|
Kavros posted:There's at least a few things which you can easily guess on, because by now they're the lowest hanging fruit on the guessing tree: first, there will be lots of rapidly cycled in new restrictions on acceptable online commentary about markets or the financial health of the country. There we go: quote:China’s top intelligence agency issued an ominous warning last month about an emerging threat to the country’s national security: Chinese people who criticize the economy. quote:In a series of posts on its official WeChat account, the Ministry of State Security implored citizens to grasp President Xi Jinping’s economic vision and not be swayed by those who sought to “denigrate China’s economy” through “false narratives.” To combat this risk, the ministry said, security agencies will focus on “strengthening economic propaganda and public opinion guidance.” quote:The new information campaign is wider in scope than the usual work of the government’s censors, who have always closely monitored online chatter about the economy. Their efforts now extend to mainstream economic commentary that was permitted in the past. The involvement of security agencies also underscores the ways in which business and economic interests fall under Mr. Xi’s increasingly expansive view of what constitutes a threat to national security.
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 05:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 30, 2024 05:58 |
|
|
https://twitter.com/yuenyuenang/status/1755737871758115271 the policy options available to van Buren and China today are wildly divergent of course, which limits the usefulness of this observation, but I thought it was still chuckle-worthy (YYA is an advocate of the progrowth corruption thesis, which would not normally shock anyone in the harbeger-triangles-in-an-okun-gap outlook) I'm visualizing some tragicomic meeting where some Western-trained technocrat tries to explain the concept of policy credibility and expectations to XJP. And thus! ronya fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Feb 9, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2024 02:29
|
|
|
ronya posted:https://twitter.com/Lingling_Wei/status/1754848737665401193 https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1755790414391681262 snort
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2024 12:36
|
|
|
There is no
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 04:49
|
|
|
I mean, to be fair, there isn't There is a reduction in growth but it's not negative, and even 4.5% is still faster than the so-called Hindu rate of growth As bad as China's economic problems are, India would probably prefer to have China's problems. Of course India does not presently indulge inevitabilist weltpolitik.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 06:11
|
|
|
Yeah it's not so bad right now; I think there's reason to expect it will get worse, but even then there's a lot of relativity in how these things are felt. A drop in growth can be dangerous on its own if you were planning pretty hard for growth numbers to stay up, but maybe the Chinese government can pull something off. There's even a logic to suppressing talk about maybe there could be a recession because a lot of that is driven by vibes, in theory, suppress the vibe that things are going badly, and you won't get that societal depression spiral. I don't actually think that trying very hard and loudly to suppress talk of whether there may be hard times ahead works very well though. It can make things seem more hopeless.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 07:05
|
|
|
using state censorship to do what amounts to stock market manipulation makes perfect sense in a contemporary financialised world economy, and the people's republic of china has been pretty clear that it considers censorship a legitimate tool under some circumstances in a way it's more surprising that we haven't seen a push towards such intervention from e.g. germany
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 19:00
|
|
|
As an isolated thing it's not bad, but it goes with a general trend of obfuscating economic data that has never really stopped and only ramped up. The issue isn't avoiding vibecessions, the issue is 1) not trusting official numbers or statements because you know the government is actively massaging things and 2) leaving individual actors unable to make rational decisions because economic data is either incorrect or they don't trust it when it is correct. The nasty shock is only put off for when it's no longer possible to hide the gap between capacity and output.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 19:26
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:in a way it's more surprising that we haven't seen a push towards such intervention from e.g. germany It might be convenient for the government but I think the upper class very much prefers to have as accurate information as possible to make their investment decisions and they do not particularly care if it makes the current stable of politicians look bad. In any case lying about it while the underlyjng numbers steadily deteroriate is just pissing yourself to stay warm in a snowstorm.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 19:27
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:in a way it's more surprising that we haven't seen a push towards such intervention from e.g. germany How on earth would you accomplish such an intervention in a place like germany? What would be the enforcement mechanism to obligate censorship of non-positive coverage of the economy?
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 20:40
|
|
|
Kavros posted:How on earth would you accomplish such an intervention in a place like germany? What would be the enforcement mechanism to obligate censorship of non-positive coverage of the economy? Can’t they just get their central committee to crack a few heads?
