Tag: China

China Economy to Overtake U.S. by 2016

China’s economy expanded last year at 7.8pc – its slowest pace in more than a decade – and recent data has fuelled concerns that any rebound in the country’s growth is losing steam.

However, the OECD was upbeat, predicting in a new survey of China’s prospects that the country’s economy could expand by 8.5pc this year and by 8.9pc in 2014.

While the OECD noted the slowdown in China’s aggressive expansion, it nonetheless predicted that growth should average 8pc in this decade at current rates of investment and reform.

After allowing for price differences, it forecast that China could become the world’s largest economy, overtaking America, around 2016.

via Telegraph.

High debt is a drag on growth.  You’re using sooo much money for debt service (paying interest) that could have gone to pay for more useful activity… education, roads, technology, etc.

China’s economy grew at nearly 8% last year.  U.S.’s economy grew at less than 1/2 that. (Thanks Obamacare and businesses fearing other Obama policies.)

Also worth noting that this story NOT being carried by any major U.S. news organization save the Washington Post and CNN International.  Not even a single link / page to the regular CNN site despite the story begin pick-up by Reuters news service.  To ABC/NBC/CBS/MSNBC and yes, even Fox this story is not news worthy.

 

Obama Admin Quietly Released 8,500 Criminals, Some Killers

Qian Wu thought the man who brutally attacked her was gone forever.

She was sure that Huang Chen, a Chinese citizen who slipped into America on a ship and stayed in the country illegally, would be deported as soon as he got out of jail for choking, punching, and pointing a knife at her in 2006.

But China refused to take Chen back. So, after jailing Chen on and off for three years in Texas, immigration officials believed they were out of options and did what they have done with thousands of criminals like him.

They quietly let him go.

Nobody warned Wu, or prosecutors, or the public. The petite, 46-year-old woman learned Chen was still here when he stormed into her unlocked apartment one day in January 2010 and announced, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me.” Terrified, she called the police, and he fled. But for two weeks, Chen was free to stalk her and finally, to catch her as she hurried home with milk and bread one afternoon.

Chen then finished what he had started earlier, bashing Wu on the head with a hammer and slashing her with a knife. As she lay crumpled in a grimy stairwell, he ripped out her heart and a lung and fled with his macabre trophies.

“She lived in horror in the last two weeks of her life,” said Yongwei Guo, Wu’s widower, through an interpreter in New York. “She knew there was somebody coming to kill her and we asked the police for protection, and also the government, but they did nothing.”

via The Boston Globe.

Kudos to the Boston Globe from bringing this to light.

China To Build World’s Tallest Building In 90 Days

It all started simple enough.

Six days. That’s how long it took to build this level 9 Earthquake-resistant, sound-proofed, thermal-insulated 15-story hotel in Changsha, complete with everything, from the cabling to three-pane windows. The foundations were already built, but it’s just impressive.

While still in basking in the glow of success the same group decided to up the stakes a little …

 

The hotel is so solid that it can resist a 9 magnitude earthquake, as tested by the China Academy of Building Research (there’s a scene in which you can see the testing process, at 1:49). They claim this is five times more earthquake-resistant than conventional buildings.

The company also says that it is five times more energy efficient, with 6-inch thick glass curtain wall insulation and four-paned windows with built-in shades, a heat recovery system and 3-stage filtration air conditioning process that purifies indoor air to be 20 times purer than the air outside. They even have air quality monitoring in every room which, given the pollution problem in China, seems to be an important selling point there.

 

 

I guess since the two proof-of-principles have worked out it’s time to go straight to the head of the class.

According to its engineers, this will be the tallest skyscraper in the world by the end of March of 2013. Its name is Sky City, and its 2,749 feet (838 meters) distributed in 220 floors will grow in just 90 days in Changsha city, by the Xiangjiang river. Ninety days!

via Gizmodo.

For those too lazy to click, the magic here is that the building is pre-fab.  Not so much like a trailer but more like a very cool and very complicated erector set.  There’s video at the second link.

