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Let's talk about China

What I feel about it...well its hard to find news on China what with the wumao actively targeting anyone regularly putting out stuff even marginally off CCP message , even on sites blocked in China...so far play to the bloke, puts a lot of effort in , and as he actually operates out of China -his arse on the line.


If you are interested you are interested if you have other sources put em up or failing that and you really are after having your arse wiped for fuck off and leave China as some far of land you can't be arsed with.

Politburo may have been brought forward over Quin Gang but those financial ain't good and a lot of face/politics and livelihoods at stake . There will be losers
 
Doubling down on being a police state and cozying up to Russia is bad for tourism, it seems, except tourism from Russia

A lot of the people I know who were engaged with China for a long period of time throughout the late 00s and 10s have essentially broken ties with the country and are no longer interested in returning. The lack of these regular repeat visitors, as well as declining numbers of expats living in China who invite people to visit them, and the cumulative/aggregate effect of their negative reporting to people back home probably dents inbound tourism quite a lot even on top of everything else.

IMO it is even more intolerable for those who speak the language because you'd have to put up with constant propaganda supporting Russia's war in Ukraine etc but you have no right to respond and have to just grin and bear it.
 

A translation of a speech by a University Dean which contains a lot of veiled criticism of the policies which have led to a decline of foreign travel to China.

I don't necessarily agree with his claim that China's image would improve with more people visiting - in my experience people who spend more time in China (at least during Xi era) tend to become more critical than those who don't visit - but I agree with him that China's global status is ultimately harmed by the paranoid prioritisation of security which has a deleterious effect on person-to-person exchanges.
 
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A similar speech by president of the Smart Tourism Branch of the China Tourism Association on the collapse of inbound tourism which also contains some useful additional information. The former speech above says that now tourism is mostly from developing countries rather than developed; however this appears to be from classifyng street vendors and migrant labour regularly crossing the border back and forth from Vietnamese or Myanmar border towns as tourism.
 
Those poor people. Not that I expect the CCP to curb their coal fired power plant building any time soon

Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents.

 
Tbf 2021 not a good reference year...other stuff going on

Ah yeah. I get confused which year was the one they decided they had beaten covid and started packing out giant swimming pools and cinemas while the rest of the world was in lockdown, and which was the one they decided to weld people in their flats to die of starvation and housefires because 'zero covid'
 
Ah yeah. I get confused which year was the one they decided they had beaten covid and started packing out giant swimming pools and cinemas while the rest of the world was in lockdown, and which was the one they decided to weld people in their flats to die of starvation and housefires because 'zero covid'
2020 Ain't we doing well
2021 Ain't we good at welding
2022 We Ain't good at counting cases
 
I am nervous about Taiwan. Many European and US businesses get their products made in Taiwan and China and one of the first reactions likely if China were to invade Taiwan would be trade sanctions.

Obviously companies like Apple are very exposed to China with 60% of iPhones made by Foxconn which although Taiwanese has massive plants in China.

But many companies are exposed to that risk.

Foxconn is moving a lot of their production to India.

 


Erstwhile aspirational Chinese home-buyers have lost their appetite for risking their savings on millions of houses that most likely will never be built.

For a country that seems to insert it's state apparatus and controls on just about everything, they proper fucked it when it came to reining in companies like Evergrande from getting in way over their heads to the tune of $300Bn.

And then when trust in the property market fades and real estate is just about the only thing people in China can invest in then it's no wonder the economy is tanking.
 
Sharp decline in the number of people studying Mandarin. Strong suggestion it could be politically motivated.

I studied Mandarin around the time of the post-Olympics peak hype and the fact is that the jobs just aren't there for it.

Some of this is down to jobs in the west that need Chinese preferring to hire bilingual native speakers of whom there are plenty; but also for jobs within China there isn't a particular preference for foreigners who can speak Chinese, and in fact sometimes it seems they prefer foreign business partners who don't speak Chinese as it gives the Chinese side an advantage.

Chinese firms that might hire foreigners for localisation etc tend to keep them quite segregated from the rest of the company and there are limited opportunities for progression. Getting money you make out of China is difficult and they don't really want you there long term either so it isn't a great option.

Aside from jobs, Chinese language popular culture (TV and film) is also with some exceptions (typically older movies or movies banned in China) frankly a "improving my language skills" chore rather than something particularly enjoyable and it is getting worse as political control increases over media. There are also determined to police interaction between Chinese and foreigners so you can't even really participate in Chinese social media easily. Many things require a Chinese phone number to join so if you aren't physically in China you are locked out. Learning a language for cultural exchange rather than economics is one thing but they even try to make non-economic uses of the language painful and fraught these days. I honestly regret learning it and feel I could have learned French, German and Spanish in the time it took me and I would get a lot more out of them.

Also I personally couldn't stand living there anymore, which doesn't help either... in the end I just retrained and got a software related job which is better paid and with more opportunities than anything China related and also required a lot less hours of study to get to a level where it was professionally useful...
 
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According to FSI who train diplomats in languages, for an English-native, Mandarin takes approximately four times more hours to master than Spanish, about 2.5 more than German, and twice that of languages like Farsi and Russian.
This must to some extent hold back some cultural reach. Though places like Korea and Japan manage to have cultural influence in the west and I doubt they are that easy to learn either.
 
Well they made a concerted effort this week to get their pension funds and banks to prop up their stock market...might have well have just set fire to the money...which is worth less anyway due to their intrest rate cut earlier in the week.


Evergrande (now in Chapter 15 bankruptcy) spread to CountryGarden ...17% of GDP was in construction..

You've got the on going decoupling from US with a tit for tat trade war not only with them but Australia too (used to import of their raw materials ) and now Japan too. The slump is large enough to be impacting on the economy of their largest inward investor. ... Germany.



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Tbf they ain't too rosey in the rest of the world either
 
This must to some extent hold back some cultural reach. Though places like Korea and Japan manage to have cultural influence in the west and I doubt they are that easy to learn either.
I think learning to speak Japanese is less of a challenge. I've had several colleagues over the years who have achieved some degree of proficiency and Japanese pronunciation is not as challenging as the other two - Japanese names are usually easy to master As to Korean, I'm always being told that you can learn to read Korean in a few hours rather than the years that it takes to learn Chinese.



 
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