Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "China Update" channel.

  1. "The human world is yet to experience peaceful multipolar governance"... that's because it involves multiple fault lines of strategic conflict. There's a reason Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana are named after a single power that had overseen the trade network of like a third of humanity at the time.
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  2. The only real difference between Cross-Straits and Cross-DMZ is the official stance of Taipei considering Taiwan to be a part of a greater "China", all because of a legacy by an autocratic corrupt ideological KMT thinking it could one day take back the Mainland. By every other aspect Taiwan is not part of the PRC, never has been and trends to distance from the label of "Chinese" because of how toxic the name has become under the CPC. It's rich to hear Beijing claim how the law supports their One China Principle argument, when the ruling Party itself doesn't let the law stand in the way of its interests.
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  3. Debt. I'd wager in amounts that make liabilities in Japan and the US look reasonable and exemplary.
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  4. The Mainland wants us to think so, but HK's advantage had always been being a safe Western portal into the rest of China -- a China-built HK would merely be military outposts and inconvenient bedroom communities serving Greater Guangzhou. Returning HK to an autocratic China means that it's merely running on the institutional inertia it built up while it was away, and Beijing is putting brakes on whatever momentum remains.
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  5. Or rather they do, but Beijing has to gaslight everyone else for reciprocating its own strategy because its "superior" economy critically relies on mercantilism.
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  6. Finally an American public figure hitting back as hard as Chinese state media regularly does to us, but more logically and believable đŸ„Š
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  7. Longevity of the civilization doesn't necessarily mean advancement of one. Mainland China still expresses the self-righteous elitist authoritarianism that every dynasty before ran and fell on.
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  8. The despotic worldview is that if it's not something they firmly control, it must come from someone who's equally powerful. It's practically unthinkable that other weaker actors have the agency to independently converge on a common conclusion (especially one against them).
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  9. The Party hopes new technology developments will save their prescriptive political system. But they can't admit that their perscriptive political system is what prevents them from those developing new technologies themselves.
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  10. Right, the value of HK came from being a safe Western portal into China. Being even just seen as integrated into the Mainland means HK no longer has a valuable unique selling point compared to going directly to Guǎngzhƍu or Shànghǎi.
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  11. Rest easy if they do; it's such a running joke that even the Soviets mocked how often Beijing would declare a "final warning".
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  12. Lei's Real Talk attributes the balloon launch timing as partially infighting from more hawkish elements in the Party, highlighting a disturbing degree of political independence of the PLA echoing the surprise J-20 test in the hours preceding the 2011 Secretary Gates visit with President Hu. Might this rationale for the balloon deployment sound plausible?
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  13. CPC: "We don't want to hear unfavorable news from your district, or you're fired." Also CPC: "Why can't we get accurate data?"
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  14. Beijing wants to recreate the centrality that China thought it played around the "world" (i.e. the Western Pacific), until fleets of boats that sailed literally around the world came by and showed Imperial China how much of it they were missing.
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  15. The inaccuracies stack over time too, since the numbers must always be better than before. I've heard estimates that China's true GDP is like 40% smaller than they say, so still second place but far more distant and more like Japan than America.
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  16. Even the Russians complain how quickly Chinese cars rust through. Not just EVs but their ICE models too.
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  17. The faster we divest and diversify, the better. The price of being overly efficient is brittleness to shock, and for too long we were fooled by the "efficiency" of autocracy to prepare for the efficiency of them changing their commitments on us.
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  18. If China or any other developed nation wants more native-born children, they need to bias their social supports to all those under 40. This means inexpensive housing, inexpensive childcare, inexpensive education, and inexpensive career costs to taking time off to be with the family. Capitalism hates dependents, and the physical mobility it demands have thoroughly broken up the extended families who used to help young parents raise the child. But something greater than the individual families have to contribute to proliferate its productivity -- and no automation alone is not the answer, for without continued human management it will just end up unholistic and incomplete.
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  19. I'm surprised we don't hear more about Zero-COVID's contribution to global price inflation. Not all that many of us enjoy a glut of US Dollars, but we all buy from China~ who for the past couple years wasn't so interested in providing a predictable supply of goods and services.
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  20. When I left out of Beijing Capital a couple months ago, I was amazed how empty and how many closed shops the terminal had. The only places open was a Starbucks stall and the Air China lounge. The domestic terminals and the cities themselves were a little more lively, but the lines at the shops weren't nearly as long as they're set up to handle.
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  21. Not that many people will be be buying though. The bigger problem is current homeowners scrambling to salvage their life savings from their submerging real estate.
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  22. Spiraling out of Beijing's control now that the US is no longer sees China as all that lucrative, and have begun seeking other sources and markets.
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  23. "Where is fairness in competition?" It's in the global supply chain diversifying providers by offshoring out of China.
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  24. It wants to stay in power. With its economic outlook looking grim from diminishing returns as well as unreversed aging, debt, and pollution, the Party clearly hints at wanting to seize Taiwan as their Plan B for remaining "great, glorious, and correct".
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  25. What graduate would want to work in China if they don’t have preexisting personal relationships and interests in China? All the economic excitement is in South and Southeast Asia now.
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  26. Or its AI models. We're finding the bulk of DeepSeek's power comes from distillation (copying) of OpenAI.
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  27. Not even directed by the US Government, instead as an independent decision by a for-profit corporation. Unlike how "private" companies are steered into supporting Chinese state objectives.
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  28. The blanket $800 de minimis allowance was so horribly abused by Chinese merchants sending “gifts” to American paying customers. In the other direction China only allows „50 ($7). I found this out the hard way after my friend in Beijing was forced to pay import taxes on her own birthday gift 🎁💾
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  29. Běijīng sees everything through the lens of power, which is a zero-sum scale that ranges from absolutely imposing to absolutely subjected. They're fundamentally discomforted by the thought of compromise because to them it signals being dominated. This is why the more confident they are, the more aggressive they ironically become. Struggle and resistance is the only language that the CPC appreciates. Hence why when dealing with Běijīng, deterrence is far more productive than appeasement.
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  30. G7 is also the majority of world trade by value
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  31. Inner Mongolia too, there's been a surprising amount of protest in the push to get Chinese Mongols to neglect their language.
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  32. No, Taiwan was also important before its rise as the world's chip fab. Taiwan prevents PLA ships from getting to the open Pacific undetected, and the existence of the ROC is living proof of what Chinese people can achieve without the CPC.
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  33.  @carlflaherty2215  The unemployment is worst among college graduates, who spent valuable youth years (there's massive discrimination for being over 35) on an "education" which considering the amount of choosy international students China's universities don't have wasn't worth what they paid.
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  34.  @jimflagg4009  Also a warning against American disengagement from the Middle East, whose uncompromising religious and tribalist conflicts its been long trying to get out of. But ironically going ahead with dedollarization would likely hurt moreso than benefit those with trade surpluses like China and Saudi.
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  35. Only Taiwan’s words about itself might be growing more “autonomous”. In practice Taiwan was always independent of Communist China, and was hardly tied to the clasically ocean-averse Mainland China throughout its history.
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  36. The PLA also has political commissars, as the dual loyalty of its soldiers to the CPC and to "China" means the Party can't trust its armed forces to not develop a divergent idea of the enemy to the nation. Vietnam and interestingly Taiwan also includes commissars in its ranks, though for the ROC since democratization they function more like an Inspector General as opposed to a teacher and enforcer of state ideology.
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  37. Imagine if China weren't run by the CPC. Oh wait I don't have to, I can just go to Taiwan đŸ‡čđŸ‡Œ
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  38. Russia is stacked with exactly the affordable fuel and food China needs to survive though. Bonus if Beijing ends up in a domineering position over Moscow because of Russia’s deteriorating negotiating power going forward.
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  39. According to the Smiling Curve model, manufacturing is the lowest value-added, most price sensitive, and most easily substitutable middle stage of the production process compared to R&D (i.e. valuable IP) in the beginning and Sales & Services at the end. Hence why entire economies can fail to break out of the middle income trap and why the PRC is so desperate for “high quality” growth, even though their modern society lacks the willingness to openly explore the bottom-up critical thought and disruptive experimentation required to innovate their way up.
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  40. "You don't understand China's economy"... apparently neither does China 😬
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  41. There's ultimately not "other countries" to the Middle Kingdom, just territories they haven't yet subjugated.
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  42. Beijing found where Canadian apologetic pleasantness ends. I'm sure that's an achievement they didn't wish to get 🇹🇩
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  43. To the Party it's all about power, which is a zero-sum game because power is comparative capabilities by definition.
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  44. As a "civilization" perhaps. The Chinese state and its leadership got terminated violently quite often though.
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  45.  @jimpollard9392  Creative accounting seems to be the most major innovation coming out of "New China" đŸ“ˆđŸšïž
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  46. A shooting war across to Taiwan will scare off all that shipping though, leading to considerably more expensive food and fuel imports across vast overland routes as opposed to cheaply floating it straight into its population and production centers.
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  47. Sadly this nuance gets lost in regular conversation, just as the Party wants as it works to equate itself with all of China, its people, and its destiny.
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  48. Problem is that growth continues to stall, likely permanently as aging, debt, and pollution eradicate options for easy profits to distract the public from politics. With the people no longer blinded by money, the only option left for the Party to continue unchallenged rule is through fascist ethnonationalism.
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  49. Parents are too distracted pressuring their kids to get married and have kids, as if having even more dependents would magically solve all their economic and reputational challenges.
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  50. Finally? That's been how China fueled its "impressive" growth since the Great Recession. The Zero-COVID zero-growth only accelerated their growth in debt burden.
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  51. ​ @uss-dh7909  Progressives have many different ideas on the best way forward and often can't converge on a consensus; it's like herding cats. Traditionalists though have a common (if skewed) history to reference, and are much easier to terrorize from the fear of change.
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  52. Since when did the CPC do the right thing instead of the face-saving one?
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  53. Big red flags fly all across Tiananmen, the Square across the street, and form the backdrop of the Great Hall of the People. Those battle banners at the center of power in modern China literally don’t get any more red. You know who also historically flew plain red flags? Pirates.
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  54. ​ @kevinjohnson8220 ​​ That's why Taiwan is such a mortal threat to the CPC: its very existence shows how a Chinese ethnostate can thrive without the Party.
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  55. The CPC comes across as an overbearing traditionalist parent -- meaning what they say will have the opposite effect on the audience, on top of being proven hypocritical and obsolete.
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  56. Which is ironic considering the specific strains the WHO and CDC recommends to include in the annual flu shot heavily relies on epidemiological data from Mainland China, and it's been like this for as far as modern medicine can remember. Even the fabled Spanish Flu had indications of precursor strains in China in the year before the global outbreak, given the prior surge of respiratory cases and apparent improved resistance of those in China during the following pandemic.
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  57. I'm curious to know what specific national security threats lead the PRC to blanket ban American and European apps that practically the entire rest of the world does not protest connecting to.
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  58. China’s contribution to the C919 is pretty much limited to the fuselage panels and overall shape of the plane. Everything else that makes it more than a static display comes from the US and Europe.
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  59. China's HSR hemorrhages money because mail and passengers (which collapsed in the past couple years of Zero-COVID) only pay so much. While infrastructure never really makes money on its own, the aggregate of fapiao (tax receipts) generated from all these builds aren't paying off the ongoing operation and maintenance of it all.
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  60. That's why authoritarians always need an external enemy, inventing supposed schemes as required.
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  61. Right, they're suffering their market's single point of failure from Russian petroleum, and have become a lot more aware of a similar risk from China.
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  62. During the lull between the National Day and Chinese New Year weeks off, we'll have a better idea of whether this surge in holiday-fueled Chinese tourism is a blip or a trend.
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  63. Still #2, but likely a lot closer to just edging out Japan than it is catching up to the US
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  64. ​... because "fiscally conservative" administrations always cut education support to rescue retiree entitlements, since senior citizens are very active voters while kids can't vote at all and college students are barely beginning that practice of citizenship. So universities have to make up for the shortfall in budget -- which correlates to academic prestige and attractiveness -- somehow, and student tuition (especially non-resident ones) has become its go-to choice.
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  65. They don’t, and even when they do their post-89 “patriotic education” tells them to dismiss what they hear, not look further into that history, and report anyone who does.
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  66. It's certainly trending that way. Without some fundamental changes (that the Party is fatally allergic to), Mainland China's ultimate outlook makes America's Rust Belt seem mild by comparison. Within China the sentiment on the street feels similar to the US in 2009, except the Chinese are a lot more willing to permanently expatriate if given the opportunity.
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  67. There's no real substance behind the supposition, and Tony wasn't alone with that assessment. He even put out a Sunday special from his hotel room discussing it.
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  68. Compassion is much more focused when done for a single face than diluted over an entire identity or idea.
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  69. Hence their promotion of a “multipolar” world with threats of militarily invading its neighbors.
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  70. Right, democracies benefit from the Wisdom of the Crowd phenomenon. "Efficient" elitist aristocractic rule (e.g. theocracies, military juntas, and Communists) are more politically brittle because they lack the resilience of a "messy" periodic challenge by its own people.
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  71. US is supplying two fronts, but not fighting them. If anything America's military is getting more prepared for this third front in the Western Pacific with each passing day.
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  72. Party members could probably ignore the effects since many of them have staff to run errands for them. Hit their families and employees and make the Party member do everything himself though, that's where the real irritation would be, especially if combined with making every place he visits a "close contact".
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  73. Běijīng defines "harmony" as the lack of challenge to its rule and interests.
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  74. "Homes" "with Chinese characteristics" no less... i.e. overpriced major fixer-uppers if they're even habitable.
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  75. It reminds me of those cryptobros who pitch to buy in regardless of conditions -- conveniently omitting how overleveraged they got into a fundamentally unsustainable scheme and want the rest of us to prop them up.
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  76. I would bet on the "China-only" chips, because the ruling Party values the insulation. However this risks the insulation becoming isolation and uncompetitiveness as Chinese chips go from unoptimized to increasingly incompatible with global software developments.
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  77. What else do you expect from a Party that habitually dismisses if not silences the existence of opposition?
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  78. I think most Chinese people do, because they get their information just from state controlled broadcast and social media. Decades of "patriotic education" have taught the entire working age population to categorically dismiss unsupportive views as basically 'un-Chinese', with censorship efforts targeted primarily at Chinese language postings to maintain this narrative.
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  79. Right, I've heard stories about Chinese construction foremen treating news of worker deaths like a mere annoyance. But yes the farther you are from their core family and identity, the more slave-like and blatantly disposable they treat you.
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  80. Winning with Chinese Characteristics
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  81. It makes him a primary source on topics the host country are anxious to confront and wants you to conveniently have no idea about.
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  82. The price of efficiency is flexibility. Maintaining alternatives has a cost but you do gain resilience to shocks. The faster we diversify our supply chains out of the PRC, the better off we'll ride out its sinking productivity from self-made aging, debt, and pollution.
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  83. Communist China hasn't exactly stayed ambiguous either about its strategy of absorbing the territory and people in China's peripheries (Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, HK, Taiwan). To them being wishy-washy is a sign of weakness to be exploited.
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  84. Projection is a common feature among culturally-regimented anti-progressives.
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  85. Perhaps the Sea of Southeast Asia... SeaSEA?
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  86. Ethnonationalism is all the Party has left, now that they've burned through their potential for more productivity and prosperity. Mainland China is going into survival mode much like the similarly race-based fortress of "civilization" that legitimates post-Soviet North Korea.
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  87. It's always been a danger that the Mainland will attempt the final invasion before their own aging, debt, and pollution stalls their rise permanently. The risk is how will Beijing react to a peak that's lower and earlier than they desired.
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  88. I'm feeling that the unwelcome attitude is going to persist even after COVID restrictions finally end and travel renormalizes. There's a reason the Chinese state been shifting its posture (especially domestically) away from pure economic benefits and towards unbridled nationalism: the party of easy profits is clearly over and the Party has only hateful patriotism remaining to redirect frustrations and prop up its unchallenged rule.
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  89. And even is such growth is driven by Chinese companies offshoring themselves, it won’t help the millions of Chinese workers left behind and wondering where their next paycheck will come from. Kind of like America’s Rust Belt, but America overall already well developed the “high quality” high value-added industries on the edges of the Smiling Curve that Beijing is desperate to copy.
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  90.  @Ghandara-hg1gc Casually ignoring how so many Chinese have been checking their bank accounts lately. At least the US isn’t undergoing bank runs out of its largest institutions.
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  91. It's largely domestic debt. The state just silences those whom they owe. Therefore free money.
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  92. China targets 5% growth, unlike other countries that report their results after the fact. The PRC doesn’t necessarily achieve this target without artificial state input, creative accounting, and outright lies.
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  93. They’re taught a selective and incomplete history. There’s some parallels with the more recent Apartheid, but technically Israel’s actions are more in line with the British actions during the Boer Wars
 which didn’t turn out so much an outright genocide as an integration of Dutch Afrikaners as likewise South African.
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  94. The strategy of development into liberalization and democratization worked for anti-communist dictatorships like South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Chile. But the key qualifier is anti-communist.
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  95. Also built with disposable quality, overpromising its range (unlike every other manufacturer) and self-immolating with alarming frequency.
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  96. I last visited Tiananmen last year, and find it to be sterile and uninviting much like my experiences in the rest of “New China”. Merdeka Square in Jakarta is like three times larger and far more friendly; more “free” to enter in both senses of the word.
