When will China take the Crown?

[The Wizard]

2015 - and it is a great thing, the sooner the better.

Knowing this is a troll, I'll take the bait regardless: how does it come about that a declared socialist supports the dictatorial capitalist one-party state that is the PRC?

Well, firstly, Chongqing is mentioned to convey a sense of size, of unparalleled growth of a scale still not fully realised yet. That is the point that is made by the statement. Meaning, context and all that. Here, one would negate the point being made not by saying that Chonqging is an important industrial area, but by saying it isn't.

Random pedantry is not impressive. Rather, it shows inability to distinguish trivialities from what's important, as is the case here. More worryingly, spewing random facts to impress has become sooo obsolote ever since we all got ourselves a wikipedia.

Secondly, if one wants to be pedantic, at least do your homework, eh? Wiki alone does not suffice, one must also understand the random facts one finds on it. The city of Chongqing has three times the inhabitants of the city of Paris. The municipality of Chonqging also has three times the inhabitants of the aire urbane of Paris, or the region of Île-de-France, mostly rural too.


The rest of your post is wrong because the capital of China is Beijing. Which means 'Northern Capital' and has the postal code 100000 - 102629.

And don't call me sparky, small fry.

Well, allow me to retort, sparky (). There is nothing trivial about asserting that Chongqing looks impressive until you realize it's basically a province the size of the Netherlands, not one giant city like Tokyo. There is nothing pedantic about spewing facts when you are replying to someone else spewing facts (it was you after all who began by dropping the incorrect factoid that the "provincial town" Chongqing is bigger than Paris). And if you're going to argue municipalities... you can make a municipality as large or as small as you want. Miami is generally understood to have millions of inhabitants, but the municipality only contains half a million people. Would you say it's a city of 500k, then?

It's all rather marginal, really, this argument. If you want to make a point about China's size, Louis, at least do it properly, eh? Say something about how there are like 50-100 cities of more than 1 million inhabitants in that country, and that still, despite this, half the population is rural. That would have gotten the point across quite nicely, and would have spared you the ire of hopeless nitpickers such as myself.

EDIT: OK, I know I shouldn't drag this pointless little factoid shootout out any longer, but this is going a bit too far:

Chonqging is a great example even simply by virtue of being a large Chinese city undergoing rapid development. Copy'ing and pasting tidbits about it that one just found on the internets five minutes ago is not relevant, not conducive to debate, and not telling of being able to distinguish trivialities from what's important.

Excuse me, but why are you giving me flak for posting "tidbits one just found on the Internets" when it is you that posted a tidbit you found on those Internets and I merely replied to it? FYI, if you hadn't seen it, I was not trying to portray you as a dimwit, as stated in my second post in this thread. Please tone down the hostility. I don't bear you any ill will. And if you don't want to argue tidbits and factoids, well, then don't make half a post out of it.