[Newfie]

So this is what I mean, why all the angst over climate change and none over these other issues? We tend to get to smacked with some pet project and forget about other, possibly greater, threats. It’s also why I’ve changed my tactics arguing with deniers. I’m leaving them alone on the CC issue but confronting them with other issues where the hard left/right dichotomy is not nearly so established.

Things I have a hard time understanding are Chinas large scale investment in USA government bonds and their investment in buying foreign land.

The effect of them investing in bonds is, I think, a significant stabilizing force. I freely admit I don’t understand much of this economics, but then I don’t think Economist understand much of the real world. But let’s suppose we went to war with China, say a ground or limited naval war. What is to keep the USA from welching on those bonds? So China is highly invested in making sure the USA is successful, and visa versa.

So China owns land in the USA. What does that mean? Say they raise soybeans and cattle. Are they allowed to export that product to China without export fees? I don’t think so. And would they be exempt from a general boycott on sending food to China? I doubt it.

In a more extreme scenario what is to keep the USA from simply nationalizing these Chinese held lands? Possession is 9/10ths of the law. The situation might be different in Africa and Russia gets real interesting. But China is far from alone in this plot, to buy foreign land.

I don’t know that India is purchasing land the same as China. They don’t feel the immediate food crush. Yet they may be in a more dire situation in even the medium run.

Now reflect upon the WEF Risk Analysis and you will see that they pretty much talk around these issues or flat ignore them. That does not give me a good feeling that anyone in a position of power is thinking this through very effectively.

[rockdoc123]

Things I have a hard time understanding are Chinas large scale investment in USA government bonds and their investment in buying foreign land.

China’s Central Bank intervenes to prevent imbalances between the US dollar and yuan in local markets by buying excess US dollars (which they receive a lot of due to the trade imbalance) and reimbursing exporters with yuan. This creates a scarcity of US dollars which keeps the USD exchange rate high and thus China accumulates US dollars as forex reserves. This also keeps RMB weak which China wants in order to make exports more attractive but as a consequence, they accumulate a lot of US as foreign exchange reserves. Given the enormous amount of US dollars China ends up with they look at US Treasuries as the safest investment for their forex reserves (safer and more predictable than Euro debt, real estate or stocks). The one issue that is an important one is the potential for China to weaponize their US debt in any sort of prolonged trade war. But China dumping their US debt unilaterally probably would hurt them worse than it would the US as long as the trade imbalance sits the way it.

If the US were to either welch on their required bond payments or seize lands owned by China unilaterally they would be effectively saying to the world "we are closed for business" (i.e. they become completely untrustworthy). This might be survivable if the US made everything it needed internally but it doesn't as is shown by the large trade imbalances with pretty much every producing country in the world.

India is in a similar relationship with the US albeit not to the extent that China is.

[EnergyUnlimited]

China and India for all their higher IQ's and greater socialization to authoritative rule is not enough of a counter balance to the instabilities that are programmed to throw both of these nations into turmoil as the overshoot predator gains traction in this century.

From what I have learned China is a high IQ country (103-105 average IQ, depending of particular study) but India quite surprisingly is a low IQ one (average IQ 89).

Though due to a huge size of population Indians should be able in right conditions to educate more skilled engineers than for example US.
Of course dysfunctional social setup preventing them from doing so.

@Agent R,
Hi, nice to see you around.

[Newfie]

Cross posting from another forum.

I thought it brought a new perspective.

My wife, who is Chinese loves to eat rats. She is very scared of mice however. You see rats squashed on the streets early in the morning where she used to live. The local restaurants grab them. Another product she was fed as a child was placenta as her mother worked in a hospital. There's no waste in China, not much round here either!!

[EnergyUnlimited]

Cross posting from another forum.

I thought it brought a new perspective.

My wife, who is Chinese loves to eat rats. She is very scared of mice however. You see rats squashed on the streets early in the morning where she used to live. The local restaurants grab them. Another product she was fed as a child was placenta as her mother worked in a hospital. There's no waste in China, not much round here either!!

Asked my wife.
For her eating rats or mice is abhorrent, however squirrel, monkey or dog meat is fine.
I dont find it weird. Even here in Poland dog lard is considered traditional medicine, even if now killing dogs to get it is legally forbidden (animal welfare claptrap - why to protect dogs and for example not pigs?).
Never mind, our gypsies are selling it and if you know friendly gypsy trader or some degenerated drunkard in secluded village, you will not find it difficult to purchase it.
But as one of chinese phrases is telling, "all what have wings except of airplane and all what have legs except of table is edible".

[Ibon]

In the northern Philippines there is a species of rat that is clean as it feeds on rice in the rice fields. It is an important source of protein and used as a food. This is a rat but not the urban garbage eating variety

[Newfie]

China and food.

That leaves China with a stark ultimatum: If it is to have enough affordable food for its population in the second half of this century, it will need to make sure the world grows food for 9 billion people.

Its answer is technology.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/

And not one mention of over population

[Newfie]

And India doing better, but also growing rapidly. That is not even mentioned.

On the face of it everything seems fine, but the country has been importing foodgrains on a large scale. Foodgrain imports indicate how insufficient the country is in staple food production. In 2015-16, foodgrains accounted for 79 per cent of the imported agricultural produce; the figure was 78 per cent the following year.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.downto ... wise-62091

[bochen777]

Long story short, instead of China focusing on its main enemy the US, China has allowed itself to get shortsighted and distracted into a border war with India at the same time its losing control of North Korea situation.

