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There's at least some millions of kids for whom Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf will be their Tom and Jerry cultural reference equivalent It is painfully bland though, even for basically Peppa-Pigesque fare
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Jul 10, 2022 15:28
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China has long since grown past the 1980s period where it needed to coercively divert agricultural surplus to fund coastal urban development The pivot began occurring in the mid 1990s, with revenue centralization in 1993, interregional equalization payments beginning in 1995, and general transfers growing rapidly afterwards - evolutionary reform to steadily increase inter-regional transfers has been consistent, reflecting a sustained political will to improve inland and rural conditions. It's important to appreciate the starting point in 1993 with Chinese central government budgets almost totally at the mercy of a handful of richer provinces (with, obviously, no reason to agree to steep intergovernmental transfers, and indeed fiercely resisted it), to how far it has come today where Chinese policy thinking can take the successful march of equalization payments amidst thoroughly cowed provincial governments as given. Rather, in terms of stylized facts, the main dynamics on contemporary China are 1) the sheer staggering size of the rural migrant labour force (more than a third of the entire working population - hard to compare outside of, say, the relationship between the Gulf states and Kerala), and 2) the threadbare Chinese welfare state, even in the rich cities. My sense is that lay observers may not appreciate how significant these are because their mental model remains the later Soviet Union, with its rigid movement controls in defiance of sustained urban labour shortages, and welfare transfers comparable to contemporaneous Western European counterparts. But that is not contemporary China, which has very much the opposite problems. On the former there is an increasing acknowledgement amongst Chinese policy thinking that migrant labour increasingly have to, and should, be able to settle down - of course progress on this has been evolutionary (or, less politely, anaemic) but lots of Chinese domestic reform is - but on the latter however, the center remains fiercely opposed to any hint of welfarism - this, probably, will be the next zone of contention in domestic Chinese politics, with people in richer provinces steadily developing expectations for a correspondingly generous social safety net. You know, welfare and immigration politics, familiar to all developed countries - except with a weaker welfare state, far more crushing austerity, a more sharply aging population, a heavier debt load, and of course proportionally far more migrants. Oh, and a dysfunctional and strained method of resolving political and social tensions. I've remarked in the other China thread that China is in many ways playing the Asian development model on fast speed and hard mode, and that's really especially true here. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Aug 25, 2022 |
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Aug 25, 2022 16:31
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All the countries with a cram school culture periodically have spasms of moral panic about it: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. Once upon a time an authoritarian East Asian leader, in a surprising and sudden move, prohibited all for-profit private tutoring to mitigate unease over social inequality and the excessive expense of private tutoring putting poorer households at a disadvantage, as a measure widely acclaimed by media and domestic observers otherwise very occupied about worsening authoritarianism - but the year was 1980 and the leader was General Chun Doo-hwan of South Korea, a couple weeks past becoming military dictator. Very important priorities when defending the country from existential threats sufficient to justify seizing power. Really, attacking private tuition as a cheap populist gesture is an easy "look, my untrammelled power gives you the things you want!" trick. (the measures were never effectually enforced - estimates are that perhaps 80% of elementary school students in Korea were taking illegal private lessons by the 1990s - but remained resoundingly popular as a populist political gesture under subsequent civilian governments post-democratization until the Constitutional Court of Korea resolved the question in 2000 by abruptly declaring such a prohibition unconstitutional) ronya fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Aug 25, 2022 |
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Aug 25, 2022 17:49
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An export-oriented economy exports its economic volatility (remaining relatively easily at full employment by filling in any swings in domestic demand through foreign demand, whilst the importer sees amplified swings in their remaining domestic demand) in exchange for domestic wage repression (which the importer partner gains in the form of cheaper imports). It's true for every export-oriented economy from the developed ones (Germany, Japan, Korea) to the developing ones (Vietnam, Malaysia). Michael Pettis (of Trade Wars are Class Wars) tends to emphasize the latter: the need, but also the difficulty, for China to easing off lifting wage repression. But one can likewise point at the former: if China expects its developed regions (the wealthiest currently at a Poland level of gdp/capita) to support its less developed ones in an import substitution way, it has to accept increased domestic volatility in those regions, precisely because it won't be exporting it any more. But does anyone expect the next decade of China moving to diminish the influence that its new middle classes have on its domestic outlook? I don't think so.