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 21:07
|
|
|
Kavros posted:How on earth would you accomplish such an intervention in a place like germany? What would be the enforcement mechanism to obligate censorship of non-positive coverage of the economy? I mean if the governing party can successfully capture the institutions then you can get the central bank and office of national statistics to fudge the numbers the way you want. Until someone notices. But even in a state as controlled as China the most they can get away with is 'we are going to stop reporting these stats so everyone knows they are bad but nobody knows exactly how bad'.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 21:08
|
|
|
I'll be honest, I was just trying to make a tongue-in-cheek quip, but I'm glad it sparked this discussion. I agree that it does make sense for the Chinese government to try and get ahead of any fearmongering, but at the same time, people aren't stupid. If the CCP start loudly proclaiming that everything is fine thank you please don't say otherwise Or Else, it's not hard to imagine the populace will start to get suspicious. As for what they can do with said suspicions, that's another matter entirely. Bloody Pom fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Feb 12, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 21:21
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:But even in a state as controlled as China the most they can get away with is 'we are going to stop reporting these stats so everyone knows they are bad but nobody knows exactly how bad'. Didn't they do this with unemployment in a way which suggests Super Not Great
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 22:15
|
|
|
Owling Howl posted:It might be convenient for the government but I think the upper class very much prefers to have as accurate information as possible to make their investment decisions and they do not particularly care if it makes the current stable of politicians look bad. In any case lying about it while the underlyjng numbers steadily deteroriate is just pissing yourself to stay warm in a snowstorm. a case can be made for stephen harper having done something of the kind in canada (though obviously much, much milder than what the PRC is getting up to and more as a means of managing the political development of the country than as an investment strategy), but realistically it would probably amount to asserting more direct control over bureaus of statistics and intervening in the various definitions of economic KPIs to fudge them - think how "inflation" is technically used. this is rather different than what one might intuitively expect it to mean due to the removal of certain inelastic goods from the basket, but for stuff like bankruptcy measures. in the specific german case, they would want the medium-term future look better to make the manufacturing crisis look less structural, though obviously something like this would be very inconvenienced by a lot of this stuff being subject to EU regulations outside of the german government's direct control. in many cases it's actually pretty easy to generate almost monolithic consensus on fairly major stuff (even when it directly impacts the pocket books of very rich people, e.g. the attempted severing of economic ties with russia), and the haute bourgeoisie are not really especially intelligent people with well developed critical thinking skills, and so are not immune to this. it would have to be very gradual, but there's imo no obvious reason to believe that some version of manipulating key economic indicators to manage the stock exchange couldn't be done - though the price of introducing such uncertainty is probably very high for now, as you note. this is a bit of a digression to my main point, though, which is that within a heavily financialised world economy where "political risk" is a well-understood and very important term, information management is a huge deal and so it makes sense that governments use whatever tools they can to try and manage information. apparently ridiculous stuff like this level of blunt censorship can be rationalised given the rather peculiar but often quite effective chinese constitutional arrangment
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 22:51
|
|
|
I think the biggest problem with trying to hide the problem (aside from, y'know, freedom) is that if you refuse to let people know that there is an issue, you also give up your ability to put out good vibes when you set about solving the issue. Admitting that there was a problem that you were just hiding undermines your credibility. I think you can also end up creating a sort of hopeless vibe where people who are picking up a vibe that something is bad but can't see why because all the metrics are good. They may think that whatever's wrong is beyond the power of the government and there's just some intangible malaise that can't be challenged, only endured.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 22:54
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:I mean if the governing party can successfully capture the institutions then you can get the central bank and office of national statistics to fudge the numbers the way you want. Until someone notices. Germany is probably the worst example for this in Europe due its federal structure. There is nothing like a German IRS. The federal states raise all the taxes independently and publish the data. And most of the leadership jobs in the federal administration are non-political/non-appointed offices. And IIRC from the last census, the federal statistics department can only perform and publish statistics specifically as instructed in laws passed by parliament. They can't just fudge the calculation method a little bit. They would have to outright falsify publicly verifiable tax data to change the GDP numbers for the government. My point being that it's orders of magnitude harder to manipulate data like that in a democracy than in an autocracy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 22:56
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:this is a bit of a digression to my main point, though, which is that within a heavily financialised world economy where "political risk" is a well-understood and very important term, information management is a huge deal and so it makes sense that governments use whatever tools they can to try and manage information. apparently ridiculous stuff like this level of blunt censorship can be rationalised given the rather peculiar but often quite effective chinese constitutional arrangment I think I've made a similar point in this thread before, that info management in regards to the economy is something that is critical. But there are tools besides censorship and lying/omitting statistics. It can easily be subtle actions like cherry picking which statistics are reported. Then again, if you expand the concept past actions that China is doing, which is mostly notable for how clumsy it is, you'll find that governments have been engaging in these actions pretty much forever. Like would we consider Biden selling Bidenomics something in this vein? What about the funding and pushing of pieces on the vibecession? If the government likes the way a certain piece of info is presented in the public, could it decide to amplify it? There's so much room in the gray area, but China's decision to just go mask off isn't new either I guess.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2024 23:32
