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 🥊
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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 Guǎngzhōu 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 🇹🇼
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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" 📈🏚️
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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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