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flatbus posted:Why didn't the other Politburo members like him? Arakan and Readman have gotten the gist of it, but here's a more cogent explanation from Peter Chovanec's analysis of Bo's downfall: quote:First, they were offended by his courting of the media and his vigorous self-promotion, which showed a lack of appropriate deference and humility to established power channels and ways of resolving competition. Second, they felt threatened, because few of them were equipped to compete on this basis, if that’s what it took. Third, they were alarmed by Bo’s tactic of “mobilizing the masses” in ways that explicitly invoked the Cultural Revolution, which called up deep-seated fears that populist fervor could be used as a weapon against rival leaders within the Party — as indeed happened during the Cultural Revolution, to horrific results. The bolding is his, not mine. I am of the belief his dabbling in neo-Maoist and populist talk got him into the most trouble. You can argue that everything China has pursued since opening up and beginning its reforms is tied to a rejection of the Cultural Revolution and a fear of its revival. When the policies of the "Chongqing model" inevitably lose their effectiveness, it seems likely to me that a populist politician like Bo Xilai would start targeting "corrupt elites" within the party and government as a way of maintaining his political power. There's certainly popular resentment against corruption in government and Bo Xilai's media savvy and cronyism shows that he isn't above demagoguery. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as the Cultural Revolution, but it certainly would be a reversal of 30 years of policy and a huge blow to the more market-oriented members of the CCP that seem to be in power at the moment. McDowell posted:Do attitudes towards the West play any role in this maneuvering? Would Chairman Xilai have had a different foreign policy than Chairman Xinjing? Or is the political struggle more about different domestic plans? I never heard that his foreign policies or attitudes to foreign countries was a factor in his downfall. His time in Chongqing seems dedicated to the whole "Smash Black Sing Red" thing, so he didn't speak much about China's foreign policy. His time in Liaoning had him applauding greater trade and foreign investment, but that shouldn't be surprising for an official of a costal province. Nor have I heard of his international perception being a factor as well. He certainly courted foreign press with his charisma and frankness, but that plays into the general hatred of his media savvy as opposed to a foreign media savvy. The struggle doesn't seem to be over the domestic plans of China so much as the future of the Communist Party and the stability of China. Bo threatened to overtake his political rivals with his popularity and he threatened China's stability with populist sentiment similar to the Cultural revolution.
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Sep 29, 2012 10:01
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Does anyone have insight on how Chinese view or accept foreign-born Chinese? I'm an American born Chinese, but when I told locals, especially ones from the older generations, that I'm an American (美国人) I would get confused looks. Later on I was told to use American-born Chinese (美国出生华裔) and never encountered the problem again. This only happened a few times and I wasn't in China for very long, but is this a thing in Mainland China or did I just coincidentally meet some very parochial locals?
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Oct 1, 2012 10:00
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flatbus posted:I think these issues that require apology are orthogonal. China and Korea certainly did nothing during WWII to provoke or deserve invasion by Japan, so on that issue they can claim to have done nothing. What those governments did in other times to other people is a separate issue; it's certainly possible for Japan to apologize to China and Korea appropriately without waiting on China to apologize for what it's done to other peoples. Otherwise, you'll get a queue of peoples waiting for an apology forming circular references. When Grand Fromage says the "Chinese and Koreans act like they've done nothing at all," I think he meant that the "Chinese and Koreans act like Japan has done nothing at all" and not "Chinese and Koreans act like the Chinese and Koreans themselves have done nothing at all." CIGNX fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Oct 9, 2012 |
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Oct 9, 2012 06:21
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Throatwarbler posted:I don't have a position on this poo poo but if you actually believe that any government hand out foreign aid purely due to some kind of collective national altruism then you have a very poor understanding of how governments and large organizations work. Switch "China/Japan" with for example, "America/Israel" and tell me with a straight face that this is what you actually think. How is the China/Japan aid situation analogous to the America/Israel one? America is giving aid to Israel to bolster its military and maintain America's interest in the Mid-East (whatever that means). I don't think Japan is giving aid to bolster the Chinese military. For what reason would Japan give aid to China but then cover it up by saying it's an apology for WWII?
