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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 7:42 am 
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It seems to me now, that the chinese goverment is abandoning the strategy of sweeping all problems under the rug and not to rock the boat, that had seemed to be their general strategy for a decade at least. (As a sudenote in my previous comments i had assumed that this strategy was still intact.) That does sound alarming indeed.

Now are they feeling confident enough, that they figure they don't need to be carefull anymore? Or do they feel that they loose their grip and are getting desperate? And i can't really say, whats more frightening. it definitly seems like interesting indeed.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2016 12:13 am 
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They might be flailing and trying to cover it up with hubris.

This article explains what's going on with the Chinese economy pretty well. In a nutshell, China can't keep on selling cheap exports to other countries forever. They're starting to become too wealthy to produce exports so cheaply and their foreign markets haven't been doing so well economically so demand is depressed. Their economy has been slowing down, and the recent stock market crashes are making everyone nervous. They need to shift to a more consumer-oriented economic model, but the powerful vested interests who run the state-owned enterprises (think steel, coal, chemicals) don't want their party to end, so they block economic reforms.

In the last few years, the Chinese government attempted to buy time to implement these reforms by building more bridges to nowhere (because construction spending pushes GDP figures up) funded by state bank loans, and by encouraging investors to dump their money into real estate and the stock market. But this is like curing a hangover by getting more drunk.

Some analysts think that President's Xi's Epic Paranoid Corruption Crackdown is basically his way of whipping the Party into submission so that he can implement the needed economic reforms, but meaningful reforms are not yet forthcoming. It's hard to tell whether it's because there's just too much internal resistance, or because he fundamentally is more interested in amassing personal power than fixing the economy. And this has all come with a side of nationalistic chest-beating, by the way. China's been picking a lot of maritime territorial fights with its smaller Southeast Asian neighbours lately. It's scary.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 16, 2016 11:59 pm 
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I visited Hong Kong in the early 90s as a teen (good god, I'm freaking old!), before the changeover, and I've been trying to keep an eye on how it's going there ever since.

I think I hoped, as did many HK residents, that Beijing would be smart enough to keep from strangling the golden goose but maybe I've overestimated their grasp on reality vs. propaganda.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 4:19 am 
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Maybe it's that we're no longer the golden goose. We used to be really important because of how much investment we dumped into their economy, but now they're so rich and we're so small, we're just a drop in the bucket. They still need us as a banking centre (*cough* money laundering shop) because we have a freely convertible currency and they're not ready for that yet, but they've probably figured that the big international banks will put up with quite a lot of restrictions on civil liberties before being scared off. What's a few disappearances and police beatings when there's billions of dollars to be made? That said, I don't like the new paranoid leadership one bit.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2016 12:18 am 
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That's truly sad. I always thought that Hong Kong and to a lesser extent Taiwan had a much more authentic feel to it than mainland China. Where I live, the Chinese community contains a disproportionate lot of business owners, hard workers, and successful professionals than the general population and I think if given the chance at personal freedom the Chinese have an amazing future ahead of them. Unfortunately, it's hard to shine when you're being squashed into the mud by a boot heel.

I just wish my fellow Asian peeps would learn how to #^&@ drive. Calgary can be genuinely life threatening at times on the street.

Chinese joke (I can make this one cause I'm half Chinese): What's the easiest way to blind a Chinese person? Put a windshield in front of them.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 3:22 am 
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So you've probably heard that one of the booksellers turned up, in China, on state television, confessing to a 10 year-old drunk driving charge. The official story is that he was so overcome with guilt he turned himself in. The authorities have also acknowledged that they're holding a second bookseller, who is allegedly serving as a witness in the case against the first. Nothing has been heard about the other three, but they don't have foreign passports, so there aren't any other governments in the world looking out for them.

How do they expect anyone to believe such a crazy thing? A guy on vacation in Thailand upped and left and crossed several international borders without his passport to turn himself in for a 10 year-old crime? And that he magically changed his shirt in the middle of his confession (yes, the confession tape has continuity errors). The answer is that they don't expect anyone to believe it, they just expect their friends to play along. Hong Kong's government can go "Welp. Case closed. Nothing we can do about it, he's a criminal suspect." The British and Swedish governments can stop raising diplomatic concerns about the disappearances of their citizens. (They've been exceptionally mild-mannered.) And everybody else can go screw themselves.

