China

Who is funding the falungong? Seems like they have some deep pockets.

Can you please comment on whether you believe the 50,000 Foxconn jobs left and the supporting 125,000 people are now adversely affected.
This clearly has a negative impact on Chinese GDP and a strong positive impact on the Vietnam economy.
This is only one component of China's GDP The I, Investment from Private firms.
If you choose this topic, we can start discussing the list of other companies that have reduced production or left China in the last 18 months.

No clue. I avoid politics and try to stick with just economics and Investment, although I do look at it if it will have a major impact on Econ and investment.
ie. US economic policies are dictated by the liberal /conservative party in power and that impacts the world economy.

Not sure how my buddy is trying to scam me. He is white and speaks fluent Mandarin. He has his own money.
I do not know and have never met anyone in falungong.

Try to stick to the topic of how the Chinese economy is doing. You can yell at me over that. Definitely point out any flaws in my argument or idea. I am trying to get to the truth, so I won't be mad if I am wrong. I will be alter my investing strategy accordingly and be grateful for the information.

High speed railway stations.. Mal investment timestamp 6:07 to 7:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhclmurNUuw&t=713s

YouTube

China’s High-Speed Rail Is Dead: Over 4,000 Ghostly Stations, Billions Spent, No Passengers

like all compelling cults, they tell their members to give them everything

like all lasting cults, they then wisely invest the surplus "donations" into real businesses

they are a billion dollar corporation now with tons of businesses and it also appears that during covid, they managed to finally turn the epoch times into a profit generating publication

this stuff is common, the reason why sushi suddenly became a thing in the USA, why you have sushi places pop up all over the place is because the Moonies, for whatever reason, decided Sushi would be good business in America and they set up a bunch of Sushi distribution centers in America and then encouraged their members to go to the USA, open a sushi restaurant, and sell their freshly supplied fish - the overwhelming majority of all things sushi in the USA is either owned by a Moonie individual or by the unification church directly

by mindflayer k

High speed railway stations.. Mal investment timestamp 6:07 to 7:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhclmurNUuw&t=713s

YouTube

China’s High-Speed Rail Is Dead: Over 4,000 Ghostly Stations, Billions Spent, No Passengers

Please criticize the video and let me know if it is fake. I cannot say if they are true, only that when my friends used the high speed rail system, they said
it was pretty empty. As did my other friend who said the Macau bridge was empty when he took it.

The video source is suspect but China's financial struggles with most of HSR routes are well documented elsewhere, including by CCP's own publications.

by mindflayer k

High speed railway stations.. Mal investment timestamp 6:07 to 7:30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhclmurNUuw&t=713s

YouTube

China’s High-Speed Rail Is Dead: Over 4,000 Ghostly Stations, Billions Spent, No Passengers

Please criticize the video and let me know if it is fake. I cannot say if they are true, only that when my friends used the high speed rail system, they said
it was pretty empty. As did my other friend who said the Macau bridge was empty when he took it.

yup, you've been drinking cult flavored koolaid

china observer is a falungong channel

Hi Rickroll,

believe it or not, I do appreciate your point of view on these topics as you are one of a very small population of posters willing to give an opinion or
challenge the stated narrative. I agree that almost all of the titles used on youtube videos are worded to gain clicks, even those that I consider to give impartial information.
I try to look past the titles and ask is this information true or is it just lies or better yet, what % of this reporting do I attribute to be true.
Reading or viewing the piece, I try to use a first principle approach of testing the ideas that are stated.
I read China's state run Global Times and China Daily and question the articles just as I would the clickbaity Western media.
There is a third set of youtube media that I try to listen to with an open mind. The majority is also very clickbaity but is usually Chinese natives,
complaining about events that are happening to them personally. I believe them to be as authentic as American media covering the homelessness,
immigration and crime in US liberal cities. (Very inflammatory, but with about 50% truth, designed to draw a strong emotional response.)

