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Mozi posted:Perhaps a strange question, but I'm in Shanghai and want to buy a harmonica, rather not getting something off of Taobao sight unseen. I don't suppose anybody has any tips? Or fat person clothes. I normally wear an XL in the USA, but I haven't found anything equivalent to a Big and Tall in Taipei.
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Mar 3, 2012 19:15
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What page in the thread is that discussion on? I've been interested in the book's credibility for years, since I first read it.
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Jun 25, 2012 04:46
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I cannot believe the Chinese would throw everything away on this. If it looked like war was imminent, every organization from the US, the UN, to ASEAN would be using every trick they had to force a settlement. A war between Japan and China is a hair's thickness away from another world war. There's no way the current global system could survive that right now.
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Jan 22, 2013 14:42
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I read an article about the plight of low-level bureaucrats in China. There was a guy they interviewed who basically said that corruption is all that makes it worthwhile, and if you're in a position where you can't profit from graft, it's one of the worst jobs you can have. You work from early morning to late night, get paid poo poo, and have basically no respect. With conditions like that, it's really no wonder that the people who gain any power at all start to abuse it horribly. edit: I mean, Bo's salary was something ridiculous like 25k a year. How bad must it be for data entry drone #242984?
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Feb 27, 2013 04:01
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GuestBob posted:Can't you just have two job titles and earn two salaries? I thought a "lecturer" who was also "clerk" to the department would get two paychecks. Maybe, but I think that'd be a tougher sell. With hidden assets, you can at least play a little razzle dazzle to keep your graft out of the public eye. With two job titles though, you're probably on a dozen different registries, and I think most people would get pissed at someone getting two paychecks for the work of one.
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Feb 27, 2013 06:06
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Sad thing is, from the description the child wasn't even hit that hard. If she had stepped out, apologized, and helped the kid up, I'm betting things would have been fine.
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May 28, 2013 12:11
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VideoTapir posted:I think the bigger question is "is anything the government has said about the perpetrator true?" Yeah, their reaction is a bit...odd. Riot mob tries to lynch a woman? Better give out all of her personal info, as well as the personal info of everyone she's related to.
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May 28, 2013 13:01
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Bloodnose posted:A few closely allied countries have no-mutual-spying agreements because like you suggest with your Canada example, it's a waste of resources. I know the UK and US have one. I assume the US and Canada would as well. Not only that, but they share resources quite liberally. When Vasili Mitrokhin passed over the whole KGB archives to the UK, it didn't take them long to bring the USA in.
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Jun 13, 2013 06:42
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It doesn't exactly help that Xi Jinping has been doubling down on the "remember the good old days" rhetoric. If one were being pessimistic, one might say he's laying the groundwork for a potential crackdown if people get restive about slow growth.
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Jul 25, 2013 05:38
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Re: the paul kennedy thesis, he also states that the death knell of any great power is imperial overstretch, where they grow too large to maintain their power and collapse. China is massive, and large swathes of its territory are essentially conquered vassal countries. You could argue that they already have overstretch built in.
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Jul 26, 2013 19:57
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Bizarro Watt posted:What's the state of academia and scientific (non-military) research in China? Someone earlier mentioned that there are only a few internationally renowned universities, and I believe I've read in the past that science in China tends to be rife with research fraud. On the other hand, I know a couple scientists who have heard that China is pouring a ton of money into their research, but I'm unfamiliar with the mechanism how. Does China have their own NSF and NIH for funding? I have a friend who's deep into Chinese anthropology and archeology, and she says that there are institutions where you basically fund a dig, tell them what you want to have the result be, and they'll get back to you with your desired result no matter their findings.
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Jul 27, 2013 18:23
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ReV VAdAUL posted:Sorry to Godwin but are we talking similar to the Nazis and their digs that found hey, Germany had an ancient culture just as advanced as the Romans sort of thing or something more subtle? I didn't ask, but I assume it's more subtle than that. The Chinese academics she was talking to all knew that place was full of poo poo. If they came out with national enquirer-esque stuff like that, they would probably become well known to the general public as liars, too.
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Jul 27, 2013 21:40
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The one bright spot, I suppose, was that the same academics she was talking to were trying to form their own associations of only reputable archeologists. It's great for the Chinese government if they can make up whatever poo poo they want, but the fact of the matter is that because of those same antics, no one cares what Chinese academics have to say.
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Jul 28, 2013 03:46
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My experience with choudofu was bizarre. I would close my mouth, and I would be flooded with wonderful tastes and sensations. I would open it again, and the smell would overwhelm the taste. All the Chinese people were amazed that the gweilo would eat it, though I got a bigger reaction when I picked up a peanut with my chopsticks.
