This isn't a new phenomenon but I figured we could use a thread to consolidate any discussion of China's rising influence in the world.


Article today on the growing influence of China in Afghanistan:

Quote :

"China's growing influence in the Afghan economy has been hailed by the country's mining minister, who has revealed that projects acquired to feed Beijing's industrial base will triple government revenues within five years. Muhammad Ibrahim Adel, the minister for mines, said foreign investment in the country's vast mineral deposits would bring $2 billion (£1.25 billion) in taxes and royalties a year by 2013. "Within five years I hope the government will be getting $2 billion a year from mining, not including the salaries people earn," he told The Daily Telegraph. Afghanistan has the potential to emerge as one of Central Asia's biggest sources of raw materials for manufacturers. China paid $800 million to acquire the Aynak copper deposit 30 miles south of Kabul two years ago and has emerged as the favourite from a pool of Indian and Saudi firms to gain control of an iron ore deposit at Hajigak, 60 miles west of Kabul, when tenders are considered next year. Both deposits rank among the world's largest and entail the construction of roads, processing plants and railways in deprived areas that are currently dominated by the Taliban."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6630574/China-pumping-millions-into-Afghanistan.html

11/22/2009 10:16:56 PM

China is buying up natural resources all over the globe - they own a huge amount of rare earth mineral mines... Other natural resources too... We keep sending them money and they keep buying up shit for the future.

It's a good time to be Chinese, I suppose.

11/22/2009 11:15:59 PM

powerful in china, yes.

everyone else, probably not so much

11/22/2009 11:16:48 PM

we got played, but whats scary is that once they get rolling no one will be able to stop them

11/23/2009 12:56:28 AM

scary in the sense that every other country is scared of us

11/23/2009 12:59:49 AM

i dont think countries are scared of us, we are a source of opportunity for them, china will be too but what else comes with it is what scares me

yes we also do our share of bullying but im sure china will take that to a whole new level

11/23/2009 1:13:48 AM

China plans on the long term and extreme long term. Their culture predates the west. Nothing you guys need to worry your pretty little heads with. Just concentrate one what public gaff Barack HUSSIEN Obama committed recently and rant about that.

11/23/2009 3:52:52 AM

While I'm sure they love to believe that is true, I have seen nothing to convince me that today's Chinese meet that stereotype. Their entire financial system seems designed to destroy capital. The Chinese government is in a race to sacrifice long term economic viability for short term economic growth faster than modernization boosts productivity. Some day, the productivity will not be there, and China will collapse into anarchy. I guess their plan is to have sufficient foreign reserves to bail themselves out of that coming catastrophe, but it assumes the reserves will be worth something at that time, which I am sure they will, but it seems shortsighted for them to make their own survival dependent (but not sufficient) upon our survival.

11/23/2009 9:34:13 AM

Fuck China. They (corporations, govt) are pernicious. They don't give a shit about human life, Chinese life or otherwise.

Oh wait, most government and corporations of most countries are the same, just differing degrees.

11/23/2009 12:56:18 PM

The chinese have taken the polluting and destruction of the environment to a whole new level.

11/23/2009 1:17:43 PM

Quote :

"The chinese have taken the polluting and destruction of the environment to a whole new level."

Maybe, but I don't particularly blame them for it. They're just doing what we did when we had our industrial revolution, only they've got a billion people and more advanced technology with which to pollute. All we had was coal and a willingness to shoot every animal on the continent.

---

Sooner or later, China's level of economic development coupled with access to information that is growing faster than the government can stop it will lead to the disintegration of the present regime.

The "economic development" factor could go either way: If the Chinese economy collapses or suffers serious setbacks, the people will get pissed and demand reform. If it keeps getting better, there are two possibilities, one with a sizable middle class that demands political rights and one with large disparities of wealth that cause the lower class to say, "What the fuck kind of communism is this?" In either case, people demand reform.

What happens then is anybody's guess. Probably some nasty repression, for a while. But then, pick a number at random:

1) Soviet-style breakup of the Chinese empire, with Tibet and possibly Xinjiang (sp? at any rate, the place with all the angry Uighurs) getting independence, leaving us with a handful of quasi-stable republics.
2) Savvy Chinese politicians transition the government into a democracy, probably win first few elections and get looked on favorably as reformers.
3) Replacement of the current regime with a similar one dressed up in different clothes.
4) Civil war.
5) ???

