jamesaurichs

Yeah, I'm sorry to break a nationalist's heart. China needs foreign investment to survive, otherwise its 22% youth unemployment rate, 3 of its biggest real estate companies being bankrupt, local government's $12 trillion debt, 600M citizens on $140/month income will just get worse.

But those investments are now gone forever.

Xi is losing it everywhere;

- internal purging of military senior officials. 5 out of the 7 senior officials are now missing in action. https://www.newsweek.com/china-defence-minister-li-shangfu-m.... Very similar to Mao Zedong's purging of his generals https://www.hoover.org/research/lin-biao-incident-and-people.... China has had to transfer generals from airforce and army to head up missile force, because so many generals in the missile forces were purged.

- Xi Jing Ping was privately scalded by party elders during the recent party summit Beidaihe. There's an internal unrest and struggle occurring

- china's export drop 4th straight month https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/business/china-exports-au...

- the great flooding of northeast farmland this summer wiped out 1/3 of China's grain production. in order to mitigate the flooding of Beijing, they instead flooded provinces next to Beijing, which incidentally housed many military forces. Those forces were destroyed without warning.

- another big real estate developer, sunac, filed for bankruptcy https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/19/economy/china-sunac-ny-bankru....

- the Hangzhou asian games was a massive failure, attended by no major heads from developed countries. Cost $30 billion, while its local governments are so desperate for money, they are raiding temples

- marriages in China in 2022 are down 10% from 2021, lowest record since 1986. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/12/china/china-marriages-record-...

- Huawei homegrown chips was a nothing burger. iPhones were sold out in seconds online. Full Apple Store crowds. Very empty Huawei stores. People didn't like the overheated mate 60, or the broken software.

In short, political, economic, demographic, and tech collapse in China.

There's going to be a lot of Russian and Chinese interference in American politics in 2024 for sure

silver lake is a private equity firm, pretty famous on hacker news

I would beg to differ. A lot of game developers watch gaming streams. There's a reason why cohhcarnage was asked to voice in cyberpunk and baldur's gate 3, and why blizzard personnels will respond to asmongold directly

They have greatly damaged their users and their indirect users' trust. When big time streamers like cohhcarnage and asmongold directly replies to unity and tell them how much they have messed up https://twitter.com/CohhCarnage/status/1703577526809845760 https://twitter.com/Asmongold/status/1703636396718555428, you know you've done fucked up

the stock is doomed, check out asmongold's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNXQ2bYik78. more importantly, insiders have been selling a ton, for example the founder of iron source. Silver lake sold all of theirs direct stocks for example.

Note that this OP probably has some agenda against dollar, being that in another comment before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37046128#37047171 they said

"Yeah, for example China's position of overwhelming strength vs. weak little USoA meant that China's wages have risen by an order of magnitude and their technology catapulted into the present century, building them in to the world's largest economy."

Just a subtle subterfuge against dollar if I had to guess

"Chinese factories haven't slowed down and Chinese GDP is still rising"

This line is so wrong. You can't have 22% (at least) youth unemployment rate, and 19th straight month collapsing land sales revenue https://www.reuters.com/article/china-economy-landsales/chin... (which is how local government get most of its money), and your biggest and second biggest real estate developer going bankrupt, and still support a 5% GDP growth as mentioned by the Chinese government. just doesn't happen in a real world.

And there are so many reports of factories closing down, especially in the Shenzhen and Dongguan districts, either online videos or news reports https://thediplomat.com/2023/04/dongguans-industrial-woes-ch..., that I don't know why you're attempting to lie outright.

1.) "The demand side is mostly people buying second and third units as investments." that is incorrect. Most purchases are first purchases from couples that want to get married, and a home purchase is a required dowry from men that they need in order to get approved for marriage from the parents.

There are famous online videos from newlyweds that purchased a condo from a few years ago, and have been documenting their journey, and they still haven't received the unit. Meanwhile their kid was born already.

2.) Yes, just google "empty kindegardens in China". Also, marriages dropped to the lowest since records began in 1986. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/14/marriages-in-c...

3.) Nope. China’s government land sales revenue declined for the 19th consecutive month in July. Land sales fell 10.1% from a year earlier in July, after declining 24.3% the previous month https://www.reuters.com/article/china-economy-landsales/chin...

The Chinese local governments' bonds alone total at about $2 trillion, and any defaults would rock the Asian nation's $60 trillion financial system, according to Bloomberg. https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/chinas-10-t...

