Thread: The View, from China

^ Where are the people?

Looks half decent.

Originally Posted by David48atTD

^ Where are the people?

Looks half decent.

As soon as we're out from the lockdown I'll go and take some more (with people)

Bars on the windows? Is that to keep people in?

A great article about how the chinky parasites are literally sucking the life out of Tajikistan.

A ubiquitous sign seen around Tajikistan’s capital speaks volumes about the country’s reliance on its eastern neighbor: “Assistance from China for a common future.”
The words are typically emblazoned on buildings and buses paid for with loans and grants issued by Beijing.
One prime example is the new premises of parliament. That that complex, which is going up where the headquarters of the Soviet-era Communist Party used to stand, is being completed with a $250 million grant.
Another $120 million in handouts have been given by China to build a new city hall.
In theory, this all comes without strings attached, but analysts are not convinced.
“This all feels very disturbing,” Tajik political scientist Parviz Mullojanov told Eurasianet. “This is a very dangerous trend, especially as there are also large debts. Amassing Chinese debt is playing with fire. At any moment now, this could serve as a pretext for political and geopolitical expansion.”
The numbers tell an eloquent story.
Of the $3.3 billion that Tajikistan owed to international creditors at the start of 2022, 60 percent – $1.98 billion – is owed to the state-run Export-Import Bank of China, better known as Eximbank. Sri Lanka’s massive liabilities before China have made international headlines in recent months, and yet, what that country owes to Beijing accounts for only 10 percent or so of its foreign debt pile.
The bulk of Tajikistan’s annual debt repayments are, unsurprisingly, earmarked for China, but the rate at which money is being paid back will be far from reassuring for the country’s bean-counters.
Of the $131.9 million repaid by Tajikistan in 2021, $65.2 million went to China in one form or another. Almost $22 million of the money paid to China was interest accrued.
In terms of interest payments, only the Eurobond issued by Tajikistan’s Finance Ministry in 2017 proved more costly last year. That bill was $35.7 million.
Chinese debt has usually been extended for the purposes of building or overhauling transport infrastructure or energy projects. Work is more often than not implemented by Chinese companies themselves.
Secret deals
Because Chinese debt agreements are shrouded in secrecy, working out the terms, even the size of the credit, is complicated.
To take one example, Eximbank in 2014 agreed to extend credit to complete the Vahdat-Yovon railway, a link between the center and south of the country. When the Dushanbe to Kulob route – of which that Vahdat-Yovon section constitutes one part – was inaugurated by President Emomali Rahmon in August 2016, all Tajik state media noted was that the project cost 985 million somoni ($125 million at the rate of the time) to finish. Khovar state news agency did not state where any of the money had come from or who had done the construction.
But in early 2015, first deputy Finance Minister Jamoliddin Nuraliyev told reporters that Eximbank had contributed a loan of at least $68 million at preferential rates toward completion of the Vahdat-Yovon railroad. The tender for the contract was reportedly handed to the state-owned China Railway Construction Corporation without even the semblance of an open bidding process.
Another important project mostly underwritten by Eximbank was the epic effort, which started in 2006 and ended in 2013, to overhaul the high-altitude Dushanbe-Chanak road from the capital to the northern Sughd province. The Beijing-based lender’s contribution on that occasion was an almost $290 million loan. Once again, a Chinese company – the colossal engineering company China Road and Bridge Corporation – got the contract, meaning the money was in effect quickly re-routed back into China, although the debts remained in Tajikistan.
As a China Road and Bridge Corporation executive told Chinese state media in 2019, his company has built 728 kilometers of road worth a total of $779 million in Tajikistan.
The relatively pristine Dushanbe-Chanak route is undoubtedly a boon to Tajik motorists, although many drivers grumble at the fact that they are required to pay tolls to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. How much of those collected tolls, if any, go toward servicing foreign debts is a mystery, like so much else that has to do with Chinese debt.
Mullojanov argued that this approach was part of a well-understood strategy.
“China has a standard policy for all countries: They need to employ their own workforce, so they send their own people and industrial resources to do all the projects. China needs a market for its industry,” Mullojanov said.
Other analysts have taken a more benevolent view of Beijing’s loan agenda, however.
Marina Rudyak, a scholar at Heidelberg University’s Institute of Chinese Studies, said that her analysis of Chinese official and academic discourse shows that Beijing believes debt will in the final analysis lead to economic growth and, accordingly, less debt.
“It is, you could argue, a more need- and want-centered than a risk-centered perspective,” Rudyak wrote in emailed remarks. “For Tajikistan in particular, I think we have to consider the role China ascribes to it in particular in the Afghanistan context. It needs a stable Tajikistan and will probably pour as much money as it believes it takes to keep it stable, even with prospects of loan defaults, because the alternative of Tajikistan collapsing into a new civil war or similar is much more costly.”
Paying in kind
In the short-term, however, the burden of the debt is forcing Tajikistan to give away the family silver – or family gold, to be more accurate.
In 2016, Xinjiang-based company TBEA put the final touches to work on a 400-megawatt power plant in Dushanbe known as TETs-2. The Tajik government only contributed $17.4 million to the $349 million project. The rest came from TBEA itself. Three years later, to pay off that debt, Tajikistan simply gave TBEA the concession to develop its Upper Kumarg and Eastern Duoba gold mines, both located in the northern Ayni district. The decision was green-lit by the rubber-stamp parliament. China-based news website Securities Times at the time cited TBEA chairman Zhang Xin as saying that if the mines did not contain sufficient gold to cover their costs, Tajikistan would grant a development license to yet another deposit.
Warming to this approach, parliament later that same year voted to exempt another Chinese company, Kashgar Xinyu Dadi Mining Investment, from all types of taxes and customs duties for a period of seven years. The miner was also granted development rights over a silver deposit in the high-altitude Pamir region.
It is not known for certain what Kashgar Xinyu Dadi Mining Investment did to earn such generous treatment, but the whispered speculation is that it was in return for the Chinese government underwriting the parliament and Dushanbe city hall projects.
The question that arises perennially is how much Tajikistan will be prepared to give away as it continues struggling to settle all its liabilities.
Critics of the government point, for example, to the contentious matter of how Tajikistan in 2011 ceded around 1,100 square kilometers of land, equivalent to around 1 percent of the country’s territory, to Beijing. This means Tajikistan went, according to official data, from covering an area of 143,100 square kilometers to 142,000 square kilometers.
Tajik officials at the time insisted this development had marked a major victory for them as China had as part of a territorial dispute dating back to the Soviet era demanded around 5.5 percent of land that Tajikistan has claimed as its own.
Curiously, though, Tajikistan has shrunken even further since 2011. Poring through State Statistics Agency data, local news outlet Your.tj found that Tajikistan only covered 141,400 square kilometers, implying that another 600 square kilometers of territory – a chunk of land not much smaller than Singapore – had gone missing. It is unclear where this land went, but precedent suggests China might be a strong candidate.

