My guess is that "1 dollar to america's 20" stat is looking at the entire defense budget, when america only spends a small portion of that towards acquisition.

The two countries are in two very different modes at the moment so it's a more difficult comparison than what that quote lays out.

(Haven't read the article, just what was quoted, so 100% assumption on my part.)

Actually the analogy would work better if the South had won the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and other wealthy and important Northerners were the ones who fled.

I was listening to a podcast of an American independent conflict journalist named Michael Yon (I dont know exactly how to describe what he does, but basically he travels around the world documenting conflicts, and he has spent the last several decades visiting doing exactly that visiting 80 countries, and reporting on what he sees).

Anyways, he says he has spent a lot of time recently in China and Southeast Asia and something which he said he found alarming is the coordinated construction of several anti-Japan propaganda museums focusing on their atrocities during WWII. He says he has visited the museums, and his impression is their main purpose is to build disgust and hatred for Japanese people, and he is concerned because history has shown us building widespread hatred and disgust for "the other" through propaganda is a common precursor for really bad stuff to potentially go down in the future.

I don't know how he differentiates the purpose of the memorials/museums, I'm curious if he ever discusses it. I've been to both the Nanjing Memorial and the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam. To me it seemed that they both just told the story of what happened. Yet in Vietnam I felt very little animosity towards Americans (perhaps it was hidden from me because I am American), but in China it was obvious they held grudges against the Japanese.

It was a fast moving podcast and he didn't get too much into the weeds on that topic. He mentioned he has written a book on it that was picked up by a Japanese publisher and translated into Japanese. It appears people in Japan might be more interested in this topic than Americans. Reading through the lines, I would guess his thesis is that the extreme animosity of Chinese towards Japanese in 2022 isn't organic or accidental, and part of a coordinated propaganda campaign. And the museum is part of it.

I definitely agree that it's a coordinated effort. However museums/memorials seem like an especially difficult subject as I think they serve a legit purpose.

The ones I went to were all very good, I think if they spread hatred it's because the population is already primed to feel that way.

It's also possible that there are some lesser known museums which don't serve a legitimate purpose of telling history, and are actually pure propaganda. Those would not have made it onto my radar.

It's an interesting subject.

Isn't there some shrine the Japanese prime minister pays respect to annually that always sends China into a hissy fit? Maybe it's a memorial to Japanese veterans who died in Manchuria or something?

Yon is a loon who's just pulling a right wing grift at this point to pay the bills. Was pretty good back in the Iraq/afghan wars.

thousands of protesters on the streets. China has a problem which is similar to the 2008 financial crisis only it is many times bigger.

since it went under, where do I post this? Let me try again here without spoilers.



China is running out of cash, thousands of people in the streets protesting.

Do you guys all know about this? They call it a super-bubble. Chinese dont invest in anything else but real estate. 70% of peoples money is invested in real estate. This thing is bigger than the 2008 bubble, with the money in play being 10X of what was wiped out in 2008. So it is 10 times worse.



WTF?

why is nobody talking about this?

Buildings for 90M people have been built and the people have been scammed. The buildings are unfinished, companies are broke.





It seems to have been a ponzi, just as in the US housing bubble.

90M lost everything! Thats more people than the entire UK has.


Ghost towns at min 6

Pretty sure just about anyone who lived there was wondering when this would happen.

You lived there?


Ok, the things I know now from the videos is that they are building like crazy since about 2000 and now it all comes all crashing down
with now about 70% of the population living in cities. Compared to 1995 when it was more people living in rural areas. I guess that is obvious.

And they seemed to copy the US model of building on loans, which comes now back to biting them in the ass. There is no more cash. The Cccp has serious problems now, existential problems. Coincidently after covid or while covid is spreading this stuff comes out. It was long anticipated of course.

One of the major problems when I was living there was that wealthy people from Hong Kong would buy up entire complexes before they were even built. A unit could cost less than 100k usd, which was a lot for Chinese at the time but nothing for a hk businessman. Since these kept selling the developers would build far more than needed, and since the price kept rising, outside investors kept purchasing.

Rent would be based on the rising prices of the units, despite the fact that tons of units were empty. The rent was often not realistic for the people actually living in China. It was not sustainable, but anytime I asked an apartment owner they would just laugh it off and talk about all the money they were making.


The hk businessman part might be unique to the area of China I was living in since it was so close to hk.

That is the same problem they describe in the vidoes. The investors got in when there was nothing, just the plans. Too bad their investment never came to blossom, the buildings are unfinished probably never will be. THats why the protests.

They are also talking about the amount of money it is for chinese.