There are a number, and I mean a large number of issues. I'll just pick a few

1.) as of 2021, There are nearly 800 unfinished Evergrande projects in more than 200 cities across China. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/business/china-evergrande.... Even if the buildings were unfinished, the buyer still had to keep paying the mortgage!! and if they didn't, and the courts foreclosed the property and sold it, the buyer is liable for the fees and the differences. Most of the time the buyer is hugely underwater since the real estate price in 2023 has crashed 50% - 70% from peak. And now, because your social credit is shot, you no longer can purchase tickets for flight or train, making it even harder to try to find jobs to pay back your debt.

2.) China is known for its tofu dreg buildings. Just google online if you want to see brand new condos with facades blown off, cracked foundation, sand mixture where cement should be, tilted buildings, etc. This is especially true with buildings built in the last few years. And this is especially true for buildings from bankrupt mega developers like evergrande and country garden.

3.) This is a domino that leads to a series of systemic collapse. Country garden, the second largest developer in China, missed bond payments as small as 22 million recently. It had a capitalization of 60B in 2018. Now it has a debt of 200B. Zhongzhi enterprise missed payments recently, being one of the largest trust company. People are reminded of Lehman from these events. https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-beijing-lehman.... Doesn't help that export and import just collapsed by double digits in July, exports to US dropped 23% y/y, there's huge youth unemployment of at least 22%, foreign investment dropped 90% in 2023, and the worst flood in the last 50 years just hit China's biggest grain region.

Oh yeah, and because Chinese citizens are outraged by Fukushima release, they are boycotting Japanese seafood, and in general all seafood, which has decimated the entire seafood industry in China overnight, with no traffic to seafood market or restaurants.

4.) Even if the buildings were done, a lot of the buildings are empty and not livable due to shoddy finish, foreclosures, no public amenities working, lack of residents (owners are selling the units at 50% price cuts), etc. Imagine living in a huge 50 story building with only a few residents at night. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/see-inside-a-ghost...

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/beijing-replaces-english-words-sub...

The English word “station” was replaced with “Zhan,” which is the pinyin or romanised version of the Chinese character.

In some places, station names such as Olympic Park and Terminal 2 of the Beijing airport were changed to “Aolinpike Gongyuan” and “2 Hao Hangzhanlou”.

https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/13/why-china-is-turn...

Why China is turning away from English

If there are any business to do in China in the next 10-20 years. Foreign investment in China is down 90% this year. Again, international travel in China is down 97% this year. Apparently everyone else except hacker news readers are aware of the shift.

English IS the global lingua franca TODAY, used by most travelers to navigate through an unknown environment. if the signs in China are not translated into English TODAY, then there's no reason to go there TODAY.

Here are some conjectures:

1.) There is a very high dislike of China across the world.

Large majorities in most of the 19 countries surveyed have negative views of China https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/29/negative-views...

2.) No business need to travel there. Foreign investment is down 90% this year. Literally no US/europe presence in the trade fairs in China the summer.

3.) Flights are super expensive, because of low demand, upwards of $5k-10k. travel out of China is down hugely due to the economy, you can search on youTube for videos from Shanghai airport where the airport is devoid of travelers, and filled with empty shops.

4.) It is very hard for travelers to navigate through China. No English translations in street signs. One needs Alipay to pay for anything in China, which is complicated to setup. Ethnocentrism from rising nationalism means there could be racism/violence against travelers.

There is 0 reason to learn mandarin if you're doing it for travel/business reasons

In Taiwan street signs do mostly have English translations. A lot of citizens speak English, especially night market vendors. You'll also have a lot of native English speakers in Taipei due to expatriation from US and Canada.

In Singapore signs officially are in English. And it's one of the four official languages, which means most people speaks English.

In Malaysia people usually speak at least 4 languages. Because it was ruled by Britain before, people speak English fairly well.

Lastly, in China, well, nobody is traveling there now. International travel is down 97% this year, even after reopening. And if you're doing business there, well, there's no point understanding the contract in Mandarin because most likely it won't be enforced, and will favor local business anyways by the courts. What's really screwy is the government has replaced most of the English translation on street signs from a literal translation to phonetic translation of the mandarin sound. So even if your read the English part of the sign you cannot understand it.

