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The link certainly supports your general point. I was just talking about the sentence I quoted in particular. I am pretty good at English and I don't understand that sentence because it's missing an important piece. It's this phrase specifically: "...hence Chovanec's research indicating even a small decrease in real estate could reduce GDP..." You have the verb "decrease" there and its object is real estate, but real estate is obviously supposed to be the first half of a compound noun which you don't finish. Read literally the phrase suggests that the land area of China is decreasing. So you're talking here about real estate investment, maybe? Or sales volume? You're missing half the noun so it's hard to tell specifically what you mean by that sentence.
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May 17, 2012 18:17
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Fine-able Offense posted:Well the confusion might stem from the fact that I deliberately left the particular noun out there because it could (logically) be any one of several interrelated aspects of real estate, and all of them would fulfil the general idea. Wow. I honestly thought you forgot a word and I was waiting to hear what it was so I could understand your sentence. I didn't think you had intentionally produced a sentence with no clear meaning. But in retrospect it should have been obvious with how weaselly the whole thing was. With a clearer object for "decrease" let's subscript the weasel words in this sentence: Fine-able Offense posted:Commercial and residential construction + infrastructure projects make up a truly ridiculous proportion of their GDP, hence Chovanec's research indicating even a small decrease in any one of several interrelated aspects of real estate could reduce GDP by as much as 40% as all the secondary and tertiary spillovers grind the economy to a halt. And wow again, it looks like the new object you gave has exactly the same problem as the last one: you imply that "real estate" is half of a compound noun, but you don't supply the other half. The literal meaning is still that China is physically shrinking and we should worry about the impact of that on GDP. Now obviously I don't actually think that you meant China is physically shrinking, the point is your sentence is so bad that a reader might reasonably arrive at that conclusion. Again, I thought I was just asking for a missing word, but your response has been far more amusing. The insinuation that it's my fault for not understanding a sentence that you intentionally left incoherent is especially rich. Here's the problem: why should we pay any attention to your conclusion if your reasoning, under scrutiny, is meaningless? If you want to make a claim like "could reduce GDP by 40%" you should probably arrive at that claim through something more than a collection of weasel words so deliberately vague they could equally refer to foreign investment or square kilometers. fake edit: Fangz caught something much worse and I can't believe you're doubling down on such an elementary mistake. Fangz you totes stole my thunder. Lizard monkeys go home!
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May 17, 2012 19:24
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Jesus, why does one rapist rear end in a top hat represent foreigners all of a sudden? Then again the government press has always had these sort of screeds right?
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May 20, 2012 12:29
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I find it so hard to count in 万 and 亿. 4wanyi is 40,000x100,000,000 right? So 4 with 10 zeroes after it which makes it 4 trillion? edit: derp
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May 20, 2012 15:36
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Hong XiuQuan posted:Um 40,000 x 100,000,000 = 4,000,000,000,000 which does = 4 trillion, but it has 12 0s :P Serves me right for trying to visually count the zeros. My math is okay but for some reason I have trouble counting physical objects by sight. Playing dice games is difficult. 
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May 20, 2012 15:46
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Wouldn't that be 1 qian wan? 1 wan yi would be 10,000 yi right?
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May 20, 2012 17:07
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There are a lot of bad English teachers in China - and a few of them are foreigners! It's not a good career path for people with no skills, but there are no good career paths for people with no skills. If pressed someone with a grudge against English teachers is probably just going to shift the goalposts as far as necessary to prove to himself that foreign English teachers in China are bad at their jobs, bad for students, and bad for themselves somehow. Given the job climate in the United States it's small wonder that people who might not be terribly qualified are coming over in droves. It's because there's demand for them here, no matter how small the career opportunities. Over in the States the powers that be are committed to throwing the young generation under a bus, so why shouldn't the come to where they can get a living wage? If you want to actually talk about language teaching efficacy that would be a fine conversation to have, but you need to start with the Chinese educational system instead of starting off ranting against the underemployed young people who take the jobs they're offered and muddle through with virtually zero training or support. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 12:58 on May 22, 2012 |
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May 22, 2012 12:55
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Throatwarbler posted: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. Do you do this? Do you have any firsthand experience with this? Do you have kids even? In my experience the parents that care enough to seek out private teaching usually care about the quality of that teaching as well. The other type is rich kids who couldn't loving lift a finger to save themselves if they were dying and are failing because of it. I think there's an impulse to all out-cynic each other on D&D, but there are a lot of people out there just genuinely trying to do right, and they're told that part of that is having their kid learn English. And you know what? Every time I've brought it up with Chinese students, “Why is English important?" they always seem to have a cogent answer. Often it has to do with overseas business but often it's also that they want to study in an American college. Am I supposed to give them some sort of internet cynic rant?
