41
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Josef bugman posted:Heya, quick thing but I'm looking for more info on this, can you link it? Absolutely. This is from just a cursory search, you can dig deeper yourself into the sources on each. Re : sleeping in beds/invading privacy of their homes Big Brother style: https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-prayer-weddings-occasions-9ca1c29fc9554c1697a8729bba4dd93bm Re: Concentration camps(oh sorry CCP , "ReEducation Camps") : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037 Re: Sterilization, torture, rape, etc. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelin...st-the-uyghurs/
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Dec 7, 2023 00:07
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https://www.politico.eu/article/chinas-paranoid-purge-xi-jinping-li-keqiang-qin-gang-li-shangfu/ Quite the headline and article.
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Dec 7, 2023 17:55
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i fly airplanes posted:https://www.politico.eu/article/chinas-paranoid-purge-xi-jinping-li-keqiang-qin-gang-li-shangfu/  I knew about the ministers' disappearances over the last year, but I wasn't aware of alot of the dots connecting them to the bog-standard authoritarian culling of threats to the head honcho.
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Dec 7, 2023 20:21
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that article sources zero of its claims and just throws around large numbers seemingly at random, also doing its best to conflate purged meaning fired and purged meaning killed. there's no named author and no actual reporting.
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Dec 7, 2023 21:13
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china does enough weird dumb poo poo as part of its paranoid devolution, like just tons and tons of poo poo, that you don't need to spice it up with supposition about things like "oh this 68 year old dude with a liver transplant and bypass surgery "supposedly" died of a "heart attack" ... sure sounds like "code" for gettin killed by the gobbarment!!!" so when someone like this mystery author article does that it's just some hilarity at work
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Dec 7, 2023 23:52
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Benagain posted:that article sources zero of its claims and just throws around large numbers seemingly at random, also doing its best to conflate purged meaning fired and purged meaning killed. there's no named author and no actual reporting. Can you quote specifically the claims you have issues with? I found the article quite well sourced, so I'm surprised you are taking up issue with this.
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Dec 8, 2023 10:44
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i fly airplanes posted:Can you quote specifically the claims you have issues with? I found the article quite well sourced, so I'm surprised you are taking up issue with this. How? If I were to say that Mitch McConnell having what could be a stroke despite "having access to the best medical care" as a sign that Joe Biden has ordered his murder it'd sound demented.
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Dec 8, 2023 11:03
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Yes but when you run a regime that routinely does disappear senior public figures and tightly controls information and does not allow independent investigative journalism then you naturally lose a bit of that benefit of the doubt. Sure it's entirely plausible that the old guy did just die of natural causes, but when your cover story for people getting purged is 'they decided to privately take some rest and recuperation' then it's your own fault that people raise an eyebrow when that actually happens.
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Dec 8, 2023 12:37
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Alchenar posted:Yes but when you run a regime that routinely does disappear senior public figures and tightly controls information and does not allow independent investigative journalism then you naturally lose a bit of that benefit of the doubt. "Dissappeared" is an interesting way to say asked/forced to resign in what in most nations would be called something equivalent to a cabinet reshuffle. Like if a minister in the old days over here was caught loving someone they were told "resign and go to the back benches" and this seems like a similar thing with less publicity around it. To characterise this as a "purge" seems a touch over the top.
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Dec 8, 2023 12:44
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Benagain posted:that article sources zero of its claims and just throws around large numbers seemingly at random, also doing its best to conflate purged meaning fired and purged meaning killed. there's no named author and no actual reporting. It also uses terms like “celestial court” which is, god drat, amazingly dated orientalism.
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Dec 8, 2023 13:00
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https://x.com/tulsigabbard/status/1732690475482755422?s=46 Good lord. Is China actually funding her? Josef bugman posted:"Dissappeared" is an interesting way to say asked/forced to resign in what in most nations would be called something equivalent to a cabinet reshuffle. Like if a minister in the old days over here was caught loving someone they were told "resign and go to the back benches" and this seems like a similar thing with less publicity around it. To characterise this as a "purge" seems a touch over the top. It is absolutely a purge. Did you not follow along with what happened to China's tech sector all the way to Jack Ma? This is not typical behavior similar to a "cabinet reshuffle" in Westminster democracies.
