The China China does not want to be known

[Prem]

http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/05/in ... ectations/
Chinese Anxiety — In Debate About Overwork, a Glimpse of Shifting Expectations

Almost half of all Chinese report feeling “more anxiety,” now than they did five years ago. What, exactly, is driving these concerns, or increasing reports of these concerns? Avid followers of China-related news might immediately think of censorship and other restrictions on freedoms, yet reports show that the main sources of anxiety in China lie elsewhere. Furthermore, recent coverage of these concerns has revealed changes in the expectations, dreams, and demands of many Chinese.Several days ago, a 24-year-old employee of Ogilvy in Beijing died from sudden cardiac arrest, which initial reports say occurred after the employee worked overtime for one straight month. His last post on Sina Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, went viral, drawing countless comments from other overworked netizens, many of whom noted that China had become the number one country in the world for death by overwork.Studies show that many Chinese are unhappy with their jobs – or lack thereof. This year, millions of Chinese students are graduating and face what is reportedly the worst job market in history. Even if they are able to find a job, their worries will not end. A recent Regus study showed China ranked first among 80 countries in workplace stress.A video produced by Tencent News depicted sources of anxiety felt by Chinese in the workplace: financial troubles, interpersonal relationships, and endless overtime. While the short video included facts and figures about stress in China’s workforce, it focused on individual stories – a 26-year-old who believes he will never be rich enough to buy a house, and a low-level office worker who dreams of emigrating. Chinese increasingly see their anxieties and dreams as individual matters, rather than collective issues.As China’s growth slows, the idea of a national revival – the Chinese Dream, as it is known in official parlance – stands at odds with the hopes and fears of the average Chinese, creating further cognitive dissonance. While state-run media and government bodies continue to focus on positive news about officials’ achievements and economic development, most Chinese have become far more concerned about food safety, the quality of manufactured goods, and the safety of medicine.Given the number social media-driven exposés that have drawn public attention over the past few years – on corrupt officials, rat meat scandals, and fake condoms, among other issues – it may be that increasing transparency is making it impossible to ignore issues that once simply flew under the radar. China’s rapidly growing middle class is already making its voice heard on these issues, and it is expected to swell to 40% of the population by 2020.Despite the fact that anxiety has increased, Chinese overwhelmingly feel they are better off than they were five years ago. Cases like those of Mr. Li, the Ogilvy employee who reportedly died from overwork, may draw more attention because society increasingly values individuals’ lives and dreams.

[jamwal]

China is starting to get embarrassed about its tourists’ obnoxious behavior abroad

Chinese tourists are making their mark on the global tourism industry—literally. The picture above is a relief etched 3,500 years ago in Egypt’s Luxor Temple in Egypt. More recently, someone added the characters “Ding Jinhao was here,” as documented by an ashamed Chinese traveler who posted his photo to Sina Weibo (registration required). “We want to wipe off the marking with a towel,” the traveler wrote. “But we can’t use water since it is a 3,500 year-old relic.”

Ding, who turned out to be a 15-year-old from Nanjing, was quickly found out via Sina Weibo research. His parents have since apologized.

A tour guide surnamed Zhang told QQ (link in Chinese) that he “had never seen this sort of behavior from tourists,” and that “until recently, the Chinese tourists going to Egypt were relatively few, and their character was relatively good.”

“There’s a lot of this kind of uncivilized behavior out there,” said Zhang. “Take for example the sign outside the Louvre Museum only in Chinese characters that forbids people from urinating or defecating wherever they want.”

[jamwal]

Chinese baby boy rescued from sewer pipe after being flushed down toilet

A newborn Chinese baby was rescued from a toilet pipe after he was flushed away by his parents, state TV reports.
Chinese firefighters found the tiny boy lodged in a sewage pipe below a squat toilet in an apartment building in Jinhua, Zhejiang province. His placenta was still attached.
Firefighters sawed out an L-shaped section wide on Saturday afternoon after neighbors reported hearing crying. The baby was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors cut around him to pull out the abandoned infant.

The 2-day-old child — named Baby No. 59 from the number of his hospital incubator — was reported in stable condition at a nearby hospital.

[Nikhil T]

Is China getting ready for the next global financial crisis


A little snippet from a wonderful article.

When it comes to those from the outside watching the Chinese financial system, things haven’t changed nearly four decades later. China watching is still imprecise at best. Or as Stephen Green, head of Greater China research at Standard Chartered Plc in Hong Kong recently told Bloomberg “It’s a big black box, and it’s quite scary.”