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  97. Debt writeoffs were never part of the Party's list of negotiation options. This is why BRI projects have gotten so toxic because Beijing never forgives debt and always wants all of its money back, but changing their mind to start writing off debt to foreign countries would raise very discomforting questions from local governments who are far more leveraged.
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  98. I was today years old when I learned the richest man in China got his wealth by selling water that tastes like the plastic bottle it comes in (yes I've drank enough bottles of Nongfu Spring to know this firsthand).
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  99. Chinese authorities want Western technical knowledge, but not the questioning mindset and deconstructive experimentation that knowledge springs from.
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  100. There's definitely topics to discuss, Beijing just refuses to wake up from its dreaming and be present.
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  101. I'm not a certified building inspector, but even in my <10 year old high-end flat in Běijīng I could tell there were concerning flaws with the structure. Those "Watch for falling objects" signs posted outside weren't depicting flowerpots falling from tenant's balconies. And that's ignoring the unexplained IT wiring and the rusty water that came out of the taps.
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  102. ​ @tonysu8860 The USCG gets deployed primarily for missions like cooperative training exercises and polar exploration support, not to enforce US laws hundreds or thousands of miles from America's shores.
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  103. ​ @beckyconstantinides2546 Wangfujing is a major pedestrian plaza and shopping area in central Beijing, flanked by fancy malls on both sides for like two blocks, and walking distance to the Forbidden City.
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  104. Taiwan is the “China” even many Chinese wish China became đŸ‡čđŸ‡ŒđŸ‰
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  105. If it's like a black hole, they'll also see the outside increasingly pass them by as they approach their demise.
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  106. 15 min since release, and about 1 in 3 of your comments are spam bots. Congrats Tony, your channel has become "marketable" 😅
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  107. The intercept isn't the problem, it's the Chinese doing so through deliberately unsafe maneuvers.
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  108. I lived in an apartment within the Beijing 3rd Ring where a sign on the outside warned of falling objects, and they weren’t depicting flowerpots falling from balconies either.
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  109. They died inside, seeing how swiftly Western visa applications became the hottest purchase this year.
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  110. When I was in Indonesia before COVID, my local friends described reports of buzz-cut military-aged male Mainlander Chinese “tourists” swarming all over the Riau island group (the Indonesian land closest to the 9-Dash Line).
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  111. Japan actually produces cars that are durable and maintainable, unlike the garage hog of US makes and component inaccessibility of European ones. Chinese ones are built to be practically disposable and hold almost no resale value, doesn't matter how many thousands of dollars they cost off the lot.
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  112. YouTube sadly rewards clickbaity taglines, which is crucial for a one-man show like Tony. But his analysis is solid as he lives in China and often reads straight from Chinese language sources.
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  113. China also lacks the variety and depth of data needed for an AI to learn successfully compared to the open and expressive West, as the information accessible is severely constrained for "state (i.e. Party) security" reasons.
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  114. It's revealing what the PLA would plan to do with an equivalent system just by what they fear about the supposed capabilities of Starlink.
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  115. That’s an issue specific to YouTube and its algorithm on what videos to filter and recommend, not the channels who upload to it.
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  116. Kissinger was no doubt a powerful statesman, but blindingly Eurocentric in his approach to shaping US interests. Hopefully the present and future of American diplomacy results in a more holistic foreign policy.
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  117. It might not curtail the manning and equipment procurements, but it could affect the quality and combat effectiveness. Much like how North Korea who spends all their spare funds on its military are supplying Russia artillery shells with an alarming dud rate. So yeah it would help all those resisting the CPC's belligerence by compelling a buildup of deterrence to match, while possibly blunting the actual threat.
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  118. Unfortunately for the Party designing that ladder involves disruptive risk-tolerant imagination that thinks beyond the "stability" of low-reaching scaffolding.
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  119. They'll try, but stealing personal experience and underlying mentalities only gets so far. What needs to change is the institutional environment within China to develop these domestically, which terrifies the Party.
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  120. Right, the "multipolarity" that Russia and the PRC advocate would just lead to more trade-dissuading regional armed conflicts. The "warmongering" American presence ironically helps keep the peace by not allowing unrelated local tensions from escalating into bigger wars that global movements detour well away from -- think how much civil aviation got disrupted by no longer flying directly over Russia and expand that to critical sea lanes.
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  121. Beijing claims to be "open for business", but not the two-way transactions that peaceable commerce requires.
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  122. Probably because hopeful engagement turned out to be little more than appeasement for the insatiable.
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  123. Strong overcapacity to strong debt? Or strong worker inefficiency to strong underemployment?
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  124. Even the libertarian paradise of Subsaharan Africa is arguably more socialist, because at least the extended families take care of each other. In China you're at the whims of the state, and the state views you as a replaceable cog in their interests.
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  125. Much of the Arab World would likely collapse from Western disengagement; Even today they rely on Westerners to staff and run their rigs. Their prime desire is just weapons and security, but even then they need to import Westerners, Pakistanis, Africans, etc just to man and operate what they bought but decline to put in the hard work to get proficient with.
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  126. Something about spreading the opportunity among those who can't afford such tutoring. But instead it seems the tutors are simply driven underground and have degraded in quality.
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  127. Zeihan is annoyingly clickbaity, but the trends he describes have kept basically accurate even if the timeframes are off. And having lived in and personally experienced Mainland China, I'd say that the pessimistic news from there tends to be closer to the ground truth.
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  128. We could just reciprocate China's de minimis limit, which is like $7 (the US is a very generous $800). That pushback alone makes even their cheapest purchases not worth the packaging and postage.
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  129. I’d still be curious how Chinese cars stand up to IIHS crash tests. These are very stringent considering the high speeds Americans regularly crash at, with insurance companies having to pay for.
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  130. ​ @DK-ev9dg Technically there is a substantial level of sovereignty for US states, which the federal government steps in only in interstate matters. Though technological advancements since its agrarian origins have meant that there's few things that don't cross state lines anymore.
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  131. As our disengagement preceding WW1, WW2, and 9/11 showed, we can’t exactly start isolating ourselves from the world and rely on being the Beacon on the Hill as our main defense âœˆïžđŸ—œ There’s a reason we have hundreds of military bases worldwide
 and why nearly all the host nations are more concerned what happens to them should we leave, either the costs to their defense or their domestic politics without the “evil Americans” to conveniently redirect public frustrations toward.
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  132. Statistics and projections involving modern China in general are often overly optimistic.
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  133. Hasn't improved over time either. Even the Soviets joked about Beijing declaring yet another "final warning".
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  134. Feel being the key word
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  135. Based on what buyers both in China and worldwide are finding out, there is no substantial after-sales support. Parts get backordered for months, and mechanics even in the dealership are ill equipped to try anything more intensive than a brake flush and tire change. Seems like the plan is to just have you buy a new model, in line with modern China's strategy of making it cheap and disposable.
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  136. It's almost shocking to see how much more cosmopolitan other nations are compared to the PRC, having finally gone on an excursion from the Mainland recently.
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  137. "High quality jobs" centered around innovation thrives on creative destruction, but this is anathema to the Mainland China way across all its major dynasties where they enforce the stable stagnation of "harmony". Hence why China lacks in world-changing original inventions that weren't independently developed elsewhere after Europe managed to build its own printing presses back in the 1400s.
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  138. Hint: they’re usually labeled as “emerging markets”
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  139. Ironically this is among the most sober analysis you can get about China, especially since Tony lives there. Anything less "clickbaity" is likely a state-sponsored outlet trying to convince you that the socially-open market-friendly China we knew of before has returned.
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  140. Also socially conservative, demanding adherence to traditional social roles and unquestioned authority. The CPC and the Republican Party have a lot more in common besides depicting themselves with the color red đŸš©
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  141. They're going to have to hold their breath a lot longer though. There's basically nothing compelling the Party to return travel conditions back to normal now that they have instituted the "health kit" internal passports they need to track dissidents and stamp out unrest with all the other problems of "New China" flaring up: household debts, government debts, overwork, falling global interest and investment, HK, Tibet, etc.
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  142. Taiwan would still be the bleeding edge of chip fabs. It's the developed older processes that are being exported for diversification and redundancy of TSMC experience. Taiwan is still going to be important as the ongoing common root for all those forks in knowledge.
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  143. I wouldn't be surprised if the balloon incident was meant to sabotage the first trip attempt, giving the Party another reason to blame America for something Beijing wanted anyway.
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  144. By itself it didn’t. What potential it proved possible left America absolutely shook.
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  145. In speed, not in longevity. The PRC is entering a phase of permanent stagnation similar to what the USSR faced in the 1970s, a state that lasted a few decades more but not very well.
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  146. There's a glaring difference in how well Taiwan handled their quarantine and treatment response compared to how botched up everything was on the Mainland. There's a reason the failed Dynamic Zero-COVID lasted for nearly three years.
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  147. Also overestimation about the centrality of the Middle Kingdom in the minds and actions of people worldwide.
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  148. The channel "Lei's Real Talk" focuses more on the CPC itself, using its history and current actions to provide insight into the infighting within the Party and how this is influencing the gross incoherence in Chinese government policies.
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  149. Efficiency and resilience are competing interests. There’s a point where being penny wise becomes pound foolish when a sudden shock comes along. We saw this when COVID disrupted the regular flow of goods that allowed Just In Time manufacturing. Europe experiences this now being so built around cheap piped gas from Russia. America is wise to divest and diversify its economy away from those who try to institute a “multipolar” world through promises of military conquest.
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  150. Only a matter of time until the people realize the connection between all these adverse "Acts of God" with the Mandate of Heaven.
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  151. Embassies are only to sovereign states, which requires a defined and recognized territory. Right now the ROC still claims all of China and Mongolia (same as the PRC), and they themselves are not prepared to receive the consequences of ceding the excess to the Mainland and effectively splitting itself from "China".
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  152. I wouldn’t consider an ICBC branch in Beijing to be a “small local bank in the middle of China”. I remember an incident of vaguely explained restrictions on withdrawals happening there like just last year.
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  153. The Party stuck to a narrative and plan that became obsolete, but they're far too prideful of their initial achievements and anxious about change to adapt accordingly. Plus all those "health kit" internal passports was useful in limiting personal movements and containing unrest.
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  154. ​ @YourHineyness The last time the US tried to demobilize and disengage, it got sucker punched by 9/11. America and especially China's neighbors would be more comforted knowing that Beijing or Pyongyang aren't organizing what Hamas managed a week ago.
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  155.  @henli-rw5dw Which means multiple rule and protocol systems, competing hegemons, and ultimately fault lines for conflict. Remember the last time the world was “multipolar” it led into two world wars.
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  156. Hopefully this stage is merely The Empire Strikes Back by now.
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  157. Chinese cars need to pass IIHS crash tests before even considering buying one for the high-speed American drives we often do.
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  158. The push to buy sounds a lot like crypto HODLers trying to salvage their principal, except we understand more about the trustworthiness and trends of the PRC and aren't biting.
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  159. It's crazy how the book is essentially the constitution of the CPC.
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  160. I wouldn't be surprised if the PRC soon goes the way of the USSR because they likewise overspent on their inflated security concerns as a militant one-party autocracy. There is a minimum share of taxes a government has to return to its citizens in the form of satisfactory policies and services.
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  161. What I've learned having lived in China is that the more pessimistic predictions are usually closer to correct. It's like the opposite of America where bad news and negative opinions are all you hear about especially nowadays, yet the biggest drawback isn't the lack of personal safety but the lack of convenient services.
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  162. 2:01 International definition of "derisking": Making the global supply network more resilient from a structural downturn in China. Beijing's definition of "derisking": Making China more resilient from a structural downturn in China.
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  163. Pretty much the playbook of every socially traditionalist tyrant.
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  164. And it's not like seizing the physical plants automatically grant those bleeding edge chips either. Most of the value-added comes from Taiwan's extremely specialized engineers that keep fab yields within spec, and I doubt they'll be working to the same degree after a hostile takeover.
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  165. Right, the Policy recognizes a single "China" that includes Taiwan, but does not necessarily recognize Taiwan as under the sovereignty of the People's Republic. This is what most countries outside Africa and the Middle East follow, hence why they have separate "trade" relations with Taipei.
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  166. Yet another example joins the liberal democracies' "we told you so" conga line đŸ•ș
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  167. Selling chewing gum. You can bring and chew it there, you just won't be able to buy any while on the island. Getting caught with drugs though is no joke.
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  168. When was the last time a Republican administration not privatizing profits at the expense of the rest of America? Probably Eisenhower?
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  169. If China's long-term fundamentals have not changed... we are not worried enough 📉
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  170. It's not cultural colonization, but the feeling on the street is that it smells a lot like colonization. I've spent years in both Mainland China and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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  171. By not making enough parts to spare. Especially when you’re focused on launching glitzy new models, rather than build a reputation for reliability.
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  172. The PRC's new diplomatic campaign "might see some success in parts of Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. However in East Asia and in the West, these diplomatic efforts will see likely see limited to little success." So basically the Chinese government is trying to salvage international support from places that generally have the least experience and interest in the area.
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  173. The Sunshine Policy is a flawed strategy as engagement and appeasement seems to work on democracies much moreso than autocracies. That said, it might be in the PRC's interest to actually converse and comfort the US and its allies (and stop constantly accusing them for being closed-minded) or risk a more threatening solidification of international will and arrangement against Beijing.
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  174. It would still be provocative though, since Russia already has plenty of lethal equipment to wield if it can get it from their domestic railheads to the front lines in Ukraine. China is already gaining suspicions over its true intents by granting Russia a financial umbilical cord.
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  175. I've heard Wall Street analysts calculated the true value of RMB at more like „9 per USD
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  176. The Sunken Cost Fallacy is the only thing at this point keeping the Chinese housing market from collapsing faster than the buildings themselves.
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  177. While Taiwanese don’t necessarily want independence from “China”, they definitely desire independence from its Communist Party.
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  178. Or they do know what the options are, but they all invariably involve the politically fatal deconstruction of the Party's image as "great, glorious, and correct".
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  179. Especially considering their wages were already becoming seen as too high. Plus there's still no real attractive alternative to invest the excess cash, so right back to deed promises and concrete shells it is.
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  180. Although the nationalism is likewise driven by official pressure, since the non-Mainlander quality controls of a foreign brand still commands emotional aspiration and flauntable value.
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  181. And power is a zero-sum game, because it's a relation of what one side is able to do that another side cannot. Thus the more they win, the more we lose.
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  182.  @ddegn China’s best products tend to come with Western level prices. Despite China’s industrial progress, it’s still true you get what you pay for.
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  183. That downward spiral of economic activity is why deflation is so dangerous, as much as consumers say they want prices to come down. Inflation by contrast is at least naturally self-correcting.
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  184. It sounds like the Taiwanese find it increasingly burdensome the thought of the multigenerational project of bringing democracy and more transparent governance to Mainland China; Better for Taiwan to rule itself well and convince what’s left of a post-Party Mainland to follow, rather than try to administer the changes and expenses directly.
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  185. ​ @EM-dw2yv  That 300m is profitable and accessible though.
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  186. The sudden news describing a sudden spike of "TikTok refugees" hints this is a Party-controlled marketing campaign, having directed RedNote and other Chinese social media app admins to make the algorithm serve much more English-language content right as Americans (whose curiosity was seeded by "refugee" stories) sign up. Apparently there's quite a bit of complaints from older 氏çșąäčŠ users whose feeds were suddenly dominated by English-language content out of nowhere.
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  187. I predict the post-COVID PRC will end up in the ways of East Germany with a Soviet Union scale of industry: economically stuck, disconnecting from the rest of global reality, and racking up abuses against its people to be revealed later. It may take another generation, but we all know what ultimately happened to both of those model nations of Communism.
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  188. Airbus also has chronic issues with the speed of delivering on their orders.
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  189. Qinghua University and modern education, defeating Imperial Japan, abandoning the KMT, counter-Soviet support, ignoring 1989 and allowing entrance into the WTO, continued source of profitable export sales and intellectual property. Post-imperial China would not be anywhere near as prosperous without American graciousness.
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  190. In American English we'd call it getting blindsided.
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  191. The existence isn’t classified, but the exact numbers, disposition, and capabilities would be.
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  192. But how much of that is debt-fueled state spending on Zero-COVID and redundant infrastructure, as opposed to market-making innovations and consumer purchases?
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  193. Hence why it's called malinvestment.
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  194. Democracy isn’t more socially stable than authoritatianism day to day, but generation to generation. It’s shortsighted to question the underlying Wisdom of the Crowd.
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  195. It's a geopolitically vital area where the competition is all militarily weak and historically deferential to China. Hence it's the next natural step towards enforcing its rule over Tiānxià which being "internal matters" would void any "international" agreements it had made.
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  196. Similar can be said for all the other major dynasties, and they all have a common throughline: overly centralized authority.
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  197. Does that figure include the junkyards full of "sold" and fully-registered EVs?
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  198. Still wondering how YouTube censorship really works, because sometimes I get replies to my comments that I can't even see anymore.
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  199. It'll need more than years, more like 2~3 generations and a change of environment (including government). Only when a youth cohort who has no direct memory of these shenanigans starts exerting its economic and societal influence would the downward trend really reverse.
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  200. I think of it architecturally, as the space between a hanging soft ceiling and the actual concrete above.
