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Helsing posted:On the other hand China's development is still driven by exports rather than domestic consumption like in the United States. So what happens to all those export oriented factories? Are they taken down by a collapse in the credit system? Or can they keep chugging along while other parts of the economy collapse? From what I'm hearing from people in industry and finance right now exports aren't too healthy either. It's all anecdotal, I know, but I'm hearing pretty consistently from a range of sources that they're at best stagnant and possibly declining.
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Jun 8, 2014 12:16
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whatever7 posted:Lets assume that's true, so you are saying you should make pointless complaint because Chinese make pointless complaint in Chinese forums? I don't think anyone's complaining about China's population size in and of itself, the issue is whether or not the kind of economic growth the Party needs to maintain support is realistic given the demands required. It's more an issue of "not enough resources" than "too many people".
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Aug 17, 2014 09:03
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whatever7 posted:When China's GDP get close to the United States' GDP, there will be all kind of accounting tricks go into effect to lower the reported number. There is a Chinese saying "The bird that stick its neck out gets shot." This regime seems quite happy to have a very long neck, though.
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Aug 25, 2014 20:26
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I would honestly say their best bet is hold through the recession, build up the rural areas, and wait for the population drop that's coming. How feasible is that, though, for a government whose sole source of actual legitimacy is "we'll make you richer"?
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Sep 24, 2014 08:50
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I would argue that the greater source of legitimacy is protection from external threats like the USA, Japan, South Korea, and anyone else the state media wants to present as a threat. Once the PLA loses to an external or internal threat, the CCP is hosed. Economic problems can be blamed on scapegoats and Xi is cleaning out the party as it is. If the economy tanks tomorrow, Xi will have people to blame and they'll all be disposed of before people can question it. I think the government is trying to make protection from external threats into a bigger source of legitimacy, but I'm not seeing much evidence on the ground that people are more concerned about it than the economy. It's a lot more abstract than paying shitloads for your only child's high school and college education only for them to be unable to get a job. I think they probably will try to pull the scapegoat card when the economy goes down, but I can't see it being that successful. They've tried the same strategy with the various food scares, after all, but people still blame the government as a whole for them.
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Sep 25, 2014 05:39
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Ceciltron posted:You guys do realise that less than 10% of the Chinese economy is State Owned Enterprises, right? I'd be interested to see where you got that figure from (not challenging it, I'd actually be interested in reading it) but regardless it's worth noting that there's a different between "state owned" and "state controlled". A large section of the market is built around companies which are either offshoots of state owned organisations (SOEs, universities, local governments) or depend upon government or state-owned contracts. All of these the government is able to exercise significant control over.
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Oct 1, 2014 11:35
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whatever7 posted:After Israel, the most democratic country in Middle East is Iran, and it got the shittiest treatment from the US. Speaking of I would've thought Israel and Palestine would be enough to disabuse the whole "democratically elected governments are all friendship and hugs and rainbows with each other" myth.
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Oct 22, 2014 05:49
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Cultural Imperial posted:http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/chinese-economy-fall-off-cliff Good article, matches up with what I've been hearing but add some details. Not too sure about the note of optimism at the end: "the Chinese invested heavily in infrastructure and education, particularly scientific education. This strategy provided a platform for rapid growth which, once China gets through its current problems, could well prove more durable than the Conference Board report acknowledges". I currently work with 13 Chinese universities and have taught professors from another 20 more and I have to say that if the hope is that scientific education and research will be the key to China's future growth then China's in deep poo poo.