The good news from where I'm sitting is that most of the outcomes lead to a China that is either substantially weakened or friendlier to us.

11/23/2009 1:56:48 PM

Your #1 is not possible. The Chinese people would need to fight a decade long civil war before suffering the dissolution of the empire.

11/23/2009 2:07:34 PM

Quote :

"Maybe, but I don't particularly blame them for it. They're just doing what we did when we had our industrial revolution, only they've got a billion people and more advanced technology with which to pollute. All we had was coal and a willingness to shoot every animal on the continent. "

They also have 100 years of scientific knowledge telling them the horrific consequences for their actions. Back in the day the US knew better to some degree, but trying to compare the two is downright idiotic.

11/23/2009 2:12:26 PM

^^I suspect that the same was said about the Soviet Union twenty-five years ago. That outcome may be the result of civil war, but I'd hesitate to say that it's necessary.

^So? The United States has knowledge of the consequences of its current environmental policies, and how often do our actions reflect that policy? Either they don't believe the information is true, or they'd rather get rich than protect the environment -- both of which can currently be said about much of America.

If we'd been on part with China in terms of industrialization fifty, sixty years ago, we'd be working like mad bastards to catch up with the world, and we'd sing "Fuck the Earth" while we did it. You don't really start giving a shit about the environment until you reach a certain level of development where you can afford to.

11/23/2009 2:26:47 PM

There's a difference between when you KNOW the consequences. I wasn't around 100 years ago, but I'm pretty sure nobody had a clue what caused most cancers.

You don't see US industries dumping heavy metal waste into drinking water supplies for nearby villages

Now if you want to argue that what the US industries did 130 years ago with their level of knowledge = what the Chinese are doing today with 130 years of more scientific and medical knowledge, then by all means carry on.

11/23/2009 2:38:45 PM

Quote :

"While I'm sure they love to believe that is true, I have seen nothing to convince me that today's Chinese meet that stereotype. Their entire financial system seems designed to destroy capital. The Chinese government is in a race to sacrifice long term economic viability for short term economic growth faster than modernization boosts productivity. Some day, the productivity will not be there, and China will collapse into anarchy. I guess their plan is to have sufficient foreign reserves to bail themselves out of that coming catastrophe, but it assumes the reserves will be worth something at that time, which I am sure they will, but it seems shortsighted for them to make their own survival dependent (but not sufficient) upon our survival."

I couldn't disagree with this more.

Not only have they leveraged their near infinite (relative) human resource to produce a manufacturing base, but their technological advancement and prowess is growing extremely fast. Their biggest disadvantage up to this point was their inability, due to cultural reasons, to innovate. That too is changing.

The only economic blunder their truly committing right now is the reluctance to increase domestic demand to match, or exceed their exports. Once they do that, there's not a ground of competitive advantage the United States will have. In fact, I have no idea how you can remotely come to the conclusion you've come to considering the immense manufacturing base China has created and their aggressive move to securing future sources of fossil fuels while simultaneously investing in green energy development.

[Edited on November 23, 2009 at 2:49 PM. Reason : >.<]

11/23/2009 2:47:47 PM

Quote :

"China plans on the long term and extreme long term."

The Three Gorges Dam is direct proof of this.

11/23/2009 2:50:47 PM

^^green energy development huh? lmao

11/23/2009 3:46:13 PM

Quote :

"^^I suspect that the same was said about the Soviet Union twenty-five years ago."

You suspect wrong. The Soviet Union consisted of various peoples that spoke different languages, had different customs, very violently racist against their fellow Soviet citizens, and extremely nationalistic to their local countries. None of which is the case in China. To put it another way, if China found itself split up into different political regions, the Chinese would quickly negotiate a reintegration, just as the Americans did after the revolutionary war.

Quote :

"There's a difference between when you KNOW the consequences. I wasn't around 100 years ago, but I'm pretty sure nobody had a clue what caused most cancers."

Cancer was an unheard of disease back then because most people died of obvious environmental causes. Black lung from breathing the London air was never a mystery, neither were the deaths associated with poor sanitation that unpredictable (especially in the late 19th century). And the reason people put up with obvious environmental degradation was not a mystery: banning the industrial revolution would have meant starvation for a large chunk of the population, and the technology did not exist to handle it any other way. As such, everyone accepted they were going to die early from various lung diseases in exchange for their fellow men surviving the harsh winters of the era.

