Posted on 02/12/2019 4:20:25 AM PST by vannrox
The guy is a liberal, and makes fun of conservatives. Aside from those MAJOR faults, his report is seemingly an honest one.
Show city based on central planning.
I live there 50% of the time. It’s a fascinating city. Thanks for posting this!
Sure.
I visited chengdu, and chongqing back in 2013. I really enjoyed it there, and everyone was so nie and friendly. We went to see the pandas but we went at the wrong time of the day, and they were all resting and hiding. I really did like those little red pandas that looked like long tailed cats.
I like Zhuhai, but chungdu is a great place to live, and central to all sorts of outstanding natural and scenic sights.
We went to get a massage and the gals told us that they loved chengdu because the flight out were so fantastically cheap. This is because the panda bears are a world heritage site. cool huh?
villages in China are big because some of their factories employ 500,000, the factories are big because China has at least 1.3 billion people.
Scale is everything
It sounds like “village” is being used as a term of art, rather than in its standard usage, which is “a municipality smaller than a town, which is smaller than a city.”
What China has done in the last 30 years is impressive.
Is it a threat to the U.S.A.?
Much of the improvement was planned in the West, and was done with stolen U.S. technology.
But, the U.S. did similar things as we caught up to and surpassed Great Britain.
I have said the U.S. Interstate system is the greatest mass transit system in the History of Man.
But, 24,000 miles of fast train can give it competition.
Over the past year, I’ve watched probably 20 hours of YouTube videos of Chengdu, South African guy who has settled into the landscape there and really talks to the positives of the city. As he hints strongly...the city authorities have an image that is beyond anything else in China and it’s based on people having few complaints to whine about.
The thing that gets me is that it’s in the middle of nowhere (nowhere near the coast), and since 1980 (at 2.5 million population then)....it’s grown at an enormous pace.
Fred is far from a liberal, at least in the modern sense. A modern liberal would be horrified by this:
Are White Men Gods? (II): Getting the Facts Straight
https://fredoneverything.org/are-white-men-gods-ii-getting-the-facts-straight/
Dujiangyan water system is also an amazing world heritage site. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan
“They go through mountains. We went through–I’ll guess and say a dozen–tunnels, all of four lanes, all miles long (one said to be nine miles) lighted and straight. This was done in two parallel tunnels, each carrying two lanes in one direction or another. Valleys? We crossed them on bridges or elevated highways.”
They fooled him. They’re actually really short tunnels but on the highway they have you continue to go through the same tunnel multiple times, just so it feels long - like the old Soviet military parades in Red Square when the tanks and long guns went by, then went around the block and went by again and again, only to look like they had many more than they did. As to their long bridges over ravines and valleys - that’s all fake too, just painted backdrop 20 below road level. They don’t fool me!
As to the high speed trains, they only make you THINK you’re going fast, but that’s because the cities are actually really close to each other, despite what they publish on their fake maps. For example, Google Maps says it’s 720 miles between Beijing and Shanghai, but it’s really only about 150 miles according to my sources, so when their so-called high speed train gets you between these backwards cities in 3 hours, you really only traveled 50 miles per hour, not the 240 miles per hour they claim. Heck, Amtrak even does better than that. They don’t fool me - not for a minute!
(At some point it might be a good idea to take China seriously, they’re not hiding what they’ve done - pretty much any American can visit there, and it can be extremely cheap, just look on Groupon, for example)
How much of China’s progress was paid for with American trade debt?
The same can be said of India.
Interesting report. Describing most of the Chinese as middle class is a bit of a stretch. The per capita income of China is only about $8,827 (2017), while the U.S. per capita income is $60,200 (2017) and Japan’s is $45,470 (2017). Even Russia’s is higher at $11,441.
China’s purchasing power parity per capita income is higher at $16,760 (2017), as is Russia’s at $24,893 (2017)
I have traveled into the hinterlands of Liaoning one of the three Manchurian provinces in the far northeast. It is quite primitive and the standard of living is much lower than what you see in the provincial capital of Shenyang. The modern highways are far away and the roads are third world quality. Farming is still done with oxen.
The quality of housing and life is much lower, too. Even in Shenyang, exterior and interiors of many buildings appear to have never been painted since the original coat of paint. You quickly get used to having dirty walls as a backdrop.
Liaoning is part of China’s traditional industrial heartland, an important center of coal, steel and equipment manufacturing, which has suffered from restructuring in the modern era, pushing up unemployment to very high levels. The economy shrank in 2016, but rose in 2017 with new investment. Its per capita income, 8,108, is 8% lower than the national average. Reminded me the dirt interior walls and neglected exterior facades of buildings in East Berlin before the wall came down.
By the way in Liaoning, ostensibly a province of Manchu people, 84% of the people are Han Chinese. Only 13% are Manchu. Even so, the mannerisms and culture of the people is still mostly Manchu. Many of the people I met in Liaoning are very outgoing, use their hands a lot when they talk, are expressive. A few are hot-headed but in a delightful, endearing way.
Ping for later.
i was only there for 2 days on business last year. What I was able to see was very impressive. It is the one city in China I want to take my wife to if possible. Shanghai was interesting but Beijing was an overpopulated dump. With about a 1/2 mile visibility on most days.
Again scale - in the west we are used to villages consisting of hundreds or a few thousand but the US population is barely a third of China’s which makes all the difference in the expected population size of a village.
Standards of scale expected in the US, with a population of slightly over 320 million, are different from standards of scale existing in Asian countries with populations over one billion.
There is a you-tube channel worth watching by a guy who has lived there for years...
https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza
Its, to me, fascinating. I’ve watched dozens of them.
Yes. China is a wonderful place.
Safe and clean. Peaceful and non threatening.
There are hundreds of the articles from Europe in the 1930s.
If you go back let me know and I’ll give you some tourist ideas. I’ll be back there in 2 weeks.
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