Heineken wrote:It stinks from top to bottom.
What the hell are you talking about? I can understand your anger with the government of China and the Red Capitalists, but a bunch of dirt-poor farmers and factory workers. What have they ever done?
In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping said "Let a few get rich first." He openly told the Chinese people that a small portion of the population would be driving around in luxury cars while the rest slaved for peanuts. Big Western companies like GM and Volkswagen were allowed to form joint ventures with state-owned companies. Since then, foreign brands have continued to dominate China's exports and local sales, with a few exceptions in telecommunications and white goods.
The regulatory agencies enabled pollution and destruction of the biuosphere in exchange for payola, while the regional government were willing to do anything to attract foreign investment and create jobs, even at the expense of the poor, who had their land confiscated and polluted by the by-products of industry.
And what did the poor get in return? Most are still farmers, and a few hundred million more got jobs at factories, working for wages that keep them alive and allow them to go home once a year to be with their families on Lunar New Year. They've never been allowed the unionize; it's theoretically still a communist state, and the government's job is to protect the workers. Their wages have declined in real terms since 1997.
In other words, it's just another sordid alliance between industry and state - global industry and state. Foreign manufacturers have a seat at the table. Like I said, foreign-owned manufacturers are responsible for 60% of China's exports. And yet here I see posters advocating the destruction of all of China, including the people who got shat on the most during China's industrial period.
Americans will finally come to realize that you caused the Great Housing Bubble and Crash by manipulating your currency and artificially keeping long term US interest rates low by buying up US t-bills. And they'll be pissed.
What? Chinese bought up T-bills to artificially deflate their currency, which they had to do to maintain a peg with the U.S. dollar, which the U.S. government asked them to do in 1997 to help stop the Asian financial crisis from spreading any further. They had to keep their currency artificially deflated - wrongly, I'll admit - to maintain low production costs and prevent foreign manufacturers from moving to another low cost country.
But that does not mean that China forced Americans to buy houses that they couldn't afford with money that they didn't have, and the Chinese also did not force predatory lenders to tell greedy would-be McMansion owners that housing prices would go up forever.
That guy's a real asshat for trying to pass blame to the Chinese for Americans' greed and financial idiocy.