Quote :

"Not only have they leveraged their near infinite (relative) human resource to produce a manufacturing base, but their technological advancement and prowess is growing extremely fast. Their biggest disadvantage up to this point was their inability, due to cultural reasons, to innovate. That too is changing."

They have done nothing of the sort. All they had to do to develop a major industrial base was stop arresting people for doing it, which they kindly did in the 1970s. But their political system is still dependent upon its control of their Financial system. Therefore, Chinese business will always need to operate as if it has no financial system, which means self financing, because all the money put into Chinese banks (outside Hong Kong) is largely wasted. That means after the low-hanging fruit of is used up, Chinese growth will eventually stall for good.

[Edited on November 23, 2009 at 4:14 PM. Reason : .,.]

11/23/2009 4:06:48 PM

ah, if only we could go back to those harsh winters

/global warmist

11/23/2009 4:09:52 PM

As the Chinese economy expands, the demands of the public are going to shift from simple raw economic growth to public goods. They're going to start demanding better roads, clean water, health care, social safety nets, and good governance. The real challenge is whether or not the current government can deliver on these needs. They're trying to retool to address these demands, but it is a real question whether or not they'll be able to meet them.

China also faces their own equivalent of the baby boom which will add to the demand of public goods to serve old people.

I don't think democratization will become a big issue until there is a general feeling amongst the public that the current system is no longer able to address their needs. Even then, it'll more likely be limited democracy at a local level than the traditional liberal democracy that we think of in the West. On paper, the Chinese system is capable of delivering some of this, but its a question of whether they can transform the political culture to accept it.

I don't predict any sort of violent breakup or collapse of the PRC. What we'll probably see is the current system muddling through at least for the next decade or two. I'm not going to even try to predict beyond that given how dynamic the situation over there is right now.

In some sense, the Chinese government is racing against the clock right now to build as much as they can while they still have an advantage. They must know that their manipulation of the currency is unsustainable in the long run, and they're trying to move up the economic ladder far enough where they can let their currency float while minimizing the disruptions it will cause to the system. Easier said than done of course.

11/23/2009 4:11:45 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ4K0hHin9s

11/23/2009 4:33:12 PM

Quote :

" You suspect wrong. The Soviet Union consisted of various peoples that spoke different languages, had different customs, very violently racist against their fellow Soviet citizens, and extremely nationalistic to their local countries. None of which is the case in China. To put it another way, if China found itself split up into different political regions, the Chinese would quickly negotiate a reintegration, just as the Americans did after the revolutionary war. "

You have bought into the Chinese propaganda then.

11/24/2009 12:31:01 AM

11/24/2009 11:18:01 AM

Quote :

"You don't see US industries dumping heavy metal waste into drinking water supplies for nearby villages"

The population of Bhopal, India will be thrilled to hear it.

Quote :

"The Soviet Union consisted of various peoples that spoke different languages, had different customs, very violently racist against their fellow Soviet citizens, and extremely nationalistic to their local countries. None of which is the case in China."

Are you fucking kidding? All of those apply to China. The Uighurs have been getting themselves shot left and right to get out from under the oppression of the Han Chinese who have been moving to their area in recent years. The Han, incidentally, being the majority in Eastern China, the ones who run the government, and who have been systematically suppressing the different languages and customs of the Uighur population.

Then throw in Tibet, which is extremely nationalistic and has different customs and language from the rest of China. And, for all I know, the Kazakhs, Mongols, and Manchu, though they haven't gotten much press lately.

Quote :

"To put it another way, if China found itself split up into different political regions, the Chinese would quickly negotiate a reintegration, just as the Americans did after the revolutionary war."

The dominant force might try to negotiate, but given the long history of independence movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, I suspect any successful negotiation will be at the barrel of a gun and not any political agreement.

11/24/2009 2:23:47 PM

^ quite right, I failed to qualify my statements sufficiently. Tibet and a few other principalities certainly qualify as potential breakaways for China, just as Hawaii counts as a possible breakaway for America. But collectively they represent a tiny fraction of China's territory and people, just as Hawaii does for America. Compare that to the Soviet Union, whose breakaways represented more than half the soviet population.