|
|
|
WarpedLichen posted:Then again, if you expand the concept past actions that China is doing, which is mostly notable for how clumsy it is, you'll find that governments have been engaging in these actions pretty much forever. Like would we consider Biden selling Bidenomics something in this vein? ... no. but i'm curious how you personally make the connection.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 00:38
|
|
|
Kavros posted:... no. I guess to me the ruling government advocating for itself (ie job growth is high, we're doing good, rah rah) is what would be in the space of "info management." It's just the tool in this case is something we all consider above board (it doesn't really make sense to say a government can't say good things about itself). Just that as the hand gets heavier and heavier on the scale you end up with censorship. Like if step 1 on the ladder is the government puts out a press release saying the economy is doing good. One step more would be using connections and access and what have you to spread that as a headline. Then say having friendly experts write puff pieces and editorials. Then having a propaganda arm really spreading the story. Then having your propaganda arm control what anybody can write about the economy. I guess just telling your story is technically "information management" right?
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 00:53
|
|
|
Well the thing happening right now with the American economy is that we have lots of bad economic vibes but the actual independently tracked metrics and indicators seem to report that things are doing well. Biden doesn't have a gag order on the news and the metric tracking agencies in his pocket, that just seems to be the case in objective reality. Which I'd sure like for people to stop vibing that everything is getting worse, but arresting pundits who perpetuate the sentiment would probably make things worse.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 01:07
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:using state censorship to do what amounts to stock market manipulation makes perfect sense in a contemporary financialised world economy, and the people's republic of china has been pretty clear that it considers censorship a legitimate tool under some circumstances ronya posted:A long time ago as a cheeky undergrad I remarked (facetiously) in a macro tutorial that if we took expectations seriously then governments should consider exerting actual control over the actual mechanisms of expectations of media sentiment and such: censorship as a central bank policy instrument. It seems that contemporary China really believes it. ^cough the reason not to do it is that this analysis is really contingent on expectations being the only problem (that is, that growth is low only because everyone thinks everyone else thinks growth will be low, in a Keynesian beauty contest way) if that is not the problem - if, for example, the problem is instead that growth will be low because Chinese local/municipal govts are embarking on a massive campaign of austerity, that the dirigiste-favoured strategic sectors will predictably struggle with overcapacity, that Studwellian export discipline really matters especially in a political environment like mainland China's, that indicative planning runs out of steam once the technology frontier is largely reached as it has in every single other Asian tiger economy, etc. etc. etc. - then this opinion engineering would only make the problem worse by committing policymakers to allow zombie sectors to totter on (because, after all, their prospects for recovery look good by mandate) now there are other vaguely Marxian reasons to e.g. hold that the stock market is the forum for open collusion toward a capital strike by the bourgeoisie et cetera, but contemporary China does not subscribe to that worldview. In the Chinese policy outlook markets are, in fact, a generally good and effective way to allocate capital, and the present problem is preventing a planned deleveraging from escalating into an irrational panic ronya fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Feb 13, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 03:20
|
|
|
A good comparison here is maybe 538, where political operations began crafting polls specifically to be introduced into Nate Silver's models and make them look more favorable. This has the result of obviously making polling averages look better for them, but then everyone ends up working in a poor information environment and reality hasn't changed at all.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 03:52
|
|
|
Information management is a form of opinion management but not vice versa. The Biden administration is releasing information and trying to bring opinions more into line with what might be hoped for based on the information. That’s not the same as starting to hide the information or blocking access to dissenting voices.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 04:27
|
|
|
Staluigi posted:Didn't they do this with unemployment in a way which suggests Super Not Great Yes, they stopped including college students as "unemployed" even if they are seeking work. And like magic the youth unemployment rate is 5% lower, problem solved Also recall when an American stock analyist was fined $200k and banned from trading in Hong Kong in 2012 because he published a 52-page report claiming that Evergrande was heavily mismanaged and soon to be insolvent. It wasn't a criminal charge, but a civil charge filed by Evergrande to hold him legally responsible for the dip in stock value that his report caused. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/24/citron-research-short-seller-andrew-left-on-evergrande-debt-crisis.html
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 16:06
|
|
|
ronya posted:^cough well if the idea is to induce general investment beyond what your economic fundamentals would normally induce, then controlling information seems like a good way of exerting political control over international capital
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 21:07
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:well if the idea is to induce general investment beyond what your economic fundamentals would normally induce, then controlling information seems like a good way of exerting political control over international capital Nah it's... reasonably good at directing internal investment (China is very good at this, it's the choice to suppress domestic demand that's the question mark!), international capital flees an information void.
|
|
#
?
