This thread is now about China

[patches70]

I demand a hearing---FROM THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE, TO THE PEOPLE, IN THE PEOPLE.

Guilty.

You are hereby remanded to to the ministry of Love, Room 101 where you will be reeducated with extreme prejudice. May God have mercy on your soul.

Next!

[saxitoxin]

Is it just me or does anyone else think it would be hot as hell if Gabby and BBS made out?

[thegreekdog]

Is it just me or does anyone else think it would be hot as hell if Gabby and BBS made out?

It's not just you.

Is it just me or does Gabby remind you a lot of Symmetry? The whining, wailing, and gnashing of teeth is almost a spot-on imitation.

Feel free to report me for flaming the both of you. As far as I'm concerned you both need to put your big boy pants on. Gabon, when I read the OP my initial reaction was "google conspiracy." I bet it was a lot of others' initial reactions too. So get a grip dude. If you don't want to argue with BBS, don't respond to him. If you want to make a thread about eugenics, make a thread about eugenics. But for fucks sake, grow a pair.

[2dimes]

Maybe, but I really want some wings because of that "buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo..." post I just read.

[nietzsche]

[BigBallinStalin]

Is it just me or does anyone else think it would be hot as hell if Gabby and BBS made out?

In keeping with the general theme of this thread, which CC couple do you think would be hottest if they made out?

[2dimes]

This one is too good to leave on the last page.

[saxitoxin]

Is it just me or does anyone else think it would be hot as hell if Gabby and BBS made out?

In keeping with the general theme of this thread, which CC couple do you think would be hottest if they made out?

There aren't many, however, there are a small handful that would test the limits even of my own heterosexuality:

Nietzsche & Army of God ... like a Brown Sugar / White Sugar thing
BBS & Gabby ... angry, hate fucks are always hot
Mr. Hot Stuff & Count Snoutmeister ... 2 words - inter, species
Serbia & A Mirror ... double trouble

[john9blue]

Mr. Hot Stuff & Count Snoutmeister ... 2 words - inter, species

interspecies is one word.

don't ask why i know this.

[cornpops]

sabotage says:

'1. No one in China looks back at it and says; wtf was the government doing? They just robbed us and bailed out the other guys that robbed us. That is, they maintained the trust or perhaps built trust in some minds.

2. They dealt with the crisis, a situation that average businesses can't deal with on such a grand scale.'

1 - no, but they continue to say 'wtf is the government doing' about a whole bunch of other, fairly serious, things. have you ever lived in china? do you honestly think the average citizen here trusts their government? (i'm not chinese, so i can't really speak for them, but i have a bunch of chinese friends whose opinions i can lend to this debate)

2 - the USA didn't ride into 2008 on the back of a decade where it was averaging more than 10% GDP growth every year. China and the USA hold very different economic cards, making a comparison of the US and China dodgy at best.

it's also worth noting that a whole bunch of china's building projects from the last 10-15 years are already crumbling and being closed off. that money is being pumped into creating some very shitty infrastructure (although maybe this is the plan: an india-like economy of middle men constantly repairing the crappy, broken things. constant employment, epic winz ensue)

[cornpops]

sabotage says:

'Family and home are the same character in Chinese'

家 = home
家人 = family (人 means 'people' or 'person', so 家人 means, literally, 'home people')

even if 'family' and 'home' really were represented by the same character, that doesn't demonstrate a whole lot. come live in china and tell me all about the noble and traditional collectivist society that exists in cities like beijing and shanghai.

'0 political blowback from the public.'

jesus, dude. sure, you can argue that china gets some things right where the US gets them very wrong, but you're wearing a seriously big pair of rose-tinted glasses here.

'For these reasons, losing a job isn't a big deal to many in China.'

tell that to all the young men who have to own their own apartment and car before a girl will even look at them. 10s of millions of surplus young men, all desperate to find a wife by the age of 25 or else look like a loser, all needing to provide cars and apartments and ipads to their prospective mates if they want even a chance. yeah, people don't really care if they lose their job here.

where are you getting your information from?

[_sabotage_]

Cornpops;

I have lived in China for 7 years and spent a lot of time there since the late 90s.

