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I looked up 88 as in verse 88 in the bible - psalms 88 showed up:

1[a] [b]
O LORD, the God who saves me,
day and night I cry out before you.
2 May my prayer come before you;
turn your ear to my cry.

3 For my soul is full of trouble
and my life draws near the grave. [c]

4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am like a man without strength.

5 I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.

6 You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.

7 Your wrath lies heavily upon me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
Selah

8 You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;

9 my eyes are dim with grief.
I call to you, O LORD, every day;
I spread out my hands to you.

10 Do you show your wonders to the dead?
Do those who are dead rise up and praise you?
Selah

11 Is your love declared in the grave,
your faithfulness in Destruction [d] ?

12 Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

13 But I cry to you for help, O LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.

14 Why, O LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?

15 From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death;
I have suffered your terrors and am in despair.

16 Your wrath has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me.

17 All day long they surround me like a flood;
they have completely engulfed me.

18 You have taken my companions and loved ones from me;
the darkness is my closest friend.

Definitely fits his state of mind.

Actually, Chen was elected the first time with less than 36% of the votes.

The second time, he won a very narrow margin after an "assassination" attempt 2 days before the election - and no assassins have ever been caught (a lot of people suspect that he did it on himself in the hospital). Put it this way, he was supposedly shot with a bullet (a 22, by the way, no one uses that for assassinations), and instead of being rushed to the best hospital or the closest one, he went to a small hospital loyal to him and the DPP.

He's doing this TI stuff right now to get people off of his corrupt regime - his son in law has already been convicted, now his wife is being investigated for corruption. He's in deep political doo-doo and he knows it.

No. The report is that if you're ethnic Chinese (even tourists), you have to be real careful in that province. It's not uncommon that tourists are attacked with handgrenades if you're ethnic Chinese, even if you're from the US (they really don't care). If you're white, you might be OK.

Obviously there are discrimination against hte Uighur by the Han chinese there (i.e. business will hire more han chinese than Uighur, etc.) But as far as violence goes, the Uighurs can be pretty violent, not all, but some. I have heard stories about hand grenade throwing as well.

Exactly - that means they have 450 million middle class guys in their own standards.

BTW - the service fees of the cellphones are NOT cheap. It's about 9 RMB per minute with long distance, or about $1 per minute. So certainly they have to make above $100 per month to afford that.

My point is that in China the middleclass is much bigger than in India, because they have a manufacturing base. Without it, IT work is limited to a a couple of million people, as what the author of the article says.

I read somewhere that the number of Chinese cellphone users are about 450 million people. A cellphone costs in China about $30? (or maybe a bit less). Surely if you make $1 per day, you can't have that. Cellphones = a better indicator of middle class than anything else.

The average wage in China is actually $100 USD per month, or about $3 per day (tht's using 8 RMB to $1 ratio, which is now 7.7 RMB to $1 USD ratio) It's about 800 RMB per month, that figure though was about 5 years old.

"Do YOU realize what that "Great Leap Forward" was all about? It was about China exporting more food and buying weaponry with that money. Read that again......"BUYING WEAPONRY".
Thats how Mao starved his people for his territorial ambitions."

This is about as gross distortion of history as you can get. Show me the link, the proof for this.

What happened was inflated values of grain production and a FAMINE has occured. Search for Great Leap Forward on the web and see it for yourself. Besides, in late 1950's, Russians were no longer helping China - it was India who cozy up to them.

And who gave you that expertise? It's the british.

You guys had an airforce in 1962, etc. Far better military equipment too.

You do realize that about 20 million Chinese died during Mao's Great Leap Forward, right? (in other words, the country was in shambles) - that's in the late 50's. And you do realize that by that time, the Soviets were totally against China and China got zero support from them after 1950's.

Funny - we once interviewed a candidate from India with a resume that looks like a technical book - i.e. all the terms you can find in networking :) I ask 2 questions on the resume, he can't answer them other than to say "I learn it from school..." Needless to say he didn't make it to the second round - if you can't trust part of the resume, you can't trust anything on it.

Maybe if you would actually read my post, you would act a little more like grown men instead of slapping labels on people.

In 1962, India is far more wealthier than China, and possesses better military equipment than China. You can blame the british for a lot of things, but even today, where did the aircraft carrier that India has (which China doesn't) come from?

As far as the Vietnam war goes - something you just don't understand given that India was one of the biggest supporters of the Soviet Union. Vietnam was backed by the Soviets for its invasion into Cambodia - part of the reason is to check if the Soviets would come to Vietnam's defense, it did not. Even the Vietnamese accused China of betraying the world communist revolution by "becoming a puppet of the imperialist United States".

You mean same quality of hardware that allows them to shoot down a satellite (measuring at most 4 feet) in space and it's a moving target too? It means their guidance system is accurate within 1 meter and that's on a BALLISTIC missile too.

The reason why Japan and US complained so loudly against it is because they have underestimated Chinese capabilities.

How do you define winning and losing?

China invaded Vietnam, Vietnam tried to invade China into the Yunnan province but was UNSUCCESSFUL. In other words, China was able to go into Vietnamese territory and not the other way around. In this way, China wins.

If you define victory as China having to force Vietnam out of Cambodia, then you're right, they lost. But from the casualties, both side suffered about 25k men. It's a draw.

Remember 1962? China beats India without an airforce and with much less technological weapons than what India possess at that time because Indians underestimated China and didn't think it could operate in high altitudes. In the long run China did lose in terms of international image but military wise, they did achieve their objectives.

That's somewhat of a racist comment, wouldn't you say?

I am starting to wonder if India is a democracy by all these attacks on you. I mean, you simply disagree with them.

I guess their form of "democracy" is that if you don't agree, then you have to shut up.

1D? I mean the 1D mark 2 :D

i have a 1d actually, not a 5d :)

I don't know any chinese that compares himself actively against Indians - i do hear lots of Indians comparing india to china, though.

now, i did hear some of my chinese colleagues asking indian colleagues why indians don't do well in the olympics (and that was only during the summer olympics) simply because they were curious how a country with 1 billion people would do so poorly comparatively to say, Australia.

i don't think it has anything to do with nationalism - most of the time the chinese/american-chinese guys don't even get along with each other - i see far more cohesiveness within the indian community than the chinese community.

I think this thread says it all - the post is about India, and yet immediately we get comparison against China (and it's all the same argument from MSM about open v. closed society, etc.) People tend to overlook some facts about it - such as how Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, etc. all developed their economy under a dictatorship system at the time the economy was developing. Singapore today is stil ruled by a one party state (98% of all seats belongs to one party) - no one ever says Taiwan's development would fail due to Chiang Kai Shek's rule (and he did rule it with an iron hand - lots of people were jailed wrongly and executed).