And a few things coming out of the black box now seem to suggest that things are not as hunky dory as they are being made out to be. The loans given by banks and other financial institutions have reached very high levels. As Chancellor and Monnelly point out in their research paper “Between 2007 and 2012, the ratio of credit(i.e. loans) to GDP climbed to more than 190 percent, an increase of 60 percentage points.

China’s recent expansion of credit relative to GDP is considerably larger than the credit booms experienced by either Japan in the late 1980s or the United States in the years before the Lehman bust.” As of the end of 2012, the total lending by banks and other financial institutions as a proportion of the GDP ratio stood at 198 percent.

[krishnan]

Farmers collect dead fish from their fishponds in Xinjin county of Chengdu, Sichuan province June 9, 2013. More than 400 tonnes of fish were found dead on Saturday morning in 55 fishponds in Xinjin.

Local environmental protection administration said no industrial pollution was found, and the fish were killed by insufficient of oxygen in the river, local media reported.

[sanjaykumar]

Not to worry, the will be sold to the proletariat.

[Prem]

Why the Sunset Looks the Same on Mars as it Does in Beijing
http://gizmodo.com/why-the-sunset-looks ... -513190854

On the left is the sunset as seen from Mars. On the right is the same view from Beijing. Were it not for the latter's urban setting, you might not be able to tell the difference. Crazy, right? Fortunately, science can explain why..Martian dust is a risk to future human exploration there. Minerals like gypsum in Mars dust could have the same effect as the buildup that harms coalminers' lungs, COPD and things like that. Of course, we wouldn't be outside breathing it in directly, right? The dust is a risk to spacesuits and settlements, too.
Note the Photo in the Link.
Beijing is a different story. Chemical pollutants from car exhaust and burning fossil fuels are converted to nasty stuff like sulfur dioxide gas, which can turn into an aerosol made of sulfuric acid (hello, acid rain!). Pretty nasty. It's those aerosols, of various sizes, that scatter the light in Beijing (and LA, and Mexico City). You'll notice that Beijing's sunset is redder. Sunsets on Earth are naturally red-orange-yellow (they don't need pollution to be pretty, contrary to popular belief), but those aerosols filter our even more of the orange light, intensifying the red. Larger aerosols and dust from regular sandstorms that hit Beijing add to the general "haze" because big sand grains just scatter everything, adding a white glow to the sunset.
Incidentally, the Chinese government loves to blame this stuff on sandstorms, even though it's mostly pollution.

[member_19686]

Students riot after teachers try to stop them from cheating on exams

By Malcolm Moore, The Daily Telegraph June 20, 2013

BEIJING —What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating.

The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China’s notoriously tough “gaokao” exams, winning a disproportionate number of places at the country’s elite universities.

Last year, the city was cautioned by the province’s education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were “harshly criticized” for allowing cheats to prosper. This year, a pilot scheme was introduced to enforce the rules strictly.

When students at the No 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised by 54 randomly selected external invigilators.

The invigilators used metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers. A team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, the Southern Weekend newspaper reported. Outside the school, officials patrolled the area to catch people transmitting answers to the examinees. At least two groups were caught trying to communicate with students from a hotel opposite the school gates.

For the students, and for their parents waiting outside the school, the new rules went too far. As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest. “I picked up my son at midday [from his exam]. He started crying. I asked him what was up and he said a teacher had frisked his body and taken his mobile phone from his underwear. I was furious and I asked him if he could identify the teacher. I said we should go back and find him,” one of the fathers, named as Yin, said to the police later.

By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in school offices as students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent their rage, smashing cars and chanting: “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.” The protesters claim cheating is endemic in China and that sitting the exams without help puts their children at a disadvantage.

Teachers took to the Internet to call for help. “We are trapped in the exam hall,” wrote Kang Yanhong, an invigilator, on a Chinese messaging service. “Students are smashing things and trying to break in,” she said.

An invigilator named Li Yong was punched in the nose by a father. Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset. “This supervisor affected [my son’s] performance, so I was angry,” the man, named Zhao, told the police.

Hundreds of police eventually cordoned off the school and the local government conceded that “exam supervision had been too strict and some students did not take it well”.

MOM CAUGHT POSING AS DAUGHTER

– A 52-year-old Frenchwoman has been caught sitting a crucial pre-university English examination in Paris in her 19-year-old daughter’s place.

Dressed in “elaborate makeup”, low-waisted jeans and Converse shoes, the mother made the brazen attempt at cheating this week to help her daughter secure her Bacchalaureat — France’s equivalent of A-levels.

http://www.theprovince.com/news/Student ... z2Wy1GVeBj

[Bade]

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/18/asia/chin ... index.html

Although China now is the second largest economy after the United States, it is also home to the second largest number of poor people in the world, according to the World Bank.

Almost 100 million people lived below the national poverty line of $1 a day in 2012.