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Oct 23, 2014 02:17
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Cultural Imperial posted:Hahah Well the main problems are: 1. Most university faculty don't actually give a poo poo about the subject they are studying. When I was teaching professors I was astonished how many confessed they actually weren't remotely interested in structural engineering/molecular biology/polymers/whatever they were researching. They'd basically been railroaded into the career path by their parents and had stuck it out strictly as a way to get the requisite signifiers of success in China (wife/husband, car, house, kid who will be educated anywhere except China). There were definitely some who were passionate, but they made up at most 50% and the ratio only gets worse the higher you move up the administrative ladder. 2. The quality of research being produced is pretty horrible. Most university faculty have never been properly trained in research methodology. PhD programs here are something of a joke, and masters programs a really unfunny joke. To make things worse, Hu Jintao's brainchild of funding universities purely on the basis of research output has created serious perverse incentives. Since universities are funded on how much research they produce, departments are funded on how much research they produce, so staff are promoted on how much research they produce. The result is that it's not uncommon for faculty to need to publish 6 papers a year to get/keep professorial positions. And anyone who's ever done research will tell you that at that rate the research isn't going to be much good. Corners are cut left right and centre, topics are chosen on the basis of how easy they will be to churn out (rather than how important they might be), and blatant academic dishonesty is commonplace. Most of the research being made is either replicating results from elsewhere, putting existing research into a "China context", collating someone else's data, or doing reviews or summaries of research. Now all of these can be useful, but they're not likely to lead to a revolution in innovation in China 3. Because of 2) the teaching at universities is farcically bad. Many of the staff are really bad teachers to begin with (because of 1) and the poor teaching quality at schools when they graduated) but even those who are really good at and passionate about teaching simply don't have time to devote to it because of the pressure to produce borderline garbage research papers. As a result, even though the younger generation are much more promising than the current crop of academic staff, they're simply not getting adequate training and whatever passion they might have for the subject is killed by terrible lecturing. 4) Lack of academic freedom. Now this most obviously hurts social sciences the most, but even in the hard sciences I've heard stories of professors being forbidden from publishing their findings because the results could embarrass the CCP. Said professors either stop giving a poo poo about their work entirely, or else emigrate and publish overseas. This leads to a big problem where because of 1), 2) and 3) the government is relying increasingly on foreign universities to train their faculty, but most who are half-competent won't return from their foreign sojourns. So there's the whole brain-drain effect on top of everything else. Now this is all based on my own personal experience, mind, but I've heard similar complaints from many of my Chinese friends, in particular those who work in R&D-intensive industries. By and large they don't even bother working with professors from Chinese universities and instead work solely with academics whose experience lies chiefly overseas. The only hope China has of switching to an innovation-based economy is to seriously overhaul higher education. Scrapping the system of evaluating universities solely by research output would be a big start. However this government is showing no signs of doing so, and to be honest even if they did it would probably be too late: the reform needed to begin 10 years ago, not today.
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Oct 23, 2014 04:06
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Ardennes posted:In the case of China, wages are lower in the interior and the countryside than the coast, but the coast also has immediate access to shipping routes so I don't know if you are going to have the same dynamics. Almost certainly not. SOEs are moving/being moved into the interior but the wage differential is simply not making up for the logistic nightmare involved. I know a guy who runs a state owned chemical firm who opened a major plant in Inner Mongolia: he was saying that the plant is vastly less economical than the Shanghai-based plant it replaced. Basically trucks are backed up all along the roads running to it, and the management are almost all relocated due to lack of local expertise (meaning they are on higher salaries than they would have been in Shanghai). If Chinese SOEs can't make it work it's reasonable to assume that multinationals will be more likely to move to coastal Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh etc. than to the Chinese hinterland.
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Nov 25, 2014 18:22
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VideoTapir posted:Gee, maybe they should be building truck and rail corridors between some inland cities and the sea ports rather than golf courses and shopping malls. To be fair they have. Ultimately though the sheer volume of traffic that goes from Chinese ports would require an utterly ludicrous level of infrastructure to accommodate, unless all of the interior development were concentrated in one area (which kind of defeats the purpose).
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Nov 25, 2014 19:05
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My Imaginary GF posted:Less consumers for Chinese goods. Who are China's largest export customers? What effect does lower energy costs have on domestic consumption in those countries. Hint: it doesn't suppress it.
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Dec 14, 2014 02:45
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My Imaginary GF posted:Well, do the ones at the very bottom of the receiving end for the organ of power get sent to have their organs sold off in America? I don't think so. I'd love to read these accounts of Chinese officials having their organs harvested. Any links?
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Dec 14, 2014 09:03
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Nintendo Kid posted:It's not very meaningful. PPP is most designed for comparing what an actual person can buy out of normal goods among countries, it kinda stops being sensical for whole countries except for meaningless dickwaving. It's especially meaningless for countries with huge gini coefficients because increase in GDP does not necessarily mean any meaningful increase in purchasing power for the majority of people.
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Dec 30, 2014 00:59
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Shifty Pony posted:\I'm sure the construction workers would be strongly discouraged from buying provisions and such at local stores instead of at company-owned store and at that point economically speaking the work site becomes just a little patch of China in the Amazon. I doubt they'd need to be discouraged, as long as the company stores stocks instant noodles they'll be flocking there instead of trying any of that foreign garbage.
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May 20, 2015 16:43
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rex rabidorum vires posted:I would think bank of China is supplying the money to certain entities to purchase shares to create a price floor at the expense of say increased lending or increasing the money supply.. rex rabidorum vires posted:It could create a huge feedback loop of BoC investment through expansionary monetary to create an infinite rise of the market Minor point, but you're confusing Bank of China (a retail bank, though state owned like all Chinese banks) with the People's Bank of China (the Chinese central bank).
