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BrotherAdso posted:
Taiwan has conscription.
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Feb 16, 2012 04:20
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A more apt comparison of the PAP would be something like the armed forces of the Russian MVD or Ministry of the Interior. One thing that Most of the FSU states retained such a force and it's common in many authoritarian countries, like Iraq, and the German Bundespolizei or French Gendarmerie Nationale are a bit more distantly similar. It wasn't that long ago when the French Army tried to launch a coup, after all. Anglo Saxon countries generally don't have so many internal security threats as to need such an organization, there isn't really a British or American equivilant.
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Feb 17, 2012 21:14
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BrotherAdso posted:I tend to assume I'm writing for an American audience, which is why I had such a kludged together analogy for the PAP. The MVD are a good analogy, so are the Bundespolizei for sure. Yeah, The British and American governments generally aren't worried that some rogue army unit is going to storm the Capitol/Parliment because they want to keep fighting in Afghanistan forever and also a pay raise or something, but throughout the world it's more the exception than the rule. The PAP/MVD/Gendarmarie Nationale are huge and heavily armed/trained to almost equal levels as the regular army for a reason, and it isn't law enforcement.
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Feb 17, 2012 21:32
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asdf32 posted:That conclusion would be a distant 3rd compared to 1) It's anticipation of future growth or 2) It's a bad business decision. Malls get built and not used in the U.S. too. When it happens it's a mistake and people involved pay a heavy price. 3 of the people listed in the OP, Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn, occasionally Bill Bishop and Gady Epstein(the "China" columnist for The Economist) run a podcast series called Sinica, where they talk about all kinds of poo poo and have had both Michael Pettis and Arthur Kroeber on as guests. The podcast shows up in iTunes under "Popup Chinese", a podcast for teaching the Chinese language, and the episodes are all mixed together and you sort of have to read each one to figure out what's what - a strange setup which I suspect they do intentionally to stay somewhat below the radar of the Chinese censors. Unfortunately right now they seem to have having hosting issues (or the MSS are on to them  ) and the podcast is inaccesible, but here is a Google cache of the page containing the episode where they do an hour or so long interview with Kroeber and go into the details much more in depth than the 20 min Planet Money episode. Until they come back or someone finds a copy of the file I guess you'll just have to take my word for it that it's a pretty good episode.  http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...n&ct=clnk&gl=ca
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Feb 19, 2012 21:12
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french lies posted:I was able to download the episode using a link in one of the comments. Seems to me the episode is still up, it's just the link that's broken. Thanks for the tip anyway, I'll give it a listen. Yeah, looks like the site just happened to be down when I checked, it's back up now. Here are all the episodes.
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Feb 20, 2012 16:27
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You think maybe a lot of Chinese people have terrible/uninformed opinions because the government restricts open debate, the free dissemination of information and provokes nationalist jingoism for its own benefit, and not because they're just stupid poopyheads? There is a spectrum between "All decisions are made by an unelected self perpetuating bureaucratic oligarchy" and "All decisions are made by direct national referendum". It's possible to move along that spectrum closer to where the west is without going all the way to one end. french lies says he doesn't want a generalized discussion on the nature of capitalism and then goes off and immediately start us off on a generalized discussion on the nature of democracy.  Here have some Chinese democracy.  People in Hong Kong protesting a court ruling that allows migrant domestic workers (often Filipino) to apply for permanent residency. quote:He also warned that migrant workers’ command of English could put local workers at a disadvantage. “In the service sector, local workers will be at a disadvantage if migrant workers enter the job market,” he said. Yes, he is unironically suggesting the Filipinos need to be kept out because their English is too good and locals can't compete. This and that other protest against mainlanders should be pretty conclusive evidence that Hong Kongers are more
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Feb 22, 2012 18:58
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Al-Saqr posted:Here's a Question I've always had. Why does the chinese government choose to treat it's muslim population like crap? ( I am referring to poo poo like THIS)Is there a racism towards muslims in Chinese society or is this a leftover of communist fanaticism they haven't bothered to fix yet? or is it some sort of revenge over the fact that some of the more important generals and forces of Chang Kai Shek were Muslims? Most Muslims in China aren't Uyghurs? You're starting off with a pretty low level of knowledge on this subject.
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Feb 23, 2012 18:08
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I don't understand what problem converting to an alphabet based writing system is supposed to solve. If you want to raise literacy rates wouldn't it be easier to spend more money on teachers and paying the parents of poor children more than $1 a day so the kids can stay in school instead of making the rest of the country adopt a different language? It boggles the mind that there are actually people seriously arguing for this.
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Feb 23, 2012 19:54
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BrotherAdso posted:They are a Turkic people linguistically and ethnically, but the Chinese government treats them differently and their demographic and cultural situation is pretty different from, say, Uzbeks, so it's good to treat them as a separate category. Good point though - Kazakhs are only slightly distinguishable in many ways, but since they're a more scattered smaller population (like 2 million?) they have slightly different issues. The Kazakhs are still today mostly nomadic herders living in Yurts. They, together with Mongols and smaller groups of Turkic nomads, graze their herds on the mostly non-viable desert areas and are pretty marginalized economically, much more so than the Uyghurs. The Uyghurs have historically(well, within the last thousand years anyway, there was a nomadic Uyghur Khanate in the remote past tenuously linked to the modern Uyghurs) been a sedentary agricultural kingdom centered around the oasis cities surrounding the Tarim basin. You might recall that the Mongols under Genghis Khan, lacking a written script, adopted the ancient Uyghur script(modern Uyghur is written using the Arabic script) after their conquest of the region, as well as many Uyghur administrators to oversee their conquered settled populations because at the time the Uyghurs were already an established literate culture of farms and cities and were seen as civilized sedentary people. The modern Uyghurs in the 19th century used the term specifically to describe the non-nomadic settled Turkic peoples of the Tarim basin.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:54
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Hey guys Micheal Pettis' blog is back up.
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Feb 24, 2012 17:06
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The Chinese government lacks legitimacy and consent, therefore any attempt by them to control the flow of information is assumed to be nefarious. David Cameron was also talking about controlling information flows in the aftermath of the London riots, he can do that because as a democratically elected leader he has the legitimacy to speak about it and if Britain somehow made real name registration for Twitter mandatory(or something) it would be no big deal, since it would just be another "cultural norm" of British society.
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Mar 4, 2012 21:20
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The guy who took Bo's place, Zhang De Jiang, has a degree in Economics from Kim Il Sung University.
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Mar 23, 2012 11:03
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Property prices fell 40% in HK during the Asian financial crisis, that was less than 15 years ago. Isn't most property in HK either some kind of government subsidized development or owned by Lee Ka Shing? The property "market" is just a cabal of big real estate developers in cahoots with the government and has been since the days of the British. There was a report breaking down the changes in household net worth in the US since 2008 by ethnicity. Asian Americans experienced a significantly larger decrease in net worth than other groups because everyone knows real estate always goes up! EDIT: It's not all bad. All land ultimately belongs to the People.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/world/asia/harassment-and-house-evictions-bedevil-even-chinas-well-off.html?pagewanted=all quote:
Throatwarbler fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Mar 25, 2012 |
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Mar 25, 2012 23:39
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french lies posted:All this forced demolition chat made me think of the Fuzhou bomber last year. Maybe he'll think twice about doing all that illegal construction in the future.  Seriously that's probably what it was. Same with the people in the NYT article. The "problem" is that so called 小产权 houses make up something like 1/3 or more of the housing stock in many urban areas.
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Mar 27, 2012 01:32
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You're pretty opinionated for someone who knows "very little about the Chinese economy beyond what I hear on Sinica".
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Mar 27, 2012 10:31
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I would support the US government literally seizing Apple's cash pile and redistributing it to poor Chinese workers. What am I supposed to be ashamed of? 
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Mar 28, 2012 13:13
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french lies posted:I really recommend Evan Osnos' recent piece on Macau. It's quite long but it has a great hook (random dude that won zillions by playing Baccarat) and some really spectacular writing by Osnos. He covers Macau's sordid history in detail and how it has shaped and been shaped by the Chinese and international players. One thing I really liked about this piece was the academic experiments basically proving that Chinese investors are much more tolerant of risk than American ones. There's a lovely Orientalist meme going around the west about Chinese investors, especially real estate investors, that somehow they are much more "long term" and "family oriented" and otherwise more conservative due to their ancient culture blah blah blah *sound of gong in background*. Even if you've never met or spoken to a Chinese person, which would instantly disprove this nonsense, think about the business environment in China, is it more risky or less risky than the west? Now consider that business still gets done and money invested there, and what does that say about Chinese businesspeople and investors?