Check out the pictures....very much like rural India.

[Falijee]

China Economic Numbers May Be Fudged

A dead giveaway that China's GDP numbers are fake

At this point, Wall Street’s just playing along with China.

“You can’t trust the numbers,” Bill Miller, CEO of LMM Investments told a room full of investors at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha Conference this week.

Miller spoke on Wednesday, just hours after China announced that it once again hit its GDP growth target of 7%.

This, despite the fact that its economy seems to be experiencing a major slow down.

But after 25 years of watching China hit the mythical 7% mark without fail, analysts understand the charade.

There are dead giveaways everywhere. The most obvious way to tell that China’s books are cooked, though, is by looking at how its neighbours are faring.

Investors are seeing that the Chinese stock market’s rules are made up by the government to suit its purposes. And the government has no choice but to play that way because the financial sector and its stock market money machine are keeping GDP “on target.”

The day China reported its 7% GDP number, the Shanghai Composite fell 3%.

People aren’t buying this stuff anymore.

'Saving Face ' is a big factor in Chinese Culture!

[Picklu]

^^ All you have to do is to check this thread itself - there are not enough left to pay the 50 cent army.

[A_Gupta]

Irreparable ecological disaster?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/3 ... l-Disaster

[Vayutuvan]

What dailykos says about CHina may be 100% correct but why does he/she take potshots at smaller governments? There is no connection between the size of the government and agencies to enforce environmental and other (for example, fiduciary) rules on corporations. Smaller government does not mean that funding to sical causes needs to be cut but wasteful expenditure and overheads (hAvaD/Yale educated lawyers) should be laid off. Better and wider use of technology and technical manpower and least number of talking heads. If the governmen can be run without the huge circus every four years so much the better.

[jamwal]

An interesting post from 4chan, take it FWIW

http://imgur.com/r/4chan/8yzBmY8

[Vips]

View: $3 trillion can't buy China out of virus trouble.

Asia’s emerging-market currencies are sliding as the coronavirus outbreak threatens to slow the region’s economy and drives outflows into the dollar. Investors may consider the region’s copious foreign-exchange reserves to be a buffer against severe economic dislocation, capital flight and currency fluctuations. That would be a mistake. Asia’s reserves have expanded vastly since the 1997-98 financial crisis to reach more than $5 trillion, 40% of the global total. Often cited as a strength, they may prove of limited value in any future crisis.

First, reserves aren’t profits. In addition to net export payments, they include foreign investment. The asset (reserve investments) is offset by a liability (the amount owed to foreign investors) . China is the world’s biggest holder of reserves, with $3.1 trillion as of the end of January. While that looks substantial in dollar terms, it considers only one side of the coin. Since 2009, growth in China’s foreign-exchange assets has tracked accumulated investment liabilities. Based on International Monetary Fund criteria used to calculate the minimum required level of reserves, China needs around $3 trillion — roughly what it has now. The IMF calculations factor in short-term foreign-denominated debt, portfolio liabilities, broad money supply and the cover necessary for trade payments. Similar vulnerabilities exist in Indonesia, India and South Africa, because foreign-currency, especially short-term, borrowing is high.

Some analysts have suggested that China could use its reserves to recapitalize the banking system, which is sure to be hit by the economic shutdown that authorities have imposed in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. Assuming a level of bad debts comparable to that of the late 1990s, the losses and recapitalization requirements would absorb around half or more of China’s total reserves. That would leave the country’s foreign-exchange chest below the IMF minimum.

In addition, reserves can be volatile. Intervention to support a currency can reduce holdings rapidly, as the recent experience of Turkey and Argentina shows. It is difficult to estimate unexpected outflows from disinvestment, unwinding of carry trades, exchange-traded fund redemptions or contingent payments such as collateral calls or derivative settlements. For example, potential claims on Chinese reserves from its Belt and Road Initiative and other international obligations are poorly understood.

Reserve investments are also difficult to realize. Most are in government bonds and other high-quality securities denominated in socalled G3 currencies — the U.S. dollar, euro and Japanese yen. The size of the holdings means that governments couldn’t sell them without a collapse in the price of assets such as U.S. Treasuries and the dollar. That would inflict large losses on Asian investors.

Granted, many central banks have expanded the type of assets they buy. China has redirected its reserves into real investments in advanced economies and strategic projects such as belt and road. However, these aren’t liquid and are risky. China faces challenges in obtaining repayment of loans to developing countries. Such investments are also exposed to potential interference by the host country, especially during geopolitical or trade conflicts.