I encourage anyone reading my posts to take a hammer to the ideas and smash as hard as you can.
Thanks

As stated before, I am not trying to confirm what is stated in those videos. I am doing the opposite. I agree that the youtube videos
that you posted are not objective journalism. it is mostly opinion. (exaggerated opinion at that) I would prefer that you attack any or all of the videos content
and say it is 100% or 50% lies because of xxx, yyy, and zzz.
I am trying to determine if they have any truth and come to a belief in some direction of a macroeconomic and micro economic trend then come to some conviction
about that belief. Then based on the conviction, make a large investment.

ie. Is it better to buy real estate in Nanning, now that home prices have dropped drastically or in a Dallas suburb where the prices went way up during covid and are
now falling?

Looking at the title of the third video +100 million leftover women in China caught my attention as the title is very clickbaity.

I have not watched the video.

Based on what I know, I would start with the assumption that is 100% false because of what I know about Chinese culture and
the desire for male children, I would expect that there were say 40million extra unmarried MEN, not women. Parents and grandparents
of my generation would be pressuring their children to get married and have children.

Going a step further I would say if there were +100 million leftover women (not sure what the definition is exactly)
there would have to be +140 million leftover men?!?

Then I would ask myself it it possible that both are true? If so, what could have caused this. This is a trend in Western developed
nations that have very strong feminism, where women seek to out earn men and only want to date/marry the top 1% or 10% of men.
The primary difference is that in Western hookup Culture, women can have many children with different baby papas or even unknown parantage and
it is not heavily looked down upon. It might be worthy of a Maury Povich episode for shock value to sell adds and diapers, but nothing more.

I would ask myself has China's culture changed so dramatically that women are refusing to marry regular guys? Is there another reason for this?
Has the cost of living in China raised so dramatically that a family cannot live on one income? Are these leftover women unmarried but have one or more children
like in the US? Did a large number of married males die from covid? Permanently leave the country to work on Belt and Road initiatives?

Lets say none of the alternate possible reasons has any weight and that Chinese state media says this number is correct. 100M, +30y old and refuses to get married for whatever reason and has no children.
If it was true and I believed in it strongly enough AND it was my area of forte, I would ask myself what % of Chinese women are getting married now?
if It was 95% in 1980 what is it now? 88%? 75%? If I found it to be below a certain threshold, I would consider shorting a publicly traded 'wedding supply' company.

Because I am not in the wedding business but RE. i would ask myself ... if this is true, how does it affect Chinese Real Estate.
Unclear to me now, but definitely worthy of asking that exact question. I would make a prediction and then look to see what happens in RE.

Third step, brainstorm possible shifts in RE. My guess, would be that smaller bachelor units would be in higher demand than family sized 2 bedroom or 3 bedroom units.
If strongly convinced, of a certain city's future growth I would lean to buying 2 bachelor pads instead of the 2 bedroom unit. I do not have any boots on the
ground in China and am not licensed to sell or rent RE in China, but at least you have an idea of why I would consider reading the article or watch a videos.

Yes, it might be true that 100 million women in the "leftover" range are unmarried, its estimated at 1/5. The estimate for men is 1/3 which is going to be closer to 200 million

The culture is such that women tend to marry up. I believe the marriage is generally more of a business relationship in China than a conventional "loving" relationship here

Hypergamy is a feather in all cultures. (there may be individual exceptions, but not generally, women athletes for example ) Women marry up, because they need a good income earner to support them and their children if/when they do not work.
Every traditional love story (non woke) is based on this principle. Name one love story where the Rich Girl marries the hobo bum. Stories may start that way, but the hobo/kid/looser guy, gains value by slaying the dragon, rubbing the magic lantern, gaining the treasure and becoming worthy. It is always every girls dream to be picked out by the handsome prince for her purity/beauty/etc.

There are definitely levels to hypergamy. You can pretty much buy a loyal wife in Colombia. You can't buy loyalty in the US.