https://eurasianet.org/tajikistan-th...f-chinese-debt

Tiananmen Square 2.0? China deploys tanks to prevent people from withdrawing money from crisis-hit banks

New Delhi: In a grim reminder of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, armoured tanks were seen deployed on the streets of China amidst large-scale protests by people demanding the release of their savings frozen by banks.


The country's Henan province has been for the past several weeks witnessing clashes between police and depositors with the latter saying they have been prevented from withdrawing their savings from banks since April this year.


Fresh videos have surfaced online in which Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA's) tanks can be seen deployed on the streets to scare protestors. Large-scale protests are being held in the province by bank depositors over the release of their frozen funds.

As per the reports the tanks were out on the streets to protect the banks and prevent locals from reaching the banks. The episode comes in the wake of an announcement by the Henan branch of the Bank of China that savings of depositors in their branch are "investment products" and cannot be withdrawn.


This incident is now posing a serious question if the history is set to repeat itself.


This is a grim reminder of China's repressive crackdown of 4 June, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, which was carried out when Chinese leaders sent in tanks and heavily armed troops to clear Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where student protesters had gathered for weeks to demand democracy and greater freedoms.

The crackdown, which killed hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters, is shunned in classrooms and strictly censored in the media and online.


On the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the world recalled the courage of the famous Tank Man who stood firm in front of an army, the image of which led to becoming one of the symbols of 20th century.


After a protest in Henan's capital, Zhengzhou, turned violent, authorities say they will start releasing money in batches to to depositors who have had their funds frozen by several rural banks, with the first due on 15 July. Only a handful of depositors have received the payments, posing a serious question on whether banks have anything to spare.


As per a notice issued by Henan Provincial Financial Supervision Bureau, some bank depositors in Henan villages and towns were supposed to get their deposits back on 15 July.


However, non-mainstream media believe that only a few handfuls of depositors have made these payments. Chinese state media has also not posted anything about the repayment.


Non-mainstream Hong Kong media also believes that at such a time when stability is emphasized most and stability is in Chinese President Xi Jinping's interest, allowing such incidents to get bigger (such as the Zhengzhou bank protests) shows that these banks really do not have money to spare, at least not until the issues are resolved.