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Aug 27, 2022 06:01
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Beefeater1980 posted:I bounced a bit off Trade Wars are Class Wars, because while it’s very good, I don’t fully understand what they are saying the system levers are. Someone is doing something and as a result elites in trade surplus countries make a ton of poo poo they don’t need and sell it to trade deficit countries, beggaring local producers, to everyone’s detriment except the elites in both places. But they talk about it as if it were the trade surplus countries (or their elites) forcing their goods into the markets…are they advocating tariffs? Trade bans? Why *shouldn’t* they make what they want and sell it to foreigners? It feels like they’re implying there’s a natural amount of consumption and production based on population and it’s doing more than that that distorts things, but they don’t come right out and say it. Pettis doesn't really have a political economy of the deficit countries beyond "there are two different kinds of elites", no. For Pettis, "the world's rich are able to benefit at the expense of the world's workers and retirees because the interests of American financiers were complementary to the interests of Chinese and German industrialists" (pp. 224) I don't entirely buy it as phrased as such - my own take is similar to how I phrased it above, i.e., that some polities have prioritized higher real wages and other politics more macro stability. Both of those are fair things to want, and countries can prioritize either. We can see the mighty German trade unions backing wage restraint across the 2000s, for instance. Are those the 'German industrialists' Pettis has in mind? ronya fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Aug 27, 2022 |
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Aug 27, 2022 07:25
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Zeihan says that the Japanese recognized the real estate bubble as irrational, but that's not entirely true; whilst there was certainly skepticism, at the time there was - as in China today - a fair amount of domestic boosterism arguing that This Time Is Different. Where China exceptionalists today argue for some unique aspect of Chinese traditional culture, Japan exceptionalists in their 1970s/1980s heyday likewise engaged in elaborate nihonjinron theorizing about some allegedly unique aspect of Japanese traditional culture that supposedly explains its inevitable economic success (and not a small amount of natter about its rightful peaceful hegemony of Asia in the post-Vietnam War vacuum) Japan's asset price bubble had barely popped when the region then promptly swung into the 1990s "Asian values"/"Pacific century" argument of Asian tiger economies, championed by the authoritarian governments of Malaysia and Singapore. It, too, then beat a hasty retreat after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Despite a dramatically rapid recovery from the latter, corresponding political rhetoric has not returned to its lofty heights My hot take is that Chinese rhetoric on its inevitable success and with a rightful hegemonic role was always very likely, short of a transition to an opposition government (as with Korea or the Philippines - Kim Dae-jung famously wrote a personal pushback against Singapore's Lee's Asian values take), simply because that's what previous Asian developmental states did too. And, like previous developmental states, the pundit puffery will only end with economic slowdown severe enough to be undeniable. In the event, that penny might drop quite soon, perhaps just shortly after the next party congress. ronya fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Aug 28, 2022 |
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Aug 28, 2022 06:40
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Packaging, mostly.
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Aug 28, 2022 08:04
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https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07BEIJING1760_a.htmlquote:4. (C) GDP figures are "man-made" and therefore unreliable, Li said. When evaluating Liaoning's economy, he focuses on three figures: 1) electricity consumption, which was up 10 percent in Liaoning last year; 2) volume of rail cargo, which is fairly accurate because fees are charged for each unit of weight; and 3) amount of loans disbursed, which also tends to be accurate given the interest fees charged. By looking at these three figures, Li said he can measure with relative accuracy the speed of economic growth. All other figures, especially GDP statistics, are "for reference only," he said smiling. Well, it's been 15 years and Li has been on the politburo for 14 of those years, and Premier for 9. How are things now? quote:近年来，国家统计局坚决查处统计违纪违法案件并督促通报曝光，遏制、震慑效应初显。但从查处的案件情况看，统计造假不收手、不收敛的问题仍然较为突出。... Okay then.
