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It does look as if it will be the same thing as with various other world leaders who end up "inexplicably" absent until they come back from "a foreign trip" or end up with the hagiography on TV after their heroic, unfortunate demise whilst being treated for a condition. Meles Zenawi being a recent example and Castro, Umaru Musa Yar'Adua and Hugo Chávez slightly less recent.
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Sep 11, 2012 19:04
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Electro-Boogie Jack posted:That's why I said that it was the effect of long-term corrosion, a history of lying and obfuscation that makes people trust random internet rumors. Pretty sure accusing Xinhua of feeding us fake news over the long term is a reasonably safe charge. Him not being number one would be a big thing. Given the orderly transitions China is trying to engineer having the heir apparent suddenly moved aside would show that a serious hitch in the process occurred. If that passed without official comment that would just reinforce how opaque the process is and inflame speculations about disturbances and power struggles at the top especially in light of recent events. That said I still think a medical problem is the most likely reason. That would be fairly routine.
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Sep 12, 2012 16:53
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On the note of embargoes. Chinese suppliers have mysteriously run out of rare earth metals for Japanese clients in the past. The fallout for that on China was minimal (in part because official collusion was essentially impossible to prove). As an aside, the fact that after centuries of internecine warfare, religious struggles and more recently the two world wars Europeans are generally all happy and civil with each other these days is one of the few things I think we can be a bit smug about. That was by no means a given. The experience in Europe has also deeply shaped western feelings about what are the appropriate feelings, behaviours and approaches to dealing with deep seated historical grievances are. Unfortunately that seems to clash quite deeply with how the rest of the world processes these things.
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Sep 17, 2012 10:04
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ReindeerF posted:America's also taking a case to the WTO against China for supporting automobile and auto parts manufacturers this week (at least it's been announced this week). This seems like it's timed to coincide with shoring up Michigan, Ohio & friends in the election, but who knows. Anyway, just another poker in the beehive. State owned enterprises all round! 
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Sep 17, 2012 10:31
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:I see they are taking a note from the US's big book of invasion. Let normal citizens run off and do their poo poo without official backing. Then claim they have no power to prevent it. When attacked, welp, we gotta defend our citizens. Good stuff. The big book of invasions every time every where. You had the same "defend our citizens" stuff from Russia when they invaded Georgia and Britain at various times etc.
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Sep 17, 2012 13:25
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Grand Fromage posted:I think he meant "Russia when it invaded Georgia, Britain at various times..." as in Britain did the same poo poo to justify invasions. It's hardly a new tactic, Romans were selling their invasions of neighbors as defensive actions over two thousand years ago. Yes, exactly that. Sorry about the ambiguity.
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Sep 17, 2012 14:54
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Longanimitas posted:This has to be a troll. Well, troll or not the posts are hitting all the official PRC talking points down to a T. The PRC also has very little humour about its official talking points.
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Sep 18, 2012 01:31
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Fangz posted:He's only made 4 posts, it's going to take a long time for him to pay off the reg fee. Well, 50 cent or not what was raised is whether he is a troll. Whilst he might very well be I did just wanted to point out that the points made had a certain heft in the international scene and are not farcical in that respect; if only due to the party making those arguments.
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Sep 18, 2012 02:08
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As an aside, the naivety of some US students at UK Fresher's Weeks is a bit of a running joke. You always have a few people who had a pretty sheltered/religious upbringing or never drank any alcohol before. And yeah, I always used to "revise" for my exams in the UK.
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Oct 3, 2012 12:04
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If they are that ill informed what are the most prevalent myths regarding how pregnancy happens etc? You have the stork as a story or cultural touchpoint (or "the birds and the bees talk) here in the west. What is the equivalent in China, Korea etc. And presumably it's something rather more advanced than that when talking about older youngsters. Munin fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Oct 3, 2012 |
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Oct 3, 2012 16:47
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Magna Kaser posted:Definitely boring on that front at the moment. Though, every 7-11 in Chengdu has installed a very large Chinese flag outside their doors since the riots and protests happened. I should go around and see if other Japanese businesses have the same thing going on. Heh, that makes me think of those:   Also, I'd still be interested in what common misconceptions there are about sex and procreation and what kind of information prevails when teaching and family discussion around the subject is very limited. Links to any sociological research about it would also be much appreciated.
