Here is something that I did not know: someone in China who moves to a city cannot simply move in and expect all of the services that western people expect of their governments, like being able to enroll their kids in a local school. China has urban settlement restrictions on their cities. Someone who moves to a Chinese city has to either send their children back to their hometown to live with relatives and go to school there, or pay up for private schooling. China recently made it easier to relocate to smaller cities, but maintains restrictions for larger cities like Shanghai and Beijing based on a point system (say the wrong thing on the internet, say goodbye to any hopes of relocation). China to make it easier for citizens to settle in small and medium cities
What a load of crap. When China or Russia talk about national security, they are talking about the privilege of power for the ruling party or system. No country has tried to invade either China or Russia in over 70 years. All of the existential threats to China and Russia come from within. When the U.S. or Europe talk about national security, it is often about the long-term stability of the free market system worldwide, which allows the U.S. and Europe to afford to be able to defend the seas from pirates and rogue nations (like China and Russia) and support a stable system of international law. That stability is routinely threatened by the theft of technology by two countries: China and Russia. The U.S. has largely been responsible for both the survival of China (when Nixon provided 13 fertilizer plants after Mao destroyed Chinese agriculture) and the rise of China (when U.S. retirement funds under Clinton provided capital and technology to China). The U.S. was also responsible for the second rising of Russia, after their economy collapsed in the late-80's, when the U.S. supervised the rebuilding of Russia's economy under Clinton, which enabled Russia to continue funding the manufacture of military weapons and equipment. And, of course, the U.S. was responsible for the survival and first rising of Russia, when it sent massive amounts of military aid to Moscow during WWII, only to watch Stalin's barbarian hordes capture (and keep) all of Eastern Europe. Your dimwitted propagandist sources seem unable (or unwilling) to grasp reality.
Chairman Xi has been changing out people in some high-level leadership positions. First it was China's foreign minister, Qin Gang, who was suspected of having an affair. Then it was the head of China's Rocket Force, General Li and his sidekick, General Liu, who are suspected of taking bribes and kickbacks. The interpretation is that Xi is feeling insecure about his failures in China, and wants people he can trust when China invades Taiwan in 2025 or 2027. The Reckoning That Has Chinese Officials Dropping Like Flies
China is smuggling fentanyl as well as chemicals used to make fentanyl into the U.S. One recent shipment was enough fentanyl to kill 25 million Americans. They accept payment in cryptocurrency, making it more difficult to track their transactions. 'This isn't some random dude with a duffel bag': To catch fentanyl traffickers, feds dig into crypto markets | CNN Politics
I must admit, I was slow coming around on this. I feel like I’m thinking in terms of the US soft landing. I want China to not do well because they are trying to oppress others and are rivals. But I don’t want their economy to collapse to the point that it might destabilize into war.
What I would like to see is a slow decline in the economy of China as China loses population, so that at some point in the future, China has to decide between having a massive modern military and a fully staffed workforce for its factories and other non-military jobs. The military is not needed by China, except for disaster recovery from floods and earthquakes, and to bully their neighbors to take what belongs to them.
China's economic problems are described as "long-term Covid" in nature, and not something that the government can fix. The economy was far more successful when the government allowed businesses some freedom to do things in a free market-type environment, but with success came the "need" for the authoritarian government to assert control over the economy, thereby damaging it. China's economy is trapped in a downward spiral that authoritarian regimes are doomed to repeat
Xi is a disaster. China reports double-digit plunge in July exports and imports, missing expectations This makes them even more dangerous, as their economy eventually implodes, in order to save face they need to create conflict to incite nationalism, which means conflict with the US and potentially attack on Taiwan.
More detail on the causes of the Beijing-area flooding. Even though China set up some defensive measures after the 1963 flooding of the same area, they did not account for all of the construction of large cities since then. The construction involved covering large areas of ground with concrete, which prevented water from draining into the ground. The percentage of people living in cities has almost quadrupled since 1963. Tokyo, in contrast, has a much better system for handling heavy rains than Beijing does. Part of this is because Japan became wealthy decades ago, while China's wealth has been more recent and they have not had time to upgrade their infrastructure. Explainer-Why was northern China ravaged by floods?
More on China's economic disaster unfolding: the U.S. has reduced its imports from China by 25% in 2023. As tensions rise, U.S. imports from China plummet
Meanwhile, the U.S. is not a wealthy nation. It’s a nation of poor people in which many healthy people live …
China's younger people in large cities have become so poor that they are forced not only to get a roommate, but to share a bed with the roommate. Sounds interesting, right? Young people say they can't survive in the city without someone else in their bed. (Part of me wishes I thought of that line when I was younger.) It's not like hot bedding, or alternating use of the bed. It sounds more like "nuclear bedding", where snoring or sudden motions could cause a chain reaction leading to a massive explosion. Where is Chairman Xi when you need him? 'Bedmates' are a hot commodity for China's broke and jobless youth, who say they need to sleep next to strangers just to survive in the country's megacities
The Chinese save so much money because they are terrified of their financial future. The economy is going bad fairly quickly, and Chinese people want to be sure they can afford to eat in the next year. The nation came into money rather quickly, so the mentality is that they could lose their wealth just as quickly. There are a lot of indications that Chairman Xi doesn't know what he's doing with the economy as well as foreign relations. Americans are very confident (maybe a little too confident) that the economy will be successful in the future, so they feel less of a need to save.
Adam Tooze with a decent depth analysis of recent Chines economic woes. Lots of analysis. I love this suggested explanation, although it is proffered in the context of criticism of recent Administration industrial policy moves For Posen, Xi’s China has reached a tipping point, which unlike Li Yuan he traces less to China’s national history, than the general logic of authoritarian regimes. According to Posen, all authoritarian regimes suffer from a severe case of what is called “original sin”. The lack of credible legal constraints on action by the sovereign makes it hard to sustain a high-functioning economic regime. Since the reform period of the 1980s, the CCP has, in fact, been unusual in holding out for a relatively long time against the temptations of arbitrary rule. But in Xi’s third term the regime is finally succumbing to this universal temptation and - this is the crucial point - broader Chinese society is now waking up to this reality. This is just a fascinating passage These kind of comparisons again and again reveal the failure to grasp the sheer scale of the Chinese projects. This China that we are casually generalizing about, is a state whose population is the same as that of North America, South. America and all of Europe put together, under almost 80 years of uniquely transformative rule by a historically unique and still dynamic political party that directly inherits the DNA of the revolutionary era and self-consciously orientates itself towards avoiding the fate of the only regime to which it can, at a pinch, be meaningfully compared, namely the Soviet Union. https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/whither-china-part-i-regime-impasse?utm_medium=email
It has already been demonstrated that China fabricates stories about its economy. The indications are quite clear that China's economy is in serious trouble.
