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I figured an all encompassing thread would be better for this, since we've still got China raising hell over portions of the Pacific, and North Korea launching more missiles.

Anyways, here's another provocative move on China's part, in what I believe is their plan to help forestall the economic armageddon they are going to face as a result of their 1 child policy.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/02/16/exclusive-china-sends-surface-to-air-missiles-to-contested-island-in-provocative-move.html?intcmp=hplnws

The Chinese military has deployed an advanced surface-to-air missile system to one of its contested islands in the South China Sea according to civilian satellite imagery exclusively obtained by Fox News, more evidence that China is increasingly "militarizing" its islands in the South China Sea and ramping up tensions in the region.

The imagery from ImageSat International (ISI) shows two batteries of eight surface-to-air missile launchers as well as a radar system on Woody Island, part of the Paracel Island chain in the South China Sea.
It is the same island chain where a U.S. Navy destroyer sailed close to another contested island a few weeks ago. China at the time vowed “consequences” for the action.

Woody Island is also claimed by Taiwan and by Vietnam.

The missiles arrived over the past week. According to the images, a beach on the island was empty on Feb. 3, but the missiles were visible by Feb. 14.

Well, at least Growler drivers will get to take a break from Syria.

One of the few foreign policy decisions I agree with Obama on is the pivot to the Pacific. China's going to keep its theatrics up, though, and I doubt we'll put our heart into countering them. This seems like a long, slow game whose outcome has already been decided.

 djones520 wrote:


Anyways, here's another provocative move on China's part, in what I believe is their plan to help forestall the economic armageddon they are going to face as a result of their 1 child policy.

I thought I read recently they were planning on removing that.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 djones520 wrote:


Anyways, here's another provocative move on China's part, in what I believe is their plan to help forestall the economic armageddon they are going to face as a result of their 1 child policy.

I thought I read recently they were planning on removing that.

They slowly are, but their decades of it has created such a population imbalance that they'll be facing a massive welfare state in the next 20 years that many believe will significantly hurt their economy. by 2020 there will be as many as 30 million men who will be unable to get married and have children, and as a result won't have anyone to care for them in their twilight years, leaving the burden on the state. This could cost end up costing into the trillions for them.

China faces a number of significant problems that are coming on them all at the same time. The demographic bulge of the one child policy is one of them. Serious environmental degradation is another. They also have to worry about several aspects of their economy, continuing resentment of the communist one party system, and the remaining imbalances and poverty of the countryside versus the cities.

DIrecting the nation's attention to external concerns is a classic way of trying to avoid the impact of all the above. Witness their premier's visit to London recently, where he spent most of his official state banquet speech whining about what bastards the Japanese were in the early 1940s.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
China faces a number of significant problems that are coming on them all at the same time. The demographic bulge of the one child policy is one of them. Serious environmental degradation is another. They also have to worry about several aspects of their economy, continuing resentment of the communist one party system, and the remaining imbalances and poverty of the countryside versus the cities.

DIrecting the nation's attention to external concerns is a classic way of trying to avoid the impact of all the above. Witness their premier's visit to London recently, where he spent most of his official state banquet speech whining about what bastards the Japanese were in the early 1940s.

It's been working for the Arab states in blaming Israel for all their woe's. Might as well work for China.

 djones520 wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 djones520 wrote:


Anyways, here's another provocative move on China's part, in what I believe is their plan to help forestall the economic armageddon they are going to face as a result of their 1 child policy.

I thought I read recently they were planning on removing that.

They slowly are, but their decades of it has created such a population imbalance that they'll be facing a massive welfare state in the next 20 years that many believe will significantly hurt their economy. by 2020 there will be as many as 30 million men who will be unable to get married and have children, and as a result won't have anyone to care for them in their twilight years, leaving the burden on the state. This could cost end up costing into the trillions for them.

I think you underestimate how lax they are on their safety standards. They are whittling that 30 million down pretty quick with all those dock explosions and ridiculous pollution.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 djones520 wrote:


Anyways, here's another provocative move on China's part, in what I believe is their plan to help forestall the economic armageddon they are going to face as a result of their 1 child policy.

I thought I read recently they were planning on removing that.

They did remove it, now its 2 children IIRC, but the damage has already been done. Its gonna take 30-40 years for balance to be restored, assuming every women in China gets married and has 2 children(which actually will still result in a net population decrease as there are significantly more men than women).

This is on top of the rapidly growing middle class demanding middle class lifestyles which will put massive strain on their resources, and exercising greater political will.