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Apr 4, 2012 23:37
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Imgur has blocked anon image uploading from China. My pic threads  Oh hey new Sinica just dropped.
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Apr 6, 2012 11:57
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french lies posted:Is Imgur giving any indication as to why? My first guess would be bandwidth costs but I wouldn't put government interference out of question, especially considering the timing. Spam, probably. There's a couple of other websites (blogs with active comment sections) unrelated to China that require a captcha if you connect from a Chinese IP.
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Apr 6, 2012 12:48
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whatever7 posted:That's not a fair statement. First and 2nd tier cities residents faces much higher real estate pressure. Who do you think owns the real estate in the cities? Here's a source showing home ownership rates in China from 2005. http://www.gallup.com/poll/15082/homeownership-soars-china.aspx By comparison the figure for the US is about 65%. EDIT: oops, confused myself. Throatwarbler fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Apr 17, 2012 |
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Apr 17, 2012 11:46
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Just got back from vacation in Chengdu. The first thing anyone says when asked about the whole affair is "His son is named 'Gua Gua'? That's his actual full name? You must be mistaken, surely that's just some nickname that his parents call him in private, right?  ".
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Apr 17, 2012 12:58
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Ronald Spiers posted:Well according to the NY Times some Republicans are demanding answers for why the US didn't protect Wang Lijun. I guess I thought Americans can go beyond petty politics and think in terms of rational world politics (then again international relations is also a pretty petty business). Republicans wanted to protect a communist thug, a communist princeling joined the Oxford University Conservative Association. White is black. Freedom is slavery. I guess it wouldn't be a stretch to spin Guagua into human rights icon. The suzhi of the average American.
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Apr 18, 2012 13:31
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Pfirti86 posted:Guagua Bo put out a statement through the Harvard Crimson (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/4/24/bo-guagua-statement-to-the-crimson/): Oh no, the son of some murderous corrupt oligarch might only have hundreds of millions instead of billions!  Speaking of Ferraris, the latest Sinica just plopped and it's about the car industry, which is good because a) I just got back from the Beijing Auto show, b) It's sort of a hobby of mine, and C) the episode is great, much more informative than most "car" sites/podcasts. I've been kind of toying with doing an effort post about the Chinese car industry, but I haven't because I'm really just a layman and don't work in the car industry in any way, so a lot of it is just conjecture and analysis of publicly availible info. Maybe I'll do it after I post the pics.
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Apr 27, 2012 11:53
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Or the PRC could take away the CIA's leverage by not extra-judicially detaining a blind guy and his family who has committed no crimes. That the CIA isn't necessarily acting out of complete altruism in this case(supposing if any of that stuff is true) doesn't really make the Chinese look any better.
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May 3, 2012 01:16
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:I had a big long post, but this article sums up my points more accurately Those are really your points? The poo poo in that post is what you literally believe? Jesus Christ
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May 3, 2012 09:12
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Warcabbit posted:Okay, this, I want to understand. Lay it on me, brother. How's it work? I'm familiar with one version of the Chinese court system from reading Judge Dee, but I rather think that's a tad out of date. The joke is that it doesn't work, and you're hosed unless you take to the streets.
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May 5, 2012 11:15
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Every 2 bit hack that gets on TV in America also automatically becomes an official representative of all official positions of the US State department.
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May 9, 2012 03:49
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Ronald Spiers posted:CCTV is subordinate to the Chinese government. It is well known CCTV is the mouthpiece of the party-government. Pro-tip: Just because something is run by the Chinese government doesn't make them competent or good at what they do.
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May 9, 2012 04:17
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He's talking about the 19th century European idea of a Nation State, as distinct from multi-national, multi-ethnic empires like the Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist Russian, Ottoman and Qing. Notably all 4 of the latter declined precipitously throughout the late 1800s and had ceased to exist by the end of WW1, just as modern nation states like Britain and Japan reached the heights of their power. The status of places like Tibet, or the Caucasus, are ambiguos today because they had previously been part of multi-national empires that have successor states.
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May 9, 2012 17:23
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So when did the Chinese start referring to Seoul as 首耳 instead of 汉城 ?