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Sep 17, 2013 04:01
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Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:Not the best thread to ask but not sure where else I may be able to find out. Want to buy the mother in law some books before she goes back to Shanghai. She used to speak Russian but "that knowledge has gone back to the teacher". I was thinking of getting her a Chinese translation of my favorite Russian novel Dr. Zhivago. I'm also going to buy her a copy of the novel in Russian as well. Have you tried the China thread in Tourism and Travel?
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Sep 23, 2013 16:35
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Ha! That reminds me of when I first heard of gongbao ji ding. It's suspiciously close to kung-pow chicken in its sound.
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Nov 21, 2013 14:48
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MeinPanzer posted:That's because kung-pow is simply an older way of transliterating gongbao. True enough, it was the ji ding that really made me do a double take.
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Nov 22, 2013 03:10
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The closest that got to happening was after the Falklands, where Maggie Thatcher decided she was putting the idea of losing Hong Kong in review. She bruited it to her cabinet, then went on a trip to China to try and negotiate something. However, it quickly became clear that the Chinese WERE willing to take HK militarily if it the British went back on their promise, and the cabinet made it clear Britain was incapable of holding off China should that happen. A plebiscite, if it had happened, wouldn't have meant much. To China, it'd be another Unequal Treaty.
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Jun 10, 2014 22:37
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It'd be interested if China democratized ala Taiwan, where the former dictator's party manages to live on. The same sort of thing happened in Korea, didn't it? After the war, the ruling elite weren't proscribed at all, to the point where the former dictator's daughter is now president. Even Russia still has its communist party from the old days, though it's mostly a puppet for the russian nationalists.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:00
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What's really amazing is no one ever has the decency to at least be embarrassed, or maybe rethink. Every incident I've heard of, it's "HOW DARE YOU OPPRESS CHINA BY CALLING ME OUT ON THIS?!" Actually, that reminds me of the chinese families I saw at Incheon International last week, stuffing huge quantities of soap from boxes into their bags. Are they reselling it for a profit or something?
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Jul 31, 2014 10:46
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synertia posted:No, it's probably for them and their families. Right, but is Chinese soap that bad? I would have thought they'd have luxury dealers for fancy stuff all over China by now.
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Jul 31, 2014 11:46
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The best restaurant like that I saw was a "Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese" place in Lebanon, Oregon. Any one of those is rare to find done well in rural Oregon, let alone all three in the same drat restaurant.
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Aug 14, 2014 15:24
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systran posted:I'm not actually justifying them and I agree with you it's really weak, but I'm trying to explain their justification. They likely will also plan to move to Canada or something after they graduate or go back to China. There are also a lot of Chinese people here in the US who don't bother learning English! When you have Chinese bubbles and your PI and whole lab is Chinese, why bother?! It's the same here in Korea, honestly. I know an Irish woman who has been here for 12 years, still hasn't learned Korean. Some people just cannot be bothered to learn a langauge.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:33
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It's hard to believe he would have kept that much money in China. Isn't the first thing you do is sending money overseas?
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Dec 6, 2014 07:11
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Arglebargle III posted:I love the utility angle on that. What's this guy's utility for 2 tons of cash in his basement as opposed to 1 ton of cash? What's he getting out of that, really? Why is he even taking bribes at this point? Greed, and inertia, probably. Think about how people would start to look at you if you stopped taking bribes. In a country where *everyone* takes their cut, the one man who isn't stands out sorely. People would probably assume that he was about to flip on them to investigators working for some rival, and the trust his whole political position was built on would collapse. By the time you make it to the upper echelons, you couldn't stop taking bribes even if you wanted to. Probably mostly greed, though.
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Dec 6, 2014 08:59
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IIRC, one of the big south american drug lords found that when you store enough money in warehouses and mattresses, you start losing large percentages of it to rats, silverfish, and moths.
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Dec 7, 2014 01:55
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I've heard people criticize the private life memoir by his doctor, but never really on specifics. To be honest, the picture painted in that book seemed fairly balanced. A shrewd and charismatic general and politician who was probably better at winning a war than ruling afterwards, poorly served by the yes-men he surrounded himself with, and a variety of quirks reflective of his humble origins. As for sleeping with tons of young women...honestly, is that to be considered unusual? Power is an aphrodisiac. I'd be more surprised if he didn't, given the opportunity.
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Jun 26, 2015 14:43
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah I had ammo stored for both my hagwon jobs in Korea. Getting hosed is more of a when than if issue at those places. Though my first one was actually good to me, having it for the second was very handy when the time came. What kind of ammo? Might be useful to be on the lookout for in my current job.