11/28/2009 8:27:32 PM

Quote :

"The population of Bhopal, India will be thrilled to hear it."

i laughed

i cried

11/28/2009 10:17:01 PM

Quote :

"But collectively they represent a tiny fraction of China's territory and people"

Small percentage of people? Certainly. It's hard to compete with a billion Han Chinese.

Small percentage of territory? Less so.

Let's also bear in mind that as those regions go, so do resources of significant importance. Xinjiang (still don't know if I'm spelling that right, still don't care enough to look) supposedly has a large share of China's coal and a larger share of its natural gas.

I do like how you're qualifying "China will not break up" into "China will not break up, other than those pieces that break up."

11/29/2009 2:55:10 AM

Quote :

"The good news from where I'm sitting is that most of the outcomes lead to a China that is either substantially weakened or friendlier to us."

the bad news is the one that probably will happen, won't do either of those things(#3). imo. only time will tell.

Quote :

"green energy development huh? lmao"

are you questioning this? china is widely regarded as leading the way in green energy development.

[Edited on November 29, 2009 at 3:08 AM. Reason : .]

11/29/2009 3:04:45 AM

#3 won't do it initially. In the long term, though, it can only lead to one of the others.

11/29/2009 3:07:08 AM

^what about a continual loop of #3's? or am i being too cynical?

11/29/2009 3:07:57 AM

In the long view I don't think that authoritarianism can balance on the very sharp edge of a society with prosperity and access to information.

11/29/2009 3:10:42 AM

by that point i'd think they had already won. in the long scheme of things.

11/29/2009 3:25:28 AM

I am pointing out a difference of scale. You seem incapable of comprehending the difference between Hawaii breaking away and the entire south breaking away as in the Civil War.

America imports much of our oil and gas from Canada. Similarly, China already imports a large chunk of its coal from Australia. Do you suggest upon independence they would opt to starve rather than sell coal to their former masters?

11/29/2009 9:16:41 AM

LoneSnark, this is what I originally said and what you originally disagreed with:

Quote :

"1) Soviet-style breakup of the Chinese empire, with Tibet and possibly Xinjiang (sp? at any rate, the place with all the angry Uighurs) getting independence, leaving us with a handful of quasi-stable republics."

I made no reference to scale. If you took "Soviet-style" to imply very specific details about population proportion, I'm sorry, that's not what I was trying to get across.

Quote :

"Do you suggest upon independence they would opt to starve rather than sell coal to their former masters?"

I don't know where the hell you got that from, but whatever. I was merely trying to point out that these territories have weight beyond their relatively small populations.

11/29/2009 1:55:57 PM

Interesting audio bit on growing China - Mideast ties:

Quote :

"China became the largest exporter to the Mideast in 2008, overtaking the United States with nearly $60 billion of exports. Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong, says China's growing demand for oil has resulted in high growth rates in the Arab world, which in turn looks to China for consumer goods. China's growing exports to the Middle East also ensure employment for hundreds of thousands of workers otherwise facing potential job losses in the economic downturn."

http://www.cfr.org/publication/20969/growing_chinamideast_ties.html

12/15/2009 7:35:12 PM

It's a good article and shows the potential challenges facing nations that do business with China. Unlike when they dealt with Western nations which usually try to flood third world states high end goods and services (leading to the complaint that the West is trying to keep them down, relegating them to cheap labor and material extraction), the Chinese pose just as dangerous a challenge by flooding their markets with cheap goods and wiping out their low end manufacturing (and thus relegating them to just material extraction). Take a look at the sort of aid that Chinese give to third world nations: they may build a bridge and highway, but they do so with Chinese workers using Chinese manufactured goods instead of local workers and locally produced goods.

Interestingly, this provides a different angle of pressure on the Chinese to let their currency float as poorer nations trying to industrialize are essentially blocked out by heavily subsidized Chinese goods.

Still, as long as it gives these third world nations an alternative to traditional Western states and their tendencies to demand conditions (both good and bad) with their funds, these governments will go along with it.