In China I think its more about speedrunning obligation (marriage, children, career) then they get to actually pursue themselves

lots of expats wind up dating/marrying very wealthy chinese women over 30

wealthy women want wealthy and successful men who will be faithful

wealthy men want to use their wealth to indulge in mistresses (super common in asia for a man of means to be paying rent on various mistress apartments)

poor and middle class women are happy to go along with it because at the end of the day, they are being provided for and their children will grow up with resources

wealthy women do not need the carrot of the financial provider so won't put up with the stick of accepting mistresses - yet paradoxically still want to be with a man of status

also, wealthy men typically won't even consider marrying a women over the age of 30 because that's basically considered barren, they want a young woman who'll produce healthy babies - even if this isn't on the forefront of their mind, all their relatives will be reminding them of that constantly

so the women with good income are often quite picky and then "miss their window" and become "leftover" because the men they want are not interested due to their age and they won't settle for a regular guy - some of them later end up settling for the canadian or portugese guy because there's enough mystery and aura around the fact that he's a foreigner to obscure that if he were native chinese then his career/assets/education wouldn't check all the boxes they normally require in a man

and then, due to the wealthy guys rounding up all the women as mistresses, there's a ton of dudes who are just left out and it's quite common for the men on the border provinces to find wives and bring them in

Everyone I talk to in China is struggling except for the ones who would be the absolute last ones to struggle.

this thread is amazing, looks like some of it is user generated ie a propaganda department wouldn't put nude women out there

very cool though, thanks for sharing

one thing that i really noticed in last few years is that the butt of most memes sharply transitioned from north korea being the laughing stock to usa - last few years there i'd regularly be told something absurd and need to say "no that's not true" and then i'd look it up to prove it was wrong but then sure enough it was right

was stuff like a city not having water for a month etc etc, or some wild gov official scandal, etc etc - all kind of obscure stuff you wouldn't know if not local but it's picked up and made fun of bigly in china

during covid it really ramped up, just nonstop videos of stupid and inept government people - my favorite was a woman in california giving a press conference to never touch your mouth with you hands to prevent spreading and literally the next thing she does is lick her finger to turn the page of her binder to continue reading

Obviously Epoch Times is anti CCP propaganda, and should be treated as such.

Do you think the current "dunking on the US" movement in China is organic, or do you think it is orchestrated by the CCP? If orchestrated, why?

both

so internet in china is very much a wild wild west

despite what many believe, it's still full of porn and other stuff that censors would like to censor - it's just not logistically feasible

ie they can get pornhub and youjizz and xvideo but may miss out on blocking lesser known sites

i worked for a photo sharing startup much like instagram there, we had a team of about 50 people hired just for censorship - but it wasn't political posts, it was dick pics they were deleting and this isn't a unique thing to china

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

WIRED

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed

i'd often get lunch with those guys because they obviously had a lot of funny stories of what they deleted today, but they were mostly depressed af, imagine your day is being shown thousands of pictures each day that the ai flagged as potentially being a dick and it's your job to confirm whether it is or not

users who shared that stuff were not punished or anything, the dicks would just get deleted, if they had x amount of dicks deleted then eventually they'd receive a warning and then finally getting banned

the real threat though was fighting spam, something about half of the engineers were solely dedicated to combatting as it's a constant arms race

also i think i mentioned it before, but most of the talk about censorship is just flat out wrong, stuff like winnie the pooh being censored was a lie, a meme super imposing Xi's face on Winnie would be censored, but Winnie himself was fine, you could go to a book store and find winnie the pooh books and go to a licensed streaming service (a chinese version of netflix) and easily find all the winnie the pooh films

but i digress...

while it is very much a wild wild west, however, anything you see with a big audience, ie something big enough to get the attention of someone resharing in a twitter thread absolutely gained the attention of a censor at some point and its continued existence implies that it had approval

things shared amongst friends, nobody cares about - my wechat groups were chok full of straight up pornographic gifs as they were commonly used in chat "oh man, i had a bad day at work, boss was such a jerk *post giant dick slapping a girl in the face sticker*"

but if i shared that in a huge public channel it would 100% be deleted immediately

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/peoples...