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  201. At least the transition to EVs won't be as intense as the first time we swapped horses for ICE cars, along with the infrastructure of ubiquitous paved roads, oil extraction and refining, and bulk liquid fuel transport they also require.
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  202. That was an issue beforehand, as "anchor baby" China-raised Chinese were always counted as "international students" in their statistics and marketing material. I'd imagine the proportion of actual foreigners has gone up though, as they're often more ignorant and adventurous.
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  203. POGOs are big business in the Philippines. Also invites a lot of questions domestically since they're basically walled Chinese colonies and any economic benefits they promised to provide aren't evident.
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  204. I "watch" his videos like a podcast, looking at and doing something else
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  205. A warming climate makes the extremes more severe, moreso on the summer highs though.
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  206. We are at the tail end of an Ice Age, but the amount of warming that's happened since we got entire nations to burn coal puts us on a trajectory that will overshoot where it would have naturally ended up. This ultimately risks ending up in an environment that life has literally not experienced since the volcanoes of young Earth started to temper down.
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  207. That's because central government guidelines are not very specific; the "make it happen" wording leaves a lot for the lower levels to interpret, which based on the consistent "unwavering" policy up until now meant to double down on testing and detainment.
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  208. Which is troubling considering the Chinese government refuses real social support and instead proliferates a destructive low-trust low-spending poverty mindset among wouldbe Chinese consumers.
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  209. That's hard to imagine considering there's far more excitement in leaving and permanently diversifying away from China.
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  210. Attractive because it's new. But the way it's built also degrades quicker than expected without constant and expensive maintenance labor, and the quality only seems to get worse with the more recent ones too.
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  211. “Mmmm, tastes like baijou” đŸ›ąïžđŸ¶
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  212. Yeah, unforeseen creative destruction is pretty scary for a Party that wants to have things all planned out.
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  213. Right, the CPC has as much soft power as parents towards their teenagers: every value they celebrate ends up promoting the opposite!
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  214. Yeah I'd like to not have to open a Chinese bank account just to use WeChat Pay, since not everyone takes Alipay which does have working foreign card and prepaid Tourist Card options.
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  215. Anything to deflect from all the floods -- likely from deliberate releases -- that have destroyed so many Chinese lives lately.
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  216. Yet that's how the Chinese housing sector was fueled, since there aren't any other accessible attractive investment opportunities for CNY holders.
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  217. Might want to update the Korea stock footage, Gwanghwamun Plaza stopped looking like that back in 2020 đŸ‡°đŸ‡·
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  218. No, gold and other limited-quantity media have the habit at getting splurged or hoarded at exactly the wrong ends of the business cycle. That's why the world converged on fiat, which gives issuers some control of compelling spending in a downturn or saving in overheat.
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  219. Trying to figure out if openly saving that one Philippine outpost is worth the escalation against the PRC, and if we'll be positioned well enough to react accordingly.
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  220. China has also been a series of autocratic dynasties for its entire history; The ROC on Taiwan is the first Chinese ethnostate to break from this cycle of oppressive top-down domination followed by violent government transition, and that only happened at the end of the Cold War. So yeah it's arguable that thousands of years of history doesn't necessarily lead to a comparable development of wisdom.
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  221. Mainland China doesn't have time on their side: were already seeing the retarding effects of aging and pollution and especially debts, losing a major customer and a primary source for high end chips will only accelerate their decline.
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  222. CPC is horrified that revolt against their rule is a popular serious street sentiment, instead of remaining an overplayed theme of fiction scripts like it largely is in the “declining” West.
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  223. Watch literally anyone else. Plenty of Americans themselves openly discuss what's wrong with the US.
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  224. Any political strategy espoused by pro-authoritarian social conservatives tells us more about themselves than the more nuanced ways the world actually works.
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  225. "New China" is certainly past its prime, with the Party-run PRC once again having permanently squandered multiple generations worth of labor and wealth, and this time the suffering is well recorded. While it doesn't fundamentally obliterate the thought of Taiwan reintegrating with the rest of China, the CPC is now mortally terrified that it shall not be around when that happens.
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  226. ​More like painful truth.
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  227. China is facing a sustained decline, but South and SE Asia are currently on the upswing while Latin America and Africa expect their turn at prosperity might only be a generation or two from now.
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  228. Yet Ukraine shows they’re very much willing to fight, but are still at risk of perishing without further American support. The rest of NATO is still catching up since they’re not constantly mobilized like the US is.
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  229. Beijing is still impounding all the debt they've accumulated. But like any dam, the maintenance is intensive in continuous because its failure will be catastrophic... and the pressure behind it keeps building at an alarming rate.
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  230. I feel like socially conservative societies habitually discount the sacrifice and grace of other people who enabled their prosperity, hence the conclusion of purely independent "greatness" and the superiority complex that results from such inconsiderate ignorance.
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  231. Democracies also have a habit of overdramatizing their political issues in order to gain attention, which leads to said issues getting addressed before they get truly out of hand. Authoritarian societies don't see this nuance and falsely determine that their more sterile public discourse indicates that they must be superior by comparison.
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  232. Beijing would deem any US official visiting Taiwan "inflammatory", so we might as well signal how reliably we'd support Taiwan in case the Party tries to seize it without the buy-in of the ROC citizens.
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  233. Which combat in the SCS will do, regardless of who started the shooting. US and UK firms absolutely dominate maritime insurance, and having anti-ship missiles flying about would make the waters around Mainland China uninsurable -- civilian trade (with the affordable food and fuel China relies on) will quickly disappear.
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  234. It's much like smartphones, which are also internally integrated, working with only specific parts, and impractical to repair. EVs especially ones that don't come from legacy makes are basically such smartphones that you can ride, and like smartphones lose spare parts support after the first year or two, particularly from Chinese brands who focus on hyping up their next model rather than building a reputation for reliability.
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  235. He gets others to engage, but not necessarily comply. It’s motivating compared to the apathy the Chinese have for a distant Party and their one-way communication.
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  236. I doubt the tariffs will do much to inflation compared to China simply opening up the ability to travel again. It's not like the taxes were the rising factor compared to port and factory shutdowns in China.
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  237. 0:14 Do you take New Zealand holidays off then? 😂
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  238. Middle Eastern states are likewise autocracies and want what China achieved: global economic centrality while as a hierarchical self-righteous ethnostate.
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  239. Centralized directives work for natural monopolies like infrastructure planning, not so much for market-driven industries and innovations where competing efforts really do lower prices.
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  240.  @patbyrneme007  I lived in Beijing through last year. Big thing I learned there is that the more critical and pessimistic reports about the PRC are closer to the reality on the ground.
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  241. The "growth" comes from state malinvestment into yet more SOEs and redundant infrastructure projects.
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  242. Right, Americans are superb at navigating chaos and managing risk -- the mentality actively welcomes challenges and adventure. Being "safe" through forced detention is anathema to the American mindset, especially with wide availability of effective mRNA vaccines which make practically all the inoculated fully capable of fighting off COVID infections on their own.
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  243. Most of the G7 are generally welcoming of immigrants (Japan being the most strident ethnostate in the Group and perhaps a faltering one at that), and this helps mitigate the overall decline and aging of the workforce. China still hasn't come to grips with actively inviting outsiders to immigrate and integrate, at least past the women from SE Asia they coopt or coerce into "marrying" Mainlander men.
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  244. Chinese brands are infamous for their lack of after-sales support, which is kind of important if you want to maintain its components and fix any fender benders over the next like 5 years.
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  245. It's their "Dual Circulation" double-think.
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  246. ​ @j.joseph5353 Especially considering US intelligence agencies only have so much budget and staffing to process all that data if it's even successfully collected. Washington doesn't spend nearly as much on "security" as Běijīng does.
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  247. I'm not optimistic that it will though, unlike the North Koreans the HĂ n population is too large, diverse, and educated to enforce a race-based fortress mentality. China under the CPC is growing too old, indebted, and polluted to continue promising indefinite growth, and will more likely advance their "struggle" to the point of armed conflict to maintain its uncontestable legitimacy.
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  248. 10:07 Right, freight is the key to enduring profitability, unlike serving human passengers with their requirements for life support, space to move around, and a pleasant experience. In aviation this explains how old 747s and tri-jets easily get a second wind as airfreighters long after their airliner seats get scrapped, while the human-centered A380 is end-of-life as its fundamental design makes it troublesome to take pallets. Moving dumb bulk cargo also explains how America's unspectacular at-grade rail network continues to print money over a century later, having been built for the extremely heavy steam trains of the era. China's impressive expansion of rail strapping together the state would have been economically useful had they beefed up as quad-tracks for cargo trains, whose more profitable payloads would have subsidized operational costs especially for the passengers blowing past in the parallel HSR.
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  249. Commuskeptics have been saying to divest from the PRC while the assets still have value. Seems the car companies made a serious mistake of the situation, much like they did during COVID when they canceled all their chipset orders.
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  250. Indeed, America has gone through much worse before. This current Woke vs MAGA culture war is quite tame compared to the Civil Rights Movement, or the Anarchist and Labor Union movements before that, or slavery enforcement and the Civil War before that. We habitually overdramatize all our issues because the attention is how they get addressed.
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  251. It’s basically a war economy attitude, one that the ruling CPC has been carrying since it seized China. We unfortunately have to respond in kind to limit how much we get pushed around.
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  252. They don't. The stickiness of their debt makes American student loans seem gracious. Also applies to foreign aid loans which BRI "partners" are finding out the hard way.
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  253. The problem with explosive growth is that the explosion also ends just as suddenly.
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  254. I've heard China's GDP is about 60% of what it reports. So still second best, but just barely and not as likely to grow now that all the debt that fueled its rise are now getting called in.
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  255. Considering the build quality of these structures especially for more more mundane less visible uses like residences for locals, I'm not sure if it will be worth the asking price. There's not really a shortage of housing in China, there's a shortage of retail investment avenues.
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  256. Or rather cashless payments. I primarily use credit cards but was forced to both get a Chinese SIM in order to temporarily open a ICBC bank account during my time in China since not all vendors took Alipay (either foreign cards or the domestic Tourist Card). This separation from global payment system is a massive barrier against tourists who just want to sightsee.
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  257. It’s to make sure when it is offered, the tarriffs negate the state subsidies they enjoy when pitching an “affordable” false market rate product.
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  258. Low income non-WFH-enabled workers make up the bulk of the population though. They only made so much as a delivery driver or as a dĂ bĂĄi (I keep hearing about protests over unpaid wages with the sudden end of Zero-COVID lately), and longer term outlook is not that bright as the PRC trends towards deindustrialization on top of all the debts incurred. The "revenge travel" surge from the lucky ones will wane with time, so as we saw at the start of the pandemic it would be economically unwise to overspecialize on Chinese demand like before.
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  259. This mental shortsightedness is why we should not value quarter-focused corporate executives for multigenerational policymakers. Especially ones his age who won’t live long enough to see his reputation deservedly crash.
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  260. ⁠The AFP is remarkably tiny and underequipped for the amount of territory it’s responsible to defend. A constant airlift is likely beyond their means to sustain for all but the most critical shuttle missions.
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  261. Likely ours, but we also rebuild faster and already have mechanisms in place to mitigate effects and reform the financing industry. China's though is unpracticed and would be more likely to obliterate the economy when its banks go bankrupt.
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  262. ⁠Trump is transactional. If Beijing offers his family some valuable kickback, he risks giving himself a concussion from how quickly he’d turn around.
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  263. Southeast Asia Sea
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  264. Sputnik itself was, but the what it compelled was a major shock.
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  265. I'm interested to know what he thinks about how Beijing treats us now, because he's the one who fathered US-PRC relations at the expense of Taipei
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  266. They do try to pitch their centralized autocracy as "superior" to the chaotic democratic way of policymaking. It is useful at first but at a certain stage of development it does need to subordinate itself to its people, as had happened in former anticommunist dictatorships like South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia.
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  267. America is a political amnesiac that expects opportunity from changes in a situation. For Beijing to become a bipartisan issue speaks to how long and pervasively it treats the US as an enemy to be vanquished so that it can regain the dominance that it "deserves" as a great power.
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  268. I don't see how traditional gender roles will help. Automation has deteriorated the advantage of strict specialization in an agro-industrial economy; it's become common to not work what you formally studied, entering instead through OJT and hobbies. Notice the societies having the worst time growing productivity per capita (especially if their capita are still growing) are the ones still trying to enforce the woman-homemaker model. Going forward it'd probably be more productive to revert more to the hunter-gatherer ways that most of human history lived through, where roles were cross-trained and a lot more fluid based on immediate needs.
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  269. The sleepwalkers are those "non-aligned" governments and corporations who believe in the PRC continuing a "peaceful rise". America's "overdramatization" is democracy's feature of how issues get noticed and tackled before they actually boil over... Běijīng however keeps trying to hide its fundamental self-made issues of aging, debt, and pollution, and has proven it's willing to escalate its "struggle" into total militarization just to keep depicting the uncontested Party as "great, glorious, and correct".
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  270. 8:46 This is a taste of the "multipolar" world being advocated, where the multiple regions of militarized coordination fractures global communication and trade from the selectiveness of safety for passersby.
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  271.  @skydragon23101979  It's warmer towards China because of the opportunities they promise, but there's still a lot of suspicion about Chinese activities at least as much as towards America and it's been rising. I've spent the last few years in sub-Saharan Africa and SE Asia, and this is what the locals themselves say.
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  272. China (and Russia) are classically feudal authoritarians with a constant anxiety over maintaining social control and political stability (i.e. supreme rule by one family). The reason the countries themselves are so big is because of historical expansion into its neighbors. Ultimately what they want is the coast-to-coast security that the US enjoys, the problem is Eurasia is way bigger with much more effective competition.
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  273. With Chinese media being in such a bubble of false hopes and blatant lies, the model collapse will be spectacular.
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  274. And likewise inspiring to the Taiwanese, as the Ukrainians are showing that resistance is definitely possible and insurgencies could work against not only the US in politically defeating an occupation. BěijÄ«ng must be sweating profusely trying to wargame an invasion if TĂĄiwān in light of these realizations considering their even less experienced PLA with untested equipment that everyone can see coming across the Strait.
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  275. It's not like there's much choice from Chinese sources, as they're all effectively CPC editorials.
    2
  276. The term for uncontested HĂ n China is "China Proper". Whether China Proper survives intact at the end of the dynastic cycle for "New China" remains to be seen.
    2
  277. Just find any pessimist or speculator channel. For every "anti-China" video there's probably a dozen pitches to "buy gold/crypto".
    2
  278. The only “peace” they understand is that of absolute domination, a world lacking challengers and alternatives.
    2
  279. If she's reading Chinese language news through WeChat, she won't see what every independent outsider is seeing about the PRC.
    2
  280. The prediction is the target Beijing demands, just like how their GDP is not measured but dictated.
    2
  281. Right, Americans keep thinking our 120% Debt/GDP is alarming ... it's at least twice as bad in the PRC whose money and promises aren't nearly as trusted!
    2
  282. Tony confirmed to secretly be a Party member through the leaked "struggle session" đŸ€Ș
    2
  283. Considering the top-heavy politics and godlike self-promotion of the Chinese government, it's not that far of a stretch to imagine what's really putting downward pressure on modern China.
    2
  284. Hence why foreigners and visa-holding Chinese are scrambling to expatriate. The Party is on a power trip with its "anti-COVID measures" and how their (self-perpetuated) vulnerability to the pandemic can be used justify their increased intrusiveness on everyone in the Mainland, all because at the core of an authoritarian society is chronic clinical anxiety. The feeling on the street is that the CPC's "New China" is returning in all the worst ways.
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  285. Manufacturing didn’t leave, but it’s no longer the case that a middle school education and confident eye contact with a firm handshake will land you a living wage with union protections anymore.
    2
  286. Dead "bear-cat" bounce
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  287. There's already a gross oversupply of "real estate", coupled with the bulk of the average family's wealth tied into previous overpriced purchases of those flats because the Chinese economy has had practically no other trustworthy investment options. Deflation especially in the price of housing would obliterate what little buying power the Chinese people still have.
    2
  288. Other countries aren’t neck deep in debt trying to keep up the appearance of economic vibrancy.
    2
  289. He's trying to salvage his Party's reputation as "great, glorious, and correct".
    2
  290. Right, it still took like another half a century to get us off our horses and local tram lines once personal cars became affordable.
    2
  291. I like to say China is like china: hard and impressive, but also very brittle đŸș
    2
  292. Torpedoes might even be overkill. A common glide bomb has similar destructive power at a fraction of the cost, and most PLA navy vessels lack credible air defense.
    2
  293. We get what we pay for. American voters who vote primarily over promises to the retail prices they pay are warned to remember the knock-on effects when they want to choose supposedly “pro-business” politicians.
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  294. That's the risk the Mainland thinks it'll be ready to take. Doubt it though; their domestic agriculture is severely underproducing and overly polluted, while energy won't come as cheaply and consistently as a war-mobilized nation will require.
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  295. Tony graduated from PKU and still lives in Beijing. In fact his day job isn't even YouTube even though he'd like it to be.
    2
  296. "Fast and efficient" is often more effective at enriching the powerful and ruining a society, than it is at figuring out how to navigate the constantly oncoming future given the incomplete knowledge which a single entity alone could never hope to fully grasp.
