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Leaving China

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Re: Leaving China

#551

Post by yourapostasy »

rippercushions wrote: post #307
robomartin wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you wrap Singapore into your comment? I was recently there and took note of what looked like significant Chinese cultural influence almost everywhere.

Unlike Taiwan, Singapore is a multi-ethnic state where English is the lingua franca, and the government has a very heavy focus on racial harmony etc. Also, Singaporean of Chinese descent are generally not huge fans of China. While some older folks have drunk the CCP Kool-Aid, among the young there is a lot of straight up racism/prejudice against "PRCs" (mainlanders), especially around ten years ago when there was a h…

> Also, Singaporean of Chinese descent are generally _not_ huge fans of China.

How does this assertion fit in with the polls cited in the Wikipedia entry for China-Singapore relations [1] and other polls [2]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Singapore_relati...

[2] https://www.iseas.edu.sg/media/commentaries/singapore-in-the...

Re: Leaving China

#552

Post by opinionsonly01 »

onethought wrote: post #467
opinionsonly01 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claimed they had extended lockdowns. That is not true. I said they had lockdowns, they did not have extended lockdowns. Please stop spreading misinformation. Edit: I also reframed for your last comment > China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine". But since you're defending…

You are now entering a pretty minor argument of semantics. Extended lockdowns vs non-extended? Melbourne did lockdowns for effectively 4 months, longer than any single Chinese lockdown. So even on that point you are incorrect. This isn’t misinformation. It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK (for a variety of reasons). There is not enough of them, that’s the problem.

> Melbourne did lockdowns for effectively 4 months

You claimed Singapore and Taiwan has 'extended' lockdowns. I called you out. Now you're back peddling and trying to justify your statement with "but but but melbourne, you didn't mention melbourne and they had long lockdown!!!"

> It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK.

It does refuse, and clearly you're not from China or you're just lying because China didn't recognize citizens who returned home with vaccines that were not Chinese.

Not everyone is allowed to travel to HK.

So your statement is completely false.

Re: Leaving China

#553

Post by gaoshan »

I've been in China, on and off, since 1996. Not living there full time but spending a month or two at a go. If I were to draw a graph of my own sense of optimism about where China was headed it would be a strong upward curve from the start up until a couple of years after the 2008 Olympics. By the time Xi took power in 2012 I was still thinking that he might be a positive influence.

In many ways his early life, the political downfall and persecution of his father and Xi's own persecution during the Cultural Revolution had me primed to think that he might be a reformer. Someone that could possibly carry on in the footsteps of Deng Xiaopeng and really bring China across the finish line and into the world as a powerful and positive force for the planet at large. Instead the opposite happened.

By 2013 what Xi was about was starting to come into focus. He carried out "anti-corruption" reforms but it didn't take long to see that these really just targeted his opponents (and the occasional ally that was worth making an example of... in Chinese 杀鸡给猴看 trans. kill the chicken to show the monkey). As crackdowns on China's fledgling independent media and various minorities intensified the curve on my chart dips and starts to dip hard. Now it is as low as it has ever been and heading downwards in freefall. I declined an opportunity to go back this Spring and part of me is very sad about this but China is headed to a dark place and I don't want to be there when it happens. Unfortunately when the time comes it will drag much of our world down with it, I fear.

Re: Leaving China

#555

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

et-al wrote: post #388
killjoywashere wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea how sprawling Chinese diaspora was until I was in Ecuador and a sailor on the boat with me took me to a Chinese restaurant. In Ecuador. Of course there would be a Chinese restaurant in Ecuador, but of course there's also a sailor on my US-flagged ship who's ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin. And so we ordered Chinese in Chinese, in a Spanish-speaking country. In 1999.

Speaking of Chinese food in South America, there's also the delicious chifa cuisine folks should try to sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chifa

Peru has the largest Asian population out of any South American country!

Re: Leaving China

#556

Post by seszett »

coldtea wrote: post #526
ninjin wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is difficult to get distances in time into my own mind. But for those other than me reading this and having trouble with this mentally. The first democratically elected president in Taiwan in 1996, which was arguably a high point in the democratisation process, is now in 2023 temporally equidistant to the moon landing in 1969 and us in the present.

It's also difficult for societies with populations absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history, how developments 30, 50, or even 100 and 200 years still leave all kinds of traces and influences, materialized in attitudes, political affiliations, laws, and so on. History is not a "that was back in the day, doesn't matter anymore" affair.