this happened a block from where i was living at the time, someone shared it with some bros, they shared it with other bros, it went viral going around from chat group to chat group - the reason why the government stepped in was because it was viewed by millions

meanwhile, you'd regularly receive nude pics and my friends who were into hookers would talk to them directly on wechat and they'd regularly send out nude pics as a reminder of "hey want to get serviced again?" so they're probably sending out nudes regularly to hundreds of people and still not getting in trouble etc

lots of famous chinese directors who make huge blockbuster films have a "personal project" film that they make which never sees a theatrical run and is banned domestically, they know it will be banned domestically, but they still make it and will continue to make more films going forward, they aren't sent to the gulag, just a "lol you spent 12 million dollars on a film that'll only play in a few art house cinemas in the village" and next film they make will be about mermaids who love the stability a strong central government provides their underwater kingdom

i'm talking really controversial stuff, like films about students during tiananmen, about the horrors of the cultural revolution, films which portray the atrocities committed by both sides in the civil war, films about women leaving poverty in the village to try to make it as hookers in the big city (but not a fun sex and the city vibe more like a ken burns film vibe)

and back on topic...

a few of those pictures had some watermarks on them, meaning some organizations or news media made them, in which case they 100% were government created propaganda pieces - ie that children's cartoon, that script would have needed to pass censorship and in order to tackle such controversial stuff and possibly draw ire the writer was either taking orders from up high or just incredibly confident in his work or just very irrational but my money is on orders from up on high

but china is much like the usa where you have a ton of patriots who love their country and think everyone else just sucks so you'll have many people making those things independently just the same way you can assume plenty of those Eagles holding AR-15s in each talon could very easily just be made by an enthusiastic graphic designer from mobile alabama rather than from a CIA dark site

when i was working as a journalist, i once called a guy to confirm that he'd be coming in tomorrow at 3 for an interview

about 5 minutes later he called back, explained to me that he just had some tea and couldn't make it (having tea is a catchphrase used for having an unfriendly chat with a gov official)

so very clearly either his phone or our phone or both our phones were bugged and they decided they didn't want him talking to us and gave him a call to say "woah buddy, cool your jets, it wouldn't be wise to talk to them about that"

this wasn't a dissident, it was an economics professor (yes they do fudge and lie about a lot of their publicly released econ data - but... that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, just not as good as reported)

i was never accepted for a journalistic visa so was working on a tourist visa the entire time, plenty of people i hung out with didn't know about my job or just brainfarted and forgot and would regularly text me about drug use like "hey rickroll where do you buy your hash?" and stuff like that, i smoked hash basically every day of my life back then

i was clearly on the radar and under some form of supervision and at a minimum they would have known i was working as a journalist on a tourist visa

i was also someone who could have been deported on a whim due to being there on a tourist visa, and possibly given the britney griner treatment if they bothered at all to pursue something like that

it never happened - the reason why it never happened was it was never about enforcing the law, there was no reason to, however, had i graduated from hash smoker to hash smuggler or from journalist to activist, then they'd have a reason to follow the letter of the law and deport or imprison me

was talking to some people today who mentioned the economy sucked and were hoping for a rebound

If you listen carefully you can hear the rumble of a billion people laughing themselves silly at the usa attempt to thwart their cyber menace.

I have been reading Chinese history and my conclusion is that as an American we can't relate to what reunification with Taiwan means on any level. I think it was in a H. L. Mencken biography I read that mentioned an early 20th century view that a chinaman is someone who smokes opium and eats rats. It is so opposite to my American view of my grandparents that my grandfather ate steaks, smoked cigarettes and still lived to be 80. Our ancestors kicked the Japanese ass as opposed to being brutally victimized by the Japanese.

Even if Florida had been some confederate breakaway country from the civil war it can't capture the symbolism and symbolic meaning of what reunification would mean.

I think it is also am American bias that of course they are just going to blow the **** out of Taiwan eventually and take it back by force. I just don't think that is going to happen. The path of least resistance is to just wait, sabre rattle for optics and wait some more. They have to see our debt levels create a time decay to US military force.

I imagine Taiwan reunification will look basically the same as Hong Kong but it won't happen any time soon.

The best book overall I have read is Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. I feel like I didn't know anything before that book.