    2
  297. It might help these counter-dumping tariff efforts if insurance companies and news outlets reported statistics on the premiums and repair costs for Chinese EVs.
    2
  298. Zero-COVID made Mainland China into an overt open-air prison. Minimum-security, but a prison nonetheless complete with active movement tracking and forced stints in isolation cells. I survived it and got to see China "open", but instead of excitement there's now a sense of anomie, as if prisoners set free realize the outside have well adapted to life without them.
    2
  299. The CPC is the latest in a line of Chinese autocratic governments... which unfortunately means it's trending towards the same domestically violent end that befell every previous imperial dynasty.
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  300. More like goals they were already achieving to some degree when that Five Year Plan began, and nowadays conveniently ignoring the quality metrics they hoped to achieve for actual success as a fully domestic replacement.
    2
  301. Like most industrialized and aspiring countries, it’s a threat but one that can be adapted around and shouldn’t get in the way of economic development.
    2
  302. China was never comfortable with the idea that anyone smaller than themselves (which is basically everyone) is still an equal sovereign who makes independent decisions -- hence the thinking that if China is not their dominant influencer, some other competitor must be.
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  303. Profitability changes, especially when trapped in the low value-added valley of the Smiling Curve that the still heavily export-dependent PRC stuck itself in. I wouldn't be surprised if China's recent export "growth" came from all the factory machinery getting offshored.
    2
  304. I don't mind if it's Chinese or Russian or whatever, as long as it's transparently open source. It's when "state security"-dominated development environments start hiding their designs where I get concerned.
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  305. If XiĂ mĂ©n is what awaits Taiwanese upon reunification, they should pass as the PRC has already peaked and the BěijÄ«ng will be spending the next couple decades struggling to not stagnate and stay promising to its people much like the USSR from the 1970s onward.
    2
  306. Chinese government forcing the "growth", because the GDP equation includes government spending of any sort even if funded by debt.
    2
  307. I "watch" his videos like a podcast, looking at and doing something else
    2
  308. Tony lives in Beijing and is fully fluent in Mandarin. He worked in a Chinese consulting firm for years and is trying to make these YouTube reports his full time career.
    2
  309. Like how æ°Ž (water) would be pronounced "shuǐ" in Mandarin, "seoi⁶" in Cantonese, "zuiÂČ" in Teochew, "su" in Korean, "mizu" in Japanese, and "thủy" in Vietnamese. Everyone knew what water is and had their own names for it along with many other objects and ideas, but not necessarily a way to write it until they adopted the Chinese character set.
    2
  310. I'd guess it's a combination of corporate commercial "considerations" (which prefer the simplicity of hegemony and autocracy), and an active army of pro-Party "little pinks" mass flagging "inappropriate" content to an overly-trusting algorithm.
    2
  311. And unlike what the adversaries habitually oversell, when US officials claim a capability it’s done only after tested validation if not ready for mass production.
    2
  312. I was once taught that if you want to know what the PRC government is concerned about, read the headlines in their news channels and note the appearance and disappearance of the topics; what they actually say about it can be safely ignored.
    2
  313. Tony aims to be informative, not necessarily entertaining. In the years of searching for news about modern China ever since having lived in Beijing myself, I've still yet to find anyone out there who is both dispassionately factual yet verbally amusing.
    2
  314. Or maybe it is (for now) -- what we don't often hear about is China's production disruptions during Zero-COVID and their lack of recovery afterward affecting the input of supplies to the market, and inflation is fundamentally a case of demand outstripping supply.
    2
  315. It's ironic how Beijing quickly reaches for racism when responding to popular anti-CPC sentiments, when their own interests are proudly bound by birthright.
    2
  316. Capitalism hates dependents. Yet it's too shortsighted to invest in the next generation of workers, while biasing practically all significant socialized supports toward older established employees and terminal retirees.
    2
  317. Yet even with their abbreviated safety certifications, it spends more time in the hangar only to achieve disappointing operating costs when it does fly.
    2
  318. It's to ensure XJP understands, since he's famously childish with his verbiage compared to his predecessors.
    2
  319. Even if limited to options provided by advisors, it's ultimately still the President's decision as the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State sending our military into another nation's territory for whatever reason.
    2
  320. Actual medicine was never a priority with the Party, who thought they really could control movement and transmission until perhaps they developed and distributed their own mRNA vaccine. But since actual medicine wasn't their priority, this didn't happen either, and they were to prideful to "surrender" to the West by approving and importing foreign doses that do work.
    2
  321. They're all local schemes trying to grab government rebates. It's an extension of the "centralized democracy" low-level competition that props up the core of the Party.
    2
  322. I'm thinking whatever recession is more driven by supply rather than demand: China is shut down, and Russia has proven untrustworthy. Mitigating this involves divesting and diversifying away from these formerly efficient sources and regain supply flexibility and resilience by developing elsewhere.
    2
  323. Even Midas realized he can't eat gold. The CPC however still believes turning everything into concrete makes them "great, glorious, and correct".
    2
  324. That’s what happens when you try to be “scientific” in your approach without considering the humanities and social psychology of what people actually value. Numbers alone don’t provide a complete or compelling narrative. There’s a reason STEM minded folks are notoriously poor at managing over other humans, and why they rarely thrive in open politics.
    2
  325. Problem is that space is grossly overpriced for the quality, and not likely to get less expensive anytime soon as past buyers aggressively seek to salvage their lost life savings.
    2
  326. Problem is China doesn't have an effective and trusted vaccine to distribute, but importing Western ones is an act of surrender for the Party who spent the last couple of years touting its effective pandemic controls.
    2
  327. The longer fangs come not from sharper teeth, but from a receding gumline đŸŠ·
    2
  328. There wouldn't be much benefit to it, since the countries Chinese expats naturalize into often have generous visa reciprocity with the PRC. What would need to happen is making China far more inclusive and attractive to migrate into, which is anathema to the identity of a proud ethnostate.
    2
  329. It wouldn't be a single country, but diffused among all the nations who try. What inflation we get from the lack of efficiency out of a single source would be more than made up in the resilience of the supply chain through future shocks.
    2
  330. The current Republic of China is the China we wished China to be (including ironically within China itself) -- a former autocracy that shows what Chinese people could achieve once they terminate the oppression of an unchallenged single family/Party dynasty government.
    2
  331. You’d be better off taking a month-long “vacation” to get those shots. It’s not like vaccination status counts for anything when reentering and living in Mainland China anyway.
    2
  332. Laos and Cambodia are effectively Chinese colonies at this point as well, along with a string of Chinese-exclusive "trading post" communities popping up throughout SE Asia.
    2
  333. Perhaps SOEs that are largely regional efforts like their aviation manufacturers, but other than those nothing really. It's a fundamental flaw in the PRC's practically feudal economic relationship where localities pay up to the central government and receive back almost nothing out of Beijing.
    2
  334. The whole Party runs on personal corruption past the entry level. If anything shady acts and histories get worse towards the top... where Xi is.
    2
  335. And they've made so much junk that there's plenty more to keep tossing out.
    2
  336. He's reporting in English instead of Chinese, and thus not getting attention from Chinese citizens whom the Party truly fears losing complete influence over.
    2
  337. Given China’s incredible industrial capacity, you’d think they could just build another fleet of tanks so the liquids never have to mix.
    2
  338. The US has been "on the brink of collapse" since 1812, and often resolves each crisis stronger and a bit more harmonized with its own ideals of "justice for all". The naysayers were proven wrong each time on various Panics, the Civil War, the anarcho-communist insurrections, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement. The current "woke" vs MAGA battle is fairly mild compared to what America has already experienced before.
    2
  339. Any shooting will make those waterways uninsurable, guaranteeing a collapse of trade along with the affordable food and fuel it brings. Blockade not needed.
    2
  340. They call it “National Rejuvenation”.
    2
  341. I never liked DST. We're just fooling ourselves into a 8~4p business hour schedule while not admitting we're forcing ourselves to be getting up any earlier.
    2
  342. Right, any of us going into China also have to take a PCR test too. If we were to be as "scientific" as the PRC, we'd be picking the brains of all their arrivals before sending them via narrow camera-filled hallways to a random unmarked bus off to a run-down hotel for quarantine.
    2
  343. The bigger question is will the targets realize how present a threat that Chinese "state security" interest projects are, or will they continue believing the US has nothing better to spend its budget on than on assaulting specifically them
    2
  344. "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay" ☭
    2
  345. Corporations seem to believe it far too much.
    2
  346. Indonesians carry simmering suspicions of anything Chinese, Communist, and anti-Muslim... which the PRC checks on all three. I wouldn't be surprised if their "non-aligned" stance doesn't hold should their conflict with Beijing heat up.
    2
  347. The PRC most needs a break from the CPC, but the Chinese people aren't yet openly convinced that their "parents" could actually be chosen instead of being stuck for life under the paternalistic Party.
    2
  348. It seems Mainlanders are concentrating on "safe" places with dominant Chinese populations like Singapore. I've just been through Australia, Korea, and the Philippines, and I wasn't hearing nearly as much Mandarin as before; instead it was Japanese, French, and surprisingly Bahasa Indo/Melay.
    2
  349. The Chinese think Mongolia and half of Siberia belongs to them, and it won't stop there. The concept of 怩䞋 is the reason they spent their whole history expanding westward through military conquest.
    2
  350. "Win-Win Cooperation", the slogan of the Beijing-led New Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
    2
  351. Japan exports a lot of things that the rest of the world can buy, like cars and electronics. China isn't able to do the same with barebone apartments and redundant infrastructure.
    2
  352. Beijing sounds completely overconfident that it can quickly and cheaply seize a physical fortress from across 100+ miles of saltwater moat, one that's been preparing for their arrival for decades, and increasingly motivated to commit an insurgency that guarantees the fight to be long, expensive, and ultimately embarassing. The US would know, apparently those tactics are what we're teaching to the Taiwanese nowadays having had 20+ years of firsthand experience on the wrong end of an IED.
    2
  353. The true test of quality is if they pass owners long enough to end up becoming the vehicles used by rebels and terrorists in some distant land đŸ›»đŸš€
    2
  354. As automation progresses, distance and logistics becomes a bigger factor in costs; we had a hint of this in 2012 when fuel prices surged. I'd imagine overall manufacturing will become more localized especially as general purpose 3D printers get more advanced to satisfy increasingly customized customer orders, and then the dominating limitations becomes more imagination, access to inspirations, and the education to translate those visions to a computer. So South and SE Asia will benefit as manufacturing shifts toward them, though not to the same extent as China. Looking at how polluted and overspecialized China became, they probably wouldn't want it anyway.
    2
  355. A cracked flight deck would be a dealbreaker though.
    2
  356. PRC shills sure are sore winners.
    2
  357. It exists, but it's the opposite of what the Party wants.
    2
  358. Ironic how exclusive ethnostates who donate far more immigrants than take them in are trying to define the global "progressive trend".
    2
  359. China ironically doesn't automate its manufacturing processes as aggressively as it clearly could precisely because of how badly this would impact its employment figures.
    2
  360.  @Andy-P Not without great risk of political instability for the millions of Chinese who still need a job.
    2
  361. "Old leftists", a thinly veiled reference to XJP and his clique who are making China's "new era" less promising than the last one. Impressive that it passed the censors.
    2
  362. Per ton of carbon emitted, EVs are at least twice as efficient per mile driven when charged on 100% coal, and it only gets better with greener sources mixed in. There's active efforts to reuse (e.g. turning old EV batteries into building energy storage) and recycle used cells because of all the costs in mining and refining new ones.
    2
  363. Seems these order-seeking autocrats forget that the America thrives in more chaotic conditions; the US makes literal fires seem stable and predictable by comparison đŸ”„
    2
  364. Although other than outsourced Korea and anti-mobility Himalayas, the battles China itself is looking at are primarily at sea and in the air which they lack modern experience and historical prowess in fighting.
    2
  365. The Sierra Madre was originally grounded permanently by intent. There was no more port calls and dry dock maintenance once it was beached, they can only work on it so much in the midst of open sea. Plus they'd need to remove the ship first to refortify their claim, during which provides an opening for the Chinese to seize it.
    2
  366. ​ @GavinGlass Which Chinese brand and what city? Overseas I've heard nothing but horror stories just for replacement parts and finding mechanics even at the dealership who can do anything more intensive than a brake flush.
    2
  367. ​If you hear what Chinese media has been saying about America in untranslated Mandarin for the past decade, you'd be surprised how much we weren't "giving back" sooner.
    2
  368. The problem is getting any ship past the Chinese picket line. Plus it's a waste to beach a seaworthy vessel when the Philippine Navy is already sorely underequipped for the amount of sea they're charged to defend.
    2
  369. China banning Western-branded technology in certain areas or systems based on "national security concerns" means Designed in China equivalents include if not actively use similar intel-supporting capabilities themselves.
    2
  370. Russia is trying to justify reestablishing itself as an imperial power. It might not be an overseas adventure, but it's still colonialism: military subjugation to install a governor that the locals won't find a relief compared to their previous leadership. The Chinese government should take heed, because it has run out of neighbors who are incapable of fighting back.
    2
  371. Maybe not a closure, but ship insurance rates for sailing through PRC-controlled waters will certainly surge. This would scare off the civilian traffic who brings the affordable food, fuel, and export revenues that Mainland China relies on to survive.
    2
  372. The US at least tries, as much inspecting as “small government” opposition allows funding for. China though is actively negligent if the customers aren’t known Party members.
    2
  373. Some hotels do provide VPNs for guests on their wifi, but it's not a widespread practice. Out of all the places I stayed in the Mainland, I only lucked out once at what I remember was The Ritz-Carlton Guǎngzhƍu.
    2
  374. Alipay does allow foreign cards, but not all vendors are set up to take it and there's a „5000 limit per transaction if they do.
    2
  375. No it's the same country. But "New China" is still on a different planet from Earth, even the Chinese themselves realized this seeing all the festive unmasked faces in packed Qatari stadiums last year while despite "unwavering" Zero-COVID their cases were on a rise alarming enough to compel daily PCR testing before the ÜrĂŒmqi fire.
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  376. This really should have started decades ago when Mainland China began blocking Google and Wikipedia and such.
    2
  377. That's why it's best to keep shortsighted money-blinded businessmen away from politics.
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  378. That would involve a collapse in new buyers and an explosion of additional debt by developers, which is exactly against the central plan of the Party.
    2
  379. Well yeah, there's a reason "internal security" gets a budget at least as large as the PLA~ and one that likely isn't as wasted on corruption.
    2
  380. It wouldn't be surprising, the Party has callously sacrificed millions of Chinese to develop and maintain its political security before. It's why they've been calling up every doctor they can redeploy to Beijing and protect Party officials while leaving the countryside even more vulnerable; it's not like those people can vote them out at the next election anyway. They'll just dismiss the loss of farmers and cheap migrant laborers as "Future China's problem".
    2
  381. I’ve heard their 7nm achivement comes at the cost of enormous dud rates which makes it grossly unprofitable. The Chinese government would ultimately spend itself dry propping up Huawei if it can’t get its hands on more efficient Western EUV fab systems.
    2
  382. Combined arms are the tactics in the field, joint means the overaching command coordination between military branches
    2
  383. Tell that to the YouTube algorithm.
    2
  384. Bhutan doesn't have relations with the US or any of the P5 nations. They're an Indian protectorate, and practically all their major foreign relations goes through New Delhi.
    2
  385. Although it still seems to happen regularly. The most obvious strange behaviors I've heard happen to smartphones while in China all happened on iPhone.
    2
  386.  @308_Negra_Arroyo_Lane  Long COVID is a problem though. It takes Americans out of the full time workforce which ultimately induces upward pressures on inflation for everyone from the overly slack job market.
    2
  387. Especially considering they're competing in unchaotic non-team sports which authoritarian programs can usually squeeze out an elite individual performer. It just shows how weak China's environment is in developing its people beyond well-bounded plays that are rehearsable to the point they're practically staged.
    2
  388. Right, China is just dumping their EVs which their own people don’t want to buy. They have junkyards full of “sold” and fully registered but never used EVs because of how excessively subsidized they were.
    2
  389. Now I'm wondering how anxious Běijīng is nowadays over the thought of how many Chinese "patriots" are actually performing counterintelligence for America.
    2
  390. Bhutan is officially an Indian protectorate. They don't want the complications of aligning itself with anyone but New Delhi.
    2
  391. They're going down the same path of North Korea, who likewise turned to their "pure" and "superior" culture when their tangible economics stalled.
    2
  392. A stark contrast with Americans who habitually inflate and dramatize their conflicts, but deeper down aren't so concerned about the overall breakdown of the country to rush for a fresh passport and expatriate.
    2
  393. Yet most of the direct viewpoints come from Chinese state-run media. It comes as a surprise when Tony quotes from independent sources beyond the regular PKU professor Michael Pettis.
    2
  394. They're both classically imperial nations whose anxiety over their regime's security led them to repeatedly try expanding their borders: Russia towards the Eastern Pacific, China towards Central Asia. The West used to do similar, but after WWII realized they can gain much the same influence by promoting democracy and gaining support through a more attractive open culture.
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  395. ​Not to mention their horrible resale value, which despite the e-haters is less about being an EV in general and more about being Designed in China where they try to be as disposable as possible.
    2
  396. Having lived in China, I've learned that the most pessimistic news and figures tend to be closer to reality. State media is mostly useful for knowing what topics the Party is focused on over time, not the actual substance in the reports themselves.