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May 23, 2012 01:59
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ReindeerF posted:Please do this! Just draw a big smug-faced smiley on the whiteboard and walk out of the room like the haters-gon-hate cartoon. Okay you lost me. That was a rhetorical question. What I meant is that the kids I tutor in private (as opposed to the classroom) are quite earnest about learning English and I was asking rhetorically if I should give them some cynical rant for the crime of being genuinely interested.
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May 23, 2012 05:40
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ReindeerF posted:That said, it's not like there's not a sizable contingent (that grows exponentially - I have no idea what that means - as you head South). Are you suggesting that the number of crappy English teachers approaches infinity at the south pole?
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May 23, 2012 07:02
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Fangz what!  They will probably raise the retirement age before they start contemplating mass murder of the elderly. 60 for men and 50 for women is pretty ridiculous. Also there are filial piety laws on the books; oldsters can sue their kids for not taking care of them. Institutionally I think the Chinese state remains on the side of the old dudes rather than vice versa.
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Jun 3, 2012 15:29
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hitension posted:Oh, and Chinese women hold a higher % of parliament seats than in other culturally Confucian countries --and even the US for that matter-- but I am kind of skeptical about the power of the People's Congress anyway. They have a quota for women in the NPC so it doesn't really prove anything beyond the feminism of the writers of the constitution. And the NPC has no real power. When was the last time they failed to pass a proposed law? Oh that's right, never.
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Jun 4, 2012 04:07
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To be fair the women probably would have gone to the states with very few questions asked.
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Jun 4, 2012 12:55
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Kopijeger posted:Could you elaborate on this? I don't understand why the Chinese would have a particularly negative view of Russians given their present relationship. Have you known many Russian expats? It's not hard to form a negative view about them. I know it's a stereotype but like most stereotypes it's merely incomplete rather than wrong. I've known a lot of nice Russian expats (all women) and a lot of bigoted, aggressive jerks (all men) and the one tends to leave more of an impression than the other.
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Jun 5, 2012 03:26
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It's good to hear a native Chinese perspective in this thread, I get the feeling that most of us are Americans. I would like to point out that, in the U.S. and in most of the Western world, women below the highest class level also have to work to support their families. Because of the women's rights movement this has been portrayed in a positive light, but the reality is that American wages have been falling steadily for 30 years and men are no longer able to support a family on one income. Most women in America and the West also have to work, even if they want to be housewives. I agree with you that the labor participation rate is not a good indicator of women's social status. Assuming that you know what people want is always a bad place to start an argument.
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Jun 6, 2012 09:50
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Throatwarbler posted:There are lots of measures of how countries treat women. The number of days of paid maternity leave and the percentage of pay mandated by law, for example. One mentioned in Sinica(you're all listening, right?) was female suicide rates - China's is the highest in the world, and almost unique in being higher than that of men. I think they said was right? It was the highest in the world? Maybe I've been in China too long and my ability to distinguish tense is going. Also those （女） labels are helpful to us foreigners. It's hard to tell a man's name from a woman's name at a glance unless they're really stereotypical. And I have to agree that Chinese people tend to have unrealistic ideas about America and the West. People assume I am rich because I am white, and they take it as an article of faith that everyone in America is rich. Unfortunately both ideas are quite wrong. Chinese people always seem to be confused and disappointed when I explain American politics as well. We have our own problems.