I think it is over estimated how much china cares for those extra 30 million dudes...

They wont get welfare, they will just let them die, problem "solved".

My father in law has lots of great stories about how much china "cares" about its people from before he immigrated to Canada from there.

You know a good way to get rid of all those pesky men is a good ol' fashioned war.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 djones520 wrote:


Anyways, here's another provocative move on China's part, in what I believe is their plan to help forestall the economic armageddon they are going to face as a result of their 1 child policy.

I thought I read recently they were planning on removing that.

They did remove it, now its 2 children IIRC, but the damage has already been done. Its gonna take 30-40 years for balance to be restored, assuming every women in China gets married and has 2 children(which actually will still result in a net population decrease as there are significantly more men than women).

This is on top of the rapidly growing middle class demanding middle class lifestyles which will put massive strain on their resources, and exercising greater political will.

On top of that there are societal norms in place for one child now. The expectation is you have one child, invest everything in them and pass everything on to them. Whilst people may be able to have more than one child not many will not.

 Soladrin wrote:
You know a good way to get rid of all those pesky men is a good ol' fashioned war.

Being in the armed services of one of the primary nations that would be involved of such a conflict, don't think that this isn't a worry of mine.

One issue china faces is that it is an exporter of a lot of goods. If they were to say take military action or cause someone else to make military action then would they not be shooting them selves in the foot when the world executes a trade embargo?

Daston wrote:
One issue china faces is that it is an exporter of a lot of goods. If they were to say take military action or cause someone else to make military action then would they not be shooting them selves in the foot when the world executes a trade embargo?

Not if they felt the benefits outweighed the costs. The entire world said that World War 1 would be over in months, Europe as a whole could not support the type of economic losses that such a war would cause. Look what happened though.

When it comes to war, nations will do some very strange things.

Daston wrote:
One issue china faces is that it is an exporter of a lot of goods. If they were to say take military action or cause someone else to make military action then would they not be shooting them selves in the foot when the world executes a trade embargo?

This is part of the reason they have been making such a huge push to grow their own middle class. They realized they were too dependent on people buying their products, and if something stopped that they'd immediately crumble. So they've been ravenously building domestic markets, which has had other side effects.

It would be awesome if we just sat this one out. Our interest in free trade ends when millions die.

Frankly with our trade deficit with them, no trade is better than the trade now.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 djones520 wrote:


Anyways, here's another provocative move on China's part, in what I believe is their plan to help forestall the economic armageddon they are going to face as a result of their 1 child policy.

I thought I read recently they were planning on removing that.

From the professor of my Revolutionary China class last semester, it was removed in 2014... Also, what most people don't realize, especially if they cannot read Chinese print, is that the law only actually applied to the 80% of the population that is Han Chinese. The problem with the law wasn't that the 80% majority were unable to produce "enough" offspring, its that the other minority groups also seemingly fell back on this law as a pseudo-patriotic act.

Not that the other 20% could have done much to balance it out.

if they had four children each it would help.

I was not aware of that part of the law, and it's interesting that China has racial discrimination within a population that to outsiders seems relatively homogenous. I knew about the different languages and religions, but not that the Chinese consider themselves to be different races.

It seems a bit like white British feeling themselves composed of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh races, (Whatever a 'race' means.)

 djones520 wrote:
They slowly are, but their decades of it has created such a population imbalance that they'll be facing a massive welfare state in the next 20 years that many believe will significantly hurt their economy. by 2020 there will be as many as 30 million men who will be unable to get married and have children, and as a result won't have anyone to care for them in their twilight years, leaving the burden on the state. This could cost end up costing into the trillions for them.

The more immediate problem is the shortage of workers who would be entering the workforce right now. More workers would have meant more production and investment, which would have more than provided for the people entering retirement. Japan has been struggling through a similar issue since the early 90s (on top of a bunch of other economic issues). The rest of the developed world is also starting to enter a similar issue. Some have it worse (much of Europe), some not as bad (the USA), but none have it as bad as China.

But that isn't really the driver behind China's most pressing economic issues. Aging demographics are more of a slow squeeze. China's biggest issue is there economy is basically one great big bubble. Exports overseas bring in dollars and encourages new new and expanding businesses, that new investment encourages new cities and property development. When the first part of that, exports overseas, starts to wobble, that flows right through, multiplying each step along the way. You only need a modest decline in exports, or even just a failure for exports to grow for a few months, and the results can be catastrophic. We've already seen signs of that catastrophe (property plunges and stock market crashes), but not full blown economic catastrophe. Well, maybe catastrophe is underway, we don't know. Because China's economic numbers still look okay, but no-one believes them so anything could be happening on the ground.