Feb 13, 2024 21:20
|
|
|
mm I'm not sure regulating the domestic business press shows an intention to influence FDI flows China is not Singapore or Hong Kong where FDI occupies a large chunk of national investment - for China FDI is ~3% of total investment and <0.5% of GDP. I daresay the intended audience is domestic. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Feb 14, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2024 16:17
|
|
|
In a continuing theme of not being about international inasmuch as domestic capital: https://twitter.com/business/status/1760252595535249793 One feels like certain folks are taking the way the business press tends to describe events a little too causatively
|
|
#
?
Feb 21, 2024 16:56
|
|
|
Leaked files from Chinese firm show vast international hacking effortquote:A trove of leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked hacking group shows that Beijing’s intelligence and military groups are carrying out large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies and infrastructure — exploiting what the hackers claim are vulnerabilities in U.S. software from companies including Microsoft, Apple and Google. As always the full article is worth reading.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2024 03:48
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:
https://archive.is/al5oL
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2024 10:12
|
|
|
I don't have as close an eye to concerns with chinese business involvement anymore (we were very persuasive in convincing to decouple and disentangle), but there's one thing I will always remember from when I was kept pretty close to these issues by my work: the period of dawning realization that china was criminalizing due diligence if it was going to make any chinese operation look bad. crackdowns of non-chinese consultancy groups and investigatory firms made it essentially illegal to engage in due diligence research on investments or joint ventures. It really made us look at things like the canary story coming at the time from HK, where Citron Research's founder took on a due diligence consultancy project in 2012 researching the soundness of (drumroll) China Evergrande Group. His 57 page report ended up concluding that Evergrande was actually already effectively insolvent, was trading bad debt, and was attempting to cover this through aggressive and fraudulent accounting. An act which immediately got him targeted by the securities regulator declaring him 'reckless and negligent for spreading false information' and eventually banned for five years. This being Hong Kong in the before times, we're talking about a whole different power dynamic and royal indulgences situation, and there was still a fairly transparent civil case. The same process today would simply be black slate national security charges and broad seizures of employees and property of the offending group. This is all a leadup to mentioning that third quarter 2023 saw china's FDI turn to outflow. The first time on record ever, and marked with some severe retrenchment; foreign business' direct investments into the country have fallen 90% from 2021 and are now the lowest they have been since 1993. Commerce across the world became substantially wary of attempting to operate in china's increasingly restrictive, volatile, opaque policy environment, and these numbers are the result of decouplings that started for the most part many years ago based on conduct and conditions which were not remotely as concerning as what will drive further action today. So I think china mostly has to expect the FDI exodus to continue and get worse, even though this is coming at an incredibly bad time for them and (well aware of this) they're directing their ministry of commerce to try to claw back the outflow and 'investigate' what promises might bring investment back, because you don't want a FDI collapse becoming a foundational component of a lost economic decade.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2024 22:05
|
|
|
I feel like the FDI flight, whilst real, is not really a macro-level problem on the China scale due to the small role of FDI to begin with China has been a net outward direct investor since the mid 2010s anyway still, two session is starting and some of the powers that be are a little rattled: quote:坚持在法治基础上推进高水平对外开放 That message may need more reinforcement, considering.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2024 16:42
|
|
|
Thought this was a pretty good description of why the Pettis based evaluations of the Chinese economy have been so consistently wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_RpWMzWz1M
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2024 16:47
|
|
|
I don't know if the 2024 stock market bailout is a Western script as such, given that the go-to comparison is the 2015 Chinese bailout of the stock market under a decade ago It's true that the current mood music has signalled that it views the scale of the previous bailout as a mistake and will not be spending as much, though (and the ongoing two sessions has only confirmed that): the govt's focus is on preventing systemic financial risk 系统性金融风险 which (given moral hazard etc) means not writing too blank a cheque. A little bit for confidence is fine though.
|
|
#
?