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Dec 8, 2023 14:04
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i fly airplanes posted:It is absolutely a purge. Did you not follow along with what happened to China's tech sector all the way to Jack Ma? This is not typical behavior similar to a "cabinet reshuffle" in Westminster democracies. Jack Ma, from what I'm given to understand, is still around and giving talks. He is not dead or in prison or anything else. It absolutely is? It's firing people and moving hats around. It's not people being murdered. What would you describe as a purge.
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Dec 8, 2023 15:52
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Alchenar posted:Yes but when you run a regime that routinely does disappear senior public figures and tightly controls information and does not allow independent investigative journalism then you naturally lose a bit of that benefit of the doubt. Yeah but what you just wrote is already ten times better and more nuanced than how the article tried to contextualize it, is the problem, you don't include the connect-the-yarnstrings supposition that how china "retires" people is basically the same as russia tossing people out windows by the truckload
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Dec 8, 2023 16:24
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quote:Another ominous sign is the untimely death of Li Keqiang, China’s recently retired prime minister — No. 2 in the Communist hierarchy — who supposedly died of a heart attack in a swimming pool in Shanghai in late October, despite enjoying some of the world’s best medical care. Following his death, Xi ordered public mourning for his former rival be heavily curtailed. Cool! Who says that? Any interviews with people who actually think this, any comments? quote:Since his reign began in 2012, Xi Jinping’s endless purges have removed millions of officials — from top-ranked Communist Party “tigers” down to lowly bureaucratic “flies,” to use Xi’s evocative terminology. Where'd that millions number come from? quote:With such a febrile atmosphere in the celestial capital of Beijing, there are fears that an isolated and paranoid Chairman Xi could miscalculate, provoke armed conflict with one of its weaker neighbors or even launch a full-scale invasion of democratic Taiwan in order to distract from his domestic troubles. Who has these fears? How do we know he's isolated and paranoid? What domestic troubles? Also the "celestial capital" in relation "democratic Taiwan" quote:Hundreds of senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), as well as thousands of top Party officials, have been arrested, disappeared or “suicided” (driven to commit suicide or killed in circumstances made to look like suicide). quote:China’s propaganda system is strongly hinting that the affair and illegitimate American child are the reasons for Qin’s purge. ......According to several people with access to top officials, the real reason for his abrupt disappearance was Qin’s involvement in a much more serious scandal, involving the defense minister and the generals who commanded China’s “rocket force,” which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons program. Okay, so the guy in charge of the nukes either had a baby with a spy or was involved in something much worse. We don't actually know what happened to him. So far, that seems like the reaction of any state government to finding out the guy in charge of the nukes did some stupid poo poo. quote:China’s nuclear weapons program has massively expanded in recent years and, according to people with access to top Chinese officials, Russian Deputy Minister Rudenko’s message to Xi included allegations that Qin and relatives of top rocket force officers had helped pass Chinese nuclear secrets to Western intelligence agencies. quote:Given the opacity of the Chinese system, it is impossible to confirm these accounts definitively and the Chinese government does not comment on the inner workings of the Communist Party. quote:An associate of this official said he was currently being investigated for being “too close to America” and “possibly a spy.” Oh so they're doing the exact same thing the US research system is doing to anyone vaguely affiliated with China right now and the end of the article is a blatant and open "don't trust those goddamn Chinese" I don't know what's happening but neither does whoever wrote this article and they have an extremely obvious axe to grind.
