Thread: The View, from China

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I've lost friends to fentanyl. You have a strange view of what free enterprise means. Perhaps your view will change when it starts to flood into Denmark, which it eventually will.

Originally Posted by pickel

You have a strange view of what free enterprise means.

Supply and demand ? Check

No state control ? None. Noboby who has a say, cares about your dead friends.
Most are probably reminded of the situation daily, when they, if interested(they are not) are able to watch, if not in reality, then on the internet, scores of poor souls going under ...in public.

I doubt that your corporate media covers it much, except for ...election time

Non- regulated ways of transportation

Nah; too obvious


Your drugmarked is probably much like Thailands.

Sacrifice a small fish once in a while or one of your competitors.

That's non-regulated too.


Now, give me your definition of free enterprise

Look, Pickel. Is it a Bird ?

Nope; it's free enterprise
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CULTURE


Weight-loss drugs filled the surface of personal Oprah Winfrey talk show: 'This is water on Novo's mill'


The programme has been criticised for having too few critical voices, explains DR's culture correspondent.







Oprah Winfrey herself has struggled with obesity for many years and says in the show that she is now in a better place thanks to weight loss medication. (File photo) (Photo: © MARIO ANZUONI, Ritzau Scanpix

OF
Karen Klærke

Vaegttabsmedicin fyldte fladen i personligt Oprah Winfrey-talkshow: '''Det her er vand pa Novos molle''' | Kultur | DR






There are probably big smiles to be found at Novo Nordisk at the moment.

On Monday, one of America's most influential people - TV host Oprah Winfrey - aired a one-hour special about weight loss on American television and talked about how she herself has used weight loss drugs to lose weight, which has led her to a good place.

- Number one: There is now a kind of hope. Number two: You no longer blame yourself, Oprah Winfrey said on the talk show.

"Because when I say how many times I've blamed myself...," he said.

The statement from the TV host is a bit of a contrast to the one she has previously made, where she has called weight loss medication an easy way out.

It is one of the best things they could imagine happening at this time.

OLE HALL, DR'S JOURNALIST FOCUSING ON NOVO NORDISK

The TV program is called 'Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution' or in Danish: 'Shame, Guilt and the Weight Loss Revolution.'

Along the way, Winfrey was visited by, among others, experts, patients who support the medicine, and Negelle Morris, vice president of Novo Nordisk's US business.

Winfrey does not mention whether it is Novo Nordisk weight loss drug Wegovy that she is taking. But this does not change the fact that Novo Nordisk must be very pleased with the publicity, explains Ole Hall, who is a journalist at DR focusing on Novo Nordisk.

"It's one of the best things they could imagine happening at this point," he said.

In the broadcast, Oprah Winfrey herself begins to describe obesity as a disease, and it is precisely this conversation that Novo Nordisk has been trying to start for a long time.

"This is the battle that Novo is fighting right now. They are trying to convince many states that obesity is a disease that can be addressed.

- So this is water on Novo's mill, he says and believes that it is a publicity that would have been given millions of kroner for.

This program has also met with strong criticism for precisely lacking the criticism of this medicine.

SANDRA BROVALL, DR'S KULTURKORRESPONDENT

Oprah Winfrey has repeatedly topped Forbes' list of most influential celebrities. (Photo: © Aude Guerrucci, Ritzau Scanpix)
Has met 'strong' criticism



However, the program has been criticized for having too few critical voices, and it is also very short that the side effects of weight loss drugs are addressed in the program. This is explained by Sandra Brovall, DR's cultural correspondent and former US correspondent.

- There is one woman inside and tell that she has had very great nausea from using it and had to go off it again.

In addition, Sandra Brovall adds, the program includes doctors who collaborate with some of the companies behind weight loss drugs - they are also open about this in the program.

- So the program has also met with strong criticism for precisely lacking the criticism of this medicine, she says.

One of those who is critical of Oprah Winfrey's statements is fat activist Helene Thyrsted.

- Especially for a person who has no medical background - at the very least, it is quite misleading, says Helene Thyrsted.

"And no matter what, she's a very powerful person with a huge platform, and a lot of people who listen to her look up to her and take her word for it."

DR has been in contact with Novo Nordisk, which states that they have had no influence on the program. They have been asked if they wanted to be involved, and that is why the American director is involved.


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Might have been a buck or two in it for Oprah


I wonder if the ..Fentanyl Wonder drug was presented in the same way

Chinese Comedy Firm Fined $2 Million For Joke ‘Insulting’ Military - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

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Originally Posted by pickel

They are the number one producer of the precursors, yet will not ban them.

Originally Posted by pickel

It ain't free enterprise.

Pickel, ffs

I meant the reason China won't ban them isn't because of free enterprise. Most English speakers would have understood that.

Originally Posted by pickel

I meant the reason China won't ban them isn't because of free enterprise.

So why won't they ban them ?

(this might get interesting)

Originally Posted by pickel

Most English speakers would have understood that.

Originally Posted by helge

So why won't they ban them ?

Sowing chaos in their enemy would be my first guess.

Originally Posted by helge

So why won't they ban them ?

(this might get interesting)

Originally Posted by pickel

Sowing chaos in their enemy would be my first guess.

You do bring the worst out in me.

Hardly chaos...yet.

Have you considered that the reason they haven't banned it, is that it's a...... BUSINESS.
Probably huge export to India and other pill Meccas of the world.