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Oct 10, 2012 10:13
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flatbus posted:There's this thing that's been happening where people say other people never made certain claims when they have, literally just a few posts ago. Are you so blindingly self-righteous that you're willing to believe no one has made the argument that the 'comfort women' scheme was not a big thing, when just a few posts above you must have read this? Wait, really? Are you telling us you mistook sarcasm for a real argument?
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Oct 11, 2012 22:19
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Dr. Witherbone posted:I was wondering if anyone had examples of key cases that created this precedent for helping people being unsafe, or if there was some kind of paper/write up on China's lack of good Samaritan laws. I figure there has to have been some pretty huge public cases for people to be so worried about assisting one another. The case that started it all was the Peng Yu Incident in 2006, where a man took an elderly woman to the hospital after she had fallen and was in turn sued by the woman and forced to pay by the courts. Chinasmack has some background info on the case. It was subsequently discovered in 2012 that the man actually was at fault and not some victimized good samaritan. But at this point, the damage had been done and people were weary of helping strangers for fear of being sued. It's bad enough that even state-run papers run opinion pieces lamenting the state of Good Samaritan laws in China and even calling for the Chinese government to follow the example of the US. [1][2][3]
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Feb 26, 2013 05:45
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Modus Operandi posted:Guys like this tend to fetishize the "oriental" aspects of the culture ie. women, food, and more trivial aspects but they also have rather malevolent feelings about the people and host country while going around justifying their own privilege. Do you have examples of this or can you elaborate more on this? I've seen expats who do the fetishization, but I can't connect the "malevolent feelings while justifying their own privilege" to something I've seen before in expats.
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Mar 4, 2013 00:01
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VideoTapir posted:Shouldn't that interest rate fracas last week have affected the value of the RMB? It hardly moved at all. Probably because China still has relatively stringent capital controls. Also, whatever appreciation the rising interest rates would have created, the PBoC would have intervened as they always do by printing a bunch of RMB and dumping it on the foreign exchange.
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Jun 23, 2013 22:30
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GuestBob posted:I must admit that I am struggling to get excited about the China-crunch portents despite the fact that Robert Peston (one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse) has appeared on some of the BBC's China noise recently. In the back of my mind there is a strong suspicion that the central government has alot of cash stuck up its butt. Like, alot. If anything went wrong then they could probably fix it somehow, but the trick would be in getting the cash out of their butt without it smelling like poo poo. It isn't just a question about China's ability to rescue its financial system in the midst of a credit crunch. They can print the money just fine and they aren't dependent on foreign capital inflows like other countries were during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. The real problem is what happens afterwards. So much of China's recent growth is due to massive investments fueled by cheap credit. Furthermore, so much of people's wealth (not just the rich but including a good chunk the middle class) is tied up in either opaque financial instruments or mostly unregulated shadow banking companies that fueled the boom. With a credit crunch, you'll have the double whammy of loss of cheap credit and loss of savings.
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Jun 24, 2013 02:18
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GuestBob posted:I am not sure about the middle class (might depend on your interpretation of "middle class" though), most of the regular Chinese people I know buy houses as an investment and the whole family pitches in like billio to pay the mortgage off in something ridiculous like three or four years. Actually, you're right. Looking back at some of my notes, they were looking at "affluent but not rich" households with assets valued between $100,000 and $1 million USD, which is definitely not middle class in China. But the point I was trying to make was that there will be a void left in the economy once this investment-oriented economic model is cut off from cheap credit. China has spent the better part of this decade growing through investment (not stocks and bond, but buildings, infrastructure, and equipment), which was made possible by cheap credit. So many industries and jobs are tied to this continuous and unsustainable growth of investment. What could possibly replace all of these fallen industries and still maintain anything near 7-8% growth in GDP. Furthermore, the credit crunch may cause irreversible damage when investments begin to fail and people start losing their savings. If China wants to rebalance its economy towards consumption to restart economic growth, why do they think people will want to increase their spending on goods and services after losing so much of their wealth in real estate. I'm not advocating that the government keep propping up the real estate market, but they are in a genuine hosed-either-way situation.