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  397. The "irresponsible" part including selling CNY for foreign currency to support expatriation.
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  398. The timeline and severity would be off, but the overall trends still hold. That's why PZ is worth listening about the causes to even when he gets annoyingly excited about some overblown effect.
    2
  399. I'd wager their data on "Good" vs "Bad GDP" will end up as another "state secret" when they discover how net unproductive the vast majority of their economic activities -- particularly those fueled by state subsidies -- truly are.
    2
  400. Whether the node sizes are truly accurate or not, apparently the production yields of that purported generation is abysmal and not improving with any quickness. It's more deception than achievement.
    2
  401. There's a reason the nations closest to the PRC are also the most suspicious of Beijing
    2
  402. That's probably partly why America seems so apathetic to dedollarization schemes, it's our adversaries making a big mistake at their own expense.
    2
  403. If it was "uncontrolled", how were they vetted for their criminal/terrorist history that bars Temporary Protected Status?
    2
  404. China's current vaccines don't work as well as hoped, as hinted by all the fully-vaccinated people in other countries still dying of COVID even before the rise of Delta and Omicron which they're even less effective against. China used the classic attenuated virus approach, and apparently exposure to the whole virus creates messier antibodies than ones trained on clean spike proteins that mRNA and viral vector alternatives produce. Also Chinese are much more afraid of SARS-2, likely because of the damage caused by the previous SARS-1, and the PRC government uses it to their advantage even though they're still basically limited to testing, tracking, and isolated detentions. They're not in a rush to have their people enabled to tolerate exposure on their own through importing mRNA vaccines until there is a Made in China one that the Party can promote.
    2
  405. Small fires contained in a country or two is still way more manageable than the absolute mayhem of a world war which next time involves nuclear exchange.
    2
  406. Policy is not enough, the society itself has to become more accommodating to dependents. This is why the competitive environment of capitalism sees a decline of native-born children as minimum standards for a young adult to achieve net productivity keeps rising, and China is among the most hypercompetitive and socially callous societies today.
    2
  407. The PRC is really failing to read the room with Europe. Just because they hesitate to commit a hard cutoff of Russian energy imports doesn't mean they're not looking for permanent alternatives. Similar is already happening with international businesses in China whose overall excitement to enter and stay only keeps dropping.
    2
  408.  @TheCbins  Tony lives in Beijing doing analysis of China’s business environment from the inside, and is professionally fluent in Mandarin. You’re the one with the burden of proof.
    2
  409. A blockade is a recognized act of war. China would try to call it some sort of “law enforcement” and not prevent all ships from coming through, to not trigger the clear aggression that totally isolating Taiwan would compel a full military response for.
    2
  410. I've heard Wall Street analysts calculated the true value of RMB at more like „9 per USD
    2
  411. It's probably the urban core, residential blocks are elsewhere and not nearly as flashy (day or night)
    2
  412. I'd doubt it, considering the poorer inland provinces are even more overextended in their failures to attract coast-like prosperity.
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  413. It is rattling sabres, the difference being the American one not only actually existing but also proven to perform as expected.
    2
  414. Tozinameran (the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine) was trialed in China along with the rest of the world in 2020, though instead of Pfizer running the trials in China it was Fosun Pharma. For some reason though the PRC government sat on the data and hasn't allowed for its distribution until now.
    2
  415. Having lived in Beijing, I can confirm that the most pessimistic reports about "New China" tend to be closest to the ground truth.
    2
  416. We missed the chance back when America was born. Famous Francophile Thomas Jefferson wanted our new nation to switch to the nascent SystĂšme Internationale, but the measurement samples got stolen en route by pirates.
    2
  417. If independent estimates are to be believed, America's debt-to-GDP burden is like 1/3 of what China has accrued. The US is a relatively prudent borrower compared how Beijing basically burned real RMB on unproductive projects to achieve fake numbers.
    2
  418. Perhaps they got some specs from the Sturgeon-class USS Guitarro, aka the "Mare Island Mud Puppy"
    2
  419. That "analysis" about Taiwan sounds like a "management consultant", where management already made their decision and are just looking for "independent" justification to commit. It's becoming clear that XJP wants to invade Taiwan before they fall off their economic and demographic peak in about a decade, having destroyed any hope of peaceful reunification for at least the next two generations through the obviously not-so "Two Systems" practice that Hong Kong has come to experience.
    2
  420. "Resolutely" volatile Zero-COVID disruptions leading into unexplained retail banking stoppages and permanent international divestment doesn't exactly inspire confidence with consumers, who now question if their purchasing power will ever be as good going forward.
    2
  421. It seems at least with Anglophones that we're more successfully separating the Chinese people from the state, and destroying the strategy of the CPC to equate itself as the entirety of "China".
    2
  422. Anyone would if it could, if not for its own use then to sell to someone who wants it. Unlike how revealing the Chinese hacks highlights the threat of the CPC, Beijing is likely keeping quiet about any Western infiltrations they find in their systems as it would be a sign of critical weakness of the Party -- infiltrations that I'd wager are already well active considering how much the state demands backdoors into all its information flows, and how deeply the US seems to have infiltrated the equally offensive-biased cyber systems of Russia.
    2
  423. They have to be, they are the Party.
    2
  424. The CPC is in a different universe, an entire existence diving deeper in its own fanfiction because it refuses to be corrected by regular, anonymized, truthful popular polling.
    1
  425. Autocrats in general lack self-correction abilities, the PRC just has the money and industrial might to counterflood its sinking ship and appear to stay upright while fundamentally still taking on water.
    1
  426. In Chinese language media though, the new Cold War sounds like it began like a decade ago. We English speakers are just only realizing it now.
    1
  427.  @CorePathway  "China" as the Party-run PRC is defining it, especially now that Taiwan is deciding to diverge from the label.
    1
  428. 7:07 CEOs would be wise to listen to the warnings of Bill Bishop. China's loose interpretation of the law means anything no matter how far in the past or how little controversy you've created since, it can and will be used against you at the convenience of the Party; think MeToo but for money, where instead of personal violations it's "state security".
    1
  429. “American blogger Chris is a typical example”? No, a typical American if they travel abroad would go to Latin America, Western Europe, or Southeast Asia.
    1
  430. Autocratic major powers are feeling cornered, ironically by the falling birthrates and visible voluntary expatriations compelled by the stalling economies they themselves are responsible for.
    1
  431. America is the edge; we’re still the ones dictating the specifications and funding purchase orders.
    1
  432. More like YouTube is too crooked for this channel, and every other video that criticizes its corporate ownership who are still biased towards Communist China.
    1
  433. Right, the Philippines asked the US to leave at the end of the Cold War and that's exactly what the Americans did. Even made foreign operated bases illegal in their constitution. There's a good reason Manila has been trying to reverse that decision from decades ago.
    1
  434. I'd imagine the Chinese authorities appreciate the likes of Tony and Michael Pettis, who provide a rare independent insight into their own country because they can't trust the sycophants and their rose-tinted reports who comprise the Party and the government. All these foreigners have to do is never report speaking in Chinese and start trending on Weibo.
    1
  435. Xi Thought is basically just "I alone can save us". In America we know how well that went for the previous guy, and there's nothing inherent about so-called "Chinese characteristics" that makes their version fundamentally different.
    1
  436. That would definitely not be the isolationist and transactionary Trump.
    1
  437. Unfortunately the way Xi purged the Party, there's less and less to be gained from talks with anyone but him. And even then he does more lecturing than listening.
    1
  438. Right, if anything Chinese "no strings attached" loans only proliferate the corruption that keep those countries risky and poor. There's a reason post-Cold War Western aid demand improvements to governance and education.
    1
  439. That's ironically what will happen if Beijing continues advancing their vision of a "multipolar world", because that just introduces more fault lines and conflicts of interest between the regions.
    1
  440. Hopefully not the wrong lesson of expressing its prosperity through conquest.
    1
  441. "Crisis" in Chinese is written as ć±æ©Ÿ, the first character meaning "danger" and the second "opportunity". Pro-PRC enthusiasts have to hold cognitive dissonance to improperly separate the two logograms, when they should really be read together as in "chance for peril".
    1
  442. Those programs and taxes stabilized American society from self-eating laissez-faire capitalism fueled by the ultimately pro-cyclical gold standard. The New Deal institutionalized labor unions, where the alternative would have been full on Communism.
    1
  443. They’d argue anyone can beat down an unarmed petitioner, but food inspection requires training and judgment
 which doesn’t speak well of China’s ability to educate.
    1
  444. If Beijing can unify the focus of amnesiac drama queen democracies like America, they must be doing something terribly disturbing.
    1
  445. Beijing's "alternative" to Western democratized capitalism is just dictatorship with more money, omitting mention of the toxic society and ultimately political violence that emerges in the bottling up of personal expression.
    1
  446. Most of the world outside of Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe (i.e. the countries that gained independence after the establishment of the PRC) do not follow the Beijing's One China Principle, and maintain standing "unofficial" relations with Taipei. Meaning the majority of the world sees Taiwan as separate from the Mainland, even if they're not a "sovereign".
    1
  447. Considering that like a trillion dollars worth of bona fide Chinese gold bonds issued by the Qing Empire and Republic of China still haven't been paid since the Communist takeover, I wouldn't hold my breath.
    1
  448. A truly prosperous society would prioritize the welfare of its customers and employees over executives and shareholders. Unfortunately we now have it backwards.
    1
  449. Hey Tony, could you check the audio levels? Your content portion is significantly quieter than other YouTube videos, ads, and even your own intro 🔉
    1
  450. ☑ Socially traditionalist in practice ☑ Coercive force as the main marker of national strength ☑ Negotiations primarily by personal connections ☑ Promoting a return to a past glory that enforces fixed status by birthright ☑ Unapologetically attacking political opponents of the tactics they themselves use far more regularly Yup, Trumpism and the Communist Party of China are essentially the same polity.
    1
  451. Probably because they don't report in Mandarin and thus don't trend among Chinese citizens, so they're a useful more truthful view of China that its ruling Party isn't getting from their brownnosing subordinates.
    1
  452. ⁠Pretty much the only global invention that came out of “New China” is the modern vape pen, and even that had heavily derived from earlier Western efforts 🚬
    1
  453. It's much like the construction projects within China: appearance over actual overall positive cost-benefit.
    1
  454.  @blafonovision4342  For utilities like healthcare and infrastructure perhaps, but certainly not to the extent of making an inefficient SOE for nearly every industry like China has.
    1
  455. The Muslim World seems to care more about the creation of a Palestinian state at the expense of Israel, than it is in developing the resident Palestinians into prosperity. Western citizens seem to actually care more about Palestinians as a people rather than as a geopolitical pawn.
    1
  456. Even subsistence may be a stretch, considering how much of China's arable land has since been wasted by industrial pollution and urban development.
    1
  457. Tony provides a valuable independent assessment of China that Party officials can't risk reporting, while doing so not speaking in Mandarin which can get spread immediately by Chinese netizens. That's why he's able to continue living and working in Mainland China.
    1
  458. So Basically Trump is praised for making direct confrontation at the elite establishment, even though he himself is a born-rich urban elite who ultimately has no problem sacrificing even his closest relationships to save himself.
    1
  459. Don’t vote for Trump then, the Republican platform doesn’t believe in diplomacy as anything more than a mouthpiece to air their demands and grievances at other countries.
    1
  460. Xi and other autocrats need those foreign conflicts when efforts to correct their self-made problems inevitably fail.
    1
  461. China doesn't really offer any other trustworthy form of investment for its people due to the overly centralized ownership of enterprises, only concrete shells that at least you can see.
    1
  462. Those largely disappeared from the rest of the world, apart from Japan's Sony.
    1
  463. ​ @SirShiv7 Reality is the USD is not going anywhere. Even with the sanctions, no other currency has the stability and global trust of the greenback, and BRICS members aren't going to cede enough of their economic sovereignty to create a common one for themselves.
    1
  464. Problem is even our academics and mainstream media parrot China's officially reported information out of an inability to independently gather it themselves, if not out of lazy ignorance. So when a supposedly trustworthy Western source publishes a positive story about the PRC, it's because they're limited to deliberately pro-Party framing and not because of what we'd actually think if we could see the whole picture.
    1
  465. Taiwan is a nuclear threshold power in its own right. In fact the CIA once discovered and had to stop the KMT from completing its own bomb back in the 1980s.
    1
  466. Itself an achievement considering how much mechanically simpler EVs are.
    1
  467. The opaqueness and secrecy behind Chinese efforts of all sorts doesn't help.
    1
  468. American exercises often deliberately handicap in favor of the adversary in order to 1) not reveal its true performance limits, and 2) discover how far degraded they must get before it's an even match.
    1
  469. The problem with hydrogen is it's so lightweight that it leaks out of literally everything -- containing useful amounts for a useful amount of time in a reasonably compact and lightweight package is its most major issue, and the problem is fundamentally physical. Plus the most efficient way to get the pure hydrogen needed is from not-so-green hydrocarbons, itself a problem of scaling up short of sustained nuclear fusion to provide the massive amount of energy required to desalinate and electrolyze plentiful seawater. Japanese car makers were late to the BEV game because they focused so much effort on hydrogen. Like fusion, hydrogen for transport is a lofty goal but remains experimental at best.
    1
  470. Hopefully it means American automakers start engineering cars that customers are proud to keep, as opposed to keeping their reputation as oversized garage queens while the C-Suite and worker unions continue fighting over the diminishing profits.
    1
  471. For "New China", stagnation might as well be a spiraling decline due to the political implications on the Party's legitimacy for continued unchallenged rule.
    1
  472. More likely business as SOEs are championed and private enterprises are left to wither in desperation for inputs and customers.
    1
  473. Especially now that fracking and green energy collapsed the America’s absolute need for OPEC oil, leaving the US free to look at what remaining value its autocratic friends really bring.
    1
  474. They should be careful what they wish for, because if it's "economic independence" they want from the West, it's economic independence from the West they'll start to get. And the PRC is nowhere near ready to rebalance its overcapacity industries against its underperforming agriculture and domestic consumption.
    1
  475. GDP just measures transactions, not true productivity gains. I'm wondering how much of the GDP data comes from just the sales of medical supplies and services targeting COVID đŸ€”
    1
  476. China isn't really growing though, outside of debt-driven state projects. And HK only prospered because it was a Western portal into China -- without that foreign influence it would've remained a pirate cove turned inconvenient bedroom community for Guǎngzhƍu up the river.
    1
  477. Yet the US is keeping its interest rates up because consumer spending, corporate profits, and the price inflation its causing are too high.
    1
  478. 11:45 Remember kids, the safest way to see đŸ±đŸŠ is to first choose high-ranking parents.
    1
  479. Indeed, the PRC's failure to develop its economy beyond an export-driven model means their prosperity can be taken away just as drastically.
    1
  480. When they develop their own effective mRNA or viral vector vaccine, since the classic whole virus approach they used isn't working nearly as well as they hoped (confirmed by all the deaths worldwide who had the Chinese shots). The Party can't stand to lose face by importing the Western ones that have been out for a while, and proven to be safe and effective against crippling symptoms. Then there's the problem of Chinese people having little trust in the quality of their own products, so the hesitancy is going to further retard distribution even if it was available today.
    1
  481. Chinese diplomats seem very controlled through the Chinese MFA, with little autonomy or agency to so much attend outside events without clearance from Beijing.
    1
  482. Red tape isn't the main barrier to marriage and starting a family in China as much as the lack of personal matches due to changes in cultural expectations and economic realities.
    1
  483. They can't even grow rice or anything well, so they rely on truckloads of fertilizers and chemicals just to get a marginal yield. They're not even in the same race as Western farmers in terms of cropland productivity, and their best fields are now destroyed by industrial runoff and urban development.
    1
  484. Also a dozen countries (i.e. tolls and potential points of disruption) over land between China and the EU market. At sea there's really only two piracy hotspots in between (Strait of Malacca and the Arabian Sea).
    1
  485. I'm not hearing as much Mandarin in Korea anymore either.
    1
  486. The CPC is another dynastic autocrat ruling over China, just tied by philosophy rather than bloodline. Unfortunately that also leaves China vulnerable to the cycle of violent disintegration when the ruler loses the tolerance of the Chinese people.
    1
  487. Only <2% access news from sources not edited or under the thumb of the Party, which highlights how isolated Mainland Chinese are from true global sentiments which are significantly more suspicious of PRC intentions and not nearly so hateful or blaming of "warmongering" Americans.
    1
  488. The Party doesn't want to "surrender" to the West by admitting a need for outside assistance, especially for their "success" against COVID through their "unwavering" orders.
    1
  489. I don't see how this improves the travel situation until they get rid of the "health kit" (internal passport) "close contact pop up" minefield that rules your day to day life once you're cleared into country.
    1
  490. The Chinese equivalent of Millennials and Gen Z were schooled in post-Tiananmen "patriotic education" and enjoyed until COVID an economy that supported the government narrative, so they had high expectations about the respect they "deserve". It looks like this pride has been dramatically tempered lately given the PRC's collapsing economic prospects going forward (real estate troubles, tech sector crackdown, international divestment, etc), punctuated by their sudden inelegant exit from the long "unwavering" and obviously abusive Zero-COVID policy.
