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China

Russia has been a Client State for a while now - Putin's invasion just proved that fact for everyone to see.
 
dudalb said:
I don't think the word Democracy means what they think it means.
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Definitely.
thum_119258689896f40fe.jpg
 
There is a old joke about how if a country has the word People in it;s official name, you can bet the people have no say how it is being ran, and if a country has Democratic in it's name you can bet it is not a democracy.
 
dudalb said:
There is a old joke about how if a country has the word People in it;s official name, you can bet the people have no say how it is being ran, and if a country has Democratic in it's name you can bet it is not a democracy.
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No joke. Democratic People's Republic of Korea is Best Korea.*
 
China getting quite bolshy over other people's planes flying in the South China Sea, with now Canada reporting a bit of trouble after Aussie had the same problem a couple of days ago: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/china-canada-harass-warplanes-1.6478645

The Chinese are really trying to reinforce the point that the whole SC Sea is their water.

Someone's going to hurt [again] one of these days. Better send Tom Cruise over there.
 
This is a bit of a long read, but it does go into some of the background and early modern history of China, and goes on to inform why the Chinese are pushing a policy of ultranationalism. China actually does have a pretty legitimate beef with the West, including but not restricted to the United Kingdom, America and, yes, Australia.

The golden guardian
A saga of the high seas, martial arts and a precious Chinese statue that somehow made its way to an Australian gallery.
 
And what kind of Reparations could China get from the UK?

China is limiting itself by looking back instead of forward. Until it can define itself not in Relation with colonizing countries, but as an entity in its own rights, it won't really succeed as a Nation.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
And what kind of Reparations could China get from the UK?

China is limiting itself by looking back instead of forward. Until it can define itself not in Relation with colonizing countries, but as an entity in its own rights, it won't really succeed as a Nation.
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From this side of the planet it looks like a pretty successful nation.
 
arthwollipot said:
From this side of the planet it looks like a pretty successful nation.
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as it is trying to project to the outside.
But China is going the way of the German Democratic Republic, with more effort being spend on citizen control than education and welfare. This stifles innovation and cultural development.

China after Xi, just like Russia under Putin, is in trouble, because the leaders are only interested in staying power, and believe that that's what's best for their countries, too.
 
Xi just recently effectively made himself dictator for life, so he was successful at that.

But no, I don't agree that China is spending more effort on citizen control than on education and welfare. That's because of two reasons, in my opinion. First, the Chinese people are already going along with the government's "control" largely because dissent is known to be harshly punished so people don't risk it. This means that not a lot of effort is needed to maintain that situation. Second, because the whole idea of Chinese-style citizen control is so abhorrent to the American attitude of "Freedom!" that we hear about it a lot.

China is huge and correspondingly its capacity for effort is correspondingly huge and is able to be spread around liberally. Did you know that the biggest investor in renewable energy in the world is China? They're spending a lot of money on new coal power, true, because the huge population has a massive energy requirement and that needs to be addressed urgently, but China is also investing heavily in renewables.

China also has a large and active space program. The Tiangong space station already has a permanent crew, after launching the first module in April 2021. China has landed four Chang'e rovers on the moon and the fourth actually returned samples to earth. And who knows what else China is doing in space because they're certainly not telling anyone else much about it.

It's possible that China may not be seen to be spending greatly on education partly because so many Chinese students are overseas. Here's a supporting anecdote. I work not far from the Australian National University and it sometimes seems like the Chinese students outnumber the non-Chinese ones. I walk out the front door and the first thing I sea is a place called Super Emoji - Emotion of Bubble Tea (bubble tea is I believe originally Taiwanese, but according to China that's the same as being Chinese). These Chinese students get an education at prestigious foreign universities and return home with that knowledge. This means that China doesn't need to spend heavily on high-quality education.

Ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a diplomat and an expert in China relations, and yesterday he made a speech in which he said that China is on track to take military action against Taiwan in ten to twenty years.
 
I am very happy that China a trailblazer in renewable energy installation - it's the biggest polluter, but also conscious of the fact.

But its past policies have burdened it with massive pollution, a demographic time bomb and a messed up labor, banking and real estate market. And the handling of Covid suggests that Xi does not have the Mandate of Heaven.

These are not problems that can be solved only top-down, but that's the only way The Party will allow problems to be handled.
 
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arthwollipot said:
This is a bit of a long read, but it does go into some of the background and early modern history of China, and goes on to inform why the Chinese are pushing a policy of ultranationalism. China actually does have a pretty legitimate beef with the West, including but not restricted to the United Kingdom, America and, yes, Australia.

The golden guardian
A saga of the high seas, martial arts and a precious Chinese statue that somehow made its way to an Australian gallery.
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While I agree that China might have historical beef with the west, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Tibet etc have a quite similar beef with China which is always conveniently ignored.
It's a bit rich to complain about colonization while actively still occuping and colonizing a country.
 
arthwollipot said:
These Chinese students get an education at prestigious foreign universities and return home with that knowledge. This means that China doesn't need to spend heavily on high-quality education.
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I don't think that's correct.

Educating a lot of students abroad means you don't need to invest as much in educational infrastructure. But it also means that the money you're paying for tuition for those students doesn't circulate back into your own economy. Plus, one of the reasons that US universities are so keen to accept Chinese students is that they often pay higher tuition rates than US students. So Chinese students are in effect subsidizing education for US students. Add in the purchasing power parity advantage to domestic pay rates for professors, and it becomes even worse.

In purely economic terms, educating Chinese students abroad is more expensive than educating them domestically. The advantage of doing so is that you can ramp up education rates much faster than you can ramp up domestic education capacity. Considering how devastated the intellectual class was from the cultural revolution, even decades later that capacity constraint is still no small matter.

Ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a diplomat and an expert in China relations, and yesterday he made a speech in which he said that China is on track to take military action against Taiwan in ten to twenty years.
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If you extrapolate current spending trend out, then that's probably true. But current spending trends may not be able to continue. A demographic reckoning is coming, and it's coming even sooner than previously predicted. China may not have the manpower in 20 years to take Taiwan. As the population shrinks, not only will there be less military-age men available to serve, the pressure on them to be economically productive (which the military isn't) is going to be even higher as the population becomes more and more top-heavy.

I don not think China will be able to take Taiwan. Unfortunately, there is a real danger that China might still try, and their weakening state may prove to be the impetus for the attempt.
 
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