When an everage unit would cost an american 10 yearly incomes it is much higher for a chinese. About 45 annual incomes I think. Which makes it a lot worse for the chinese now.

I haven't been to those sites, but Germany is another example. They have plenty of monuments and museums dedicated to the cold war which, if you simply tell the story accurately, will come off as anti-Soviet/Russian. But as with your example, they are legitimate history and it's not like German museums try to erase the story of how they ended up divided and partly under Soviet control in the first place.

The literal translation of the museum name is:

Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders

--Clearly just telling the story of legitimate history. No possible propaganda going on here.

That's a big deal for free-market economies but not so much with command economies/police states. Main thing for the CCP is the housing they did get built along with the infrastructure, manufacturing/industrial, tech, military, etc.

Yeah, I did not think about what good it does for the counrtry in the long run, I was more thinking of the poor people that are in trouble now. But I think you are right there, it is probably good for the country in a weird way.

That might be similar to what is happening in the USA, L.A. now, they built social housing for 850k a unit. Thats not good for the many homeless people for which is was intended for or supposedly intented, but it is good in the long run for the state. They not only built units for 850k from what I understood, they also come with great infrastructure.

This is what I mean that goes along with the crises. People cant withdraw money from the bank now.

"Bank customers demanding their money back staged China’s largest protest in years. The violent episode is the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of China’s looming banking crisis


SinoInsider, a U.S.-based risk consultancy, concurs. The group wrote last week that the problems in Henan are just the “tip of the iceberg of serious systemic and financial risks with small- and medium-sized banks in China.”

SinoInsider explained that other banks could soon face “similar problems” due to the “financial contagion from Evergrande’s debt crisis.”
Since last year, China’s government has targeted Evergrande, the bloated property developer, in a broader crackdown on property speculation and unsustainable levels of debt in the real estate sector
"


Henan bank protests

The banking problems in Henan first emerged in April, when customers of the New Oriental Country Bank of Kaifeng, Zhecheng Huanghuai Community Bank, Shangcai Huimin County Bank, and Yuzhou Xin Min Sheng Village Bank discovered that they could not withdraw their funds from local banks. Thousands of depositors made the run on the banks after the government arrested Sun Zhengfu, the majority shareholder in “several of the banks,” for “serious financial crimes,” according to Chinese media.
After bank depositors complained to local media, China’s banking regulator announced an investigation into the banks in late April. But after weeks of still being unable to access their money, bank customers began to protest at local banks and government offices.





https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/bank-...anking-crisis/

"More than 80,000 people – including employees, their families and friends as well as owners of Evergrande properties - bought products that raised more than 100 billion yuan in the past five years, said a sales manager of Evergrande Wealth, launched in 2016 as a peer-to-peer (P2) online lending platform that originally was used to fund its property projects.
"We worry we will be sacrificed," said a 34-year-old protester who works in e-commerce and would only give her name as Sophie, for fear of reprisal from authorities.
"It's okay for younger people like me, we can still earn it back, but I’m worried about the older ones who put everything into this," she said.
Protesters and members of messaging groups of people owed money by Evergrande have said they had been told by police not to cause trouble, and had seen their chat groups blocked. read more
Sophie said police had taken her to the station four times since she joined protests at Evergrande's headquarters in the nearby city of Shenzhen in September.
"We don't know what happens to our money but we're expected to keep quiet, it's not right," she said."


https://www.reuters.com/markets/rate...er-2022-01-04/

using covid app to stop bank customers from complaining about missing money.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireSt...ntrol-85457228

'Residents say China used health tracker for crowd control
Angry bank customers who traveled to a city in central China to retrieve their savings from troubled rural banks have been stopped by a health app on their cellphone'


'In one since-deleted account on the social media app WeChat, a woman surnamed Ai said shortly after she checked into a hotel in Zhengzhou, she was questioned by a group of police who asked her why she was there. She replied that she wished to withdraw money from the bank. Shortly after, she found her health code had turned red even though she had a negative COVID-19 test result in the previous 48 hours.'

no posting about the Pelosi trip to Taiwan? Don't know why Eurasia Group has the chances of a security crisis at 30% but interesting to see it all play out...

^Kinda seems like neither side wants to be accused of throwing the first punch.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-e...e45b8ed?page=1

Becoming Xi's pawn

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing...d=hp_lead_pos1

Will this be a Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0?

The current Chinese regime is indeed evil. It's probably the evillest chinese regime there's ever been. At it's scale it might be the most evil regime ever to exist in the area.

But it doesn't have a patch on the evilness of america.

why dont you tell us how you really feel