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Oct 5, 2012 10:29
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I missed that. Having just read it though it only discusses behaviours and the prevalence of certain behaviours rather than the misconceptions and common narratives around these matters. Most of the stuff out there is considering things squarely from a reproductive health perspective rather than a social science one. Whilst that is higher priority in the grand scheme of things I'm more interested in reading/hearing about the latter.
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Oct 5, 2012 17:49
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Going from the historical. It's from the end of last month but I was curious if any Chinese or SE Asian commentators picked up on the ruling by the International Court of Justice which awarded Nicaragua a large slice of sea to be be part of the Exclusive Economic Zone despite agreeing that Colombia had sovereignty over several islands effectively within that EEZ. I haven't sought out the full text of the ruling and the articles I've come across it don't cover the arguments used to reach that conclusion. Considering the focus in the South China Sea on using claims on remote islands and archipelagos to extend EEZs across vast stretches of sea do you think this might have an effect on the argument raging around the sea claims there? AP Copy Economist Article It doesn't seem to have gotten much coverage in the English speaking press...
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Dec 17, 2012 17:29
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What's the context for it btw? Was it meant to be meaningful or something similar to "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"?
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Dec 20, 2012 16:25
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What will China use to paper things over if they are taking them into China?
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Nov 20, 2019 09:58
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Rime posted:Definitely not the actions of an authoritarian fascist regime engaged in a genocide, no sir! Work makes you free!
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Mar 2, 2020 16:34
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Darth Walrus posted:Do the arrows on that graphic represent actual population transfer destinations? Because that's the COVID-19 hotzone they're mostly headed towards. It's just pointing to the overall industrial coastal belt. I don't get how you see Hubei or the COVID-19 hot zone out of these arrows.
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Mar 2, 2020 18:22
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The China bioweapon thing is not a fringe theory. Due to the amount of press and speculation, and indeed the President tweeting about it, it has entered the public consciousness and it at the very least being entertained as a plausible possibility by many people. I had stupid arguments about it with several friends of mine. They are also very much left leaning as opposed to people who believe it because Trump said it. It is now being used to both paper over the poor response in basically all Western countries and as a part of a general campaign to discredit international organizations and health professional. Btw, you should also add some sources to claims like "China held back and sabotaged the release of the gene sequence". e.g.: https://hongkongfp.com/2020/03/07/china-censors-report-authorities-hid-coronavirus-genome-sequence-test-results-14-days/ There is so much bullshit flying around that if you make big claims of malfeasance you should also make bloody loving clear what the evidence for it is and where the claims come from. People arguing with you won't take your word as gospel and most won't try and find a source for the claim and just blow it off. Especially when most of the material online is still praising how quickly China released the sequence (especially compared to the SARS episode) and that they were the first to do so and withing days of the outbreak officially being announced (which is also all true but...). P.S. China's overall response which did end up blocking the domestic spread of the virus wasn't great and successful because they were an autocratic nightmare with a whole slew of local officials who cared more about things looking good and normal than being good and normal. It was hampered by all that poo poo. What did help it was that it had a solid contingency plan with prepped policy and resource responses following their last couple of close calls. It was not unique in that though as shown by the success of Korea, Taiwan, and a few other countries. The US did have a solid contingency plan with prepped policy and resource responses following their last couple of close calls. However that was systematically gutted by the current administrations just before the current crisis and once the crisis hit it has been clear that there is no capacity for a federal response in the US other that blaming others, peddling woo and wonder cures pushed by their friends, and allow well connected people to grift and profit from national stockpiles and diverted good (when they are not channeled to favored Republican Governors).
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May 19, 2020 22:21
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Fojar38 posted:"It escaped from a Chinese lab" is the more widely entertained theory, and I would call that theory mainstream. It doesn't help that China won't allow independent investigation and scientists have to admit its plausible even with no proof when asked about it. Even the "escaped from a Chinese lab" version is also very fringy and, frankly, doesn't really add anything to the conversation. We already had a number of close calls pandemic wise and it has been clear for years that something like this was on the cards. It happened to be China where a virus hit the jackpot but if things had fallen slightly differently it could have been MERS hitting the jackpot or swine flu. It being a lab accident is an outside chance and it pisses me off that there seems to be a near bottomless need to find a simple human source, something or someone with agency, to blame what nearly totally certainly a natural event like the outbreaks with less serious consequences before it.
