21–30 of 140 posts
This reminds me of the articles saying that germans like to use cash because of the inflation 100y ago. It's just not true and likely being written by someone who has never asked a single german/chinese.
It is not true. It's just that politicians need official reasons to do what they do. And it's a great thing to use historical reasons because nobody can really counter them. Not a single Chinese person I know thinks about Westerners as sources of the Opium Wars and therefore as enemies. The opinions move between "West is so rich, let's be more like them" and "We are nearly back to our old glory, now also learn some o…
Oh yea, there are over a billion Chinese people in China alone and because not a single Chinese person you know has told you they think that, it must not be true!
How does knowing roughly 100 Chinese people from different social levels, tiers, geographic locations, backgrounds compare to reading an article of foreign origin, though?
Yet its the same problem today that prompted the Opium Wars as back then: The West buys more from China than China buys from The West. Hopefully that colours the decisions made to rebalance the trade system.
When living in Hong Kong in the years running up to the handover in 97 the Chinese government used the Opium Wars as an excuse to accuse the British of all sorts of bizzare things during the negotiations. My favorite was calling the governor Chris Patten the "son of a running dog" which has a bit more bite in Chinese. A lot of the knashing of teeth on the Chinese side of the table was repeatedly justified by the dastardly deeds of the British in the Opium Wars to a country that was then still under the rule of an Emperor, which later turned into a corrupt republic and then overthrown again by the Communists and now seems to have been overthrown by the combined forces of Louis Vuitton, Rolex and Channel.
It is not true. It's just that politicians need official reasons to do what they do. And it's a great thing to use historical reasons because nobody can really counter them. Not a single Chinese person I know thinks about Westerners as sources of the Opium Wars and therefore as enemies. The opinions move between "West is so rich, let's be more like them" and "We are nearly back to our old glory, now also learn some o…
>> Westerners as sources of the Opium Wars and therefore as enemies The article is not wrong. Opium war, in the official narrative of recent Chinese history, is phrased as "the start of a hundred years of humiliation of China". It is heavily focused event in middle school history class. It definitely still shapes China in a lot of way, like the strictest drug prohibition may be in the whole world. In every day commun…
Russia has similar grievances against the West that are promoted on TV, and people care strongly about them as a result. In the early 90s, when the injuries were fresh, the TV deemphasized them and fewer people cared.
I've come to believe that when a government makes its citizens care about foreign policy, that's usually a distraction from domestic problems. In Russia's case it's corruption. Not sure about China.
History shapes culture who knew? America is still fighting the Civil War. But the Chinese don't blame the West for the decline of China and the fall of the empire. They blame the old corrupt elite. When Deng Xiaoping went abroad in the 80s he did his damnedest to appear cultured and in control.
Hmm, I hope that's true. But there's also the "century of humiliation" thing going on, which, to my mind, is an attempt to divert blame away from China itself (basically Mao -- the greatest enemy China ever had) toward outsiders. I don't know to what degree people are buying it.
Yet its the same problem today that prompted the Opium Wars as back then: The West buys more from China than China buys from The West. Hopefully that colours the decisions made to rebalance the trade system.
> The West buys more from China than China buys from The West because there are long list of high tech & military stuff that China is simply not allowed to buy. it is so bad to the extent that Chinese are not allowed to buy Intel Phi processors which many of your local computer shops allow you to make orders. Surely Chinese are interesting in buying America's advanced jet fighters, missiles, submarines, aircraft carr…
China's interested in buying precisely one round of each thing. And thereafter replacing it with their own. That's not a criticism, it's a fact of life in dealing with China. They have zero interest in being dependent on any outside nation more than absolutely necessary.
The things you list, wouldn't even remotely dent the trade deficits China rings up. You're talking about $5 to $6 trillion per decade with the US and EU combined.
Intel processors et al. are not going to fix that. There's absolutely nothing that can plug a $600 billion per year hole with China (US+EU), realistically. Energy exports (in the case of the US) is the only thing that could dent it. The solution is to move more manufacturing away from China and rebalance that large concentrated deficit with other nations in a distributed manner, and to make more things domestically. That will happen naturally as China's wages & costs continue to rise.
The so-called Freedom was just bullshit, it only profits, that drive the war.
And I think the western world just never really understand the Chinese people's way of thinking, nor do they care.And that's how this article comes out.
I don't understand the motivation of the article. Does the author try to justify the Opium War? Or to remind 1+ billion Chinese that the intepretation of history always subject to rulers' agenda, which is clearly stated in Chinese textbook? To show off his not-so-sharp observation to his readers? Or, to warn USA not to abandon the free trade principle?
China history is a warning sign against centralism and the ability of humanity to get stuck in loops, economic and culturally - where it from a ruling partys point of view doesn't make sense to do anything to escape the loop. Impressive is that china at least kept- enforced by the layout of the country, a centralized state. At least it did not decay as much as the middle east or africa - after reaching peak people.
This is so western propaganda boilerplate. What is the warning sign? China lifted more people out of poverty than all other countries combined. Actually the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism, and many western populations complain about their governments moving their power into a more and more centralized system. Have you for instance seen how Philipines and Turkey have m…
In the span of about 12 years, China became the world's most indebted nation. They have to accumulate about $4 trillion in debt annually to add $600 to $700 billion in GDP expansion, of which 1/3 to 2/5 goes just to paying for new debt interest costs. That debt scenario keeps getting worse each year. Local government defaults are a common discussion now, it's assumed they're going to suffer vast bankruptcies all over the nation. In just the next five years, they'll increase their already shocking pile of debt by another ~75% or so, adding between $20 and $30 trillion in new debt.
> the whole world is recognizing how centralism seems stronger than western federalism
That's incorrect. The whole world, including China, has attempted to partially emulate the developed nations of the West. China has gradually abandoned Communism and shifted to a market based economy, as one example. Their former system failed entirely, their shift to market based systems is an obvious admission of that. That process continues. All the developed Western nations have far superior standards of living at the median than China. The top Western examples are four to five times higher than China, and that's before accounting for the near total dearth of human rights in China. That gap is even greater when it comes to the poor. In China ~250 million people are still living on $3 per day or less.