China News Thread

[FCP Bob 1,312]

How the collapse of China's volatile stock market looked from the inside

[FCP Bob 1,312]

Stock Slump Casualty: The Myth of Chinese Exceptionalism

[Scroom 436]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/asia/handsome-gorilla-shabani/?iid=ob_videoleaf_organicfooter&iref=obnetwork

[FCP Bob 1,312]

This Is Why So Many Chinese Companies Are Suspended

 

China's corporations have been big fans of stock-based loans, too

[FCP Bob 1,312]

Massive explosion in China. This is in Tianjin which is a city of probably 8 million people.

 

http://shanghaiist.com/2015/08/13/tianjin-binhai-blast.php

 

http://youtu.be/nQwRMGa4jsU

[FCP Bob 1,312]

Massive explosion in China. This is in Tianjin which is a city of probably 8 million people.

 

http://shanghaiist.c...inhai-blast.php

 

 

 

Holy Shit

 

[FCP Bob 1,312]

Interesting story on the rich kids of China who everybody hates

 

The fuerdai, China’s second-generation rich kids, are the most loathed group in the country. They’re also its future.

[FCP Bob 1,312]

China's Money Exodus

Here’s how the Chinese send billions abroad to buy homes

[FCP Bob 1,312]

Behind China's woes, myth of competent autocrats

[Scrim 115]

Great.

Orientals now have individual dominion over the atmosphere and are using it for their amusement.

 

https://twitter.com/ikuya_10969

 

The next time a tornado touches down in the midwest, it's probably some mean-spirited chinaman having a laugh.

[FCP Bob 1,312]

Patrick Chovanec

‏@prchovanec

1. Understanding what's happening with China's yuan, which hit 6-year low against the US dollar today:

 

2. A couple years ago, China had chronic currency inflows from both investment and trade, which caused CNY to want to rise vs USD.

 

3. So unless China intervened to buy more foreign currency (FX) into its already massive reserves, CNY would go up in value.

 

4. That's why a lot of critics were saying China was engaging in "currency manipulation" to keep CNY weaker than it would otherwise be.

 

5. Today, China is still running trade surplus, but even more money is flowing out as investment, so net, it has balance of payments deficit

 

6. People debate why capital is flowing out of China, and how much, but it's clearly happening to at least some significant degree.

 

7. That puts downward pressure on CNY, which would fall vs USD unless China sells some of the FX reserves it accumulated earlier.

 

8. So when CNY falls, like today, China is apparently NOT intervening, at least not sufficiently, to keep that from happening.

 

9. So to be clear, China isn't artificially pushing down its currency. But it's making a decision not to hold it up, either.

 

10. The question, which doesn't really have an easy answer, is what exactly China hopes to achieve by this. In my mind, it's far from clear.

 

11. A small, gradual depreciation (like we've seen this year and last) probably won't be enough to revive China's export-led growth.

 

12. But it might lead people to think more depreciation is coming, encouraging more capital outflows and making the downward pressure worse.

[Balloon guy 158]

I cannot believe that a government who can get experts in economics cannot make everything all better.

 

Just do X and Y is a sure thing.

 

 

It's almost like economics isn't a hard science.

[Fenxis 99]

I cannot believe that a government who can get experts in economics cannot make everything all better.

 

Just do X and Y is a sure thing.

 

 

It's almost like economics isn't a hard science.

 

Economics is an interesting field but it certainly has it's limitations. Like we can predict that since China (who used to be the largest importer of coal) is going nuclear will cause demand for coal to drop and therefore the price to drop. As the price of coal drops mines will be forced to close because they are unprofitable. Which will continue to happen until supply is reduced to the point were the price recover (which is the free market economy at work -- which many think is the cure for everything). But it wouldn't have foreseen the Chinese going away from coal and there are too many unknowns about the other major users for coal will do to know where the final equilibrium point will be.

 

Economics and forecasting is a bit like poker; you know based on math the predicted outcome every hand ... but you only have loose information about what cards that the other players hold, you only kind of know their betting patterns and what cards will be turned over in the draw. Also it's way too easy to see stuff and go "A causes B" but really it's "C causes A and B" and come to bad conclusions.

[FCP Bob 1,312]

China Really Isn’t Joking About Taiwan

 

Beneath Beijing’s seemingly mild criticism of Trump’s phone call are currents of raw, public nationalism the government can’t control.

 

 

In China, it’s not an avoidable issue. When I worked in English-language Chinese state media, the importance of using the “correct” vocabulary for Taiwan was hammered into staff on a regular basis. The reasoning behind some decisions about the correct form, made decades ago, was opaque; “mainland China” was verboten, for instance, but “the Chinese mainland” was fine, and it was the “Taiwan question,” not the “Taiwan issue.” It was more obvious why Taiwan couldn’t have a president, although “leader” was acceptable.

 

A little before I arrived at one newspaper, there had been a small witch hunt to find who was responsible for this sentence: “The paper factory is the largest in China and the second-largest in the world.” After two days of investigations, the guilty Chinese reporter was fined about a third of her monthly salary, had to write a self-criticism letter, and strict protocols were put in place to make sure such a disaster was avoided in the future. Why the problem? The largest paper factory was in Taiwan, and so the sentence — copied unthinkingly from a foreign source that didn’t suffer from such sensibilities — was dangerously splittist.

 

In moments of particular stress, “Taiwanese” was forbidden, the adjectival form believed to imply unacceptable separatism. I would strenuously point out that “Californian” implied no allegiance to the Bear Flag Republic and that our many references to Sichuanese, Henanese, and Yunnanese had not yet meant a return to the Warring States, and eventually sanity would usually prevail.

 

Like a puritan’s sexual fears, the obsession with belittling Taiwan’s status actually ends up drawing constant attention to it. Sentences such as “Taiwan’s so-called ‘president,’ Tsai Ing-wen, addressed the so-called ‘legislature’ of the Chinese island of Chinese Taiwan, a province of China, yesterday” regularly deface articles in Chinese newspapers. The fixation isn’t limited to the media. Chinese customs confiscates globes and atlases that have the effrontery to show Taiwan in a different color from the mainland. Chinese education officials tear Taiwanese adverts out of conference booklets. Chinese students throw hissy fits at Taiwan being listed as a country at Model U.N. events.

 

And there’s the real problem. This isn’t just a set of political restrictions imposed by a paranoid party — one that has always been obsessed with controlling and contorting language. It’s bone deep in mainland Chinese, a conviction drummed into them by childhood and constantly reasserted. Plenty of elements of party propaganda are inconsequential to most Chinese or even mocked. Taiwan isn’t one of them.

 

I have lived in China for 13 years, and in that time I have talked with perhaps three mainlanders who thought that Taiwan had the right to determine its own future. Everyone else with whom I’ve discussed the issue, from ardent liberals to hardcore Marxists to the politically apathetic, has been fervently against the idea that Taiwan could ever be considered a country. It’s an idea as weird, taboo, and offensive to the majority of Chinese as proposing the restitution of slavery would be to Americans — not for its moral value but for going against everything they hold dear about their country.

 

Most of the time, when Beijing says something has “hurt the feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese,” it’s petulant bullshit; on Taiwanese issues it comes closer to the truth. On the WeChat Moments feed of a former student, a bright and intellectually curious teenager, I saw her rage at finding the Taiwanese flag on the wall of a dorm at her new American university. “IT’S NOT A COUNTRY!” she indignantly declared, her anger echoed by her (Chinese) schoolmates follow-up comments.

 

This is, of course, a deeply unthinking attitude. It’s a product of decades of propaganda about China’s (real but century-old) humiliations at the hands of foreign powers. It arises, too, from a complex of neuroticisms and resentments about Taiwan’s wealth and success in the past, now mixed with smugness at the mainland’s new power. And for ordinary Chinese, it’s a result of the constant lessons — beginning with kindergarten rhymes and reinforced every week by their parents, peers, and teachers — about China’s supposed oneness and the evil of those who would split the country.

 

It’s an unhappy and bitter part of Chinese nationalism, one that denies both the six-decade reality on the ground and the agency of Taiwanese to decide their own future. But it’s not going to disappear overnight. If the Communist Party vanished into smoke tomorrow, Chinese would still be contemptuous of Taiwanese aspirations and furious with anyone who suggested otherwise.

 

On America’s part, the issue needs to be handled carefully, respectfully, and with a certain allegiance to diplomatic fictions. Anything else risks stirring not just Beijing’s ire but genuine public anger — a force that Beijing itself might sometimes manipulate but may also not be able to entirely control.

[Balloon guy 158]

So a communist regime drives the legitimate government into exile, and we should support the communist usurpers, not the Democratic government of a recognized country that meets all definitions of a country on its own.

 

Because...here's my favorite part...because of the feelings of over a billion people.

[Dubey 1,035]

Because...here's my favorite part...because of the feelings of over a billion people.

 

you aren't this dense....

 

 

 

are you?

 

 

[Balloon guy 158]

There is nothing better in a political discussion than a person who sits on the sideline, and adds proof that he doesn't understand context or linear discussion, acting like he gets it.

 

Well, maybe a person who is so entrenched in one way of thinking that they can't understand what a sheep they have become because they refuse to dissociated themselves with their left wing ideology.

 

That and people with awesome cat memes.

 

Those two things might be better.

 

But that is it.

[Dubey 1,035]

Well, maybe a person who is so entrenched in one way of thinking that they can't understand what a sheep they have become because they refuse to dissociated themselves with their left wing ideology.

 

 

oh god, the irony, it is almost too much.

[FCP Bob 1,312]

Really good article on China, Taiwan and the US

 

Trump risks war by turning the One China question into a bargaining chip

 

While the U.S. position is driven by a variety of political interests, China’s position is driven by a desire for national unity that China’s leadership has defined as existential and nonnegotiable. This means that the U.S. approach flouts essential elements of the Chinese position. Moreover, not only is Washington maintaining a relationship that contravenes China’s One China policy, but it has apparently put itself in a position of setting the conditions for the resolution of the conflict. The reason this has not led to overt hostilities is because all sides have behaved with restraint to maintain a very fragile peace. They know full well how sensitive these differences are.

 

This is why Trump’s suggestion that One China is another bargaining chip, which the United States can play or not play as it likes, is both misleading and risky. On the one hand, it apparently misses the subtle, but extremely significant, differences between the American “one China policy” and the Chinese “one China principle.” On the other, it endangers the central tenet of American policy in the area — the maintenance of the status quo. The Trump transition team has already referred to Tsai Ing-wen as “President of Taiwan.” This publicly undermines the only aspect of the One China issue where the United States and China actually agree — that Taiwan is not a state, while starkly exposing the reality of the quasi state-to-state relationship that the American One China policy obscures. By using Taiwan’s status as a negotiating ploy, Trump is doubling down on this dangerous strategy. China’s vital national interests are in conflict with U.S. policy, and stable relations are fragile, because all the parties are unhappy with the present situation. If the incoming administration persists in its apparent careless indifference, it runs the risk of grossly destabilizing U.S.-China relations, and even risks war.

[brvheart 1,752]

A war with China would be horrible for China. Really horrible. China won't be participating in any wars with us.

[digitalmonkey 929]

A war with China would be horrible for China. Really horrible. China won't be participating in any wars with us.

 

American ego.

[brvheart 1,752]

At this point, I would say it's pretty factual (non-subjective) that our military is the strongest in the world by a significant margin.

[digitalmonkey 929]

At this point, I would say it's pretty factual (non-subjective) that our military is the strongest in the world by a significant margin.

 

I'm pretty sure China has nuclear cave trolls.

[FCP Bob 1,312]

At this point, I would say it's pretty factual (non-subjective) that our military is the strongest in the world by a significant margin.

 

this is true

 

It's also true that the US is not guaranteed to be the strongest in a battle in the East China Sea or South China Sea.

 

Let's put it this way, the US is not going to be putting the aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Strait like they did in the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis because China now has the capabilities to take them out that close to the Chinese mainland.

[brvheart 1,752]

and my contention is that the US doesn't care if China could take them out, because they know China wouldn't do something so stupid.