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May 19, 2020 23:21
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Nucken Futz posted:Sigh ...... uuh, right. Btw, do you have any idea where MERS and the swine flu stem from? I did specifically call them out in my post. Also, China is not the universal bellwether for flu seasons. Southern hemisphere nations are often the leading indicator for a bad one for obvious reasons. Not to mention that the strains circulation through flu seasons are very different from the ones driving SARS, MERS, and Covid-19. These strain are pandemic and endemic. The coronavirus behind Covid-19 is pandemic and, given the current global response, has a decent chance at becoming endemic leading to fun for years to come (but most likely with lower lethality as our immune systems become accustomed to it through vaccine or exposure). The viruses causing SARS, and MERS thankfully never made the jump to pandemic and endemic that level due to them being too lethal and debilitating to quickly and not being transmissible while asymptomatic. You are badly misinformed about flu.
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May 21, 2020 07:10
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:There's not much to say about That, really. It's just bad but completely foreseeable and there's nothing to do about it. It's difficult to even muster up another wave of protests right now.
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May 23, 2020 05:00
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Mass, public actions and protests are difficult in a mass pandemic. That's why the Chinese Government pushed it now. That said it has led to renewed protests which they are now trying to suppress again.
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May 25, 2020 01:12
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One country, one system!
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Jun 30, 2020 23:07
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Genghis Huangdi was a great Han Chinese Emperor: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/14/china-insists-genghis-khan-exhibit-not-use-words-genghis-khan quote:A French museum has postponed an exhibit about the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan citing interference by the Chinese government, which it accuses of trying to rewrite history. Munin fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Oct 14, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2020 20:55
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Fojar38 posted:Dumb country, Pooh systems On the note of Pooh. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/devotion-devs-are-selling-it-themselves-after-gog-chickened-out The Devotion Devs are now selling the game direct. I wonder how long their store will stay up. I love talking poo poo about our leaders and would have to have to deal with the bullshit in China where it is treated like apostasy.
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Mar 16, 2021 16:51
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The Brits were perfectly happy to run it like a colonial possession, as in by fiat, until it became clear that the actually really were expected to hand it back after talks in the early eighties. The first fully elected LegCo was seated in 1995 and the handover was 1997... I don't support the various crackdowns on political discussion etc by China but people are not totally of base when they say that the UK's professed love of Hong Kong's democratic institutions ring a bit hollow. Also, from what I can see what a lot of people are fighting for is not being locked up for having discussions like the ones we're having on this forum all the bloody time. Imagined being ruled by Trump and then being locked up when you rip the poo poo out of him.
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Mar 30, 2021 22:51
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Daduzi posted:It's widely rumored Xi is a big Han Fei Zi fan. Having read the text a few times (am working on a translation) I can 100% see it. What bits are most reflected in what he writes himself?
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Mar 30, 2021 23:23
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How are u posted:It wasn't great to live as the rural poor ("peasants", so to speak) in the USA in those eras either. We pulled millions out of poverty in the same timeframe. And the US has been trading on that economic miracle (land of opportunity etc) ever since, even as reality has diverged. Bringing material benefit to people does indeed drive a big base level of goodwill, elsewhere as well as the US. It should also be said that "in those eras" is 50 to 100 years before in the US. In any case, you can trade that huge change in material circumstances into a lot of goodwill. Then, since we're pretty tribal critters and nationalism is a things, increased power on the world stage is also something which does a lot to shore up support. Munin fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 21:14
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Control all the headwaters for the region...
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May 11, 2021 15:47
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One country, one system: https://twitter.com/AFPphoto/status/1400874999574056963
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Jun 4, 2021 19:46
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The Chinese government did feel compelled to use slightly more subtle means to quash the dissent in Hong Kong as opposed to straight up sending in the tanks. The local depth of support for the protests and the international scrutiny did constrain their methods slightly. In the end though Hong Kong is a tiny part of China and not as essential to its access to financial markets etc than ever before so there is little that the people of Hong Kong can hold hostage and China is very experienced at controlling dissenters these days. I definitely wouldn't call the outcome entirely surprising. That doesn't mean that the protests might not have longer term repercussions and the underlying issue hasn't been resolved. It is likely to be a continued thorn in the Chinese authorities side unless they give a little (which given the ways things are moving there these days is unlikely in the short term). Anyone expecting a triumph of the underdogs was making a very naive reading of the situation though.
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Jun 4, 2021 23:45
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Daduzi posted:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/06/xis-change-of-heart-is-too-late-to-stop-chinas-collision-with-the-west gently caress off with that headline. No one should talk as if world war 3, or whatever, is inevitable. It's the kind of thinking and attitude that hosed everything up repeatedly in the past.