If this project goes off it will be time to seriously think — or re-think — about how we build things.  This technology appears to be something incredible.  Something we should be using here.

Intellectual Flight from China

Like hundreds of thousands of Chinese who leave each year, she was driven by an overriding sense that she could do better outside China. Despite China’s tremendous economic successes in recent years, she was lured by Australia’s healthier environment, robust social services and the freedom to start a family in a country that guarantees religious freedoms.

“It’s very stressful in China — sometimes I was working 128 hours a week for my auditing company,” Ms. Chen said in her Beijing apartment a few hours before leaving. “And it will be easier raising my children as Christians abroad. It is more free in Australia.”

via NYTimes.com.

No story in the NYT about the intellectual flight from the U.S.

Funny how that works.  Guess that’s not news worthy.

 

 

China Crushes Man by Steamroller

A villager in northern China attempting to resist a forced government relocation by remaining on his land was brutally crushed to death by a road flattening truck on the orders of a Chinese government official.  …

The victim, He Zhi Hua, refused to accept a paltry payment from the government which has forcefully evicted Changsha Village locals in order to re-appropriate their land for commercial use.When Hua began a protest by lying down on the spot through which construction vehicles had to pass, the local Vice Mayor ordered workers for the state-owned company to murder Hua by driving over his body with a huge road-flattening truck.

via Infowars (Warning — Graphic Photos!)

Why is this not front page of the NYT?  I’ll tell you why; because it doesn’t fit with their agenda.  It’s about not doing anything to embarrass not only China but Obama.

Obama has bent over backwards for China.  Even when they stopped buying bonds and so the Fed had to take over, Obama refused to hold China accountable for any of it’s bad behavior.  (BTW, if you need a list of China’s bad behavior then you’re too dumb to vote.)

It’s time we held China accountable for it’s actions.  Everything from human rights violations to unfair trading policies.  They wrongfully hold their money constant to the dollar instead of letting it float (like all other industrialized nations) making their goods cheaper the marketplace.  This costs Americans jobs.  It’s not only unfair; it’s bad for America and Americans.

Fallout of China’s One Child Policy

I’d not thought of this:

… The reason Chinese savings levels are so high is the one-child policy.

In most developing countries the way that people save is they have multiple children hopefully to generate a gaggle of grandchildren all of whom are trained to respect their elders. Given most people did not live to old age if you did you became a treasured (and well cared for) family member.

This does not work in China. Longevity in China is increasing rapidly and the one-child policy results in a grandchild potentially having four grandparents to look after. The “four grandparent policy” means the elderly cannot expect to be looked after in old age. Four grandparents, one grand-kid makes abandoning the old-folk looks easy and near certain.

Nor can the elderly rely on a welfare state to look after them. There is no welfare state.

So the Chinese save. Unless they save they will starve in old age. This has driven savings levels sometimes north of fifty percent of GDP. Asian savings rates have been high through all the key industrializations (Japan, Korea, Singapore etc). However Chinese savings rates are over double other Asian savings rates – this is the highest savings rate in history and the main cause is the one-child policy.

via Business Insider.

Kinda sad the level of social engineering that has taken place in China.

It is this very savings that permits the Chinese government to buy trillions and trillions of dollars worth of U.S. treasuries.  Should the U.S. drive itself over the cliff (which appears more and more likely) it will cause a world-wide financial meltdown.

Very sad in so many ways.

China Enters U.S. Banking Market

The United States on Wednesday opened its banking market to ICBC, China’s biggest bank, for the first time clearing a takeover of a US bank by a Chinese state-controlled company.

Just days after high-level US-China economic talks in Beijing, the Federal Reserve approved an application from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to buy a majority stake in the US subsidiary of Bank of East Asia.

The transaction will make ICBC the first Chinese state-controlled bank to acquire retail bank branches in the United States.

via Yahoo! News Canada.

An interesting development.  Curious why so little coverage of this in the U.S. MSM.