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Sep 2, 2022 03:30
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the relative fates of Zhong Nanshan (now a LHQW snake oil promoter) and Jiang Yanyong (disappeared), who were both initially celebrated as the new modern Chinese 斗士 heroes speaking truth to power, seem instructive
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Sep 3, 2022 08:59
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no, the real power move was this part of the speech:quote:Comrades, and Hu is of course obliged to just sit there and clap this guy trashing his record the domestic/foreign disparate coverage is readily explainable in that this is really an unengaged/engaged filter, knowing that the media environment in China is not really hermetically sealed ronya fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Oct 25, 2022 |
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Oct 25, 2022 18:20
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neither Mao nor Deng would have contended, as XJP thought does, that Chinese communism represents a new form of civilization - the very claim itself militates against Marxism as a universal truth XJP thought is very upfront about its utilitarian approach to ideology. Its famous spiel on Soviet dissolution doesn't mention any material factors: it's about the historical nihilism the Chinese neoauthoritarian project strikes me as an experiment in whether the two whatevers (two establishes, ahem) could have lived with the truth criterion, fusing the authority of the party-state to internal party pragmatism. from a couple days ago: quote:To uphold and develop Marxism, we must integrate it with China's specific realities. Taking Marxism as our guide means applying its worldview and methodology to solving problems in China; it does not mean memorizing and reciting its specific conclusions and lines, and still less does it mean treating it as a rigid dogma. We must continue to free our minds, seek truth from facts, move with the times, and take a realistic and pragmatic approach. We must base everything we do on actual conditions and focus on solving real problems arising in our reform, opening up, and socialist modernization endeavours in the new era. We must keep responding to the questions posed by China, by the world, by the people, and by the times; in doing so, we should find the right answers suited to the realities of China and the needs of our day, reach conclusions that are compatible with objective laws, and develop new theories that are in step with the times, so as to provide better guidance for China's practice. renouncing Deng, this is not... trashing the (often blunt) cynicism of the Hu era, however, is very much in
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Oct 26, 2022 15:25
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conversely, if a communist country commits to reform of SOEs that should entail 所有权与经营权分离 separation of ownership and management and 遵循市场经济规律 following the laws of the market, you might question their interpretation of what communist nationalization should mean strategic industries and indicative planning are things mixed economies do, but exceptionally nationalist mixed economies may have an expansive definition of 'strategic'
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Oct 26, 2022 18:07
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neither. the most important criteria for the next five years is national security, and China is rich in coal and poor in petrochemicals 富煤贫油少气
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Oct 28, 2022 03:59
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there's a curious disaffection between the very online tankie zeitgeist and contemporary Chinese Dream discourse also - when the best the former can say about the latter is that it bashes the same enemies they don't like, rather than that it advances the goals they do like, it's very faint praise indeed
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Oct 28, 2022 07:28
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Mao is really the wrong comparison Consider post-韬光养晦 China instead as Wilhelmine Germany having lost patience with Bismarck's restraint, seeking instead to establish itself as a world power in an already crowded and hostile neighbourhood
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Oct 28, 2022 13:14
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thetoughestbean posted:I don’t have even the beginning of a clue on how to prevent something like this happening again. How do you prevent people from heading en masse into urban areas? e.g. by shaping nearby public transit: https://twitter.com/TfLAccess/status/1532325250016452609 crowd control barriers can also be used to enforce crowd flow control, canalize bottlenecks, limit rates of entrances to lower than exits, or demarcate zones for fire access, first responders, or relieving crowd pressure to an extent, until these things happen first, they are hard to enforce. The regulations are legitimized in blood. Without an awareness of what the barriers are for, resentment encourages people to vault them, which requires more resistant barriers, which are then themselves potential crush problems ronya fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Oct 31, 2022 |
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Oct 31, 2022 09:50
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cross-posting:ronya posted:English-language coverage: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-11/these-are-the-20-measures-guiding-china-s-covid-easing-efforts remains to be seen if this momentum holds even as Guangzhou case counts explode
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Nov 11, 2022 16:21
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China has remarkably low hospital beds per capita and physicians per capita for its level of development. Its public health strategy assumes that crises are regional, so that resources can be mobilized between provinces and cities. A logical strategy would be to stage a reopening by region, whilst retaining tight internal movement controls. Even very highly vaccinated/boosted countries in East Asia saw an initial wave of hospitalizations that strained capacities, even though death rates were low as long as capacity was not overstretched. I am not an NHC planner, of course, but it seems that China is instead opting for an across-the-board synchronized reopening that assumes the effectiveness of micro lockdowns to stem case surges.
