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Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by dekhn on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @12:20PM (#21204673)
Right now the leadership in China is terrified! They've been able to get away with a lot, basically using their economic power to get other countries to look the other way with regards to their behavior (suppressing their people, stealing IP, bullying smaller nations). but the moment they got called on it and people started moving their operations to other countries (previously considered "impossible"), they saw the economic impact. And they realized that they can't get away with what they're doing if they aren't providing their citizens with a constantly growing economy, their citizens are going to start getting angry again.

It's clear now much of the Chinese leadership were a paper tiger and now that the heat is on, they don't really have a strategy. They just never expect enough people to call them out publicly and embarass them. Maybe they'll keep hold of their own country by suppressing information flow, countrywide surveillance, but whatever power they had over the global economy: severely diminished.

Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by Dumblydorr on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @12:36PM (#21204855)
Their economy is also massively indebted, they got hooked on debt to a degree many here would consider reckless. They've wasted a tremendous amount of money on useless construction, which may be one downfall of a planned economy.
Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by srajabi on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @02:08PM (#21206058)
I was intrigued by your comment, so I went looking around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_...

It looks like their debt is only 15% of their GDP? I've heard the China <> Debt thing before and I don't understand it. Could you explain what you mean?

Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by bzbarsky on Thursday October 10, 2019 @10:31AM (#21214922)
I'm by no means an expert, but my understanding is that China's debt problem is not external debt, but internal debt. To put what the more negative takes are saying in US-related terms it's as if the mortgage-lending practices of the mid-2000s were done on a much larger scale (involving not just housing loans but almost everything funded by borrowing, including industry, infrastructure, etc) and for a much longer time.

As a result, there are lots of loans on the books that will never be paid off as things stand, and unlike the US there is no mechanism in the financial system to acknowledge any of that on a gradual basis (loan writedowns, etc), so the loans keep being rolled over instead.

At some point, reality will need to be faced, at which point there will be either massive financial system issues, much worse than what the US had going on in 2008, or huge government bailouts. And in the latter case, that implies even more financial repression or taxation, or both, than is already going on, with resulting decreases in economic well-being for urban areas in China, which is the thing that _really_ worries the CCP.

If the economy grows faster than the "bad loan" burden, then this problem is basically temporary, and rolling the loans over until the economy has grown enough to just deal with the issue is the right strategy. It's hard to come by plausibly correct (or even unbiased) estimates of either economic growth or the size of the "bad loan" burden, but almost all the estimates I've seen seem to agree that for a long time the "bad loan" burden was growing faster than the economy. Whether that's still the case, I don't know.

Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by dekhn on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @01:00PM (#21205172)
Agreed. I had a bunch of friends who visited ~5 years ago and were claiming US was so far behind in building that China was going to take over the world. Several went back recently and said "so many ghost towns, what happened?"
Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by BrandonMarc on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @12:22PM (#21204699)
Indeed. The "decoupling" phenomenon has their attention.
Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by RangerScience on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @12:41PM (#21204905)
I'm interested in your opinion. Sources?
Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by dekhn on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @12:45PM (#21204962)
A collection of mainstream news sources, various government reports, and speculation.
Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by RangerScience on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @12:52PM (#21205066)
Sorry, I mean, "I am interested in also reading your sources. Do you have any links that come to mind?"
Re:Fallout from Blizzard Hong Kong Incident by dekhn on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @01:01PM (#21205191)
Mostly Google News, NY Times, I never read Huffington (progressive propaganda) and I read Breitbart to see what the people voting for Trump are rambling about.