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Jul 15, 2015 02:53
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Where are people getting 7000-70000 casualties? BBC has like 7 dead, 700 injured. I mean I know China would lowball it but is the discrepancy that much? Read above, it's already been taken back.
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Aug 12, 2015 22:36
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Arglebargle III posted:The Texas City explosion was almost two kilotons and 460 people died, so the 7,000 dead figure seems completely impossible. Well, yeah, hence it being retracted. However, given the size and depending on what part of the port it was it could easly be in the hundreds. At any major port, even in the dead of night you have that number of truckers alone.
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Aug 12, 2015 23:12
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Apparently buildings up to 10km away are reported to have collapsed.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:06
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Vladimir Putin posted:I think this is a good idea though. It's the reason why startup incubators are built. Thing is, these kind of places work great if they organically form. They pretty much never work if governments try to create them through their own zoning. I remember giving a presentation to the Party Central Committee of a downtown Shanghai district on pretty much this topic (creative clusters in London to be exact) where that was my main argument: pretty much every attempt at forcing a creative cluster in London failed. What worked was identifying clusters as they naturally formed and backing them through subsidy and relaxed planning laws. Of course, the week after I gave the presentation they shut down an area where galleries and coffee shops were springing up. The week after they announced a brand new "innovation complex". The notion of not micromanaging doesn't really mesh well with Chinese government.
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Aug 13, 2015 07:19
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Yeah, the data mentioned in the article is why I've been saying for the past year that real growth in China is at best flat. If that's the case, though, it has to be said that it's fairly impressive how long the government managed to hide that fact.
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Aug 17, 2015 10:46
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the JJ posted:Lying about economic statistics is bad because somewhere somehow meat meets the metal and the whole mixed metaphor collapses like a house of called bluffs. That plus 2% growth is only fine as long as the growth is distributed evenly across both regions and social strata. This being China there's no way that's happening, so 2% growth is pretty much guaranteed to mean negative growth in certain areas. Zeroisanumber posted:Yeah, I agree. I don't buy that China is in recession, we'd be seeing a lot more signs of a slowdown if that were the case. For example? Bearing in mind the most common metrics (employment, exports etc.) are probably just as dubious as the GDP figures.
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Aug 22, 2015 15:56
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Kassad posted:Even if you take those figures at face value (and you shouldn't, as you said), both that uprising and the Taiping rebellion started as secret society plots that were planned out for years. That's definitely not true of the Taiping at least. I'm also not sure why you two are jumping on the author. His point is that civil wars in China have been highly destructive (true), that the Chinese government is aware of this (also true), and this influences their decision making (probably true).
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Aug 23, 2015 08:31
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Fojar38 posted:I'm less convinced that the CCP cares about the potential loss of Chinese life from civil unrest and more convinced that they know they'd probably end up strung up really quickly. Well, obviously, yeah Daduzi fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 09:33
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Guys, guys, no need to worry, they've got it covered: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34013514 quote:But, when in doubt, reach for the hard facts and take a deep breath - and here's what Julian Evans-Pritchard, China Economist at Capital Economics, says: Increasing credit and local government spending to get out of the problem: that seems like a novel and sustainable solution to me.
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Aug 24, 2015 02:02
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Fojar38 posted:The British establishment in general has been sucking China's dick for like the past 5 years and it's very fascinating. In the case of the BBC, it's more that they've become very conservative (with a small c) over the past decade due to a number of scandals, and so their reporting tends to err on the side of caution and predicting the status quo will continue.
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Aug 24, 2015 02:55
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hooman posted:So uhh.. forgive my financial illiteracy but if China craters how hosed is the rest of the globe financially? Very hosed.
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Aug 24, 2015 07:12
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AllanGordon posted:There isn't a lot of foreign exposure to the Chinese financial markets if that's what you're talking about. Not to the financial markets, no, but there is to the wider Chinese market. If confidence in China's economy evaporates, expect to see the stock of a whole swathe of businesses that are leveraged on Chinese growth (GM or Apple for example) and even whole sectors (for example steel) take a beating. That will inevitaly have knock-on effects. Daduzi fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Aug 24, 2015 |
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Aug 24, 2015 07:31
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Grand Fromage posted:It's a stock bubble. Prices are dropping back toward what they were in February before the bubble started. It's not good but unless a whole lot of other poo poo happens it's not going to be the end of the world. Thing is whether or not it's serious depends on two factors: 1) Whether or not the fuundamentals of the economy are still sound 2) Whether or not investors retain confidence that the economy is sound regardless of 1) Right now neither seem like safe bets.