A good chunk of revenue for the local governments comes from leasing land, especially to real estate developers and since so many projects are lying unfinished, many construction companies have not bought land again, affecting the local government's revenue.


Meanwhile, a video was circulated online a few days ago in which Beijing's Tsinghua University professor Zheng Yuhuang said that 2022 is a difficult year for China -- 4,60,000 companies in
China closed down in the first half of 2022, and 3.1 million industrial and commercial households were written off, enterprise liquidation soared 23 per cent year on year, 10.76 million college graduates have entered the society, with great employment pressure, and 80 million young people are unemployed.


As per the media reports, the reason why the suspension of loan repayment by homebuyers is not being dealt with immediately is that except for those senior officials directly in charge of urban construction and real estate, almost every successful real estate developer is the white glove of some of the other powerful family of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) elite, just like Evergrande's (one of the largest property developers in China) Xu Jiayin, and Zeng Qinghong's (CCP politician) niece Zeng Baobao directly engages in real estate to make money.


Ordinary real estate developers also have to bribe government officials at all levels in exchange for their development. If the top leaders of the CPC want to investigate the corruption in unfinished buildings and real estate, they may have to de facto use the knife inwards.


During the large-scale protests in Henan province by bank depositors over the release of frozen funds, white-clothed men, who are suspected to be from the Chinese People's Armed Police Force, suppressed the protests in front of the Zhengzhou People's Bank of China (PBoC) office, local media reported.


Over 1,000 depositors had gathered outside the Zhengzhou branch of the country's central bank on 10 July, 2022 to launch their largest protest yet. Hundreds of depositors have staged several demonstrations in the city of Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, but their demands are being ignored by the Chinese authorities.

Tiananmen Square 2.0? China deploys tanks to prevent people from withdrawing money from crisis-hit banks

Two down, anything else exotic they won't stop eating to go.

HONG KONG: The extinction of the Chinese Paddlefish and wild Yangtze Sturgeon, declared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), unleashed a torrent of comments on China's social media platforms on Friday urging more environmental protection.
The IUCN's latest list of threatened species, published on its website on Thursday, showed that 100% of the world's remaining 26 sturgeon species are now at risk of extinction, up from 85% in 2009.


"The assessments are based on new calculations which show their decline over the past three generations to be steeper than previously thought," the conservation group said, adding that the reassessment had also confirmed the extinction of the Chinese Paddlefish.
Both the Chinese Paddlefish and the Yangtze Sturgeon were common species in the Yangzte river basin which has been plagued by heavy shipping traffic, overfishing and water pollution.


The topic was one of the most discussed on China's Weibo, a social media platform like Twitter, on Friday.
"A biological population that lived for 150 million years was actually made extinct by modern civilisation. I want to ask: where is our civilisation?" one user called Snow Mountain said.
The Chinese Paddlefish was one of the world's biggest freshwater fish species and could grow up to 7 metres (yards) in length. The IUCN first declared it "critically endangered" in 1996.
The Yangzte Sturgeon, which could grow up to 8 metres (yards), was highly sensitive to increased noise on the river. Its meat was considered a delicacy in China, and it was also fished as a source of caviar.
The country has a breeding programme for the sturgeons but has not been successful at maintaining them in the wild. China implemented a fishing ban in some parts of the Yangzte river in 2021.
"Everyone, support the ban on fishing in the Yangtze River, and protect the habitats that are still in the Yangtze River," a user called Lychee said.

Chinese Paddlefish and wild Yangtze Sturgeon extinct

Apparently tanks in Shandong are killing protestors in Henan. The PLA has developed teleportation tech for it’s tanks to travel 300 miles in the blink of an eye.

https://chinaworldleader.quora.com/Indian-media-never-fails-to-disappoint-Apparently-tanks-in-Shandong-are-killing-protestors-in-Henan-The-PLA-has-devel?ch=8&oid=75834690&share=aad5f247&srid=u6VOf& target_type=post

Tanks on the streets to prempt people exercising the free right to protest.

But of course sabang doesn't think that is the important part of this story.

Snivelling chinky sycophant that he is.

You have no evidence that is even a protest 'arry- it doesn't look like one. The joke is on the Indian media outlet that described that as happening in Henan, some 300 miles from Shandong, because of a local bank run. Fake news.

Originally Posted by sabang

^ But that photo they produced as 'proof' is from 300 miles away in Shandong province, you absolutely cringeworthy numbskull. Jeez, why are lowbrow, low class losers like this even allowed on these threads. No wonder TD went to the dogs.