> societies with populations absorbed deep into their private sphere, with very little feeling for history

That doesn't really describe Taiwan. I'm still not sure of the point you're trying to make, but it seems like you are really trying to push down the people who managed to break free of the dictatorship imposed on them for 50 years by the mainlanders who came to Taiwan in 1949.

I'm not sure what your beef really is, but I have yet to read any reason for dismissing the decades old democracy that now exists in Taiwan. People my age might have been born under martial law, but most Taiwanese alive today have lived their whole adult life under this democracy. That's not incompatible with having knowledge of recent history, and Taiwan also has schools.

Re: Leaving China

#557

Post by robomartin »

gyaru wrote: post #516
robomartin wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're not seriously suggesting Latin American countries vilify the US for no reason I am stating an absolute fact: In LATAM, blaming others for everything is a national sport. And the US is a favorite bad guy. I can't tell you how many times I have heard this in person in the context of social gatherings, local news and even government/political party communications. The point is they blame it all on the US. Alway…

> The point is they blame it all on the US. Always. Maybe because historically the US has been behind a lot of things? > Trust is a delicate thing. Once you lose it, Exactly, people simply do not trust the US in countries where they have meddled in. Rightfully. Ridiculous to make this into a sob story about people vilifying the US "unfairly".

You are missing the important point: The blame for all negative outcomes in LATAM is alway, always, always outward-facing.

If you observe what they are saying you’d think these are perfect societies where everyone would have pink unicorns and bubble gum, were it not for external evil actors. And, of course, the US and the IMF are at the top of the blame list.

Re: Leaving China

#558

Post by seanmcdirmid »

petesergeant wrote: post #475
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/b/Bangko... > As of the 2000 census, there were 6,355,144 registered residents in the city. However, this figure does not take account of the many unregistered residents and daytime visitors from the surrounding metropolitan area. More than 50% of Bangkokians have some Chinese ancestry. They are still Thai, they often don’t even speak Chinese, just ethnically Chines…

You don’t see a significant difference between “is mostly” and “a small majority have some trace of”? This is like saying “most English people can speak French” vs “a majority of English people learn some French at school”

50% is still close to a majority. Perhaps mostly is the wrong word exactly, but it isn’t far off. And I didn’t claim Chinese language was common in either way, just that Chinese ancestry was common, which has huge ramifications to culture. Like Toledo and poles.

Re: Leaving China

#559

Post by seanmcdirmid »

petesergeant wrote: post #476
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average Chinese tourists often spend a lot more than Norwegian backpackers. And it is a relatively recent phenomena for Thailand to fill up with Chinese tourists over CNY. Why limit your tourist peaks to just thanksgiving and Christmas?

February is already high season in Thailand

Ya but it isn’t peak season. Things are much affordable in Thailand in February than they are in December. Heck, a week after new years it’s already sane again.

Places like koh chang (my personal favorite) become really deserted, not devoid of people, but you might be the only person at some lazy restaurant or bar that was full and bustling just a few weeks ago.

Re: Leaving China

#560

Post by photochemsyn »

roca wrote: post #493
photochemsyn wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid my view is a bit more jaded - I think those storylines were manufactured for ulterior motives as part of an effort to sell a program to the American public that would significantly reduce the average standard of living while concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaires. They'd already seen the effects of NAFTA and with China, they were hungry for more of the same. I don't believe the conversion of the…

Lots of relatively rich countries are in the TPP, including my country, NZ. It has significant rules protecting labour and environmental conditions. It's fine. From your link: > The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the United States. So they're saying that jobs moving from the USA to Mexico increased the flow…

The other side of the NAFTA coin was that it allowed US agribusiness to dump products like corn in Mexico at below-market prices, driving many small-scale Mexican farmers into poverty. At that point, they could either work as low-paid maquiladores (the border factories etc.) in Mexico or become Mexican expats at significantly better wages in the US agriculture, construction, restaurant, hotel & golf course etc. sectors.

The neoliberal project in a nutshell involved the outsourcing of unionized well-paid domestic manufacturing jobs overseas, on one hand, and the import of cheap expat labor to fill jobs that couldn't be moved offshore, driving down labor costs and creating hundreds of new billionaires, who used their money to buy more politicians to lock in the programs and prevent any change.

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