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Jun 6, 2012 18:09
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GuestBob posted:No, the article is about the village of Houfangzi in the Southeast of Hebei province, which isn't exactly a million miles from Beijing. It's funny how people build cultural conceptions of geography. The West Virginia border is a 90 minute drive from D.C. Driving from Beijing to SE Hebei takes about exactly as long as driving from D.C. to the West Virginia panhandle. West Virginia coal miners are in the Northeast Conurbation's back yard just as much as rural Hebei is in Beijing-Tianjin's backyard. Physical proximity is a weird thing to focus on. I'm not really sure what point you were trying to make with the houfangzi article about that women and education. I'm kind of confused now.
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Jun 7, 2012 16:29
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Wow, who would call Chinese women lazy? I don't know if you are responding to something or just starting with rhetorical questions. I don't know anyone who would call Chinese women lazy.
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Jun 8, 2012 09:15
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Funny story about sexism, in Chinese the word for slave is nú 奴 and the word for woman is nǚ 女. They're almost homophones. And they share the root phonetic. (Not sure if "root" is the right word here but it seems like it.) In classical Chinese, if you combine the word for servant 臣 and the word for woman you get 姬 which means concubine. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Jun 22, 2012 |
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Jun 22, 2012 06:36
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That's what Sinica said as well. I talked to a friend's CHINESE GIRLFRIEND who is actually a grad student in political science here in China (长沙 if anyone wants to hang out some time, I am staying in China indefinitely while most of my American friends went home) and she seemed pretty clear that Chinese sovereignty claims extend from being the first ones to actually show up and chart these islets. The vast majority of Chinese people don't care about Chinese oil company profits or the bureaucratic infighting between the PLAN and the Fisheries Enforcement Service or whatever, but they do care about China's prestige on the world stage, I think the nationalist claims from the islets are probably more important to the Chinese government from the perspective of how willing they will be to de-escalate future conflicts. SE Asian people have to remember that the Chinese have a massive inferiority complex when it comes to the world stage, and they are eager to assert their dominance and get "respect" whenever they can. I can see this manifesting in bizarre ways when it comes to SE Asia, since China simultaneously has their inferiority thing and their cultural chauvanism thing going against you guys. So in relation to my earlier claim, I really think the Chinese government's actions will be determined by mass opinion, which doesn't care at all about oil profits. If Sinopec or whatever is angry, the Chinese government won't care because they can stomp that poo poo flat if they need to. If the Chinese people are angry, the Chinese government will try to harness that anger to gain legitimacy. My personal scenario for war in the South China Sea is that local Chinese actors like the Hainan government or oil or fishery companies instigate some bullshit land-grab (sea-grab?) conflict, and that the Chinese government gets dragged into it by propagandist fuckups and general Chinese anger that the 小国家 aren't giving them enough respect. Chinese resentment of the Imperialist period is a little frightening sometimes, since they really don't understand modern Western perspectives on China at all. The Chinese tend to assume that they are weak and that the Americans hold the same perception, while Americans tend to assume that China is powerful and that the Chinese hold the same perception, and in my opinion it's a catalyst for conflict. Should I post this over in the SE Asia thread or what? Frankly the China megathread has been quite dead recently so I don't know if this will be seen otherwise.
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Jul 9, 2012 14:50
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Haha wow, I did not expect to see the Free Investiture controversy come up this century, anywhere in the world. Catholics you so crazy.
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Jul 11, 2012 04:26
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Wait wait wait, that byline! I know her! "Jiang Qing and Daniel A. Bell" The Gang of Four has returned! The Communist leadership is experiencing a Zombie uprising! I hope they have shotguns and chainsaws in Zhongnanhai.