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Dec 8, 2023 16:25
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i fly airplanes posted:Can you quote specifically the claims you have issues with? I found the article quite well sourced, so I'm surprised you are taking up issue with this. You can't be serious here. This is one of the stupidest propaganda pieces I've read in quite a while. fake edit: Is it really that easy to influence people in the EU? (I assume that politico aims there) Holy poo poo
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Dec 8, 2023 17:34
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i fly airplanes posted:https://x.com/globaltimesnews/status/1732064918654927302?s=20 I mean, these kinds of regular official commitments do matter, in the sense that it opposes the neoauth push to openly denouncing human rights or 普世价值 universal values as 意识形态征服战 ideological conquest or 意识形态失败论 ideological defeatism or 话语陷阱 discursive traps. (I believe embraced in Chinese state messaging as a Xi-vintage push to claim rather than contain human rights and rule of law as a concept) Claiming the UDHR as a genetically Chinese document that reflects the unique contribution of 中华文明 Chinese civilizational thought on human rights is at least an improvement over attempting to Bangkok Declaration/Asian values out of it (China also heavily drove the Bangkok statement) ronya fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Dec 8, 2023 |
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Dec 8, 2023 18:18
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Josef bugman posted:Jack Ma, from what I'm given to understand, is still around and giving talks. He is not dead or in prison or anything else. I think they're referring to the months when Jack Ma vanished after being summoned to talk to regulators, with no word from anyone on his legal status. Hence the speculation
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Dec 8, 2023 21:13
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je1 healthcare posted:I think they're referring to the months when Jack Ma vanished after being summoned to talk to regulators, with no word from anyone on his legal status. Hence the speculation And that was almost certainly just him being told 'you are going to spend some time being very quiet and with no public appearances'. But part of the system of intimidation is that while he was missing nobody knew for sure that that's all that had happened to him.
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Dec 8, 2023 21:45
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Speaking of Jack Ma, anyway, Pinduoduo's (perhaps best known to US audiences as owner of Temu) market cap has surged past Alibaba. Pinduoduo has historically pursued a low-profile discreet positioning aimed at picking off the gaps left by the sprawling Alibaba titan (similar to other domestic-oriented ecommerce site JD.com), but its relatively agile pivot to US direct to consumer retail has put in a much better position to benefit from Chinese domestic deflation. Alibaba's Temu equivalent Aliexpress has been left scrambling to respond. Amazon is nowhere to be seen in this bargain bin market tier and probably would benefit from not setting out to try: perhaps it could spin off a separate brand targeting this segment. Regarding Jack Ma in the large, there's been some grumbling in the financial press that Chinese regulators kneecapped a national flagship brand for ultimately no apparent payoff (Jack Ma is, as pointed out, now unvanished, which undermines any argument of imminent national threat, and Chinese regulators are now begging the private sector to restore number-go-up). One underrated aspect, I think, is the degree to which Chinese finreg has essentially superimposed Western anxieties re: Amazon.com on their domestic Amazon equivalent, when of course Alibaba is entirely at the mercy of Chinese authorities in a way that Amazon is not entirely at the mercy of EU national-level regulation. Given the now-deflation it was probably not necessary to launch a full-fledged assault on Ant's consumer lending arm. Fears of a self-indulgent moonshot pivot to fintech/cloud now seem mistaken given cloud's newfound application in generative AI. It's critical for regulators that engage in extreme actions (e.g., regularly disappearing domestic executives) to maintain a mythos of extremely good outcomes and not fumbling short-termist reaction, ahem, so this is something of a sore point. ronya fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Dec 9, 2023 |
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Dec 9, 2023 08:56
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To me anecdotally, the simplest summary of Alibaba vs Temu boils down to minimum order size. Most inexpensive things on Alibaba want 2+, items purchased, while Temu allows for single items - thus reflecting better on consumers. I'm sure pushy sales techniques are a part as well.