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Jul 2, 2015 13:27
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:My national media is apparently too occupied with Greece to inform me that there might be some sort of collapse in the world's second-largest economy. I only learned it by clicking on this thread. Is there a good overview of it (and its consequences)? There was a bubble. Stock market went up 117% in less than a year. The bubble started to pop, to the tune of about 30%. The pop stopped when the CCP took most shares off the market and subsidized the others. Now they're implementing policies to try and keep the bubble from ever popping. Consensus is that this will eventually be worse than just letting things play out now.
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Jul 12, 2015 00:16
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Vladimir Putin posted:I think they are just aiming for a soft landing rather than a propping up. Perhaps, but now with record gains and Goldman Sachs screaming BUY BUY BUY, prices are likely to shoot right back up. I'm willing to bet that every time they remove the props supporting the stock market, prices start to crash as people cash out to avoid the pop. Has there ever been a case of a country popping a bubble this enormous without causing a panic? Edit: Also, who wants to bet that the crash will come weeks after all the big investors have been allowed to de-expose themselves through off-market trading? TheBalor fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Jul 12, 2015 |
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Jul 12, 2015 14:43
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cheesetriangles posted:Speaking of great walls is tourist part a bunch of recently made parts for display and the real ancient wall a ruin? I was watching idiot abroad and it seemed to be the case. You gotta consider that the original wall was built well over 2000 years ago, and in that time it's been demolished, abandoned, expanded, refurbished, and made obsolete by moving borders. I wouldn't be surprised if the section they decided to make the main tourist section is mostly new construction, but gently caress it. The Japanese blew up practically every significant palace or temple the Koreans had, but no one seems to care that those aren't the original.
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Jul 27, 2015 15:46
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Pretty much nothing that old is really cool to look at without some serious restoration. If the Qin wall was still around, it'd mostly be "look at these awesome foundations where something important was two thousand years ago!"
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Jul 27, 2015 16:11
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Phobophilia posted:A laser can stop a soft target like a jet, but it isn't going to be effective against a kinetic kill vehicle, or a ballistic missile. You can pump a shitload of energy into the tip of a missile, but that's not going to redirect or destroy the motor of a missile on a ballistic arc, and it's not going to guarantee that you'll prematurely detonate the warhead. Lasers would probably be better used to blind enemies in fighter aircraft, but that's illegal. Railguns would be much more effective at stopping missiles.
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Sep 14, 2015 00:57
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sincx posted:Taiwan needs its own nuclear deterrence. There needs to be a place in the world that shows Chinese culture is in fact compatible with freedom and democracy. Barring total collapse of US power due to the Yosemite Caldera blowing the gently caress up or something, is there ever a chance that Taiwan becomes part of the mainland again? Surely they've taken notice of how China treats vassals with a history of democracy.
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Dec 17, 2015 01:04
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blueyedevil posted:I may be a bit ignorant, but which Chinese vassals have a history of democracy? I was mainly thinking of Hong Kong.
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Dec 17, 2015 06:08
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Artificer posted:No one is sure if that deterrent is going to be available on a given day though. It didn't work out so great for Ukraine, and they even had a treaty.
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Dec 20, 2015 03:18
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My Imaginary GF posted:How do you know when a Lama has reincarnated? Isn't it a bit of child abuse to pick some kid at random and proclaim them a living god? Not if you actually believe that that child chose to reincarnate in that form, and will attain full knowledge of their past lives by being a Bodhisattva.
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Mar 7, 2016 07:26
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Grand Fromage posted:The information is so completely drowned in bullshit there's no way to know. It's clear from things like imports of raw materials that things have stalled, despite the numbers the government likes to put out, but what's actually going on? Given how much lying there is at all levels I don't know if the central government even really understands the economic situation. Wasn't that something that Gorbachev or one of the other latter Soviet leaders encountered? The regional leaders lied so much on economic data that he had to ask the USA for their intelligence estimates of Soviet production so that he could cross-check them.
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Nov 4, 2016 08:54
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If they're going to declare independence, the time while Trump is president seems the best time. He's the only one crazy enough to do something like impose retaliatory tariffs on China if they try to starve out Taiwan, or back them to the hilt because Xi is engaging in brinksmanship.
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Dec 6, 2016 21:31
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WarpedNaba posted:As terrible as the CCP is, I'm rather worried as to what atrocity would count as the last straw. Or, for that matter, the atrocities they'd commit to prevent widespread diaspora or popular revolt. Is there really anything? I firmly believe the CCP would burn China to the ground rather than cede one inch of power. We'd see escalating reprisals until they were outright purging whole neighborhoods.
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Dec 13, 2016 11:36
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