    1
  491. NZ is far away and not a major source of trade secrets that the PRC is interested in, which means they're not as concerned about aggression from Beijing like China's neighbors and larger trade markets are. This gives the Kiwis the position to focus on domestic interests like expanding their export markets as opposed to handling national security concerns.
    1
  492. China classically believes it is sovereign to 怩䞋 (i.e. the whole world), where the supremacy of its ruler should not be questioned everywhere its court controls and anywhere living Chinese blood flows.
    1
  493. Food alone is plenty, all the US has to do when the shooting starts is declare the ECS and SCS uninsurable and then all the ships with the food and fuel China needs goes elsewhere. No amount of overland alternatives will be able to make up the volume, proximity, and affordability of these vital resources.
    1
  494. Xi's ideological turn toward statism started happening years before COVID. The pandemic is merely their excuse to implement the nationwide police state needed to protect the Party as "New China" stalls from all the aging, debt, and pollution that they themselves caused and can't really blame on anyone else. This is why there's a lack of excitement or optimism around his third term. In fact there's concern Xi would try a Putin-like political "defense" by attacking Taiwan as he hunts for his own "Make China Great Again" achievement.
    1
  495. It could have been an early form of what became SARS-2, hence the one-off spike in its detection. Plus the pressure to not preemptively villanize China with all the tourist and student money they were bringing.
    1
  496. China used to be self sufficient until they poisoned their farmlands with industrial chemicals and urban developments.
    1
  497. ​ @tonysu8860 Businesses are known to think in quarters instead of generations. STEM folks are infamous for being horrible managers of people because things that humans value are better felt than analyzed -- there's a reason they're rarely seen holding office in openly competitive politics. Thus business executives and engineers are poor choices of people to run a country, and unfortunately those are the type of folks who dominate the CPC ranks and rule over modern China.
    1
  498. Right, both public and private organizations in more open societies know that turning themselves around when their momentum is backwards invariably involves changing the leadership. That's something the CPC is desperately trying to avoid as the fortunes reverse hopelessly on their "New China".
    1
  499. It's just a diplomatic snub against the US they can hype up on their local media, but most likely they'll quietly continue transacting in USD because the RMB has such little trust or usage outside of Mainland China directly.
    1
  500. Beijing isn't seeing the deterioration with the Global South, whom they see as their alternative to cultivate political and economic favors with to continue China's prosperity. However they're in a bubble with the usually corrupt politicians elected through deliberate administrative filters and often mass apathy; the true feeling on the street is far more ambivalent if not suspicious of Chinese activities, with European or American development aid with its demands for better local governance favored much more readily.
    1
  501. Right, Communist China is threatened to peak soon before its inevitable descent from aging, debt, and pollution. It seems increasingly uninterested in maintaining peaceful trade, but a total collapse of civilian trade (especially food and fuel) from cross-Straits crossfire and the breakdown of stability by its own rioting people that would follow would give the Party pause in forcibly fulfilling its promise of finally conquering that "renegade province".
    1
  502. The way those buildings were built, I doubt an independent authority would certify them for human habutation.
    1
  503. Efficiency and resilience are competing interests. Apple and other who stayed committed to China are experiencing the "eggs in one basket" problem for not investing enough in alternative sources.
    1
  504. The Philippines were let go partially due to domestic questions about America acquiring overseas territories through conquest instead of self-determination. If the Filipinos self-determined to further integrate into the Union instead, it'd be more difficult to argue against that. Washington already has enough headache trying to not promote Puerto Rico with statehood despite multiple popular referendums due to its effects on America's finances and Congressional balance of power.
    1
  505. I've heard that Wall Street analysts quietly value the RMB's true value at over 9 and still growing.
    1
  506. No we haven't. We'll still continue to push for diversification and friendshoring in case the ruling Party doesn't speak like they truly mean, which we've finally come to realize is habitual. It's more Beijing is salvaging its reputation to attract Western wealth before yet another real estate developer failure digs Mainland China even deeper in the financial hole.
    1
  507. Only because China is ruled by coercive Communists. See Taiwan for the counterexample of a Chinese ethnostate under a different polity.
    1
  508. Maybe not globalization as a whole, but definitely unlimited libertarianism that sees capital and production capacity overly seeking efficiency at the expense of resilience, and ending up concentrating in a few places like Mainland China.
    1
  509. It'll be interesting how the ROC will handle the ultimate test of a democratic republic, where the branches of government as voted in by its people express competing policy agendas instead of being all aligned under a common platform as it historically enjoyed.
    1
  510. Apparently China's strategic missiles already got hacked with "return to sender" tweaks, hence the purge ongoing especially within the Rocket Force.
    1
  511. Ironically they're now too old to fight and will just end up competing against China's security forces for rations in the event of a conflict. If the PRC gets into a war, all its enemy has to do is return enough crossfire to scare off civilian shipping and watch as the Mainland starves from lack of affordable food and fuel -- no invasion needed and thus no opportunity for casual combatants to fight back.
    1
  512. Post-COVID China is more living proof that supply-side “trickle down” economics ultimately doesn’t work; nobody will buy if they don’t have spending money. Give consumers buying power and taxable receipts will come.
    1
  513. I learned from living in China that the more pessimistic reports tend to be closest to the truth. There's no honesty about modern China's leadership, just sunshine and panda farts of how the Party always achieves progress.
    1
  514. China’s long-term “planning” proving to really be just dreaming, falling apart as soon as reality hits.
    1
  515. Right, a politically separate Taiwan was a mere demerit to the CPC back when the Cold War "White Terror" ROC was just an anticommunist mirror image of the oppressive Mainland. A democratized Taiwan however is a mortal threat to the continued existence to the Party.
    1
  516. There's plenty of nationalism in the US, but if anything it's the opposite of the expansionist threat these autocrats are inventing. It's called "America First" because its proponents want to _dis_engage from the world, forfeiting a Pax Americana where truly devastating industrialized combat is largely deterred by the forward deployment and relative house fire containment actions of America's constant "wars".
    1
  517. Nothing has happened that the Party failed to prevent you from seeing. It's like how their nongovernmental buildings remain standing but only because they're fairly new; if you look closer you'd find an alarming rate of degradation, and the ones that did collapse so far just weren't in a place local security couldn't isolate from unattached foreigners and prevent an embarrassing media storm.
    1
  518. Unfortunately Trump only calculates in cash dollars, not seeing the value in teachable experience (Ukraine) or mobility chokepoints (Taiwan). His focus on autocrat-facilitated easy money explains why he’s fallen so deep into the promises of Putin and fantasies about China.
    1
  519. ⁠It’s only a joke because Beijing thinks we’re too gracious to reciprocate their own policies against them. So many supposedly China-friendly countries reviewing their trade policies hints that we’re overall not willing to remain so linked with the PRC.
    1
  520. China was self-sufficient during the Cold War, and staying there kept them poor. They "let some people get rich" for a reason, but it came at the price of polluting out their farmlands and switching to energy sources they weren't naturally blessed with. Globalized trade lets them import the shortages, but the problem is they're also trying to dismantle what's been working by pushing for a "multipolar" (i.e. multiple sources of conflict) world with their autocratic anti-Western partners.
    1
  521. If anything the Party wants guys like Tony and Michael Pettis around to inform about the reality of modern China that they're not getting from their own lower levels full of sycophants, without the Chinese public knowing since they don't publish in Mandarin on WeChat.
    1
  522. Right, just because it's possible does not mean it's profitably scalable. Chinese state media will try to take advantage of survivor bias in what few make it through, conveniently ignoring how deep in net waste SMIC produced to get there.
    1
  523. ⁠It would be because of Elon, overselling us on janky “cars”, and preventing Tesla from improving on quality and the greater BEV market from becoming adopted by the wider driving public. That’s before he was given the power to bring his attitudes against resilience into government.
    1
  524. It’ll take much more than no-cost couch sessions to correct the minds of Mainland Chinese. Apparently on the Chinese internet, videos of animal abuse — a common subject for nascent serial killers — are unusually popular and considered perfectly tolerable to Party censors (China basically lacks animal welfare laws).
    1
  525. Public opinion is still the deciding factor in a democracy, which can (and occasionally has) overturn said government. For example, Indonesia only seems to be getting cozier with China but this is a very tenuous growth -- there's an ongoing undercurrent of suspicion against Chinese and Communists which have led to things like the May 1998 Riots (a lot of violence which got directed at Chinese-Indonesians) and the jailing of Jakarta's former Chinese-Indo mayor Ahok. I was there during the nationwide Omnibus Act protests, where the demostrations got heated to the point that my Chinese-Indo friends would wear a songkok/hijab if going out to help hide their Chinese face.
    1
  526. Reality of human nature is nowhere near ideal though. A "multipolar" world would just mean multiple fault lines for militarized conflict as each "pole" tries to assert its sphere of influence (including on itself as a defense against getting dominated by its neighbor). The last time we had an effectively multipolar world, it ended up in a couple World Wars.
    1
  527. @Peak White Monkey SerpentZA and LaoWhy86 (both of whom had lived in China for over a decade until just before COVID) are the first to tell you how the Chinese government at all levels are the most knee-jerk reactionary policy administrators they've ever dealt with. Living there myself, this still hasn't changed.
    1
  528. XJP was left speechless for a long while when asked how China would like if their business arrangements overseas were truly reciprocated. Guy would have been slaughtered in open political competition.
    1
  529. It was probably too disruptive to global trade, at least before COVID saw companies ordering a now glut of new vessels.
    1
  530. Běijīng is likely to remain on their "dynamic zero-COVID" strategy until they are able to develop and distribute their own mRNA or viral vector vaccine, since the classic whole virus approach they rely on isn't producing effective enough antibodies especially with the later variants. However the Party refuses to deign to import Western ones, including the BioNTech-Pfizer one that Fosun Pharma had been testing in China and hoped to get at least EUA a year ago. Couple this with long-standing fears over quality controls, and it looks like Mainland Chinese people are going to remain terrorized by their own vulnerability for a long time while the rest of the world moves on.
    1
  531. It doesn't, but unfortunately for the average Chinese family "real estate" is the most consistent thing to invest in given their lack of private land ownership and joke of a state-run stock market.
    1
  532. ​ @dntstpmving Considerably smaller range and infrastructure support, as well as more demanding checks to ensure the pressurized fuel tank isn't liable to suddenly burst. CNG is great for like city buses and other public transit vehicles that don't leave the area of their depot, where they can install a dedicated CNG fueling and maintenance facility.
    1
  533. The CPC needs conflict to salvage its political legitimacy now that its people can no longer be distracted by a growing economy. Remember that "struggle" is their fundamental philosophy.
    1
  534. Marx outlined a possible trend, not a prophecy. He sought to raise class consciousness to prepare society to benefit from the next industrial revolution, but also warned of premature overhaul in an underdeveloped economy as was eventually pushed by Communist Parties who corrupted his arguments for their own autocratic ends.
    1
  535. Chinese EVs also have half the range of what they advertise, unlike other automakers who often undersell to minimize disappointed expectations and its threat of retarding demand for all EVs for like an entire generation.
    1
  536. It is, but probably a lot closer to Germany and Japan level than to the US.
    1
  537. More like exploring a shift in the relationship strategy following China's shift to a more insular and aggressive stance. Those old metrics of "merit" are no longer valid anyway -- the ever-anxious Party is dismantling that hopeful Old China in favor of the Maoist "æ–°äž­ć›œ New China", and America needs those folks who think laterally and aren't afraid to try new approaches in the face of doors now locked shut.
    1
  538. It's the domestic corruption China's "aid" feeds that will ultimately keep Africa poor for as long as African politicians keep receiving from China.
    1
  539. More like confirmed Omicron outbreaks + CNY. The Olympics is coincidental.
    1
  540. ⁠If you can find them.
    1
  541. That would collapse the value of the RMB as way more Yuan wants to leave, while disappointment about the "real estate" actually offered in China discourages a balancing inflow.
    1
  542. I wouldn't be surprised if the conflation was intentional. It's a fairly foreign idea to separate ancestry from legal nationality and mental allegiance -- hence why Chinese state actors tend to target Overseas Chinese even if their family expatriated generations ago.
    1
  543.  @billpetersen298  It will be interesting how the AI will negotiate the opposition of China's own laws (like freedom of speech/religion/assembly/etc are enshrined in the PRC Constitution) and what the ruling Party actually desires.
    1
  544. First thorium reactors have to prove economical to operate, which they have yet to achieve.
    1
  545. Yeah, YT is clearly captured by pro-autocrat corporate interests. It's hit or miss to see comments that criticize either the CPC or the GOP.
    1
  546. ⁠Not to mention the widespread sentiment dating back to the Dutch colonial era that Chinese are exploitative foreigners when their immigration and comprative wealth grew dramatically. There’s a long simmering cultural suspicion within Indonesia against non-Muslims, Communists, and Chinese.
    1
  547. They achieved what they said it would do, just not in the way they really desired.
    1
  548. Masterworks sells supposed shares in pieces of fine art, which are itself a common vehicle for money laundering, tax avoidance, and overall concentration of wealth due to the fact that there is only one original copy and thus the price can be made basically arbitrary.
    1
  549. Taiwan presents a mortal threat to the CPC, because it's very existence is living proof of what a Chinese ethnostate could be without the Party.
    1
  550. Chinese vaccines aren't effective -- it was marginal against the original strains and have only decreased with the variants that since came to dominate -- and the Chinese people themselves are not very trusting of it either. But importing Western mRNA/viral vector vaccines might as well be an act of surrender for the Party, who had spent the last couple of years using effective COVID control as the main argument to silence critics especially as the gag of easy prosperity degrades from unreversed aging, overleveraged debts, and widespread chemical pollution.
    1
  551. The modern “China Dream” is more like Party Delusion.
    1
  552. That's on top of the nearly 2M deaths that The Economist estimated already happened in China from the previous more deadly variants.
    1
  553. America confidently dramatizes all its issues too, we're damn near shameless about all the problems we have and our ideas to fix it. The PRC however can't even get its own numbers straight despite complete control, it's like their continued employment depends on "meeting" higher expectations.
    1
  554. Chinese vaccines were marginal to begin with, and as shown by other countries that took it are practically useless against Delta and especially Omicron. I'm sure they're rushing to develop a domestic mRNA or viral vector vaccine that works, but trust for COVID vaccines among the Chinese people is not great and likely even worse for a Made in China version.
    1
  555. Wokeness is a mere annoyance, it's MAGA that's destructive to what makes America great. Republicans have long held an strategy to sabotage good governance and sell a libertarian alternative which their rich cronies are conveniently best positioned to exploit at the long term expense of an actually free market.
    1
  556. Yes, the PRC is still grasping at their narrative that COVID came from abroad. It's a desperate attempt to salvage justification for the past three years of increasingly ineffective Zero-COVID.
    1
  557. SG relies on globally open seas just to feed itself. China putting up even just administrative barriers in the SCS to express its sovereignty there presents a direct threat to the continued prosperity if not survival of Singapore.
    1
  558. There's more opportunity with Trump to get him to sell us out.
    1
  559. It's more hype gas to the tankies than it is actual gas in real fuel tanks.
    1
  560. Hence why Beijing spends probably less on the PLA than it does on "internal security" ensuring the Chinese public don't develop a "class consciousness" by isolating and censoring their shared grievances against their government.
    1
  561. Knowing how centralized the Chinese MFA is plus Xi's further concentration of power, I would not be surprised if Wang Yi either parrots what Xi believes or what he thinks Xi wants to say.
    1
  562. Strong winds at its back... while trying to perform a soft landing of its stalling export-driven economy. If you're familiar with aviation, you'd know a tailwind is exactly what you don't want at this time.
    1
  563. Trump is a higher risk but higher reward, especially since he is more likely to sell out American interests for personal gain unlike the Democratic opposition who are more considerate of America's leadership reputation and inclusive philosophy.
    1
  564.  @bamkobe1  Right, Russia had superior technology last year only for it to get abandoned from horrible sustainment performance and towed away by a local Ukrainian farmer.
    1
  565. EVs get twice the miles per ton of carbon emitted on 100% coal, and it only gets more efficient with cleaner sources mixed in. Plus power plants don't move so pollution controls are way easier to enforce.
    1
  566. Hamburgers being a politically convenient Western cuisine, unlike their "clean" and "pure" Chinese dishes.
    1
  567. If it was fake he wouldn't be apologizing for the sounds of construction, sickness, and temporary changes of equipment in every third video. Adding noise to simulate live recording is unnecessary work for a lone-wolf effort like this channel.
    1
  568. It's the price of Pax Americana. Remember before the World Wars was also a "multipolar" world involving multiple fault lines for militarized conflicts.
    1
  569. The PRC under Xi is only serious about making the CPC look great, glorious, and correct. The Party's problem is they're committed to a lot of expensive mistakes, and they don't have a dignified way out.
    1
  570. Right, even with intact facilities it'll be nowhere near the yields without the hyperspecialized knowledge of career engineers to tweak the fabs back into spec constantly. Plus they're extremely sensitive to the purity of inputs, which is increasingly rare in a Mainland China that continues to irreversibly pollute its own water. PRC chip yields will be chronically behind short of Taiwan voluntarily ceding itself whole back into the rest of China.
    1
  571. Between the "engagement" of pro-MAGA diatribes and bot-written calls for "investing advice" vs unmonetizable informed public debate, it's clear where Alphabet's interests lie.