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Nov 13, 2022 09:45
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what I would like is some hard statistics on how effective China's micro-lockdowns have been, as enabled by app-supported contract tracing many countries tried micro lockdowns and many countries tried contact tracing apps, but none as thoroughly as China. And this is a country with an unusually large and mobile domestic migrant population it does seem evident that Omicron has managed to escape containment repeatedly nonetheless, but then again, China's a big place
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Nov 13, 2022 14:49
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Ghostlight posted:all the socialist western nations have universal healthcare and what's more socialist than communism so china must have it as well. a fun game to play is to pinpoint which tacit assumptions exist because they were true of the Soviet Union (a net oil exporter with a welfare transfer system at levels comparable with their Western European counterparts and mind-boggling mil% of GDP atop that, willing to subsidize Cuba and Syria and Angola for decades) - but of course not of contemporary China (a net oil importer etc.) Atopian posted:Given the transmissibility of omicron etc, the surprise wasn't that it escaped, it was that it was brought back under control. There were a solid couple of weeks where I thought the big recent Shanghai spike was uncontrollable. I suppose the question is: controllable at what cost. Shanghai is rich. Guangzhou is also rich, if somewhat less so than Shanghai. Ghulja and Lhasa are not rich at all, and so have the longest lockdowns. Given the new directives, what tradeoffs are officials expected to make?
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Nov 14, 2022 07:27
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https://twitter.com/HAOHONG_CFA/status/1592167550368256000
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Nov 14, 2022 16:32
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to be fair, there is definitely need to reduce public fear in advance of any reopening, so that the expected case surge does not cause panic or rushes to hospitals public numeracy is difficult! it can be simultaneously true, even for the developed countries with well-functioning public health systems, that 98% of cases are minor whilst the 2% of severe illness is sufficient to swamp public health capacity (several orders of magnitude greater than the flu, for comparison). People unfortunately struggle to respond rationally to these kinds of abstract probabilities.
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Nov 14, 2022 19:15
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BBC correspondent: https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1592421350370865152 Bloomberg news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-15/china-s-guangzhou-city-sees-rare-protests-over-covid-lockdowns In the meanwhile: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1592145014003728391 Shijiazhuang is part of the greater Beijing metropolitan area, to be clear In the other thread I speculated that provinces running up against budget constraints would de facto give up first. If Shijiazhuang does not lose its nerve in the face of a case count surge, this would be a far more aggressive reopening than I expected ronya fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Nov 15, 2022 |
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Nov 15, 2022 08:45
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https://twitter.com/alexludoboyd/status/1592545502528430081 my reading would be more modest: Foxconn employs 300,000 people in a city of 10 million, but certainly is not the only factory affected, so there are now local cadres unemployed as well as job openings left by migrants. Put two and two together. Still, it's symbolic of something, I'm sure.
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Nov 15, 2022 17:45
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This was discussed upthread, so: https://twitter.com/ftchina/status/1595046256094896129
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Nov 22, 2022 16:34
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https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1595171251483512846 https://twitter.com/EliDFriedman/status/1595389536040878083 https://twitter.com/lolc936163/status/1595421244236566536 a thread: https://twitter.com/violazhouyi/status/1595389001640587265 SMCP coverage: https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/...controls-worlds quote:Local authorities also stepped in to help, with some urging retired soldiers and government workers to take on stints, according to local media reports. Previous coverage of the promised 3000 yuan per month: https://cj.sina.com.cn/articles/view/1905628462/7195952e01901g2u7 quote:郑州富士康招工又出新招？日前，网传河南部分地区鼓励公务员、事业单位、三支一扶人员到富士康工作，并保留原岗原职，在富士康的工资以及各项优惠补贴也全部归个人所有。 ronya fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Nov 23, 2022 |
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Nov 23, 2022 15:07
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https://www.ft.com/content/929b69b4-7826-429d-9e1f-f178845fac8bquote:As case numbers soar, there are increasing signs of central intervention in cities across China, meaning a return to mass testing and quarantine. Coverage of the visit: http://www.cq.gov.cn/ywdt/jrcq/202211/t20221125_11334935.html Still betting heavily on fangcang hospitals to isolate close contacts, even though those facilities should now decant more quickly In hmm: quote:Another challenge to China changing course on zero-Covid would be the government narrative. Authorities need a different message to convince a fearful public that it is possible to live with the virus. and as I've observed previously - China needs to be able to mobilize neighbouring teams to overcome shortages in ER capacity: quote:Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong, said China’s healthcare system risked being overwhelmed like that of Hong Kong earlier this year if it did not follow the likes of Singapore in preparing for an exit. That would involve radically changing the zero-Covid rules so that only severe cases were hospitalised. this is stretching dynamic clearing to a faintly absurd point - the facilities are not allowed to isolate people for long enough to eliminate community transmission, but they're also not allowed to stop containing people until community transmission stops being detected
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Nov 25, 2022 07:45
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Vaccination reduces the incidence of severe illness, which is critical for riding out the post-reopening explosion of cases seen in those countries that successfully achieved containment but eventually reopened: New Zealand, Singapore, etc. As long as ER capacity is not overloaded, countries can ride out the wave as best as can be realistically achieved without perpetual lockdown. At this point, the calculus returns indeed to "bending the curve". NHC messaging indicates Chinese awareness of what must be done: build out ICU beds whilst promoting vaccination coverage. Whether or not they will actually do it is another matter however. Fangcang does not an ICU make - one needs physicians, supplemental oxygen, ventilators, etc., never mind nurses and other support staff for severely ill people (rather than mostly healthy, possibly asymptomatic people whose chief complaint is boredom whilst penned in by some PPE-suited security guards).