12/16/2009 1:28:42 PM

Not that relevant, but doesn't warrant another thread:

Quote :

"China teen seen as hero for killing local official BEIJING – When Li Shiming was stabbed through the heart by a hired assassin, few of his fellow villagers mourned the local Communist Party official many say made their lives hell by seizing land, extorting money and bullying people for years. Instead, villagers in the northern town of Xiashuixi have made Li's teenage killer something of a local hero. More than 20,000 people from the coal-mining area petitioned a court for a lenient sentence. "I didn't feel surprised at all when I heard Li Shiming was killed, because people wanted to kill him a long time ago," said villager Xin Xiaomei, who says her husband was harassed for years by Li after the two men had a personal dispute. "I wanted to kill Li myself, but I was too weak." ....... Zhang's case echoes two other instances of ordinary Chinese who became anti-heroes after killing people in positions of power. In June, a Chinese woman who fatally stabbed a party official to fend off his demands for sex was freed by a court in a decision that was likely made to avoid a storm of criticism. But in 2008, Yang Jia, a man who confessed to killing six Shanghai police officers in revenge for allegedly being tortured while interrogated about a possibly stolen bicycle was executed despite an outpouring of sympathy."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100121/ap_on_bi_ge/as_china_killer_hero

1/21/2010 3:43:53 PM

China has system to detect vulgar Karaoke
December 26th, 2009

Quote :

"Chinahush has a great write-up about a controversial new karaoke content management system being rolled out in Zhengzhou. The 'Black Box' (as it has been nicknamed) will flash red lights and alert the police when someone selects a vulgar song. Naturally, many netizens in China are voicing questions about such a system. . . ."

http://inventorspot.com/articles/china_has_system_detect_vulgar_karaoke_35917

1/22/2010 4:15:04 AM

its all fun and games until someone busts out some vulgar karaoke

1/22/2010 11:29:30 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmevO2V2JxA

1/22/2010 3:26:53 PM

China Says U.S. Criticism of Its Internet Policy Harms Ties
January 22, 2010

Quote :

"BEIJING — The Chinese Foreign Ministry lashed out Friday against criticism of China in a speech on Internet censorship made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, calling on the United States government 'to respect the truth and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom question to level baseless accusations.' Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement posted Friday afternoon on the ministry's Web site that the criticism leveled by Mrs. Clinton on Thursday was 'harmful to Sino-American relations.' 'The Chinese Internet is open,' he said. [LOL! Yeah, right.] "

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/world/asia/23diplo.html

1/22/2010 4:16:39 PM

'Let The West Get Used To A Tough China'

Quote :

"China has halted its military cooperation with the U.S. and threatened this week to sanction American companies involved in selling arms to Taiwan. Beijing's sharp reaction came after Washington announced a $6.4 billion weapons deal to Taiwan. It is something of a role reversal. Usually, it has been the U.S. sanctioning China. But now, China is pushing back on a raft of contentious issues, from Washington's efforts to seek sanctions against Iran to President Obama's plan to meet Tibet's exiled religious leader the Dalai Lama. "Let The West Get Used To A Tough China," was the headline this week in the Global Times, a jingoistic Chinese tabloid. After arms sales to Taiwan in the past, China could do little more than lodge a perfunctory verbal protest. But this wasn't very effective, says Yuan Peng, a U.S. expert at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank in Beijing. "By sanctioning these firms, we're learning from the U.S.," he argues. "We're beginning to master ways to make the U.S. feel pain. Otherwise, it will just do as it pleases.""

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123373020

2/4/2010 8:56:52 PM

This is where sanctions get us. Sanctioned.

2/4/2010 11:26:18 PM

The Chinese may have figured out that targeted sanctions could work, but the way they're going about it right now, they may accidentally trigger a trade war that will badly hurt both nations' economies. Both nations are tangled together so deeply, there's only so much they can do before bringing each other down.

2/5/2010 1:32:59 PM

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-51314.html

2/18/2010 11:07:37 PM

Was listening to NPR today, and they said it right. China if they do anything to fuck us over, will end up fucking themselves over. As RedGuard said, we are too tightly linked. We borrow, buy their shit, they build and sell it to us on loans we take out from them. Thats why our govt isnt worried about the debt, they know if we fix it, China is fucked, and if China calls us out on it, they fuck themselves over. When they are fucked over, we dont have our goods and we suffer then too.

2/18/2010 11:33:13 PM

bump by request

9/26/2010 10:17:32 PM

What the hell happened this weekend about China? I had 3 old family members say the statement "We better start learning Chinese.." in conversation that had nothing to do with politics or economy... some paranoia going around I guess.

9/26/2010 10:26:25 PM

This is some fucked up shit

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/china-proudly-demolishing-buildings-completed-pursuit-great-housing-bubble-perpetual-engine

9/26/2010 10:28:24 PM