The emperor isn't just naked, he's streaking down the road, waggling his willy at old ladies, scratching his nuts and farting tunes. And everybody who matters just smiles and says "Nice suit, your majesty".

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 4:22 am 
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Going over Wikipedia, it looks like the maximum penalty for drunk driving in China is three years' imprisonment; six months if the blood alcohol level is below a certain threshold. (Oh, and also a fine. And lifetime suspension of the license if anyone was killed or seriously injured).

So, even if that video is taken at face value, it does no more than buy Hong Kong time to avoid diplomatic repercussions. (I guess they could always go with "oh dear, after two months in prison he killed himself, we already cremated the body, so sorry, too bad" I have no idea what excuse they'll use for the "witness"). But yeah, this is not looking good at all.

What does it really say? It really tells me three things, just from your description of the video:

- The bookseller on the confession tape remained alive for several days after being captured.
- He isn't too visibly injured, at least not the bits that could be seen on camera.
- He disagrees with the people holding him, and probably kept trying to slip some sort of protest or other message into the video.

I conclude number three from the fact that the video was so gratuitously edited - if it was edited, it was almost certainly in order to take things out. Or perhaps to foil strategems like trying to blink in Morse code throughout the message (even if he did manage something like that, joining together half-a-dozen otherwise unrelated confessions means no-one can get more that fragments of messages out of it).

And if they're trying to foil that sort of strategem, then that implies that they think he might try it, therefore he's being less than voluntarily cooperative...

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 5:01 am 
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It's a drunk driving vehicular manslaughter charge. Supposedly he received a 2 year suspended sentence for it back then, and then skipped town. I don't know if he would face additional jail time now. I hope he doesn't mysteriously kill himself in prison.

The other guy, who is allegedly serving as a "witness", did try to send subtle signals to his family. He made a phone call to his wife in Putonghua, even though he and his wife are both Cantonese speakers. In a letter he sent home (basically saying "tell the media to stop making a fuss, I'm fine"), he mixed simplified characters into the traditional characters.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 8:57 am 
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Quote:
He made a phone call to his wife in Putonghua, even though he and his wife are both Cantonese speakers.


Okay, unless I'm missing some important context, that sounds like a generic "something's not right" or "you are being lied to" warning.

Quote:
In a letter he sent home (basically saying "tell the media to stop making a fuss, I'm fine"), he mixed simplified characters into the traditional characters.


This message, however, has a potentially higher information density. Do you perhaps know what the simplified letters said? (It makes a bit of a difference whether they say "Send help" or "Get out of the country, don't look back")

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 10:43 am 
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I don't think they spelled anything out - people don't exactly have lots of time to work out secret messages when forced to write letters under duress. But it definitely meant that he was not writing it of his own free will and that the Chinese government was behind it. Putonghua and simplified characters are the official language and writing system of Mainland China. If you convey those two things, writing "help me" would be superfluous.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 12:41 pm 
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Kea wrote:
This article explains what's going on with the Chinese economy pretty well. In a nutshell, China can't keep on selling cheap exports to other countries forever. They're starting to become too wealthy to produce exports so cheaply and their foreign markets haven't been doing so well economically so demand is depressed. Their economy has been slowing down, and the recent stock market crashes are making everyone nervous. They need to shift to a more consumer-oriented economic model, but the powerful vested interests who run the state-owned enterprises (think steel, coal, chemicals) don't want their party to end, so they block economic reforms.


The core issue is that consumerism is basically a global-sized pyramid scheme (or really, a matrix scheme), and the world is running out of new suckers to recruit at the bottom level. That's going to be a problem for other places than just China soon.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2016 4:35 am 
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Kea wrote:
people don't exactly have lots of time to work out secret messages when forced to write letters under duress


Fair enough. I was hoping it was kindof like capital letters - you wait for an H, capitalise it, wait for an E, capitalise it, and so on. But no, anything more complicated than that is highly unlikely to happen under duress.