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May 10, 2012 05:02
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Hong Kong's actually up like 80% in the last 5 years or something. They were recovering from a somewhat lower base after huge falls stemming from the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. It's notable that neither Patrick Chovanec or Michael Pettis are predicting some kind of huge apocalyptic meltdown and go to great length to make that clear in their writings. Doesn't mean it's not possible, only that huge economies are hugely complex and multifaceted and no one really knows what's going to happen in the future so making predictions is sort of a fool's game. Americans want to see doom and bubbles everywhere because the only housing bust most of them have known in their lives just happened a few years ago. The problems with Chinese state directed over investment were a problem that western commentators have been talking up ever since 1989 and finally cumulative in a real estate bust at the end of the 1990s. A lot of people lost money and GDP growth went from 14% in 1992 to 7% in 1999. So they muddled through then, the Chinese economy today is much larger and more advanced than it was in 1999, so why won't they muddle through again?
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May 17, 2012 08:06
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Readman posted:You can't really 'own' land in China (it's generally either leased from the government or owned by a village co-operative), but you can own buildings on the land. This arrangement doesn't have an analogy in western law, but there's no reason that, if you owned a building but not the land, that you couldn't put the building up as collateral. What? You can lease land in the west, you can build buildings on them and use the leasehold as collateral too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate
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May 19, 2012 05:42
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quote:There's also the other side of it..how useful is English exactly? English is a Lingua Franca, people use it outside of the Anglosphere and the Chinese do huge amounts of business outside of the Anglosphere. Equipping your staff with some basic proficiency in English is a heck of a lot easier than trying to find Chinese speakers of Igbo or Persian or Pashtun. It never seems to occur to native English speakers that people in other countries use English to communicate with each other, not just the sahib.
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May 22, 2012 16:37
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What's so hard to understand about this? Educational attainment in any country is a matter of social status, first and foremost. Having a white man teach you English is how you show others your position in society. People don't care about whether you actually learn anything any more than they care that their BMW probably isn't faster than a Camry or that their Hermes purse is no better at holding poo poo than a plastic shopping bag. I mean, what did you guys think, that the Chinese/East Asians just love education for the sake of broadening their horizons and the pursuit of pure knowledge?
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May 22, 2012 16:53
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ReindeerF posted:that grows exponentially - I have no idea what that means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth  It means the growth rate of a function is proportional to the function's value. Content: North Korea now literally a den of pirates. Hong Kongers still dogs.
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May 23, 2012 06:21
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So Sina has set up a portal for decent foreigners.
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May 23, 2012 12:12
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I'm listening to the newest Sinica right now and one of the guests just dropped a theory that really made me go  The whole concept of "剩女" or leftover women is a thing that the Communist party made up and propagated through state news and propaganda. The reason is that the Chinese leadership has seen the demographic changes that have happened in Japan and other East Asian countries that have become richer and less patriarchal - women who are highly educated and independent tend to marry at a later age, or maybe not at all, as being financially independent tends to reduce the traditional economic pressures to marry in patriarchal societies. The result of this is an magnification of the demographic "problems" that all these countries are currently going through, with very much reduced birth rates especially among st the upper strata of the economy. So, all the lovely Chinese dating reality shows and such are actually efforts by the Communist party to inject, through the state controlled mass media, an artificial urgency to marry into the current generations of young women to offset the demographic implosion that is going to hit China harder than other countries. The result of this is a massive rollback of status, especially economic status for women.
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Jun 3, 2012 02:40
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Modus Operandi posted:This isn't an east asian thing at all though most developed countries have had a birth rate implosion. Italy, Germany, Russia, etc.. are particularly bad if not worse than Japan. You're right about economics but the east/west culture difference has nothing to do with it. What? I didn't say anything about any east/west cultural difference?
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Jun 3, 2012 04:14
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All the communist countries moved women into the workforce because more workers = more tanks/Kalashnikovs/GDP to bury the Capitalist west. They didn't do it because they liked women. The actual lives of women in these countries are all still terrible even if they got rid of foot binding or burqas or whatever.
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Jun 4, 2012 05:44
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Fox...and...Soup posted:Quota itself is of the most sexist phenomena. Ugh. This is why Chinese immigrants to western countries all end up being lovely conservatives. First of all maybe you need to have more realistic expectations about how meritocratic the NPC is? Seeing as how it's a completely self perpetuating bureaucracy and all. Quotas and affirmative action are needed and used in progressive western countries where companies and governments actually have some modicum of being open to women and minorities based on merit.
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Jun 6, 2012 11:13
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