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Jul 25, 2012 04:48
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quote:"In terms of drainage technology, China is decades behind developed societies." In my experience Chinese people tend to make these sorts of proclamations on the assumption that if something bad happened in China, it must be better in the West. I have no idea whether this quote is accurate or not, but I see these sorts of statements a lot and in many cases I know they are wrong. This week on the train a guy asked me how much faster the high-speed trains were in America. He didn't really have a response when I told him we don't have any. Actually in the same conversation I mentioned the recent Chinese space flight. I was immediately told Chinese space technology wasn't as good as America's. I said that the space shuttles are all in museums and the U.S. does not currently have any functional spacecraft. These sorts of things seem to end the conversation for a while because Chinese people just have nothing to say to that. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jul 25, 2012 |
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Jul 25, 2012 15:18
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Zwabu posted:Apparently Bo Xilai was some kind of major power player before everything went sideways for him, now this accusation? Is this a story of major national importance involving some upheaval among power factions in the PRC, or is it strictly a smaller celebrity murder case? We did talk about it in the thread but the story broke back around the New Year. Bo Xilai was a major up-and-coming player. He had a number of mayoral and gubernatorial positions, was on the politburo, and was generally assumed to be making a play for a seat on the Standing Committee this leadership cycle, which is pretty much the ruling council of China. He also represented a somewhat leftist populist movement that some people saw as a challenge to the conservative technocratic elite that have dominated Chinese politics ever since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Bo's fall was a major story of PRC power factions, but it probably has very little to do with the Neil Heywood case. Bo was deeply corrupt, not unusual in the upper ranks of the PRC to be sure, but he seemed to be building quite a power structure under his personal control back in Chongqing. For example Chongqing police were being used as a personal enforcement unit way outside their jurisdiction, like arresting reporters Bo didn't like in Beijing. He was also wire-tapping virtually everything in Chongqing, including central government offices that he probably should have left alone if he knew what was good for him. The real deathblow came as soon as Wang Lijun, Bo's right-hand man and chief of police, realized Bo was about to backstab him and ran to the American consulate in nearby Chengdu (I was just there!) for protection. Wang had pretty much all the dirt that any enemy of Bo's could want to bring him down, so as soon as he was in the consulate Bo's fate was virtually sealed. At that point Bo's Chonqing power base couldn't get to him before the Feds showed up and took him from the consulate straight back to Beijing, where I'm sure he immediately spilled the beans on Bo's corruption and accumulation of power. People assumed that Wang was trying to defect at first, but now Wang's trip to the consulate looks like a smart and unexpected move from a man who needed a safe place to hide for a few days. His wife's murder trial is probably just a side-show at this point. My take on it is that Bo Xilai probably had a lot of people suspicious about his politics and motives and were hoping for an opportunity to take him out. The Wang Lijun affair, which Bo really brought on himself at the worst possible moment, probably confirmed a lot of the Party's worst suspicions about Bo's ambitions and gave his enemies more than enough ammunition to annihilate him politically. Does anyone even know where Bo is right now? Last I heard he was under investigation and suspended from all his posts.
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Jul 29, 2012 06:02
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az jan jananam posted:Who enforces this and how? Do the secret police go into Muslim houses and check blood sugar? I know it's fashionable to hate on China's ethnic minority policies and a lot of them are legitimately terrible, but this is a profound misreading of the article. The article does not suggest that the Chinese security forces will interfere with private observance of Ramadan. The article states that China expects that Party officials, government officials and students, who in China will be living in public school dorms on government property, will not publicly observe Ramadan. That's what this is talking about. This sort of law would be unsurprising in France, and it shouldn't be surprising from an officially atheist government like China's. Read the drat article jesus christ. It's hard enough to have a rational discussion about China's actual problems without dragging in imaginary bullshit. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Aug 2, 2012 |
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Aug 2, 2012 17:52
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whatever7 posted:
"... create a harmonious and happy family. Build national..." and then there's a guy in the way and the angle makes it illegible. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 22:19
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Are you guys paying attention to the trial? I just can't bring myself to pay any attention because there's going to be no way to tell what is lies and what is true. The Chinese justice system has zero legitimacy. Oh right the trial is over already after one day, I forgot about that. Really there are just no words.
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Aug 13, 2012 08:33
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I wouldn't go that far, but it's not much more than a rambling series of complaints about Chinese cities. Most of them are just common grumbles that everyone puts up with. The odd thing here is that he felt like he had something new to say about them. He doesn't. The underlying complaints are things that the natives also aren't happy about, but when he tries to embellish it feels like bullshit. When he says he can't tell the difference between Chongqing and Changsha, it makes him sound like an out-of-touch snooty Beijing/Shanghai expat. And then he goes and confirms it: he lived in Beijing and Shanghai for his whole time here. Really the title of that article should be: China Is Still Poor: How Dare They?
