China isn't doing so great.

Kizzume · Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 3:10 pm Post subject: China isn't doing so great.

I used to have fears that China would be the country that would end up deciding everything--but they have so many things right now that are building up that look like an upcoming catastrophe.

There's the dams for the hydroelectric power they've built that the floods have killed THOUSANDS and nothing gets done about it.

Many parts of their infrastructure are falling apart.

People walk around the cities with masks on their faces from the pollution.

A huge percentage of energy there comes from coal.

2/3 of the population is in utter poverty.

If we think the square was the last time they used their military to kill so many people, think again. There are THOUSANDS of human rights protests over there consisting of millions of people at times and none of them get any media attention because they control the media--completely locked down. This is also why so many hackers are coming out of China--they're not hacking to take things down, they're hacking to get information and things that their government doesn't want them to see.

Instead of the government looking into how all these poisons and such were getting into the products they were manufacturing, they just had all the people who were running the operations executed.

People go to jail for 10 years for reading an illegal book. The human rights violations there when it comes to their jails--it's unreal.

The more I read about China, the more I realize that we are supporting a country that is MUCH worse on human rights than Saddam ever was.

I still can't believe they were granted "Most Favored Nation" status after the square incident.

They are not spending barely any of their money on the infrastructure of their country--they're spending it on weapons and trying to buy American companies. They can't survive this way for long. And when they collapse, you can bet that we'll have a depression HERE that makes the Great Depression look like a training course.

technocrat · Joined: 04 Dec 2007 Posts: 216

China reminds me a lot like the early 19th century industrializing powers. They experienced a tremendous boom, but at significant cost to the working and middle class populations while a small elite plutocracy tended to benefit.

The problem with China is that it's growth isn't "long-term" sustainable, and the means of making their growth is disastrous to the environment. They have poor regulations because they want that unhindered growth.

China will certainly face some serious problems in the future due to pollution; eventually, they will no longer be able to use their coal. If anything, they ought to shift to more nuclear power, which is currently a minority energy producer there. They have to realize that they will never reach the commercial-consumption patterns of the Western World. We can't even maintain it for much longer. They are going to soon be in a world of hurt.

Another problem is their population. They have too many damn people; this is especially problematic given their small amount of arable (and decreasing due to desertification) land. They are supporting a massive population on a very small and shrinking amount of land while economic disparity between the east and the western provinces expand. It's not looking good. They need to address these problems in a responsible way, but so long as they are playing 19th century robber-baron industrial revolution....

Kizzume · Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 11:07 pm Post subject:

Isn't it strange that this isn't talked about more? It's so known by so many people, yet nobody says anything....

technocrat · Joined: 04 Dec 2007 Posts: 216

Well, there's not much we can do about it, and since it's not part of everyone's immediate everyday life, they probably do not care. I don't even think most Americans could find China unllabelled on a map.

Kizzume · Posted: Sun Dec 23, 2007 12:07 am Post subject: