Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "South China Morning Post" channel.

  1. They still are, because there's so many ways to source the energy. China just happens to still be very reliant on coal-fired generation, particularly optimized for high-grade Australian ones that the Party has basically banned.
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  2. Still not as bad as daily traffic from jet airliners, where some residents in Narita have been holding out in the literal midst of an airport since the 1970s.
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  3.  @308_Negra_Arroyo_Lane  Perhaps to signal that China is not the only major power he’s capable of talking with. He’s still Indonesia’s Defense Minister, and the TNI are markedly more anticommunist and Western leaning than the general population.
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  4. That's if Indonesia can get the rest of SE Asia to formally follow its lead as it already dominates the bloc and region... and yielding to a hegemon is anathema to being "non-aligned"
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  5. China making something and Chinese using it themselves seem to be very separate ideas.
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  6. I'd imagine an ASEAN+Taiwan+Japan blockade to starve Mainland China enough that the Party risks internal capitulation, as China's lands are too deserted/polluted to feed everyone and overland supply lines would not be enough.
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  7. It can be a backhanded compliment too, learning to avoid China’s mistakes and incompatible ideas for the world’s largest Muslim nation and third largest democracy.
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  8. There's also a rising undertone of hostility from the Chinese government, propagating into the public through its state media. I'd expect the unwelcome attitude to last beyond the end of lockdowns, meaning a relative lack of opportunity and optimism for foreigners moving forward.
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  9. Apparently about half the provinces have implemented rationing. Of course not in the city centers where foreigners and the affluent would take notice.
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  10.  @Al_MageMaster  Although now we have vaccines and other treatments that make SARS-2 largely tolerable, and further mutations are more likely to become less damaging because with our collective immunity, becoming a mere nuisance will become the only way the virus survives. Which is a problem for Mainland China, which at this point is largely unexposed or inoculated with vaccines that doesn't seem to protect as well as it should based on accounts from other countries taking them. This means an alarming amount of the over 1 billion people will be hit significantly harder if they ease up and the virus gets in, hence why they continue this expensive zero-risk policy.
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  11.  @condorX2  Misreporting, which is easily done where the only people to impress is a secretive unchallenged Party who's anxious about never looking bad. I'd wager their embarrassing statistics is missing at least one zero.
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  12. Wouldn't be such a threat if China approved the Western mRNA vaccines, but that's considered a political surrender.
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  13. For this to continue though, China has to remain peaceful with its neighbors. SE Asia has also been arming up for a kinetic confrontation because of the expansionist and exclusionary actions by its neighbor across the SCS.
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  14. Climate change will probably result in heavier rainstorms, followed by more severe heat waves and dry spells. The wanted rain would just be more random and intense, but not regular.
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  15. Haters claim it’s cloud seeding, ignorant that it can’t create supercells and wouldn’t be deployed to downpour directly on a city.
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  16. Local officials are either with the central government or are deemed against it. That's why they take the vague directives and go to insane lengths to "prove" they're on the side of the central Party. But then if it backfires the central Party refuses to take responsibility. It's the whole Inner and Outer Party dynamic depicted in _Nineteen Eighty-Four_.
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  17. Small businesses just mad the public didn’t pay all the costs for the updates to their POS machines, because somehow the act of accepting legal tender isn’t a cost of doing business 🤷🏻💴
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