    1
  572. It wouldn't surprise me if China wants to weaken Russia in order to gain more control over the Central Asia -stans, a continuation of the westward conquest strategy that China has committed across the dynasties.
    1
  573. Mainland China is fairly isolated in terms of capital flows, as intended by the PRC government. I'd imagine the hit to the overall world economy could look more like 2008 but with the actors flipped. The bigger impact might be in the supply chain when Chinese businesses can't pay their suppliers or workers, but we've been diversifying out of China for a while and a China recession will only accelerate the permanent divestment going forward.
    1
  574. Seizing TSMC doesn't automatically guarantee access to its superior fabs: most of the productivity comes from Taiwan's wealth of human capital, and those extremely specialized engineers will likely not be willing or available (due to expatriations or deaths) to work at the same level under forced Mainland ownership. Retaining that vital human resource requires more soft power, and Beijing is already bleeding what little it has to begin with.
    1
  575. Wait til we start getting China's "final warnings", which even the Soviets had joked about
    1
  576. All of China got conquered at least twice by by non-HĂ n invaders even before Europeans started showing up by sea.
    1
  577. I've seen estimates that China's economy is like 40% smaller than officially reported (so still #2 but much more distant). Plus they're still deep in the middle-income trap and trending towards deindustrialization. Short answer is likely never.
    1
  578. Ironically if it's not COVID they're coming in for, it's COVID they'll catch just waiting their turn with everyone else.
    1
  579. China historically uses water features as borders instead of as territories too. That's why as much as possible they limited foreigner presence to literal islands.
    1
  580. Scandinavia, not China. The only Democrats praising the PRC are the ones with corporate interests.
    1
  581. Social conservatives need to artificially victimize themselves to comfort their failing worldview. It's mental masochism.
    1
  582. If China doesn't start widely accepting foreign credit cards and conveniently letting foreigners go about town without a Chinese SIM, casual tourists will be in for an unpleasant experience.
    1
  583. The Party will just rebrand their "New China" ship as a barge, deliberately sitting low in the water for stability and capacity. Right up until the water overtops the main deck and the Chinese people kept captive on board realize that Party members up in the bridge have already evacuated with all of the proper lifeboats.
    1
  584. China's GDP may or may not beat Japan for #2, but it's becoming clear that it's nowhere near the US and is likely now falling further behind.
    1
  585. China has to work quite hard to keep Indonesia favorable to it, because the ongoing undercurrent of suspicion against Chinese and Communists (especially among the politically potent Islamists) means sentiments there could turn against China really quickly.
    1
  586. They're socially conservative anti-woke and still going broke. The problem is they're overly pandering their idealism.
    1
  587. "Stalling" is more accurate, since it doesn't necessarily mean losing altitude at that moment. But whether by workers aging out or something more dramatic, eventually gravity will take over and the grossly imbalanced top-heavy PRC will find itself unable to recover.
    1
  588. We'd all be best listening to the outsiders actually living within the PRC's economic structure, over that of the outsiders looking at its façade and brochures.
    1
  589. Until they cap out on the $50k currency exchange annual limit. Might be doable for now but eventually this will cause foreign migrants to seek alternatives on where to invest their time and remit money from.
    1
  590. More like just African diplomats, because it's too annoying and increasingly displeasing to be a tourist of color.
    1
  591. Ironically, Imperial Japan called for more regional insularity from outside powers about this time 100 years ago, right before mobilizing its military to make this happen by force.
    1
  592. Thing is it’s not productive either for the cost of operation and maintenance. As was mentioned, freight-capable lines would have been a wiser decision, which is why the US can still move bulk and hazardous material about the country far far better than anybody else even on tracks older than anyone alive today. HSR serves more as a marketing tool than as a real people-mover, since it still competes with flights as well as much cheaper buses and slow trains. And Chinese consumers are very price-conscious.
    1
  593. In CNY, not enough. In any other currency, far too much.
    1
  594. The way they're going, the CPC is going to ultimately face the same fate as every autocratic dynasty that ruled China before. All their high-tech surveillance might prevent spontaneous popular action, but it can't inspire popular action either when the Party needs their people most.
    1
  595. All of China is vulnerable to a similar outbreak, because the nationwide immunity is weak from lack of exposure and effective vaccination. Variants will only become less damaging and more virulent in order to survive, but the Party conveniently ignores that first part because the "controls" they impose make a really good excuse to practice and refine measures to restrict movement and censor complaints which are useful to political projects like stamping out other protests up to a wartime posture for their promised invasion of Tåiwān.
    1
  596. Problem is the convention may not be valid anymore, as a vibrant economy is no longer as possible going forward (due to aging, debt, and pollution) and is likely getting deprioritized permanently in favor of ethnonationalism. Word on the street is that the Party is on a power trip with "anti-COVID" measures with how effective it was ending the HK protests, dissuading foreigners and their ideas from entering, and getting Mainlanders used to government-imposed hardships and inconveniences under a wartime posture. This is why pessimism is so high despite how "safe from COVID" the country claims to be, and why interest in expatriation has exploded.
    1
  597. Dams build up pressure, and will eventually collapse catastrophically depending on the quality of its build and maintenance.
    1
  598. The CPC and "efficiency"-seeking multinational corporate executives.
    1
  599. China doesn't have "colonies" because the belief is that all of 怩䞋 is a sovereign part of China already, even if they don't know it.
    1
  600. They’ll hit 5% growth
 by indebting itself an auspicious 8% of its GDP 💾
    1
  601. Much like everything else modern China has developed
    1
  602. Seems like they try to define the "global south" as those places who seek an alternative to the inclusive anti-tribal democracy that the West converged on... and fail to come up with a system that's just as economically vibrant and politically durable.
    1
  603. "New China" is making it more clear that its "leftist" "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" is really just a synonym for socially conservative fascism. The CPC is basically trying to resurrect the Imperial Japan that they actively teach its subjects to hate.
    1
  604. They’d infiltrate Republicans directly too and likewise stumble in their spycraft, if they “looked the part” to get hired in the first place. If anything the influence on conservatives could be more nefarious because it’s hidden through proxy shills promising the profits of working with China to our executives and influencers.
    1
  605. But not for the Party, who never forgives debt and likely never will as long as they rule over China. Which is ironic considering they're themselves ignoring the trillion or so USD worth of gold they're obligated to pay off as the recognized inheritors of Qing and Republic issued government bonds.
    1
  606. Problem is "China's territory" encroaches on the the territories everybody else recognizes.
    1
  607. Lei's Real Talk mentioned than a Party insider leaked that Li's death was a lot more horrifying, and that his body was quickly cremated despite the wife's request for a proper autopsy. Speculation, lies, or truth, what we do know is that Beijing isn't going to convincingly reveal what it actually knows.
    1
  608. They're not even parents anymore. So many couples are practicing a Zero Child Policy because of how hopelessly unaffordable China has become.
    1
  609. Actively defending political campaigns could be itself seen as government manipulation of our democracy, which lends legitimacy to the already loudmouth conspiracy theorists our media is completely spammed with.
    1
  610. All the CPC has going for it is scale, but that's just inherited from being in control of China and not from the controls it tries to have China perform. This scale has thus far overcome the inefficiency and incompleteness of modern Chinese products. But just like how the Qing withered and fell from industrial technology overcoming the raw scale under the command of a self-righteous autocratic government, global networking and AI developed from more accurate and uncensored sources threaten to do so again.
    1
  611.  @skydragon23101979  The Party will always find some fault with the US given any level of resistance. Their whole premise is based on perpetual "struggle", and they'll create or amplify an "enemy" to redirect attention away from the core narrator.
    1
  612. It was more like a fortified field hospital, and not a very good one either -- other countries would have done faster, cheaper, and better with tents. Over time the template degraded into the prisons known as "fāngcāng".
    1
  613.  @Zei33  It's not as much industrial chemicals though, mostly organic sewage and plastic trash.
    1
  614. Yes, he's a New Zealander residing in China
    1
  615. It’s not even that strong of a ban either, since access to services in the app itself wouldn’t be affected. It’s not like China’s Golden Shield (Great Firewall) that actively blocks all communication with Western competitors.
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  616. It’s not even that strong of a ban either, since access to services in the app itself wouldn’t be affected. It’s not like China’s Golden Shield (Great Firewall) that actively blocks all communication with Western competitors.
    1
  617. AI is an amplification tool, which unfortunately means like politics and the internet that without preexisting pro-social limitations and consequences, the most hateful anti-social expressions will drown out everything else and the opposition has to get more extreme just to be heard.
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  618. Summer 2021 yeah, before the embarrassment of Shanghai and Shenzhen
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  619. 7:42 America's population pyramid prediction looks remarkably consistent, which is good for governance and the socioeconomic environment it maintains in which the markets rely.
    1
  620. Chinese elites mistakenly believe Americans are towed by a "small number" of "dark force" extremists because of the way they readily steer Chinese public opinion through their own walled garden of state-run media. In reality there's a consensus of first-hand accounts detailing the distateful and disturbing aspects coming from æ–°äž­ć›œ, while promotional stories are easily revealed as scripted, falsified, or self-censoring something substantial. Criticisms about the US are likewise seen as amateur compared to the flames we're already spitting out ourselves.
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  621. Pro-corporate Americans blindly believe the figures the PRC puts out, not helped by mainstream media sources also repeating the stats from the same Chinese state sources. They can't be bothered to do some actual research and listen to folks who have lived in China about what's really going on there.
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  622. Right, 8 is definitely not an auspicious number when it's going rate of CNY/USD
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  623. FYR: Niger is a French name and more correctly pronounced "nee-zhair" 🇳đŸ‡Ș
    1
  624. The rising tide is impounded by dams of defended wealth.
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  625. Western divestment must be leaving the PRC with a lack of new political soundbites along with the lack of new IP to steal.
    1
  626. Imagine being a Party member where lectures like this take up days of your life.
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  627. Unfortunately a "realistic" response the rest of the world now takes is just not politically convenient to the Party's fear-based narrative.
    1
  628. China like a bully is only confident to punch down. Their own diplomats are known to express a supposed right of impunity against “lesser” nations, which at this point they view as everyone but America, and they openly dream of the day of that flipping too so that they become the world’s supposed master race.
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  629. We shouldn't, but Western MSM parrots them anyway which amplifies the perceived accuracy of Beijing's creative accounting.
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  630. A democratized ROC is a mortal threat to the CPC on the Mainland, because the very existence of a separated Taiwan is living proof of what a Chinese ethnostate can be without the Party.
    1
  631. Tibetans to Běijīng basically are terrorists, hence why Tibet is so locked down and inaccessible to foreigners. Yet the PRC blames Israel for just starting to approach Gaza the same way China has been persecuting Tibet.
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  632. From what I saw earlier this year, not many. All the tourism is domestic, and the international terminals are still bare (not much better than during Zero-COVID) with like 4 out of 5 shops shuttered.
    1
  633. Right, passengers and mail only pay so much and hence why they're a net drain on the economy (especially with people not able to move so freely). The expansive tollways fare not much better considering the artificial time and speed restrictions imposed, incentivizing trucks to overload and be even more of a danger to other traffic and occasionally the bridges they cross. Ironically the US remains the envy of rail -- as a freight network -- still saturated and profitable over 100 years later.
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  634. If an embargo compelled an Asia-invading Imperial Japan into war and defeat, then why not also do the same to an Asia-invading Communist China?
    1
  635. You mean bearish? "Bull" means optimistic, coming from how it fights through the upward swings with its horns
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  636. Having lived in Mainland China (and as Tony still does), I've come to realize that the most pessimistic news about æ–°äž­ć›œ is usually the most accurate.
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  637. It would affect air and long-haul truck travel first though, since they're the least energy efficient methods of moving stuff. Those near railheads and ocean seaports are less vulnerable to the changes in climate and fuel prices.
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  638. Communists losing face 😀 Great!
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  639. "New China" feels like a shell of arrogant nationalism wrapping a mantle of vapid materialism over a core of chronic clinical anxiety. "They don't make 'em like they used to", and "the bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten".
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  640. Businesses often signal reaction to a loss of trust by changing its leadership. The CPC has proven over the decades that it doesn't matter who from their cohort is at the head though, and a deeper change of leadership is necessary if China is to reverse its deteriorating trajectory.
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  641. Right, if anything the world is more equal now that democratized nation-states of legally equal footing have become the norm. Overturning this to become what Beijing says is "multipolar" just sounds like bringing back regional imperialism, with tensions and conflicts on where each strongman hegemon claims its borders to be.
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  642. It would hurt Germany’s export figures but not necessarily its image and prestige, considering how much time a Chinese brand ends up in the shop by comparison. It’s like China is even copying the American strategy of selling garage queens.
    1
  643. Yet they still somehow believe America is waning compared to them.
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  644. It's a bifurcation that's deliberate from the Chinese side, given their Great Firewall, one-way capital controls, and Dual Circulation strategy. China is literally an information isolate due to their blanket ban on (usually American-run yet generally) global web services, instead trying to defend and prop up uncompetitive domestic equivalents.
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  645. That's assuming we'll still have such courses to offer in this anti-humanist pro-corporate political environment.
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  646. Cue all the haters who say PZ got the timing wrong like literally everybody does, casually ignoring that the overall trends he described are still solid.
    1
  647. China advocates for a "multipolar world" but ironically believes they would be the only "pole" in East Asia.
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  648. Autocracies think everything must be under the control of a single entity. It's beyond their worldview that independent actors can converge on their own especially when it's against them.
    1
  649. Storage facilities require an even stronger build, especially since it's not mostly open air like a residence and who knows what stuff they'll stuff into there. Plus they'd need to get the elevators working if not upsized for all the hand trucks coming through.
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  650. Which fortunately means their millions of soldiers and militia will be uselessly stuck in Mainland China, because too many of their unprotected transports will be sunk or trapped in port once the relatively few warships with anti-air capabilities are dealt with. There is no place for casual combatants to stage ambushes against a superior force at sea, this will be a battle where better technology and combat experience determine the ultimate victor.
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  651. A reality shaped by media, hence why inflated sense of global centrality and domestic crime rates. AI will only make this distorted worldview worse just like automation enjoying still largely past agro-industrial commerce rules has made economic inequality worse.
    1
  652. Seems the CPC wants what each of its autocratic imperial dynasty predecessors wanted: stabilizing its uncontested rule indefinitely, except through proliferation of an ideology instead of a bloodline. Sadly this also hints at its termination only through mass violence at and by the Chinese people.
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  653. It doesn't have to be the best out of the gate, this can come later. What's important is that the Phoenix fabs start way ahead of the Mainland China competition, who are still working out the kinks all the way back at 14nm.
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  654. That's assuming Pakistan and Nigeria even stays together. There's already ongoing armed internal conflicts in Balochistan and the Middle Belt.
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  655. Don't bank on it. If fear for COVID falters, it'll become tangibly obvious how badly "New China" has stalled and is getting abandoned by the rest of the world.
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  656. Followed by the undeniable military retreat and ultimately cultural disenchantment with the socially prescriptive authoritarianism that got Japan there. The CPC isn’t much less vulnerable as the US Navy is the one keeping food, fuel, and exports affordable for its “New China”.
    1
  657. China's Zero-COVID (and to a lesser extent Russia's invasion) don't get as much attention as it deserves as we suffer from the inflation those supply disruptions caused. Instead all we hear is narrow-minded contrarians parroting "money printer go brrrrrr".
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  658. They believe everything can be controlled by superior force, particularly through technology. What they're not seeing is that it's superior institutions which invents and wields that technology, most dramatically seen when Europeans began China's "Century of Humiliation" by sailing whole fleets in force from behind their classically westward-facing land-based military posture.
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  659. This is why Trump must not return to office and allow the realization of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which wishes to impose a despotic Executive Branch and break down the separation of powers within the government while under a Republican administration, in order to turn the US toward a traditionalist theocratic autocracy. That negative reform by conservative idealists would dismantle the stability of our cross-administration bureaucracy and dramatically diminish the appeal of democracy in general, while making American civil society just as brittle as the one in likewise socially traditionalist authoritarian Mainland China.
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  660. He's a non-celebrity academic who doesn't publish in Chinese where it can go viral, so he's provides useful independent reports about the PRC that promotion-seeking Party sycophants don't want to reveal.
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  661. Using Western vaccines would be an act of surrender for a Party that spent the last couple of years touting its effective pandemic controls. Exposure to the whole virus seems to create messier and less binding antibodies than ones trained on clean spike proteins, which could explain why the Chinese vaccines failed. Unless Chinese pharma firms manage to develop an effective and trusted one of their own, at best they could finally grant EUA to the Fosun vaccine (which is called Pfizer/BioNTech elsewhere).
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  662. Yeah, they're underneath the North because their weak/exclusive/extractive institutions enrich a small elite rather than the greater nation.
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  663. A cop once told me that cannabis is really not a gateway drug, but gambling is definitely a gateway crime since the debts involved spiral into increasingly disturbing motivations in an effort to pay it off... predatory loans, scams, drug trafficking, kidnappings, murders, and everything else you expect from vulnerability to criminal organizations.
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  664. China doesn't have the evidence, because there is none. The PLA are the ones trying to play chicken against US forces who have had decades of prior experience with the Russians.
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  665. It’s based on how useful those countries are in potentially helping salvage the reputation of the CPC’s “New China”.