First, I was talking about the benefits of a command structure. The benefit I maintained was that a command structure can act quickly.

My wife has three sisters and a brother. They live in Guangzhou, Dongguan, Beijing and Shanghai. Within a year of graduation, the youngest, the brother, was able to send money back to his hometown in Hunan. This money isn't needed by his parents, in fact they store it up to give back to their children as part of their inheritance. In most places, there are plenty of jobs and if someone can't find one, it's socially acceptable to return to the family home if not ideal.

If you believe that 1.4 billion people can be or even should be compared to the US, the comparison I was making, then please take that point of view. I believe that one of China's greatest strengths is that they can use leapfrog technology and bypass a lot of the cost of joining in a modern world and providing up to date benefits that excede those provided by countries who were industrialized prior to China and have a lot of existing infrastructure and built up interest which impedes this.

In many ways, the social structure of the Chinese family (and by the way I speak both Cantonese and Mandarin and 家人 means family member, not family) does have advantages and disadvantages, one of the disadvantages that you have pointed out is that marriage is also a family based decision often focusing on the ability of the couple to provide for their own family unit, which greatly disadvantages males from poor families. So when my third sister-in-law got married and decided to buy an apartment in Shanghai, her husbands family and ours pitched in the amount above their savings (their savings amounted to about 25% of the purchase price) and they were able to buy it outright. I disagreed with this, thinking that buying it on mortgage and using the other money for investments made more sense, but I was ignored and they have a place in Shanghai paid for.

I'm getting my information from running a not for profit training centre in which I held daily discussions with people from a variety of sectors and economic backgrounds who in turn have family's and are usually well aware of their own circumstances and those of others around them. I have had to bribe the government and deal with the housing and other problems for more than twenty staff including seven foreigners.

You bring up many points. I could counter them with examples from the US regarding the divorce rate, lack of family unit, price of education and healthcare. But...

My question for you is: you say you are not Chinese, are you living in China? And if so, why? And if no, where are you getting your information from?

[cornpops]

i would argue that the benefits of china’s command structure aren’t nearly great enough to make the overall package an attractive model. you live in china as a foreign expat who can live comfortably in china and leave at the drop of a hat if they really want to (as do i). would you really want to live here as a regular chinese citizen?

how does your wife have 4 siblings? is her family rich or was she just born before the one child policy? if the former (which it sounds like is the case), her family isn’t really the best reflection of general chinese society.

[_sabotage_]

I could try to educate you on the history of China, its previous dominance in technology, I could go into its fall into decline when it decided it didn't need the outside world, its further decline by submitting to the western powers and its darkest hours during the Japanese occupation. I could talk about Mao and his failed policies, or how his greatest accomplishment was returning China to the Chinese. I could talk about Deng and the march towards prosperity. I could talk about how the one-child policy is actually implemented and those who are forced to through its constraints. Or I could simply point out that China is fast become a dominant power through its command system, had been the dominant power under its previous command system and slipped furthest from prominence under democracy.

I could give you the history of the current rise to prosperity, I could tell you my wife's history from homelessness to project manager of a major international company. I could describe her ascent to this position, and how she was able to save 95% of her monthly salary, further educate herself while paying for the education of her siblings on what would have been a average daily wage in the west. I could make a comparison of one of her colleagues who she tried to join her in her computer lessons, her English lessons, her design and project manager lessons (all of which were basically free) and compare their current situations. I could point out that both her father and closest sister still work in factories in the PRD and show that its a employees market. I could show that her case is nothing special, that the during her lifetime the line between rich and porr has been defined.

I could compare Canada or the US to China. I could point out that the US can track people by phone, email, Facebook, bug their houses, arrest and kill them without any legal recourse. That they take over countries and bend them to the economic will of the US. Or Canada where there is almost no opportunity, where people are taxed over and over on the income they earn, which in the east is mainly handed out by the government through government jobs and government backed enterprise, and reinforced through regulation.