The video of the tanks was shot at a military parade event of some sort.

Interesting piece. I can see the argument from both sides.

Shouldn't that be in the Chinese peoples feelings getting hurted thread.

It cannot explain the d desire of Thai women, who seem to feel obligated to aspire to paler, more insignificant western features.

I understand the stigma attached to dusky farm girls and relative poverty, but most western men are attracted to the more exotic Asian appearance. (Except backspin who just prefers fat women).

As for the Chinese look, vive la difference.

Originally Posted by sabang

^ But that photo they produced as 'proof' is from 300 miles away in Shandong province, you absolutely cringeworthy numbskull. Jeez, why are lowbrow, low class losers like this even allowed on these threads. No wonder TD went to the dogs.

The photo is a red herring. The facts about them breaking up a protest are not in dispute.

As usual you are doing your best to distract from the real story, you snivelling chinky sycophant.

Cheers Chu. No tanks!

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

As usual you are doing your best to distract from the real story, you snivelling chinky sycophant.

That is his MO. Deflect, distract and deny.

No, that is yours. While China eats your lunch.

Originally Posted by sabang

Cheers Chu. No tanks!

Surprised they are not pandas!

Hyping ‘China threat,’ UK politicians as sensational and low-class as the country’s tabloids

British drama queens are on the move again. When Richard Moore, chief of MI6, the UK's secret intelligence service, said that China is a bigger threat than terrorism, he showed nothing but sensationalism and unprofessionalism.

Addressing the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Thursday local time, Moore articulated that China was now the top intelligence priority for MI6, surpassing counter-terrorism. One of the excuses he gave is that China is watching the Ukraine crisis closely for lessons about how to achieve its goal in the Taiwan question.

Moore's rhetoric reminds people of British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who laid bare her laughable ignorance of history and geography during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University, told the Global Times. When Moore put strategic competition and anti-terrorism together, he also makes professional analysts feel a sense of embarrassment.

If MI6 were more professional, it wouldn't make a fuss about groundless speculation. If more British politicians were more professional, they would be sober-minded about the fact that the biggest threat to the UK is its own development - and governance-related puzzles. Voices have been loud in Scotland and Northern Ireland to leave the UK for quite some time. If those issues are not fixed, social turmoil could emerge.

Unfortunately, some British politicians have delivered little professionalism on domestic challenges, but displayed great enthusiasm and skilled tactics in clamoring about geopolitics, or more specifically, playing the China card, like how British tabloid newspapers attract eyeballs.

The race to replace Boris Johnson as the UK's next prime minister has come to the final stage, as lawmakers from the Conservative Party have selected the final two candidates, former finance minister Rishi Sunak and Truss. The two front-runners represent the two forces within UK political circles - the relatively pragmatic side which advocates cooperation with China, and the typical hawkish side which views China as a rival and threat, Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times.

As the debates go on, Moore may have raised his voice to impose influence on the country's next leader and administration. Similar hype has become increasingly frequent lately in the UK. Two days before Moore's speech, Ben Key, in his first public address as British First Sea Lord, said China is a more dangerous foe than Russia - of course, this is a convenient excuse to seek more funding from the incoming government.

The trend is quite clear - some British politicians are eager to grab the limelight by simply showcasing their hawkish stance against China, just like how the UK itself tries hard to prove its global status in the global arena.

George Galloway, a six-term British parliamentarian, said that "when we act and express today the interference in China's internal affairs, we do so not on our own behalf, but on behalf of the American empire as the tail of the American dog." Be it its participation in the AUKUS and Indo-Pacific Strategy, blatant finger-pointing on Hong Kong and Taiwan affairs, or more Anglo-Saxon alliance against China, the UK has shown it is ready to play its part on the command of the US.

This is because the UK has never reconciled itself to its loss of empire and its decline in the world. To some extent, London has tied its yearning to regain its past glory to the US hegemon.

In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the UK has been charging to the forefront via high-profile support to Ukraine, including offering intelligence and weapons. Obviously, that is not enough for some British politicians, who have found a new mission - fanning the flames in Asia by stirring up trouble on the Taiwan question. This is not supposed to be the real content of "Global Britain," is it?

"The UK won't go far by riding on the US' chariot, because the latter will fall from hegemony eventually," said Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator.

If the UK wants to make a difference, it needs different politics and different politicians, who are serious about taking care of the country and its people's interests, rather than picking fights out of nowhere to grab attention, just like boring, low-class British tabloids.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202207/1271187.shtml


How very true.

Originally Posted by sabang

globaltimes.cn

So more crap propaganda then.