China Rapidly Modernizes for War With U.S.

[ah_dut]

Note to conservative U.S guys looking for the next 'bad guy' : Chinese people a) They are humans like you and me, not some sort of demon

b) They are very polite kind and friendly

c) Believe it or not...they do not talk about war all day, nor do they talk about attacking the US and turning it communist...maybe some conservatives should do the same for a change

I am Chinese so might be able to spread some light on the issue at hand.
a) obviously
b) they're the same as everyone else. Perhaps the culture is more respectful than ours in the western world.
c) well the ones I know are far more worried about money than anything if you want the honest truth.

On a note on racism: Yes, conservative chinese people tend to be very superior and racist. I mean conservative in the oldest sense of the word, trying to preserve the 'old' ways. They believe chinese people are inherently superior. But that was the way of the world...

Personally, I don't see myself (or any of my friends) as any more racist than the ''normal'' population of the UK, if anything...less racist. But I guess in some senses we are more british than chinese culturally

[Azi Tohak]

I am Chinese so might be able to spread some light on the issue at hand.
a) obviously
b) they're the same as everyone else. Perhaps the culture is more respectful than ours in the western world.
c) well the ones I know are far more worried about money than anything if you want the honest truth.

On a note on racism: Yes, conservative chinese people tend to be very superior and racist. I mean conservative in the oldest sense of the word, trying to preserve the 'old' ways. They believe chinese people are inherently superior. But that was the way of the world...

Personally, I don't see myself (or any of my friends) as any more racist than the ''normal'' population of the UK, if anything...less racist. But I guess in some senses we are more british than chinese culturally

Thank you ah dut. Nice to hear from someone closer to the subject than I am.

To be sure, I like my friend. He's a good guy. But Sjakihata is right, there is rascism everywhere. The problem is it is self-propagating. Lumping is easy (I'm guilty of that myself ) but knowing if it is true or not is hard.

I do not doubt that many Chinese (or Japanese or French or Brits or Americans [I could go on but I won't]) believe they are superior to country X for Y reasons. What I don't like is what I see of the Chinese leadership espouing that idea too. That is the dangerous part. Sounds awful familiar to too many examples in history (colonialism, Rome, WWII and on) for me to believe they are harmless.

Azi

[ah_dut]

Thank you ah dut. Nice to hear from someone closer to the subject than I am.

To be sure, I like my friend. He's a good guy. But Sjakihata is right, there is rascism everywhere. The problem is it is self-propagating. Lumping is easy (I'm guilty of that myself ) but knowing if it is true or not is hard.

I do not doubt that many Chinese (or Japanese or French or Brits or Americans [I could go on but I won't]) believe they are superior to country X for Y reasons. What I don't like is what I see of the Chinese leadership espouing that idea too. That is the dangerous part. Sounds awful familiar to too many examples in history (colonialism, Rome, WWII and on) for me to believe they are harmless.

Azi

My point is, what you put much better than me. There is racism everywhere: jsut some groups are more racist than others. Many people feel their country is superior. I just happen to think people of my country (china) think that more tan most...

The government will probably always try and spout nationalistic rubbish, that's a fact of life I will have to live with

[BDC]

China's cheap labour bank is vanishing because of their one-child policy, and most of the children being male. Don't forget that.

[Taffy_is_a_Taff]

I'm not trying to be mean but in general there are 105 males born to every 100 females (therefore most babies would be naturally male anyway). Generally. What has happened in China is that people have been aborting female foetuses because of their gender. This has skewed the proportions even more.

[Don Corleone]

I've been to China (mainland) a few times and I've never wanted to 'attack' them. I think manners count for more in Chinese society then they do in American, and there's a few other differences, but for the most part people are people.

Chinese don't discuss attacking the US not because they don't think about it but because they consider it rude to discuss politics with somebody you know you'll disagree with. You should be focusing on topics you can agree on and build harmony, such as getting rich together. But there's plenty of Chinese that have it in for America, just as there's plenty of Americans that have it in for China.

I read an article a week ago talking about a riot in a small city about an hour outside of Shanghai. The local peasants rioted and destroyed a factory, because the factory was releasing chemicals into the watershed & was destroying their crops. I was amazed to hear this, but it certainly makes the whole Taiwan equation make a lot more sense. China has a lot of growing pains going on right now, and those who are employed & living in the East Coast cities are doing exponentially better then people in the West or in rural areas. China is trying to address this by steering new foreign business coming in to western cities (like ChengDu (Agilent's China HQ), Xian (where Dell is setting up) and Guiyang (I think Panasonic). My point is that they know damn well things are a little imbalanced and a large group of the population is pretty upset that their boat isn't rising with the tide. China's trying to fix that, but it takes time and these people are impatient. One of the best diversions from domestic issues is a good national sovereigty crisis with a shadowy foreign power you know little about but who's 1) powerful and 2) appears menacing. The US, telling China to leave Taiwan alone, fits the bill perfectly, and I think if the US said "you know what, take Taiwan", the Chinese government would crap their pants.