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Aug 18, 2012 09:13
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To be fair nothing; the problem with the article isn't that China's cities are really wonderful examples of civic genius, because they aren't. The problem is that he seems to be taking personal offense at the Chinese for being poor. It's as if he deserved better than to live in these dirty cities, in a nation that experienced its last major famine less than 50 years ago. Beijing is a notably poor capital city among the major states because China is a notably poor country among the major states.
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Aug 18, 2012 12:33
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Ruckby posted:Sounds more like he's taking offense at the Chinese pretending that if they don't admit the fact that they are poor, they won't be anymore. That way they can just come up with some bullshit superiority complex to feel better about themselves instead of actually trying to address the issues that are impeding the further development of their nation. I don't think he said anything like this. The closest he comes is being offended that the Chinese build clumsy prestige projects and then have the gall to feel good about them. A superiority complex is something you must be reading into this.
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Aug 19, 2012 10:15
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Ruckby posted:Feeling good about a meaningless prestige project (ie one that makes them feel superior to other nations) while ignoring the systematic issues affecting large portions of the non-wealthy Chinese populace is the main theme of that article. You're working really hard to defend a bad article. If the article had made a point like that it might have been worth reading, but it didn't. It was very unfocused. You're straining pretty hard to make one part in the middle about prestige projects that personally annoy the author a main thrust about systemic issues. Besides, who is supposed to feel bad and take action? Your sentence skips the subject. Is that random guy on the street who was impressed by his Neo-Classical style government building supposed to instead feel bad? And go change government policies somehow? You know what, don't answer that because this is all an argument you're building out of scraps from that dumb article. The part in parentheses is still all you, no one else mentioned anything about superiority.
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Aug 20, 2012 06:34
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Ruckby posted:"That article" is the subject of the sentence. No, it's the object. The subject of the sentence is a huge gerund noun phrase that lets you avoid mentioning an actor. The point is that you're creating an argument out of whole cloth at this point. It might have merit on its own but I have no idea why you're trying to connect it to a whiny article about the author's personal complaints.
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Aug 21, 2012 06:44
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 Xi Jinping is missingThis needs to be up there in big lights. According to the NYT all of Xi's meetings have been cancelled on short notice in the last 10 days or so, which is strange because some of them are very high profile. Xi has not been seen in public since September 1st and no explanation has been offered for his absences. Naturally the rumor mill is running riot, but there is still no official word on what is happening. In an enormous irony, searches for Xi Jinping and posts about his whereabouts are being censored aggressively. How can they censor searches for the freakin' president-elect?
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Sep 11, 2012 17:00
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Back injury when swimming and boxun doesn't count as actual news. Here's a tip, if the NED is throwing cash at something, it's pretty much bullshit. Read it on my NY Times app over breakfast yesterday, so I'm not sure where you get the idea that it's not real news.
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Sep 12, 2012 06:08
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So is there anything about what the NYT reported that is factually inaccurate? Has Xi been seen in public since September 1st? Did he attend his meeting with Secretary Clinton and other dignitaries? Has the Chinese government made an official statement? It's all fine to say that you shouldn't trust rumor mill websites, but here the facts seem out in the open. If you miss diplomatic meetings and don't appear in public, that's very easy to check. I'm sure the conclusions are all rumor at this point but I don't think anyone should dismiss the story because there are rumors surrounding it.
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Sep 12, 2012 10:12
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Munin posted:That said I still think a medical problem is the most likely reason. That would be fairly routine. Still embarrassing as a medical issue taking out the top guy at this inconvenient time would point up one of the obvious problems with autocratic regimes that have no clear succession mechanism.
