Quote: (05-03-2014 02:15 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:
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When Vietnam actually wants closer military ties with the U.S., I'd call that a foreign policy failure on the part of the Chinese government.
While I'm skeptical about your first two points, I can definitely agree with this one. I haven't been in touch with their foreign policy.
I'm not quite sure what there is to deny about the ghost cities. The government threw stimulus money (i.e. debt) around to produce something that obviously isn't being used and is not about to be used any time soon given that China 1) has a low TFR, 2) doesn't have immigration, and thus, can't soak up the oversupply. This is the problem with a massive, command economy. The same government that "gets stuff done" also literally ends up building bridges to nowhere, or in this case, cities and malls in the middle of nowhere that no one wants to go to, much less utilise. This isn't even like the old Soviet system where cities that had once been mandated as the sole source of X collapsed once the free market rode in. These places simply aren't being used, period.
Likewise, I'm not sure how or why you would deny the environmental impact of all of this in China. We've all seen the pictures of smoggy skies. We've all heard about the bizarre stuff that turns up in rivers and in the soil. People have to breathe that air, drink that water, and grow food in that soil. This isn't some green hippie rant from me, this is just common sense: you don't shit where you eat. The Chinese are shitting where they eat in a massive way. One hundred years from now, the south of France or the Great Plains in the U.S. are probably still going to be fertile, productive places. Not so for much of China if they keep going as they are.
In some cases, as in the development of the West, these problems will be resolved by upgrading to better technology. Yet in a lot of cases, it will require a significant diversion of GDP to clean these things up, so in the least, it will knock a couple off points off GDP. There are other issues -- most notably anything to do with soil or the water table -- that aren't so easily solved. How do you deal with poisoned soil or the water table, other than just let that land go fallow and let nature take decades or centuries to sort that out? How do you deal with topsoil erosion and loss of arable land?
In the meantime, all of these chemicals have worked their way through the food chain or simply gone directly to humans. There may be some very subtle (or not so subtle) effects of this pollution upon the human population that also inhibit their long term health or development, including their cognitive or reproductive development. The Chinese may be setting themselves up for long term mental retardation and/or infertility. We know that, in the West, massive exposure to various chemicals (most notably in plastics) has decimated male sperm counts, motility, etc. over recent generations. What is occurring in China is on a magnitude several times that. There are going to be long term negative effects upon their populace as a whole.
Put it another way. If you think all of this is okay, would you pull a fish out of a river in a major Chinese city (assuming you can find such a fish) and eat it? If not, why not? Now imagine living like that for decades.
The great tragedy about all of this is that we may well ask what the Chinese have actually got from all of this. They're getting a little smarter now and obtaining as much gold as they can, but essentially, they've poisoned themselves in exchange for bits of paper from America. Those bits of paper may be worth considerably less than they think in the future. China knows this, yet is caught between a rock and a hard place because it holds something that is fairly worthless, but it holds so much of it that if it tries to get rid of it, it actually will be completely worthless. It's like the old saying: if you owe the bank $1,000, you've got a problem, but if you owe the bank $1,000,000,
they've got a problem. Which country is the bigger fool, the one that issues such paper IOUs or the country that takes them thinking they're actually worth something? In my opinion, Chimerica (as Niall Ferguson calls it) is the perfect marriage of two idiots to one another.