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Aug 24, 2015 08:37
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Shadoer posted:Alright I must be missing something here. As bullshit as China's government is, I don't understand why things are tanking as hard and fast as they are now. Remember, in a sense none of this is real. Stock markets operate to a large extent on a form of mass hysteria. What's real is less important than what is percieved to be real. Beijing's ham fisted attempts to shore up the stock market and devalue the RMB are causing investors to conclude that 1) the Chinese economy is nowhere near as healthy as official statistics make it out to be and 2) the CCP is far from infallible. This causes re-evaluation of investments that are predicated on Chinese growth, which causes sell-offs, which causes further sell-offs, which causes further sell-offs etc. More to the point, though, cheap oil and commodities aren't enough to fix the fundamental problem that China's 7% growth figures are, and for a long time have been, a sham. A lot of investments were made on the basis of those figures, and as soon as confidence in the figures evaporates (due to the government's seeming economic ineptitude) so do the investments. Nobody knows what the real figures are, but there seems to be a consensus that they're somewhere between 4% and -4%. For cheap oil and commodities to fix things, they'd need to result in at least a 3% boost to GDP. That's unlikely, given international growth rates.
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Aug 24, 2015 10:09
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FizFashizzle posted:American companies that bank on Chinese consumption are going to eat some pretty bad poo poo. Weirdly enough one of the biggest losers so far has been Facebook so looks like there's more than just exposure to the Chinese market in play.
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Aug 24, 2015 16:14
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tbp posted:the Chinese markets are, more than any western market, ruled by sentiment. The "disconnect" btwn them and the real economy is t something the nyt just made up, but I can't verify the economic statistics quoted in that article Nobody can because they come from the government and are most probably bogus. Really if you want to get an actual feel for the Chinese economy you need to rely on one or both of the following: 1) The Li Keqiang Index 2) First hand accounts from those who are actually involved in private investment or industry Neither of those are good right now, and haven't been for a while.
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Aug 26, 2015 15:35
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Fojar38 posted:So focusing on the macro for a moment all these news articles keep talking about how China is going to switch to a "consumption-based model." How is that going and how likely is it to succeed? Badly, and unlikely without radical changes that aren't going to happen. China is still very much a saving-focused society since a) there's little to no real social support system outside of family, b) owning property is considered a must and house prices are frankly ridiculous when compared to income, c) loans are hard to come by unless through shadow banking systems, d) education is ultra-competitive leading to all sorts of expenses even with free schooling, and e) children are expected to support parents as they age and healthcare is relatively expensive. The goverment could mitigate a number of these factors by introducing an actual welfare state, but that would be very unlikely as if people had welfare they would get lazy and stop working (as heard from multiple Chinese Communist Party members).
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Aug 27, 2015 10:19
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Artificer posted:Where are you basing the "demonstrably awful in practice" education systems from? The issues with high school education and in particular the gaokao (university entrance exam) are well documented, for a decent analysis check out the Sinica podcast episode on education where they talk to a Chinese high school principal: http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/education-in-china. In terms of higher education, I'm going to repost something I wrote in this thread last time the topic came up (I've taught university professors going overseas before and now work in higher education contracting with 16 Chinese universities). Note that this was posted just under a year ago and there's been precisely zero meaningful improvement since then: Daduzi posted:Well the main problems are:
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Sep 9, 2015 03:34
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Artificer posted:Does this have a transcription somewhere? I read much faster than a 47 minute podcast. If not then that's fine too. No transcripts as far as I'm aware. The "Chinese context" comment mostly referred to areas like social sciences, education, civil engineering, philosophy or medicine; obviously it doesn't apply to areas like physics or microbiology (those incidentally are two of the areas where outright faking of results is most likely).
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Sep 9, 2015 03:49
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quote:China should arrest people from Morgan Stanley, Merryl lynch and Goldman Sachs. Get real, do you think that a senior Chinese Bank is doing all these damages? It is orchestrated by CIA through most US giant security conpanies, simple as that. No private company can do such a damage unless is backed by a country. I'm sure that foreign banks are the ones selling all the A shares. Someone remind me, what's an A share?
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Sep 10, 2015 02:06
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etalian posted:A shares are domestic shares that are locked out from foreign investors We have a winner.
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Sep 10, 2015 02:28
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Ardennes posted:Only in the sense if you want to know what Beijing thinks it can get away with. That said, we more or less Chinese growth more or less could be anywhere between 6-3% at this point. The general consensus amongst analysts, as far as I've seen, is that the actual GDP figures (minus outright lying) would be around 3-4%. Which would place actual economic growth (minus debt-fuelled construction and real estate speculation) at anywhere between 0 and 3%, which is pretty much in line with what the few non-bogus indicators suggest. I'd wager it's in the lower end of that bracket.
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Nov 10, 2015 15:28
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