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Jun 6, 2021 20:58
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Redgrendel2001 posted:The Chinese, like the British, understand that you do these things over the course of long periods of time to avoid the inevitable confrontation that would occur otherwise. "Famines a natural disasters and not Policy failures! The deaths in Ireland and India couldn't be avoided!" "Oh, you were talking about *Russia and China*, famines are totally policy failures and not natural disasters."
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Jun 7, 2021 09:24
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Daduzi posted:Who exactly do you think you're addressing this at? What do you mean by "addressed at"? I was extending Redgrendel2001's point. The actions of, say, Churchill in India which led to millions dying of starvation is treated pretty differently in the common discourse than when less favored people and regimes do poo poo which lead to to millions of their subjects dying. Munin fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Jun 7, 2021 |
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Jun 7, 2021 10:09
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Of course the money goes to the people running the program. What would be the point of running that grift, if money went to other people and funded education instead? [edit] welp, did not actually notice this was the China thread when going through my tabs. Munin fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jul 2, 2021 |
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Jul 2, 2021 03:52
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The big problem is that there just isn't enough water for everything full stop. Conjuring up more potable water would take up stupendous amounts of energy which opens up a whole host of other problems. It's the kind of issue that is cropping up all over the place and there is unfortunately no magic handwavy solution for it. Doing something about climate change would help a bit... Oh, and watching that video it's amusing that it mentions "just raise water prices" when that is just another band aid with the impact falling on the people least able to afford it. There is definitely need to improve water efficiency but market based solutions often aren't very good at that. All the water available still gets consumed but just by different people.
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Jul 3, 2021 23:00
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And energy needs water to create as well. In general it is another band aid. Useful to make sure that household needs are satisfied and people don't die of thirst but not really economical for bulk uses.
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Jul 3, 2021 23:22
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Herstory Begins Now posted:idk how feasible it is on a fully china scale, but it's definitely feasible at an absolutely massive scale if there was interest and money behind it. There are a bunch of desal plants doing 500,000-1m cubic meters per day and actual costs are in the $2-$5 per 1000 gallons range, so it's not cheap but it's definitely not astronomically expensive either. Ends up being about double the cost of wastewater recycling. Yeah, but there is not enough water for the other stuff. That is the key problem. I don't think anyone here is saying that desalination is useless. It's just that it is in no way a silver bullet that will solve China's, or anyone else's, upcoming mass water shortages. [edit] In general you talk about desalination production in millions of cubic meters. National and global water consumption is talked about in cubic kilometers which is three orders of magnitude larger. The current global production is about 100 million cubic meters per day (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969718349167). That is still an order of magnitude less than the base unit we use to talk about national and global water consumption. Munin fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jul 3, 2021 |
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Jul 3, 2021 23:35
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Bathtub Cheese posted:Usually what "whataboutism" is intended to point out is that China critics hold the CCP to a standard that nowhere else in the world can actually meet and that maybe people who don't live there should concern themselves first with the places where they live instead of repeating your own crappy government's propaganda about China like it's a fact This is an exact echo of the Hasbara talking point that it is ridiculous double standards to expect Israel not to do what they are doing to the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. They are the only Democracy in the Middle East don't you know! Ardennes posted:I wanted to go back to that Water video posted about the North-South project. Their major criticism seems that it would only supply 1/4th the total water demand of the urban portions of Northern China in 2050 on its own...this seems ridiculously unfair framing. I mean even if it didn't solve their problems in one go, how could that be considered a failure? I think it is fair to take the initial pitch, which was definitely of the "this will solve the North's water problem" variety, when assessing the eventual outcome. I do agree that is it stupid if your takeaway is that it did nothing. The big question is how much the focus on that megaproject took resources and attention away from potentially more effective measures. You mentioned that the CCP have been taking measure around water rates etc. Have they had effective programs around improving their water productivity? You also have to say, again, that China's water issue is shared by many places, including the US, and I don't know of any place which has managed to overcome all the political, institutional, and practical hurdles to solve it in a sustainable manner.
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Jul 4, 2021 21:45
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Muscle Tracer posted:personally i feel that the problem would be best solved by focusing less on carbon nanotubes and more on quantum alchemy. just subdivide all those useless and plentiful carbon atoms into hydrogens at 1:3, or recombine them into oxygens at 4:3. it can't be that hard https://i.imgur.com/2ZGxZ1M.mp4
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Jul 7, 2021 01:33
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