Mar 7, 2024 19:18
|
|
|
A view, very succinct: https://twitter.com/niubi/status/1767340465949454739 quote:Bytedance/TikTok should be panicking - The US House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” Wednesday. All indications are the the House will pass the bill. It is not yet clear how the Senate will deal with this bill, and anything they may do is unlikely is likely to move as quickly there as it has in the House, but given today’s Senate Intelligence Committee’s annual worldwide threats hearing, and the mention of TikTok in the unclassified version of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence annual threat assessment, the momentum continues to build to vote on something that would force Bytedance to either divest TikTok or see it shutdown in the US. I feel like the larger problem with Beijing backing down here would be a successful divestiture/ban push serving as a model for constraints on other expansions overseas, especially into emerging markets (which are often more, not less, subject to protectionist measures) and not limited to social media with some MAU - it's already the case that vague SOE stakeholdership is a penalty (hence the flight to registrations in Singapore or Dublin) but a legislative model for systematically classifying Chinese ODI based on whether it meets 东西南北中，党是领导一切 requirements would be quite annoying
|
|
#
?
Mar 12, 2024 07:25
|
|
|
Crossposting from the I/P thread:Stringent posted:These are flat out lies, and it's absolutely pathetic you're dragging them into this thread thinking they provide any kind of comparison to Israel. How many tons of HE has the PLAAF dropped in Xianjiang? How many thousands of children have been slaughtered? How are you not ashamed of yourself for posting this poo poo? I've not seen any convincing evidence that the case against the PRC regarding genocide claims in Tibet and Xinjiang are "flat out lies", under reasonable definitions of genocide, which includes at a minimum cultural genocide, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. As some quick examples: 1. The Sinicization of Tibet: China has engaged in a campaign of oppression of Tibetan culture, in an effort to suppress the national self-determination of Tibetans and clamp down on independence movements across china, including a campaign of settler-colonialism; in particular the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan activist groups such as the Tibet government in exile have been clear that these programs constitution genocide and cultural cleansing. Remember that the PRC invaded Tibet and forced the Tibetan government at gun point to agree to be a part of the new China; and consequently over the years Han settlers have moved to the region to further cement Beijings hold over tibet. Tibetan culture was further attacked in waves of political violence such as the cultural revolution. Statements by Communist leaders such as Xi Jinping make it clear that the goals are the continued erasure of traditional Tibetan culture, he has stated (in 2020) that it is "necessary to actively guide Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to the socialist society and promote the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism." That's textbook. Then of course you have policies that are basically identical to acts taken by Canadian and American governments regarding Native Americans, such as boarding schools and other similar actions to erase traditional cultures; such as forcing nomadic peoples into resettlement programs, with the same disastrous results and human suffering that afflicts native and first nations communities in North America. 2. Xinjiang: The Uyghurs face considerable oppression that amounts to genocide, such as the destruction and erasure of religious and cultural sites of significance, the existence of concentration camps, forced contraception and sterilization, forced labor, and of course the same sort of settler-colonialism, where the PLA had soldiers settle in tibet and has since 1949 there's been a massive increase in the Han population in Xinjiang. Most of this is from the Wikipedia articles if you search "Uyghurs genocide" and "Tibetan genocide" in google, I can't see how you can dispute that at a minimum a systematic campaign violating the human rights of Tibetans and Uyghurs has been ongoing for decades in China. So yeah in terms of your questions, all of those things, in some form, have happened in Tibet and Xinjiang. I don't see what I should be ashamed of except for at one time believing that having the right kind of flag meant that this was excusable in the name of scientific and technological progress.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 04:48
|
|
|
probably the closest modern parallel is whether the Sri Lankan campaign against militant Tamil nationalism counts as genocide, in terms of (say) heavy weapons and artillery used against civilian shields, noting that in both cases the government represses and disempowers (but does not systematically destroy, even when it has the means available to it) the compliant part of the population under its effective control brutality is not in itself genocidal, nor is non-brutality a disqualifier: rather, intent or effect of eliminating human groups is the key which does not rule out other crimes against humanity or war crimes, of course
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2024 08:35
|
|
|
oh come on, ronya, now you're just baiting me  Anyway I think a relevant distinction is that the SL Tamil
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2024 03:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 30, 2024 05:58 |
|
|
Does even Zenz claim over 100,000 Uighurs have been permanently disappeared?
|
|
#
?
Mar 25, 2024 19:10
|
|