A further drawback of using reserves is that managing their currency and domestic liquidity effects is cumbersome. Repatriating realized
reserves will force the domestic currency to appreciate, decreasing the nation’s international competitiveness. It will also reduce the value of foreign investments when measured in a country’s home currency. Large-scale accumulation and spending of reserves affects money supply. While central banks can manage this through sterilization operations, conflicts between reserve management and monetary policy objectives will create economic and financial instability.

Finally, the economic model underlying the reserves creates a complex financial interdependence between Asian central banks and advanced economies, termed the “fatal embrace” by the late Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Foreign-exchange reserves represent advances allowing the importing country to buy the exporter’s goods and services on credit. Withdrawing support would risk destroying the value of existing investments and damaging the borrowers’ real economy and export demand.

The interdependence runs deeper. Since 2009, the growth of developing-country reserves is highly correlated to the growth of the balance sheets of advanced-economy central banks, which has been driven by quantitative easing. Attracted by higher returns than available at home, investors moved capital into emerging markets, which in turn supported demand and economic activity in developed economies. This is evident in the increased reliance of many North American, European and Japanese businesses on emerging economies for growth and earnings.

Unfortunately, this cheap capital encouraged rapid rises in debt and increased the risk of future financial instability in many emerging countries. The solution lies in international co-operation to create a new international monetary system and for surplus countries to boost domestic demand.

In a world of rising political tensions, trade wars and adherence to debt and export driven economic models, the prospects for that may appear bleak. Still, this is unfinished business the world will have to return to — once it has got past the economic shock of the coronavirus epidemic.

[V_Raman]

The world is still under the colonialists - dollar, euro, and yen - pound replaced by colonial cousin dollar!

[Manish_Sharma]

Gravitas: Are Chinese banks crumbling under debut?

[Manish_Sharma]

TWITTER

@ELuttwak
In China farmers are hoarding grain -viz. uncertainty. I recall the slogans I heard in 1976 "dig tunnels deep, store grain [secretly] everywhere.. the wind in the high towers presages the coming storm". Viz the USSR. Now the US, but GIs will not be searching for hidden grain

https://twitter.com/ELuttwak/status/129 ... 81731?s=19

[sanman]

Masjid Demolition

[drnayar]

Masjid Demolition

[youtube]aP8HQo9es9o[/youtube

imagine that happening in india !!

[sanman]

The very first COVID victim, Patient Zero, Ben Hu, came from Wuhan Institute of Virology:




https://www.bizzbuzz.news/eco-buzz/thre ... ro-1226441

[Vadivel]

Absolutely brilliant documentary, must watch.

The mayor wants to rebuild the city, the only problem, he needs to relocate 3 lac people and demolish 15000 homes.

[disha]

Chinese deliberately failing exams so that they do not have to join a burgeoning unemployment

[disha]

And here China hates "white people food". Talk about endemic racism in china and from chineese to others.



996 Chinese do not know that they are slave to the commies. Where the pigs are ruling the animal farm.

[sanman]

And here China hates "white people food". Talk about endemic racism in china and from chineese to others.
<snip>
996 Chinese do not know that they are slave to the commies. Where the pigs are ruling the animal farm.

Xi Jinping artificially prolonged the misery of Chinese by bringing back lockdowns, and he deliberately did this as a ploy to consolidate more power under himself while eliminating political rivals within the party. Nevertheless, it has still wrought negative effects on the people and the economy. Now that Xi has gotten past his power grab and is turning his attention towards the country's affairs again, he's noticing how bad things are, and is at a loss on how to fix them. Xi should have shown a little foresight instead of only having hindsight and feeling worried too late. This guy is definitely not the genius he's made out to be, and he's juggling too many balls.

[sanman]

Indian Vlogger travels to Xinjiang



watch his other videos to see his further adventures there

[sanman]

[sanman]

[sanman]

[Pratyush]

How is he able to report from PRC. When they have thrown out all accredited news media.

Why is this Indian there to begin with?

IIRC, You tube is banned as well. So how is he able to access the site?

[sanman]

How is he able to report from PRC. When they have thrown out all accredited news media.

Why is this Indian there to begin with?

IIRC, You tube is banned as well. So how is he able to access the site?

Who knows, maybe he is hired & paid by Chinese govt to do propaganda for them.

Next up: Super Friendly Girls of the City Which Administer Aksai Chin

[sanman]

[sanman]

Xi Jinping is an arrogant fool -- and pride comes before a fall:

[sanjaykumar]

Don't remember reading about this in the WP.

[sanman]

Country Garden is another Evergrande problem brewing in China's real estate sector:



Xi is just presiding over disaster after disaster.
How's BRI & CPEC going? Not good either.

He keeps acting like he's going to bring Taiwan under his control.
He's heading towards breaking China proper.

[sanman]