But I'm not going to go there. I'm not going to say that you are an uneducated hypocrite who wants to blow the western penis. Instead, I will say that China has a long and complicated history, it has 1.4 billion people to worry about and it is now on the forefront of world power. If you believe that a command system is not good for China, then you must also believe that the West is wrong as well, because China has entered the global platform which was constructed on western ideals and is nearing the top of the pack.

[BigBallinStalin]

Hey, sabotage, got a question for ya.

Remember 'back in the days' when many were speculating that Japan's economy would overcome the US, but they didn't foresee Japan's 10-20 year stagnation?

Do you think China's command system is better suited for overcoming such snags in economic development?

[cornpops]

‘who wants to blow the western penis’

ooh, ouch. now the claws are out. i haven’t commented on ‘the west’ and it’s various systems at all. i just said that i don’t consider the chinese model to be very attractive. maybe i just spend too much time outside Shanghai’s gated communities, rubbing shoulders with guys who earn 3,000 kuai a month and have very little prospect of a girlfriend, family or anything beyond the shitty job they currently hold. guys who resent the fact that the government would shut them down if they even thought of complaining about the fact that politicians’ sons are racing ferraris around beijing while they work their arses off just to be able to live independently of their parents.

it’s pretty easy to develop a large economy when you have a population of 1billion or so migrant rural workers who will turf out cheap electronics for very, very little money. that doesn’t make your country a nice place to live. ‘prosperity’ is pretty odd choice of word to use in relation to china. ask your maid how prosperous china is, not your wife’s friends in the Party.

it’s pretty rich of you to accuse me of ‘blowing western penis’ when all i see you doing is sucking the cock of a country that you are not and never will be a part of. if you're prostrate at the feet of Mao (a man who starved 40m people and fucked china far harder than colonial powers ever did) then you've got to be about one step away from sailing out to senkaku and planting a little chinese flag on the shore. let me know how that goes.

[_sabotage_]

Cornpops: I just wonder which great country in the world doesn't have poor people, which government is perfect and leave it at that.

BBS: If you would care to compare the Japanese economic downturn with the course that China is on and how I feel the results will vary, I would be pleased.

My take:

Japan's downturn was the result of a tight monetary contraction dictated by international regulations to which Japan was a party. As the stock market started to fall, foreign investors removed their funds from the Japanese market which furthered the available funds on the market. In short, the collapse was the result of several factors, banking policy, investor uncertainty and less cash available. This in turn is due to Japanese regulation and willingness to submit to foreign regulation.

China has a few advantages that other countries don't. It has a massive population which provide for both production and consumption and few competitors for it to hand off it's production too. The US had hundreds of countries around that it could have its production passed to in order to lower its costs. Several years ago many companies tried relocating to Vietnam, but in general it was a failure and they returned to China. There were a variety of reasons for this, but in general the economic incentives made China better suited to their purposes. This is not necessarily always going to be the case. But with a massive population to consume and produce and a tight control over the currency, I don't see a short-term downturn.

Resources. China has been part of building up the pies of its allies, while the US bullied countries into debt in order to secure the resources of their developing countries. The US has some strategic cooperation but mainly on the war front and largely ignores or stomps out countries who try to improve their overall lot. This policy will have enormous ramifications in the coming years and China will come out smell nicely. This will further the influence, resource pool and potential consumer base of China as the US spirals south from the long awaited blowback of their policies.

China doesn't give too much of a shit about foreign pressure and will not enable international pressure to influence them to enact policies which aid the US hegemony. Its body politique can make promises to foreign nations and the recipients can be assured of the fulfillment. As such, the problems that faced the Japanese economy 20 years back aren't present in China, the world shall side with China in the long run, the preservation of production and consumer will be maintained and the government is not unstable.

My perspective is that it's all bullshit. I don't agree with government dictating terms to people whether it be Chinese or American. I think that a new age is starting where we will both retreat and leap forward. Production will be localized, trade will have fewer middle men and the need for government will dissipate. Things will be made to last, waste will not exist and we will experience a sea change in local communities as well as a closer international community. That's what I work towards in my daily life and the economy of China, the US and the world can die a withering death, middlemen and service providers can melt into near non-existence and capital lose value to production.

Want to help?