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Jun 24, 2013 11:15
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caberham posted:I do have a conspiracy theory that it's the guys at top making crazy margin calls and then collaborating with each other to make a market short and crash pocketing the difference twice. PBOC will step in anyways and try to fix things. Will the PBOC do quantitative easing? I think so, the question remains, how many times and for how long? They shouldn't need to. QE is a backup plan to increase liquidity when interest rates are at/near 0%. The SHIBOR overnight and 1 week rates are around 5% and 7% right now. If the PBoC needed to create liquidity, they could do it with regular open market operation or lower reserve requirement ratios.
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Jun 25, 2013 23:23
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What's the connection between QE and Hong Kong and/or China?
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Sep 19, 2013 22:28
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Arglebargle III posted:No, because they're dollars. There's no theoretical reason why the PBoC, SAFE, or CIC can't exchange their dollars for other foreign currencies on the foreign exchanges in order to buy up other assets. They'd lose some value due to transaction costs in currency exchanges, but if diversification was the goal then it's a small price to pay. The real reason why they buy up US Treasuries is because there's nothing as safe, as large, nor as liquid as them. They really have no where else to park their foreign reserves, dollar or otherwise.
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Oct 16, 2013 12:14
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Paper Mac posted:I'm pretty sure the very valid practical reason is that China's position is so large that they can't meaningfully reduce their American debt holdings without tanking the market for those holdings, isn't it? That is very true. The trading volume for US Treasuries is around ~$500 billion per day and China holds ~$1 trillion of them. Any attempt to dump a decent fraction of their Treasuries would spark a panicked sell-off in the market, possibly creating the financial panic they were trying to avoid in the first place before a default happens. edit: actually, let me clarify a bit. The reason why it is still large right now despite the risk of a US default is because they can't dump their Treasuries without making their holdings lose value and possibly causing a panic. Why it grew so large in the first place are the reasons in my post above, i.e. the combination of being safe, plentiful, and liquid. CIGNX fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Oct 16, 2013 |
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Oct 16, 2013 13:04
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Arglebargle III posted:I think the main reason is that China is a currency manipulator specifically trying to keep the dollar up versus the yuan. If they went and dumped 2 trillion dollars on the currency exchanges their manufacturing sector might take a hit. And they can't afford that at all right now; the export sector is already in crisis. You're mistaking dollars for dollar-denominated assets. When China intervenes in the RMB exchange rate or gets a trade surplus with the US, it certainly gets a lot of US dollars "in cash." But nothing mandates them to use those US dollars to only buy USD-denominated assets, let alone US Treasuries. They can easily swap those USDs for other currencies if they wished to in the open market. To put this in another way, the trade surplus and RMB interventions explain why China's foreign reserves in general are large. However, trade surpluses with the US or semi-pegging the RMB to the USD don't explain why the reserves are primarily US assets, specifically US Treasuries. China can just swap the currencies before buying the assets. Instead, the reason China has so many US Treasuries is the coincidental combination of three characteristics unique to US Treasuries; 1) they are perceived to be extraordinarily safe, 2) they are one of the most abundant financial assets in the world, and 3) they are widely accepted and used, thus very liquid (to a point). So going back to why China can't dump its reserves, we have to remember that there is an intermediate step between having a foreign-currency-denominated asset and dumping said foreign currency: you need to convert the asset into cash, so to speak. That intermediate step of cashing in an asset is where China's problem lies. The act of selling off an asset lowers is price because the usual supply-and-demand laws apply. The trick with bonds/central bank bills is that the price and interest rate are inversely related (this relationship of supply-price-interest is how the Fed influences interest rates). In the case of US Treasuries, lowering the price of a Treasury increases the effective interest rate of the Treasury. If China were to dump a significant fraction of its US Treasuries on the secondary markets, supply would increase, prices would drop, and interest rates would skyrocket. Suddenly, you have a financial panic on your hands because 1) the asset portfolio of all central banks and all banks just took major losses due to the price drop, and 2) the sharp interest rate increase would cause large-scale credit failure. If China's ~$3 trillion reserves was mostly cash, the argument that "they're afraid of negative effects on their export/manufacturing sector" would make sense. Even when we realize that the reserves are mostly assets, this argument is still sorta of true in theory. However, the more immediate and more significant consequence for China is the global financial panic and the lost value of the remainder of their foreign reserves.