Quote:
Putonghua and simplified characters are the official language and writing system of Mainland China. If you convey those two things, writing "help me" would be superfluous.


Ah, fair enough. So the message is a mix of "Help me", "I'm under duress" and "Mainland China has me", then.

Given the cultural context, that's quite a worrying message.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2016 6:41 pm 
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kitoba wrote:
Kea wrote:
This article explains what's going on with the Chinese economy pretty well. In a nutshell, China can't keep on selling cheap exports to other countries forever. They're starting to become too wealthy to produce exports so cheaply and their foreign markets haven't been doing so well economically so demand is depressed. Their economy has been slowing down, and the recent stock market crashes are making everyone nervous. They need to shift to a more consumer-oriented economic model, but the powerful vested interests who run the state-owned enterprises (think steel, coal, chemicals) don't want their party to end, so they block economic reforms.


The core issue is that consumerism is basically a global-sized pyramid scheme (or really, a matrix scheme), and the world is running out of new suckers to recruit at the bottom level. That's going to be a problem for other places than just China soon.


Kiinda. The good news is that we are civilizationally capable of falling back on making an honest living - the world per capita GDP is presently $8k and rising.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2016 3:39 am 
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China's problem is that its economy is seriously unbalanced. Remember from Econ 101 how GDP is made up of Consumers + Investment + Government + Exports - Imports?

Typically, countries get about 20-30% of GDP from investment (in the old-fashioned bricks and mortar sense, not financial wizardry). In China, that number is 46%. Nearly half their economy is from building stuff. Roads. Railways. Factories. Housing. Malls. Office buildings. And they are building way more stuff than there is going to be demand for, for years. They have empty luxury hotels in the middle of Inner Mongolia. Entire uninhabited cities. Huge shopping malls with no shops or shoppers. Factories churning out more steel and cement than they know what to do with. There's this insane statistic that they poured more cement in 3 years than the US did in the entire 20th century. Now they're trying to export all this excess capacity by building highways and railways from Jakarta to Kazakhstan.

It's always been unusually high but it got really out of hand since the 2008 financial crisis because their export markets slowed down and they needed to create jobs somehow. So they built all this stuff that nobody needed, with loans they can never pay back, by state-owned enterprises whose entire modus operandi is Too Big To Fail. You thought the Obama bank bailouts were bad? Multiply that by 1000.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2016 12:38 pm 
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Well crap.

That's it. Our protesters are no longer polite. There's a small radical pro-democracy splinter movement that's fed up with being polite. They reason that it hasn't gotten us any results in 30 years, so now it's time to get rude. They've been ramping it up over the past year with rowdy protests and some vandalism, but last night we just had a full on riot.

A real proper riot. People throwing bricks, bottles, and wooden pallets; lighting stuff on fire. A cop who was being attacked with projectile drew his gun and fired warning shots into the air. Live ^$@*!ing rounds. Everyone is extremely lukcy that the bullets didn't go through an upstairs window, or brain anybody on the way down.

Nobody's really sure at this point whether the riot was planned. It started on Chinese New Year when an anti-hawker operation got out of control. Every year on Chinese New Year, unlicensed hawkers come out onto the streets and sell assorted knick-knacks and snack foods of questionable hygiene. It's illegal, but also practically a tradition. This year the government tried to get tough and sent out hygiene patrol officers to shut them down. The customers got angry and drove the hygiene officers away. The hygiene patrol called for police back-up and came back in even bigger numbers. A radical democracy group used Facebook to call for back-up against the police. And within an hour it was a full blown riot that went on all night. There's reports that the rioters were driving supplies in (goggles, helmets, masks). If they had this stuff lying around in storage from previous protests, it's not inconceivable that they managed to scare up a van to drive them in at short notice. But it's possible they intended to start a crapfest.

Anyway, none of this can be good. If the government wanted to start clamping down on civil liberties, this would be the perfect excuse.

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