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  666. They're there because the host nations want them to be. The hosts are even more concerned about what happens after American forces really do go home, as the Philippines is finding the hard way after closing and taking over all the US bases at the end of the Cold War.
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  667. The territorial limit China "respects" is China's claim over the entire South China Sea, trapping its SE Asia neighbors to their coastal waters. And I'd wager China's claims will soon enough climb onto land justified by "historical" activities and ultimately classical sovereignty over Tiānxià.
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  668. Western democracies readily change leadership and thus momentum, it basically undergoes a political revolution every couple years. Autocracies are not so resilient when change inevitably occurs, because even the most beloved dictator will still die someday.
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  669. Soviets were at least honorable with their words and agreements. Beijing has a huge disconnect between its statements and its actions, and by comparison the ruling Party seems to employ powerless interns and new hires in trying to craft those legal justifications and diplomatic bridges.
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  670. CPC Dec 2019 to Nov 2022: "u n w a v e r i n g" CPC Dec 2022 onwards: "We never meant that. Foreign forces. Corrupt locals. Weak victims."
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  671. IIHS further includes small front overlap and roof strength tests, which are high pressure high rotation collisions found in near misses and rollovers. There’s a reason insurance companies who pay for treating injuries caused in these types of wrecks had these tests added in beyond the government’s minimum guidelines.
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  672.  @3rdpig  An active blockade isn't necessary, just pull insurance for foreign flags sailing within the First Island Chain and watch the prices of food and fuel skyrocket in Mainland China as shipping movements tanks to a trickle. No amount of airlift or overland alternatives would be enough to replace the loss of cheap waterborne transportation straight to China's demand centers in the coastal cities.
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  673. Hatches were there, but its gaskets went missing.
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  674. Right, focusing specifically on elites would be like surveying West Africa by only asking the Lebanese community.
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  675. I think DuoLingo is the one example where something Communist Chinese (i.e. shaming and bullying its customers) was copied and done more effectively in the West 🩉
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  676. The Ming Treasure Voyages didn't seek to acquire territory, but it did forcibly installed friendly local administrators at the trading ports, and established a regular military presence in the sea lanes which facilitated open trade throughout the Indo-Pacific. If you think about it, the US does much the same thing since the end of WWII, hence the globalization and prosperity we enjoy today.
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  677. Wars that are far smaller than the state-on-state slugfests that burned down entire kingdoms. Wars that were going to be fought whether the US or anyone else was there or not, but whose presence if not more direct action allowed someone to stabilize their state instead of letting the conflict grow into something larger. It's always easier to extinguish a house fire than it is to contain and backburn a wildfire. The reason all those bases exist is because the host nation wants American forces there -- even if as a convenient scapegoat to redirect anger over domestic issues -- and because the hosts are concerned about the consequences of America's absence; ask Iraq (ISIS), Afghanistan (Taliban), and the Philippines (China) what happened with their territorial integrity after making US forces leave their lands. In terms of casualties, China has killed millions more people just from the TĂ ipĂ­ng Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, and Dynamic Zero-COVID than America has in all its wars combined. This pathological attitude for mistaken "progress" and paranoid "security" is what an autocratic China threatens to proliferate, deliberate or not.
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  678. The Shànghǎi Police Database Leak only had about 1 billion entries for the whole nation, and considering the lack of live births that's probably close to the actual population of China before Zero-COVID ended.
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  679. In English there's an idiom "The balloon went up", meaning committing to battle (a command balloon was a reliable signal for distant artillery batteries to begin firing). Běijīng needs to decide how literally they're willing to take this definition as the Party continues to militarize efforts at domestic governance and foreign negotiation.
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  680. ​ @lassepeterson2740 Coal isn't the problem, EVs get twice the miles per ton of carbon emitted on 100% coal and it only gets cleaner from that through more green sources. What is a problem though is how often all that energy undergoes sudden thermal runaway due to China-grade quality controls.
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  681. True or not, it's still an official talking point of the US now and has impacts on diplomacy and relations going forward.
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  682. They might be able to produce it, but they can't brand it as such. They'd unfortunately have to build their reputation from scratch, and without the continued export-grade quality controls enforced by foreigners it's an uphill battle.
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  683. Also the fact that limited-quantity media like gold causes spending sprees and wealth hoarding at exactly the wrong points of the economic cycle, hence the outrageous "booms" and catastrophic "busts" of the pre-fiat world which were often only resolved through finding more gold (usually through conquest and colonization) to inject back into circulation. Fiat has the advantage of governments being able to deliberately influence its value countercyclically, moderating the effects of overheats and recessions. Hence why practically all currencies are fiat nowadays.
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  684. Especially for Argentina and other places that were selling in CNY to exchange for USD and EUR due to their even more worthless currencies.
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  685. China's future relies on the thought of "if you build it they will come". Problem is you can't guarantee consumers will come, especially with the PRC's reputation of being patronizing and disposable.
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  686. The Party will likely nullify and conveniently forget all those debts its government and SOEs took, and silence anyone who tries to claim their money back. They've already done this for the nearly $2 trillion worth of Imperial and Republic era bonds that China owes worldwide.
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  687. Yet America’s first war as an independent nation fought the British again to assert its right to the open sea and unmolested trade opportunities.
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  688.  @skydragon23101979  China wouldn't be completely cut off from vital resources, but the prices for food and fuel will rocket up due to the much higher costs of overland alternatives and cause immense internal unrest especially as foreign funds deplete, the CNY becomes worthless, and increasingly unpaid local security forces abandon their duties. The dedollarization movement ironically makes this worse as it makes USD more valuable while reducing America's debt burden. Every simmering conflict against Beijing (India, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, Japan, ASEAN claimants) threaten to flare up simultaneously along with rising restiveness at home, leaving the PLA and the Party distracted to the point of fatally embarrassing ineffectiveness. Any shots fired from either side of the Strait makes China's coasts uninsurable, cementing the Mainland's deindustrialization and fall from prosperity as the global economy commits to decentralize its supply web away from the Middle Kingdom. Ultimately will become obvious to everyone that the PRC's rise was not because of superior CPC governance, but instead foreign tolerance of its rule over China.
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  689.  @skydragon23101979  It would be a longer war than Beijing expects. An invasion is a land war where casual combatants with improvised weapons can still stage attacks of their choosing and defeat the political goals of the occupier. The last time the PLA tried to hold territory from an enemy who fought back, they were sent scrambling back north by surprised Vietnamese militias -- Taiwan has been preparing defenses in depth specifically against a Mainland invasion for decades, and now are receiving training on how to defeat an occupier by the US who have 20 years of experience on the receiving end of such insurgencies. Ukraine has far too many analogies for the CPC to dismiss in their plans to forcibly reunify Taiwan, and if anything Beijing has become even more hesitant to pull the trigger considering how they'll likewise just unify the rest of the developed world against all their interests.
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  690. Under their definition, yes. The five major ethnicities being the Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Uighur.
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  691. The US is raising its shields against CPC habits to take foreign trade secrets for temporary access to the Chinese market, if it's even compensated at all. Even then Western defensiveness doesn't come close to how protectionist Beijing is to guard their SOEs.
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  692. The USA isn't perfect, but it does have the means to moderate and correct itself -- there's a partial national revolution every two (legislative) and four (executive) years, with smaller ones somewhere with every periodic local election. Making gains in the next cycle is what the whole drama between "woke" progressive vs MAGA traditionalist culture war is about. America doesn't have to be the ideal role model for the rest of the world to tolerate (if not invite) its presence. It just has to be better than the alternative, whether that's a more arbitrary (i.e. even more people targeted/detained/killed) and self-serving autocrat, or having to spend its own limited resources trying to keep secure just as much space for free movement and peaceful trade.
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  693. Ironically I just heard a The China Project podcast reading an article about how Chinese gamers are 7% more likely to find a romantic partner, including getting married and having children within their 20s... just like the Party and older parents keeps advocating for.
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  694. This is why Beijing spends at least as much on "internal security" and censorship as it does on the entire PLA. The CPC can't afford for the Chinese people to imagine an alternative without the Party, especially when published with Asian faces and Mandarin language like what comes out of a democratized Taiwan.
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  695. Capitalists think in quarters, not generations. This is why businessmen may be too shortsighted to drive policy, and we end up saddled with expensive mistakes down the line.
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  696. Even 10% unusable is considered uneconomical. Mainland China is just brute forcing its way to supposed self-sufficiency through debt spending, but it's going to run out of money and its people's patience long before then.
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  697. Conservative autocracies have difficulty believing that opposition is anything but an elaborate conspiracy of a single enemy leader, rather than the convergence of thought by those who independently analyze and decide for themselves.
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  698. If wages are up, it's likely due to internal debt instead of an influx of foreign funds.
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  699. Battery fires aside, their crash performance (of which the insurance industry driven IIHS is the most stringent in the world at least for those inside the car) will likely prove their safety is either sorely lacking, or they'd need to beef up their quality controls to the point where they're not so cheap and profitable to satisfy USDM vehicle standards.
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  700. US also has plenty of friendly ports in the area to call. China doing the same would be alarming in indicating the development of their global military logistics network.
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  701. Right, anything to deflect blame of the permanently deteriorating economic outlook of the Party-run PRC.
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  702. HSR viaducts don't look beefy enough to handle freight, which is huge handicap considering passengers and mail don't pay nearly as much as bulk and palletized cargo. Meanwhile China is still starving of more efficient ways to haul heavy goods other than trucking it everywhere where both ends are not on the relatively few river and canal corridors. Their approach is a huge missed opportunity in not building out heavy quad-track to run both HSR and freight trains simultaneously, with cargo subsidizing the movements of more thriftwise people.
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  703. Visible unrest would be rare, but anomie and underperforming would be commonplace. Beijing loves to complain about Western decadence, when really they're looking not at a camera but at a mirror.
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  704. Authoritarians need to invent and inflate enemies in order to distract from their own abuses upon their people.
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  705.  @niveajones6400  China has only approved their own attenuated virus vaccines, which were weak to begin with on the original strains and practically useless against Omicron. They have yet to approve any mRNA vaccines despite having tested them, and their own alternatives are not much more promising. However the Party deems it more damaging to "surrender" to the West by approving and importing their vaccines.
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  706. Meanwhile the price of new and used cars everywhere else has surged, with Chinese brands seeming the least affected. It just shows how isolated China is from the rest of the world, and how unwanted their designs are where it is available.
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  707. Right, if the US is "in decline" as they say, why do other countries increasingly seem to dismiss China for signals from America? This delusion is what happens out of an environment that is basically all order and no listen.
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  708. I don't know about that, obesity is becoming noticeable everywhere regardless of wealth growth.
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  709. It's so characteristic of the PRC government to use SARS-2 to terrorize its realm into compliance... a terror it basically created itself with potentially far more effect on Chinese nationals from lack of immunity by doubling down on forced isolation and its outdated whole-virus vaccines, while the rest of the world finds SARS-2 becoming just another cold virus as it struggles to spread among more previously exposed and strongly vaccinated people.
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  710. I'd predict it's more a symbolic win to publicly snub the Americans, but the bulk of their transactions will quietly still remain in USD or other more trusted currencies.
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  711. Debt. Which if its estimated amount of 3~5x its GDP is true would make the US seem prudent.
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  712. ​ @DK-ev9dg America never acceded to UNCLOS, mainly because it questions the bureaucratic efficiency and fairness of the UN in administering experimental deep sea mining rights.
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  713. More like China must enforce its laws. Unlike the US which is constantly pressured too be "fiscally efficient" and "small government", China certainly has the staffing and the confidence to wield government power. Problem is the PRC runs on official corruption and a culture of cheating.
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  714. Yeah Taiwan might reunite with the Mainland... when the Communist Party of China is nothing more than a history lesson.
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  715. Seems economic prosperity is finally bringing political reform to China... now that the prosperity is collapsing.
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  716. Though if you inspect how this "real estate" gets constructed and maintained, you'll probably be glad you never bought in 🏚
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  717. The dragon has been waking up, but only to find that it's already eaten through and thoroughly polluted its surroundings and has to venture much further out just to feed itself putting everyone else on edge against it too.
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  718. China needs Europe for its Euros because the RMB holds such marginal value as a cross-border currency. The only ones really transacting in Yuan are those whose money is even more worthless to convert into USD, EUR, GBP, or JPY.
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  719. Escaping the middle-income trap requires a workforce that is comfortable exploring and disrupting their way into more value-added fields like R&D and Marketing, but these attitudes are exactly what the Party wants to discourage because of how quickly it turns to thought experiments about politics and society.
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  720. Still not really pushing for jabs, especially since the inactivated virus approach they currently rely on has proven almost useless. I see more warnings against scooter batteries indoors than I do for vaccinations.
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  721. Comparing to the Party's promises of indefinite economic growth (in return for permanently unchallengeable leadership) to its indefinitely stalled economic outlook, yes Mainland China is crashing to the point were practically anyone who can will jump out. The terms "èșșćčł" and "摆烂" weren't Western inventions.
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  722. Most foreign brand cars are built in China too. Tesla simply has the most robust BEV lineup which is what Chinese customers want (and are also hard steered into getting due to the restrictions in registering any other type of vehicle).
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  723. The Muslim world effectively just wants a State of Palestine at the expense of Israel, they’re ironically not as concerned as Westerners about the Palestinian people and will likely minimize support for their new regional competitor once Palestine gets established.
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  724. If we're lucky, something like Taiwan. If not, something like Russia.
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  725. Just like Trump. And just like Trump, the longer they're not punished the more confident they get doing intentional destabilization for personal comfort and glory.
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  726. Or desperate for cash, as friendly Global South alternatives don’t offer nearly as much profitability, exchange value, or willingness to remain industrially offshored as the developed Western markets.
    1
  727. Yet China habitually practices sudden sweeping changes based on political convenience.
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  728. Anti-ship and anti-air missiles on their own are pretty dumb, which only gets worse as speed increases making fabled hypersonics effectively useless. I'd imagine the West with its plethora of networked surveillance assets would not mistakenly hit civilian craft nearly as often as the unpracticed and isolated PLA. That threat alone would scare off practically all critical materials trade for China.
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  729. The then equally-oppressive but less-competent KMT lost the Mainland, but Chiang Kai-Shek was too prideful and confident to cut his losses and declare his own "New China" on Taiwan which complicates diplomatic relations to this day. Officially the ROC maintains claim over all of "China" (including Mongolia and the SCS) but more as a historical artifact than a serious policy.
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  730. There's a natural tension between efficiency and redundancy. This long imbalance towards cutting costs also explains why China became the center of global production, and why currently the supply chain shock is pinned by the few privatized West Coast seaports who had never set up resource sharing arrangements.
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  731. There is a natural tension between efficiency and resilience. As going all in on the efficiently autocratic PRC has shown, there is such thing as being overly-efficient to the point of becoming brittle to some sudden shock to your operations.
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  732. Of course the stabbings are an "isolated incident". Any socially traditionalist American trying to redirect attention away from their toxically violent sentiments for every white male mass shooter could tell you that.
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  733. Don't count on consumer protections under the pro-corporate GOP government.
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  734. Although considering how disposable the Chinese people have been to the CPC, I wouldn't be surprised if they dismiss the deaths (especially those of retirees) as a mere business cost.
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  735. Doesn't seem so, they're not included in the common definition of the West because of their weak apolitical institutions and/or future economic prospects.
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  736. Peace Through Power, yeah
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  737. China’s true situation is diverging so far from their own narrative that it’s just easier for its officials to believe its own đŸ’©
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  738. ​ @jimbobhirstyeshuaslave5860 China is notorious for all the chemical additives and absorbed pollution in its agriculture. I was 10kg heavier and near diabetic from living and eating the food there, and it wasn't because the local cuisine was so tasty. There's a reason the rates of cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases in China are so alarming including among its young adults.
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  739. Bhutan doesn't have direct relations with any of the UN P5. This is intentional to harmonize with its Indian protector and New Delhi's stance of ultimate non-alignment.
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  740. Or a standing dictatorship or at best an illiberal oligopoly. In any case all bought out by Běijīng.
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  741. Just shows how a few generations of bad governance can overturn even the most durable positions.
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  742. The US isn't even party to UNCLOS, mainly because of the Part IX dispute over how the International Seabed Authority will handle resource extraction rights. The US does accept and enforce everything else in UNCLOS, much moreso than certain parties who are fully bound to the treaty.
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  743. Hence why COVID lockdowns ironically resulted in a baby bust; the lack of space and strangers counterintuitively made their live-in partner less exciting.
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  744.  @skydragon23101979  What's old about those? If anything recent news is that the truth about the PRC's grander economic outlook is even worse than previously believed.
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  745. Sadly corporations are sociopathic, ultimately caring for nothing else but money and the efficiency of autocracy is just too attractive. They only pretend to have morals insofar as to protect their access to their markets.
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  746. Racist as it sounds, there’s a kernel of truth since China clasically treats all persons of Chinese blood as its subjects regardless of nationality or location. Hence why all the calls for ethnic solidarity by state media and Little Pinks.
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  747. ​Right, Chinese language media is unusually mute about such "glorious" news of achieving semiconductor self-sufficiency. Most likely because what was really "acquired" was the last batches of pre-ban chips from Taiwan back in 2020.
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  748. Communist China is losing its attractiveness and influence, but realizing why would be fatally painful for the Party.
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  749. It's a common tactic of militant social conservatives to blame other faces to save your own.
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