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Oct 17, 2013 10:30
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The rumor was that Zhang Ziyi was sleeping with Bo Xilai of all people, and it was reported right around the time the Neil Heywood story was coming to light. The problem was, the source of the rumor was a single news website that everyone else blindly cited and never really checked up on. It made some wild claims, like how she got 700 million RMB over a ten year period sleeping with Bo, and how she was banned from traveling overseas while they were investigating Bo but then showing off pictures of her at various international film festivals around that time. When Zhang inevitably sued for libel, the only defense the original news site had was that it was standing up for press freedom(ctrl+f Zhang Ziyi to find the relevant stuff). But god knows what happened prior to her getting famous enough to break away from the Chinese film industry. The Beijing drama and dance schools are notorious about government officials picking up mistresses there and I'm sure their film/TV industry is just as shady.
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Oct 27, 2013 02:03
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Not to derail into Filipino stuff too deeply here, but could you elaborate on the Encomienda stuff? Briefly looking over Google just gives me info about how it's basically colonial serfdom back in the day, but I don't get the connection between that and expat-Filipino's love lives.
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Oct 31, 2013 11:48
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Beijing Cream is pretty good at curating and collecting links from other China blogs and picking up the weird news. ChinaSmack translates the trending stories on the Chinese web along with some of the comments. And if you want to wade through an almost complete index of every well-known China blog you can look at ChinaBloggers.
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Feb 3, 2014 13:14
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Known Lecher posted:I feel like I've read a handful of eyewitness Western accounts over the years from the west side that talk about troops firing, numerous deaths, impromptu barricades being smashed through, etc etc., but nothing like a full-out massacre. (Google is failing me at finding them, of course.) This might be the article you're referring to. http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dclarke/public/Munro_Who_Died_in_Beijing_and_Why.pdf It's from a researcher from Human Right's Watch who was present at Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3rd and 4th. It also collates other first-hand accounts from other western observers and some students who were present at the square that night.
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Dec 24, 2017 23:20
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punk rebel ecks posted:So why did China decide to move more authoritarian and give that Xi guy so much power? China has always had an authoritarian government but ever since Deng Xiaoping's death, political decision-making at the top level has been dominated by rival political factions competing for power and influence. When Xi came to power, he used an anti-corruption campaign to take out rival factions and consolidated power to his side. Getting rid of term limits is Xi's way to demonstrate to the rest of the CCP that he is now firmly in control of the party. If the other factions were still powerful, they would have normally opposed such a move. But now that they're either weakened or eliminated, there is no one left to oppose Xi and his faction. This signals to the rest of the party to either fall in line or else. So it's not that China gave Xi power, but that Xi has become so powerful he can force China to make him President-for-life/God-Emperor.
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Mar 20, 2018 01:04
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pidan posted:That said the girl in question did pose for a stereotypical greeting pose, so there's probably some prejudice at play here. But then again she's just some random high school girl who doesn't deserve to be called out by thousands of internet strangers. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I know this is all dumb people on Twitter and other platforms but it's interesting to think about. The pose or whatever she's doing was dumb and wrong but wearing a modern dress inspired by another culture, that attributes itself to that culture is fine. It is likely the girl and her friends were actually posing in reference to the h3h3 meme "papa bless," where you pray to Papa John's Pizza CEO John Schnatter.[1] [2] The guys in the back row of that photo are doing the Vape Nation sign, which means they were probably stacking memes in that picture.