Ideally, China would have strived for an united Eurasia landmass, if China could keep India and EU on its side, then the American trade and tech wars against China wouldn't succeeded. But now that China fell for the US lead India Trap, this serves US interest in keep the two upcoming superpowers divided and fighting against one another whilst preventing Eurasia from truly uniting as one powerful trading bloc. This means it is a huge geopolitical win for the US and gives Trumps trade/tech/bio war against China that much more leverage than it otherwise would have been able to enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZSbpk5iZGk


The CIA just spiked US salmon exports and all of Beijing got re-infected by the far more deadlier US ""L"" strain of the COVID CIA biovirus, right at the time Pompeo tells Chinese top diplomat to met him in Hawaii for talks, if these talks don't go well, (as in China does not kowtow to the US and admit total defeat etc) the US will proceed to WWIII. with denotation of high level EMP above all of China and proceeded with cyberattacks to take out whatever critical infrastructure that is left in China that was hardened against or not destroyed by the EMP blasts.

[Plantagenet]

if China could keep India and EU on its side

China is unlikely to "keep India on its side" when its still occupying Tibet and trying to encroach on Indian territory in the Himalayas as well.

The CIA just spiked US salmon exports and all of Beijing got re-infected by the far more deadlier US ""L"" strain of the COVID CIA biovirus

Do you have any evidence to support your bizarre claims??? The Chinese government says the virus strain in Beijing is similar to the European variety of the Wuhan virus. Are you privy to some information that the Chinese government doesn't have? If so, then please provide a link to back up your bizarre claim.

Cheers!

[Tanada]

And India doing better, but also growing rapidly. That is not even mentioned.

Better in some sense of the word but India is also expanding its coal use year in and year out. A big hydro project in the foothills of the northern mountains that was "cancelled" two decades ago is being brought up again as a serious proposal for power production and irrigation. In some ways with the pattern of Monsoon rains being not very certain in a warming world having a huge reservoir would give India a chunk of breathing room.

India still has a poor percentage of its population without electric service. So long as all those un-powered voters keep demanding more electricity India is going to keep expanding it power production be any means available and coal in a natural. gas poor nation remains very economical.

[evilgenius]

I wonder if it matters so much what any country does in space to prepare for war. It is an unknown for which it is easily conceivable that a country had best to at least have a presence there. It's the flip side of that which I wonder about? Will a war footing mentality arrange space into a thing that is broken out so differently under each system that as they try to talk about the same thing they court disaster? They say that the next war would definitely lock us out of space for the next hundred years. How many years would some huge accident related to this sort of miscommunication lock us out for?

[Tanada]

India could surpass China as world’s biggest minerals buyer, says economist

Dambisa Moyo warns Beijing’s debt and population challenges will affect resources companies

China’s “precarious” debt trajectory and its slowing population growth mean it could be eclipsed by India as the world’s most important buyer of minerals in a decade, according to Dambisa Moyo, the global investor and economist.

Moyo, who was speaking at the Diggers & Dealers mining conference in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, warned that China’s debt and demographic challenges would become “incredibly problematic over the next 10 years”.

She said those structural challenges would intensify China’s “struggle to manage a lot of their policy initiatives from the centre in terms of their political approach”.

That could have wider implications for the Chinese economy but also the world’s mineral and resources companies — many of them Australian — that rely on demand from Beijing for their own growth, she said.

“The real story of emergence and product mix, thinking about the energy stack and about minerals, does become India,” said Moyo, who is a board member of Chevron, 3M and Condé Nast.

Citing UN figures, Moyo said India’s population was set to surpass China’s this year which would have “material consequences” for how global mineral resources are allocated.

China has been criticised for reverting to debt-fuelled and wasteful spending to stem its economic slowdown.

Roland Rajah, an economist with the Lowy Institute think-tank, said he was pessimistic about China’s growth and although India’s economy was a fraction of the size of China’s, there was no anticipation it would slow down.

“Indian demand for coal and renewable energy will mean a lot for Australia,” he said. “India will probably grow much faster than China but China is still pretty big.”

Moyo, who is also a UK government adviser and a former Barclays board member, expects China to adopt “a more aggressive agenda” this year to kick-start slowing growth that would stimulate greater investment in resources.

But she said it was unlikely that China’s economic growth would reach the high rates of the past and estimated annual growth of 4 per cent. Beijing has set a target of about 5.5 per cent annual growth for 2022, a three-decade low.

In the second quarter of this year, Chinese growth slowed to 0.4 per cent from 4.8 per cent in the previous three months. “They definitely have a lot of headwinds,” Moyo said.

Her expectation of a rise in resource spending echoed the outlook of several mining companies that are banking on the world’s second-largest economy to take advantage of its relatively low inflation levels to increase investment.

Jakob Stausholm, chief executive of Rio Tinto, said last week that China’s approach to managing its economy bolstered his confidence in his company’s perspective. “The fact that China is actually not fighting inflation and we know that they have a deep desire to grow their economy,” he said.

Moyo said she would continue to invest in China in the short-term but the structural problems in the country’s economy clouded the long-term opportunities. “I think the story becomes very complicated after 10 years,” she said.

LINK