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Sep 13, 2012 13:03
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From my understanding, the state-owned enterprises are a major source of power and influence in China's graft-and-influence-driven personal network politics. I think it would take another Deng Xiaoping to take them down, and we're not likely to see a figure of that stature in the near future with how the party has been operating in the last couple decades. That, or it would take someone with amazing political chops to sideline them and start shrinking their power. Maybe someone with the skill and panache to fake his own disappearance?  Barring an unusually strong and able leader who wants to get rid of them, I think the SOEs are here to stay for a long time, no matter what the head guy thinks. They're entrenched and they have powerful friends and patrons. As for government intervention such as building infrastructure and messing with the central bank, I don't see that going away for decades. You have to understand how huge and how poor China really is. They could build infrastructure for another 20 years and not be finished. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Sep 15, 2012 |
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Sep 15, 2012 03:22
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Well clearly the most obvious explanation for Xi's absence is that he has been replaced by a robot communist, or a commubot if you will. Other theories are really going too far out there.
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Sep 15, 2012 08:21
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Christ, it looks like that Changsha store burning happened on Jiefang Road. It's one of the busiest roads in the city, I must have gone past that place a dozen times at least last year. Between Vile Rat and riots on a familiar street the news has been too close for comfort recently. 
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Sep 15, 2012 19:04
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Gormless Gormster posted:Remember WWII and Pre WWI China? What most of you, as outsiders, have to understand is that the Chinese feel that they have been victimized and bullied for the last century. Now that they have the ability to hit back, they are going to take every opportunity they can to regain their lost pride. Its not just a simple case of forgive and forget. This sense of victimization has been part of the national identity for decades. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to describe the Chinese view of Japan's war crimes as similar to the Jewish view of the holocaust, albeit with a far more irrational need for vengeance on the Chinese part. Fortunately or unfortunately, the vast majority of US commentators are just incapable of understanding the reasoning behind this irrational bloodlust, simply because the USA has always been strong. It has never been the victim, and its people have never been persecuted or destroyed on such a massive scale. If a Sino-Japanese war does break out, it will be a very popular one with the full backing of the Chinese people. We do understand, but we also know that those feelings are inculcated by the way history is taught and news and entertainment is presented, all with total government control. There have been many countries that fought bitter wars full of pain and rage that aren't now stupidly braying for war over a pair of rocks. It's been sixty years since WWII. Some peoples have moved on, and some haven't. The whys are in the details, and in China the details are a long list of manipulative policies designed for this end. Chinese babies aren't born hating Japan. Some of the words you're using are familiar. The Chinese aren't the only ones with irrational revanchist hatreds, and they aren't the only ones with apologists either. That "outsiders can't understand how we feel" line is a convenient excuse for terrible behavior that has, ironically, been used many times by many people. I don't doubt that a lot of them believed they were unique. I have no doubt at all that the Chinese believe they are unique in their pain because it's an error they make in practically every interaction with the outside world but for students of history this is classic revanchist nationalism. And it is inculcated. We have to be absolutely clear about that. It's no coincidence that you see people calling for war over two rocky islets with words like, "We must remember our national shame; never again!" when they were educated in a system that teaches a whole century under the label "100 Years of Shame" It's no accident that Chinese people interpret every event through the lens of victimization, because they've been taught that they are victims. It's not surprising that 2,000 Chinese students tried to get into the American Consulate in Chengdu today, over issues with the Japanese, because they've been taught to conflate China's (former) enemies into one boogeyman who loves nothing so much as to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. Sure, these feelings are real, but do they excuse the recent behavior of the Chinese? Of course not. Feeling victimized doesn't excuse vandalism any more than feeling insulted excuses murder. What's more damning to me is that I think these feelings clearly originated outside the average Chinese anti-Japan protestor. That's why you have this incredibly stupid behavior like torching cars and then crying because your car got torched. Or doing violence over a tiny pair of islands that these people will never see and which will have no impact on their lives. These kinds of bizarre acts tend to arise, in my experience, when people don't understand their own beliefs, and generally that means they adopted those beliefs from outside. And with all the obvious propaganda, it's not hard to see where those beliefs come from. I'm sure Pro-PRC Laowai will jump all over this, but I see this as 100% a phenomenon of the Communist government, created by the government for its own ends. (Fortunately, that's why I'm so unconcerned about a real war breaking out. This is all psychodrama unless the central government suddenly goes insane.) Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Sep 16, 2012 |
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Sep 16, 2012 14:50
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