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May 2, 2018 22:06
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Grouchio posted:Compared to the 2008 Housing Market crash, how big is China's bubble? Great Depression level? From 2008 until 2017, China's banking sector's assets (or loans, in lay terms) went from about $8 trillion to $39 trillion. In the US, banks collectively have about $16 trillion in assets. So basically in less than a decade, Chinese banks lent out more money than the entire US commercial banking sector. This happened because the Chinese government, in an attempt to boost GDP, undermined all of the reforms and checks put in place after the last banking crisis in the 90s to prevent this sort of profligate lending. The worry back then was that unchecked credit growth would inevitably lead to a large number of loans that fail to pay back (these are called "non-performing" loans) and cause the banks to become insolvent. The current official Non-Performing Loan ratio of Chinese banks is around 1.7%, but there are unofficial estimates that claim the real NPL ratio may be as high as 20%. This puts it in-line with the NPL ratio from the previous crisis in the 90s of about 25-30% (check page 10, Table 4).
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Oct 15, 2018 07:58
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Grouchio posted:Okay. Our NPL Ratio at the height of the great recession was 5%, right? So does that imply that when the bubble pops in China it'll be 4x more catastrophic than ours was? You can't use these numbers to make direct comparisons because the economies of the US and China function in radically different ways. Even though proportionally Chinese banks have more bad loans on their books, they aren't allowed to stop lending. The government literally intervenes and forces the banks to keep lending in order to prop up GDP. When loans are up for repayment and the debtor can't pay back, the government tells the creditor bank to rollover on the loans. Under this kind of environment, what does an NPL even mean anymore? How do you have a credit crunch when no one is allowed to stop the flow of credit? How do you have a panic when the government can instantly shut down market activity indefinitely? All you can realistically say is that the Chinese banking system is likely insolvent. What comes next is a bit of a mystery. Don't take this as a sign of confidence in the Chinese economy. I'm just arguing you should not expect an exigent crisis a la 2008 to happen, because there is no functioning market at the core of the Chinese financial system for the economy to depend on. Instead, there will probably a situation similar to when the Japanese real estate bubble burst in the early 90s. After a string of companies failing one after the other, the government stepped in to stabilize the large and politically important survivors. The problem was, the survivors were in as just as bad if not worse shape than the companies that died. The government keeps trying to revive these now moribund zombie firms, but they just end up throwing good money after bad. These zombie firms linger on and drag the rest of the economy down with them, leading to decades of malaise. Only in China's case, it'll be stuck in a middling level of economic development and per-capita income rather than at a developed-world level like in Japan's case. As for the rest of the world, the good news is that China has a relatively closed-off financial system. The bad loans are from Chinese banks to Chinese companies, so you don't have a situation like in 2008 where a lot of European banks were dabbling in mortgage-backed securities in the US. It'll be more of a problem for countries that rely on exporting raw materials to China and companies that depend on rising consumer spending in China. They'll be especially hosed if they've taken on loans to expand production based on the assumption of Chinese consumption increasing forever. edit: uncop posted:Holy poo poo. That’s one hell of a get-rich-quick scheme. https://www.pairault.fr/documents/lecture3s2009.pdf CIGNX fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Oct 15, 2018 |
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Oct 15, 2018 10:59
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Skippy McPants posted:But doesn't that group include most of the developing and underdeveloped world? A depression that disproportionately affects poorer counties sounds like a recipe for utter misery. I'm not saying this is a good outcome. Just less terrible than 2008.
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Oct 15, 2018 11:24
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Have the people in Hong Kong not been eating the right food? It's all that ham and macaroni soup. Very untrustworthy.
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Jul 2, 2019 05:11
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