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Dec 9, 2023 13:43
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Aliexpress is Alibaba Group's direct-to-consumer platform. Alibaba is a wholesaler targeted at redistributors and trading companies. For an MOQ of one, the former is the intended platform. Aliexpress has languished a bit as the neglected stepchild as thinking in the Chinese ecommerce industry favoured optimizing for apparently endless domestic growth with increasingly sophisticated marketing and outreach mechanisms (gamification, livestreams, etc.) rather than pushing hard for budget-conscious Western shoppers; Aliexpress instead focused on emerging markets. And then the wind shifted, as it were.
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Dec 9, 2023 15:57
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Wait, Temu is a real marketplace and not a massive scam? I first heard of them this morning when looking for something, and between the "spin the wheel to win" popup (which I tried closing and it poped up again) and bunch of other popup ads, I tagged them as scam and closed the tab. Now I hear that they are not only a real brand, but a big one  Do they intentionally target the sort of people who would fall for various Nigerian prince scams?
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Dec 9, 2023 17:54
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You'll be spinning a lot of wheels on Chinese ecommerce. There's a firm belief in gamification and engagement metrics. Temu is several ranks above the Wish.com tier of trustworthiness, although it's still replete with knockoffs and imitations.
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Dec 9, 2023 18:53
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AliE/Temu/Wish are genuine (and there's a long-running GBS thread on them where posters share their purchases), but it's very much a "you get what you pay for" situation; you can get huge bargains buying directly from the factories & waiting a month+ on shipping, but if you pay $5 for an Intel CPU you're either going to get a square chunk of sheet metal, or a mystery meat ripped out of an old dead laptop. I've found them extremely useful for buying defunct toys, model kits, and parts; the factories have the molds & dont need to worry about filling every store internationally with product, so they can just cast a truckload of Bionicle kits and sit on them for years.
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Dec 9, 2023 19:10
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China is escalating its war with the Philippines and I guess trying to use the rationale it uses in its war with India in the mountains by not using bullets so it doesn't count. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67668930 Right now they're using water cannons.
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Dec 9, 2023 19:14
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Xarn posted:Wait, Temu is a real marketplace and not a massive scam? I first heard of them this morning when looking for something, and between the "spin the wheel to win" popup (which I tried closing and it poped up again) and bunch of other popup ads, I tagged them as scam and closed the tab. Now I hear that they are not only a real brand, but a big one Temu is wildly, wildly successful. As is Shein, its closest competitor.
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Dec 9, 2023 19:57
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The not entirely quiet part out loud: https://twitter.com/HuXijin_GT/status/1734150597207576908 Nationalist bluster aside Beijing seems to be absorbing that there are limits to the strategy of gray zone tactics to avoid seeming like an aggressor when the other party is willing to risk lives. For example, the Philippines can keep sending tiny chartered civilian boats with journalists and officials so that the oversized Chinese Coast Guard cutters look massive (instead of deploying the handful of equivalently-sized ships that Manila does have). There's precedent for outcries leading to moderation, e.g., lasers (which the Chinese used in Feb) seem to not have been tried again. There are not many other options besides water cannons for ranged enforcement of presence (short of acts of war, anyway). Weakness is its own kind of advantage in grey zone conflict; many ASEAN countries want to be able to keep using cheap civilian charter craft rather than invest in a costly standing fleet for coastal monitoring tasks (being disinterested in maritime security in general is, ahem, one reason naval piracy remains a problem in Southeast Asia, despite the region not being dysfunctional in the way e.g. Somalia or Nigeria are). Aligning a mini-pact on this would be in e.g. Malaysia's and Vietnam's especial interest (I mentioned the proposed pact upthread). The logical Chinese strategy would be to apply a level of force sufficient to make Philippine claims expensive to sustain (by e.g. continually maintaining a massive fleet presence in Philippine EEC claims and asserting, but not automatically enforcing, the right to enforce Chinese law, save on bona fide pirates that Manila can't much complain about). Actual confrontation is probably not desirable, or at least not paying off in the way Beijing might like; it has to force Manila to chase them away instead of vice versa. Eventually a government in Manila (being democratic, and subject to electoral capriciousness) may lose interest and write it off.
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Dec 11, 2023 14:19
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