The young generation of Iran doesn't buy into the whole blaming the US thing for something that happened 70 years (1 generation!!) ago - which the US tried to install a more westernized leader. A lot of anti-US people with agenda wants the world to think otherwise. Case in point:

Mourners In Iran Refuse To Trample On Swedish, American Flags. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202307280335

Iranian students avoid stepping on images of U.S., Israeli flags. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNJLG8jCq1Q

Some real estate related news from China:

- Country garden, China's second biggest property company after Evergrande, missed a mere 22.5M payments for dollar denominated bonds. It is trying to restructure a $340B debt owned. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/chinas-government-...

- Li Ka Shing, richest man in Hong Kong, just offered an immediate 30% off on his newest buildings for sale

- One of China's biggest shadow banks skipped payment. These shadow banks provide liquidity to real estate companies, in short. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-16/chinese-s...

Some economic related news from China:

- China stopped reporting youth unemployment, estimated around 20-50%. Which is why nobody really thinks China is growing at 5%. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/15/china-econom...

- foreign investment fell down 87% from the same period last year, lowest level in 25 years. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-07/china-for...

- China's fertility rate dropped to record low 1.09 in 2022 https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-fertility-rate-dr...

- China records fewest marriages in more than 3 decades https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/12/china/china-marriages-record-...

- China's exports fell by 14.5% in July from a year ago, while imports dropped by 12.4% https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/08/china-reports-double-digit-p...

- China's economy slipped into deflation https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66435870

If we're talking about the contents on TikTok, there's probably a very good reason why the ultimate owner of TikTok, the Chinese government, wants that kind of content to be the majority sentiment on the platform.

US seems to be in a hardware/science renaissance, now that there is a new Cold War enemy, and manufacturing and research are being brought back to US.

Tesla creates American jobs for the poor to work in manufacturing

SpaceX creates aspiration for the poor

Google allows the poor to advertise their product to anyone in the world cheaply

Facebook allows the poor to market their product to anyone in the world cheaply

AirBnB allows the poor to live in an expensive city, cheaply

Stripe allows the poor to sell their product to anyone in the world cheaply

We get more rockets (literally), faster.

We get Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Stripe, etc...

The built-in culture of risk taking in US can't be underestimated. Yes, we joke about Florida man and lament about the excess funding for startups. But with great risk comes great reward, and chances for inexperienced founders to prove themselves. Nowhere else on the planet are you able to do that with such magnitude, not in Japan, not in Europe, not in China (now that they're broke and in a Great Depression, and Xi is killing off entrepreneurs).

With numbers like 1.) YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT is somewhere between 20% and 50%, 2.) 95% decrease in FDI https://unherd.com/thepost/foreign-investment-plummets-as-th... 3.) double digit plunge in import and export in July https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/08/china-reports-double-digit-p... 4.) negative CPI

I would call it what it is: China is in a great depression

Kyle Bass had a great tweet recently on this too:

China's REPORTED GDP 'growth' for 2022 was +2.9%. In a year where Chinese LNG demand was down 22%, their real estate market (which represents 33% of Chinese GDP) was in the midst of a collapse, literally welding Chinese citizens into their apartment buildings, and the WeChat payments flowing through their system were down over 20% yoy. In 2023, YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT is somewhere between 20% and 50%, 48 local governments are in some stage of default on their debt (LGFV debt is approximately $10trillion or just under 60% of GDP), the majority of Chinese property developers are in default of their dollar bonds (71% are in default of over $180 billion in bonds), Xi has ordered all corporate and macro level dat to be severed to the West, and the Chinese government is reporting +5.5% GDP 'GROWTH'?! Reputable economists don't believe these numbers from the CPC

People aren't. latest number is showing that traveling to China collapsed 95%. incidentally, FDI collapsed

"in the second quarter of 2023 foreign investors “only put about $5bn of fresh capital into China […] in 2021, we saw close to $100bn per quarter!”

https://unherd.com/thepost/foreign-investment-plummets-as-th...

China is rue(ing?) right now. China's local governments are dealing with a monumental local debt crisis from real estate fallout, and incidentally from too many built out unused rails and highways. And the center government has already said they are not going to rescue the local and provincial governments, "prefers local or provincial governments to sort out their own debt problems, and not create a moral hazard"

As a result, the civil servants in China are seeing 25-50% paycut.

Thanks. I think having a few solid rails for really populars route is justified. The issue is building too many of these rails to where ridership is not even enough to produce a profit in the beginning, let alone sustain it forever. Also, cities grow and die. Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?

US is actually smart enough to avoid big infrastructure debts. According to wikipedia, China has a 900B debt from high speed rails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China.