Well, maybe not that extreme, but for the time being, I think they like the situation exactly as it is. For now, they can tell their people "Look, things may not be perfect, but the Americans are over there across the Taiwan Strait dreaming of ways to conquer us... it's unpatriotic of you to be focusing on your personal woes with things as they are..."

[Steppe Merc]

I'm not trying to be mean but in general there are 105 males born to every 100 females (therefore most babies would be naturally male anyway). Generally. What has happened in China is that people have been aborting female foetuses because of their gender. This has skewed the proportions even more.

Or they abandon the girl. Fortuanetly, some, like my little cousin (well, she's not related obviously), can get adopted.

[Red Harvest]

However, such high and consistent growth is rather miraculous. There are over a hundred nations which are way below their potential equilibrium and they do not grow adequately to support either Sollow or convergence. The reason is almost always bad economic management.

I see it as more of an authoritarian system running an entire country like a large business with well thought out goals. China isn't blazing new paths afterall, they are correcting decades of their own poor economic management and pulling themselves out of what was once a 3rd world economy. From my project work in Singapore, it looks to me like China is essentially using an adapted Singapore model. Also, many neighboring countries had already industrialized, so China had a lot of ground to make up. Essentially, they are the last big country to industrialize.

I see some brilliance to what they are doing, but it strikes me as "it's about time they figured it out." You can't ignore the decades of incompetence that preceeded the recent growth. I can't really see this as a triumph for communism, since they had to turn to capitalism to fix what communism had broken. In the end, I think the changes will transform the Chinese govt and people into something far less threatening than they are today--at least from a militaristic viewpoint.

So yes, China USED TO , produce cheap labour goods and to a large extend it still does. But it now also produces high-tech goods and provides a vast array of financial services at a very competitive way. When China reaches its growth potential, it will do show as a very technologically develop country.

They didn't develop any of this. They brought outsiders in to show them how to do things, so that they could train their own people on how to build things. I've been aware of this for 16 years now. They have leveraged a cheap labor pool, enticed with a large potential market, and used their monopoly on the economy as big stick for getting exactly what they want. They have required that the plants built there be run by chinese and that most of the plant equipment be built by chinese, even when they were completely unqualified for the task and it cost much more to do so.

In conclusion, the structure of the Chinese regime has allowed them to design and realise very-long-term plans and they will face minimal structural problem as their economy passed from rural to industrialised to services based.

Absolute control means no real internal obstacles to implementing one's plan. However, the structure is based on authoritarian control, and that is a big weakness, since it can be flawed and hidden, and the structure can be destroyed at the whim of those in power. I was in Singapore when SAR's was not yet named and the Chinese govt was working hard to suppress the cases, it was obvious to me at the time what was going on. (There were a lot of really nasty respiratory viruses hitting us in Singapore about the same time, so I was paying close attention to the headlines out of China related to their more severe virus.) I give this as an example of the hidden faults of such a regime.

Of course bubbles and collapses happen and more often than not noone has predicted the external shock that causes a collapse untill its too late.

Actually, a major component of the tech bubble collapse was identified by a major bond analyst. Can't remember the name, but he was looking at the yields on the telecom bonds and started warning his clients to get out of those bonds immediately no matter how attractive they looked. I think he was about 6 months ahead on his call. What he recognized was that the telecom arms race had just about run its course, they were having trouble getting access to capital although their solvency was not yet being questioned. Since the telecoms were spending the billions that were driving the tech manufacturing giants, the result was predictable. For a similar sector crash to compare with, look at what happened to the theater chains in their massive buildout in the U.S. a few years before the telecom crash... They all went bankrupt because the "arms race" forced them to take on more debt than they could manage.

I wont stake my name into an oppinion that the Chinese economy might not collapse, any economy can collapse. But I wouldnt bet on it.

I don't see collapse in the cards at all, but having a strong pull back or recession would not be a surprise to me. It simply is a matter of when. Because of the state control we still have a major "transparency" issue. Kind of like with all the major companies that were cooking their books feeding the U.S. bubble... Don't forget that China's system has been inherently protectionist. That lure has worked so far, because of the lure of cheap labor and their massive potential market. It won't work forever. Eventually, they will have to open up to imports.