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Nov 25, 2022 18:17
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Pausing vaccination campaigns during the Shanghai lockdown earlier this year was, I think, emblematic of the whole shambles Anyway, the Urumqi fire deaths seem to be causing a stir: https://twitter.com/ZhangTaisu/status/1596179891187511296 https://twitter.com/WilliamYang120/status/1596180552335257601 https://twitter.com/WilliamYang120/status/1596188136987537411 This is not the first fire in a locked-down building, but it does seem to be the first mass casualty fire?
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Nov 25, 2022 19:43
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https://twitter.com/Matt_Schrader_/status/1596195784747323394 (this is despite China, at the time, putting down the protests with force - although previous such escalations would then be correspondingly wound down) Meanwhile, in Mission Accomplished news: https://twitter.com/ThisIsWenhao/status/1596330356076339201 ronya fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Nov 26, 2022 |
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Nov 26, 2022 07:36
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https://twitter.com/manyapan/status/1596526211853094913 a gathering rather than a protest as such, and not a very large one at that, but it still seems remarkable these, on the other hand, are certainly protests: https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1596415870233972742 https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1596573755723374592 https://twitter.com/Byron_Wan/status/1596585000866320386 ronya fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Nov 26, 2022 |
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Nov 26, 2022 19:36
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in an intersection of topics: https://twitter.com/DreyerChina/status/1596721748824641536
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Nov 27, 2022 06:21
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https://twitter.com/zaobaosg/status/1596692790385049600 Direct link: http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2022-11/27/nw.D110000renmrb_20221127_2-01.htm Front page of People's Daily quote:Strengthen confidence, do a solid job in the prevention and control of the epidemic
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Nov 27, 2022 08:24
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new crown disease = novel coronavirus, of course Wuhan: https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1596867762546429953 Chengdu: https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1596897213254610987 Beijing: https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1596906692364886016 https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/1596910447143587851 Security seems caught off-guard, with the tactic of quickly mobilizing non-security-bureau brawlers itself hampered by lockdown measures https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1596824175771258881 I'm quite surprised the governor in Wuhan came out to talk to protestors (apparently Wang Zhonglin; I see some sources say the Hubei party secretary came out to talk but Wang was until recently the party secretary so maybe that's the confusion there) - I thought Don't Be Zhao Ziyang was a received wisdom at this point If anyone wants a handy timeline, here: https://twitter.com/XinqiSu/status/1596790286411497472 ronya fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Nov 27, 2022 |
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Nov 27, 2022 18:30
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An observation on the stakes: https://twitter.com/jagordon/status/1596826275343372288 Broadly correct, but the point of reference for domestic Chinese unhappiness would not be the US or UK or India, but instead other countries that also achieved containment for much of 2020 and 2021.
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Nov 27, 2022 18:56
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https://twitter.com/ftchina/status/1597081117211111427
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Nov 28, 2022 06:00
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I wonder why escorts instead of the usual "wow let's talk about China's latest celebrity scandal" or "wow, a bridge/highway/train!" chatter? I have to say this I did not think this would be how things would shake out - I figured tier 3+ cities would begin quietly charging for tests and quarantine again and that's when the yelling would start
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Nov 28, 2022 06:26
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https://twitter.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1596928361586360321quote:Netizen contribution:
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Nov 28, 2022 07:09
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https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1597083102349697024 "Provinces and municipalities must achieve dynamic clearing... but not like that"
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Nov 28, 2022 07:55
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https://twitter.com/alexludoboyd/status/1597222136061767680 cool cool cool cool cool?
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Nov 28, 2022 16:21
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