China has known about the problem for years, but knowing about it and fixing it are two different things. The answer was always to expand domestic consumption, but that between special interests (government connected businessmen) and a savings culture, it was always going to be hard to transition. And now it's really looking like their efforts were too little, too late.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
DIrecting the nation's attention to external concerns is a classic way of trying to avoid the impact of all the above. Witness their premier's visit to London recently, where he spent most of his official state banquet speech whining about what bastards the Japanese were in the early 1940s.

To be fair, if there's a subject that it's still reasonable to complain about 70 years later, it'd be China's treatment at the hands of the Japanese in WWII.

That sort of started out as a bit of a joke but then wasn't by the end. Huh.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
This is on top of the rapidly growing middle class demanding middle class lifestyles which will put massive strain on their resources, and exercising greater political will.

Domestic consumption is part of the solution, not part of the problem.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Frazzled wrote:
Frankly with our trade deficit with them, no trade is better than the trade now.

Trade isn't a scoreboard. It isn't one nation winning and one nation losing.

The reason the US can have so many people working in high end jobs as engineers, lawyers and the like is because someone in another country is doing the grunt work making low end manufactured goods.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
if they had four children each it would help.

I was not aware of that part of the law, and it's interesting that China has racial discrimination within a population that to outsiders seems relatively homogenous. I knew about the different languages and religions, but not that the Chinese consider themselves to be different races.

It seems a bit like white British feeling themselves composed of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh races, (Whatever a 'race' means.)

Those are nationalities, and England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland are separate nations (either currently or historically), and lots of people from three of those areas consider themselves to be living under occupation by a foreign nation... which, technically, I guess, they are.

Why wouldn't the Chinese consider themselves separate ethnic groups, considering that they are a nation made up of many different ethnicities? Americans most certainly do, sometimes dividing themselves down along whatever state they live in (compare Georgians to Louisianans to Texans, as an example), not to mention whatever nation their ancestors came from, even if that was two hundred years ago.

Maybe I'm a bit behind on the times, but didn't China have an overpopulation problem? Did they make a swing too far that'll decimate them?

China should take over North Korea. Wipe out it's army, then there will be plenty of 'ladies' for the men folk and plenty of land to expand in to... cos China isn't big enough it would appear

My favorite part of this story is that in California a meeting of Pacific leaders just wrapped up a conference on reducing tension in the Pacific, and they walk out to see this on the front page of the newspaper. I guess this conference was a waste of time.

 Easy E wrote:
I guess this conference was a waste of time.

As are most conferences

 sebster wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
This is on top of the rapidly growing middle class demanding middle class lifestyles which will put massive strain on their resources, and exercising greater political will.

Domestic consumption is part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Depends on which problem you are looking at.

Increased consumption is a solution to the issue of being completely dependent on exports. But a larger middle class causes its own problems. They'll not just be wanting stuff that is produced domestically, nor will all of your domestic production be desired by them since its largely been designed for people with different tastes in other countries and cultures, plus they will have more free time(which means more political activism and free thinking, not things that a communist regime wants).

Bingo. The larger and stronger middle class will put pressure on the government for change, which will just cause more overall instability.

 djones520 wrote:
Bingo. The larger and stronger middle class will put pressure on the government for change, which will just cause more overall instability.

Which is somewhat ironic when you pause to consider the shrinking middle class in the US, and the burgeoning one in China


Heck, we just read an article for one of my history classes about a city called Jackson Hole located in China... Apparently it's a sort of resort/tourist village that is gaining permanent residents that models itself on their ideal of what middle America and particularly "Western" America looks like.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
Bingo. The larger and stronger middle class will put pressure on the government for change, which will just cause more overall instability.

Which is somewhat ironic when you pause to consider the shrinking middle class in the US, and the burgeoning one in China


Heck, we just read an article for one of my history classes about a city called Jackson Hole located in China... Apparently it's a sort of resort/tourist village that is gaining permanent residents that models itself on their ideal of what middle America and particularly "Western" America looks like.

I suppose it should be clarified that the instability the middle class brings is because China is a totalitarian government.

Right, I have been saying for years that all the 'China is the next Super Power" talk is really premature. They do not have the political pressure release of elections to help them through the labor/cultural/political transformation their society will need to go through to become a true superpower. There is still plenty of time for them to combust.

It will make the 1848 revolutions in Europe look like a school picnic.