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

  1. ​ @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.
    8
  2. Since when did the CPC do the right thing instead of the face-saving one?
    8
  3. 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.
    8
  4. ​ @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.
    8
  5. 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.
    8
  6. 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.
    8
  7. 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.
    8
  8. 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.
    8
  9. 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.
    8
  10. That's why authoritarians always need an external enemy, inventing supposed schemes as required.
    8
  11. 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.
    8
  12. 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.
    8
  13. Still #2, but likely a lot closer to just edging out Japan than it is catching up to the US
    8
  14. ​... 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.
    8
  15. 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.
    8
  16. 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.
    8
  17. 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.
    7
  18. Compassion is much more focused when done for a single face than diluted over an entire identity or idea.
    7
  19. Hence their promotion of a “multipolar” world with threats of militarily invading its neighbors.
    7
  20. 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.
    7
  21. 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.
    7
  22. 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".
    7
  23. Běijīng defines "harmony" as the lack of challenge to its rule and interests.
    7
  24. "Homes" "with Chinese characteristics" no less... i.e. overpriced major fixer-uppers if they're even habitable.
    7
  25. 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.
    7
  26. 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.
    7
  27. What else do you expect from a Party that habitually dismisses if not silences the existence of opposition?
    7
  28. 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.
    7
  29. 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.
    7
  30. Winning with Chinese Characteristics
    7
  31. It makes him a primary source on topics the host country are anxious to confront and wants you to conveniently have no idea about.
    7
  32. 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.
    7
  33. 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.
    7
  34. Projection is a common feature among culturally-regimented anti-progressives.
    6
  35. Perhaps the Sea of Southeast Asia... SeaSEA?
    6
  36. 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.
    6
  37. 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.
    6
  38. 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.
    6
  39. 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.
    6
  40.  @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.
    6
  41. It's largely domestic debt. The state just silences those whom they owe. Therefore free money.
    6
  42. 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.
    6
  43. 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.
    6
  44. 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.
    6
  45. Also built with disposable quality, overpromising its range (unlike every other manufacturer) and self-immolating with alarming frequency.
    6
  46. 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.
    6
  47. 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.
    6
  48. 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).
    6
  49. Chinese authorities want Western technical knowledge, but not the questioning mindset and deconstructive experimentation that knowledge springs from.
    6
  50. There's definitely topics to discuss, Beijing just refuses to wake up from its dreaming and be present.
    6