Because:

Fentanyl was first synthesized by Paul Janssen in 1959 and was approved for medical use in the United States in 1968.^[6][15] In 2015, 1,600 kilograms (3,500 pounds) were used in healthcare globally.^[16] As of 2017, fentanyl was the most widely used synthetic opioid in medicine;^[17] in 2019, it was the 278th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than a million prescriptions.^[18][19] It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.^[20]

That said: Yes, I have no doubt that some of this terrible dangerous stuff, is getting stolen/legally exported/smuggled to all the wrong places.

Because they can

From India, China, Myanmar, UK,Mexico........


Not sowing chaos. Making money

Unless you are an Undertaker, killing your customers is a no no


One of your weirdest theories so far.

Originally Posted by helge

Hardly chaos...yet.

You are a bit naive regarding the opiate crisis.

Fentanyl kills more people in America than guns do. That's not chaos to you?

Originally Posted by helge

(this might get interesting)

Or not.

Originally Posted by pickel

You are a bit naive regarding the opiate crisis.

You have to look up chaos

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by helge
(this might get interesting)

Or not.

Conspiracy theories are always welcome

Too late, China wakes up to the threat from within

China, China, China. Scarcely a day passes without some new scare story about China. The Middle Kingdom was struggling with its image overseas long before Covid, but the pandemic cemented attitudes in the West. Ever since, and with plenty of justification, its every move has been regarded with growing “reds under the bed” paranoia. The feeling is mutual.


The mood has darkened further in the past week. British democracy is under threat from Chinese cyber attacks, the Deputy Prime Minister, Oliver Dowden, told MPs this week in imposing sanctions on a number of Chinese officials. If that’s what standing up to China means these days then the central committee doesn’t have a lot to worry about.


Rather more seriously, the US and Japan are meanwhile planning the biggest upgrade to their security alliance since the mutual defence treaty of 1960.


Not to be outdone by the US ban on exports of hi-tech chips to China, Beijing responded this week by saying it will be phasing out even the low-tech variety on all government computers and servers, replacing foreign chips with its own home-grown ones.


And then of course, there is China’s de facto alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, forming a new axis of authoritarian powers with an overtly anti-Western agenda. The rupture with the West seems virtually complete.


Years of integration into the global economy, in the hope that it might make China more like us, have backfired and are now going powerfully into reverse.


But does the nature of the threat fully justify all the noise which is made about it? In military terms, possibly, even if China plainly poses no direct threat to Europe, and unlike Putin, has no plans to lay claim to any part of it.


It does, however, pose a clear and present danger to Taiwan, where President Xi Jinping would plainly like to crush the life out of this vibrant, free enterprise economy in the same way as he has in Hong Kong. His rhetoric is bellicose and hostile, and we must therefore assume he means what he says.


In economic terms, however, the China threat is receding fast. After decades of stellar growth, China’s medium to long-term economic prospects are at best mediocre and at worst grimly dispiriting.


Now gone almost entirely is the idea of China as an unstoppable economic leviathan that will inevitably eclipse the US and Europe. Already it is obvious that this is not going to be the Chinese century once so widely forecast. Instead, Western commerce is looking increasingly to India as the economic superpower of the future.


Nor is this just because of the immediate causes of China’s economic slowdown – a woefully unbalanced economy which in recent years has relied for its growth substantially on debt-fuelled property development.


For China is indeed, to use the old cliche, getting old before it gets rich. Demographic factors alone are highly likely to floor President Xi’s grandiose ambitions for economic hegemony before they can be realised.


The fundamentals of China’s predicament, in other words, do not support the narrative of democracy under threat from an insurgent totalitarian rival.


There’s been a lot in the papers about demographics over the last week following a new study, published in the Lancet, on declining fertility rates. At some stage in the next 60 years, the global population will peak, and then fast start contracting.


The birth rate is projected to fall below population replacement levels in around three-quarters of countries by 2050, with only a handful of mainly Sub-Saharan nations still producing enough babies to ensure expanding populations by 2100.


In China, however, it has already started, with the population falling in 2022 for the first time since the Great Famine of 1959-61. This wasn’t just a one-off blip: last year deaths continued to significantly outnumber births.


There may be a slight pause in the decline this year. Some couples may have delayed their plans for children in anticipation of the Year of the Dragon, synonymous in Chinese mythology with good fortune.


Any relief will be only temporary. According to projections by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, which correctly forecast the onset of Chinese population decline, it’ll essentially be all downhill from here on in, with the population more than halving between now and the turn of the century.


This is a huge fall, with far-reaching implications for economic development and China’s superpower ambitions. What’s more, there is almost nothing the Chinese leadership can do about it, beyond imprisoning China’s fast-declining cohort of women of child-bearing age and forcing them to breed.


Across much of the developed world and beyond, the birth rate has long since declined below the 2.1 offspring per woman generally thought to be the level required to maintain the population. But thanks to its dictatorial one-child policy introduced in 1980 to curb China’s then almost ruinous birth rate, China has a particularly acute version of it.


China abandoned the one-child policy – limiting urban dwellers to one child per family and most rural inhabitants to two – in favour of a “three-child” policy in 2016, but too late.


Even if women of child-bearing age could be persuaded to have more babies, there are simply not enough of them any longer even to maintain today’s population, let alone increase it.


The one-child policy may have perversely further accentuated this deficiency because of the Chinese preference for male offspring over female, though most studies on this are inconclusive.


In any case, China finds itself classically caught in a “low-fertility trap”, the point of no return, where precipitous population decline becomes inevitable.


The implications are as startling as the statistics themselves. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences forecasts that the working-age population will fall to 210 million by 2100, having peaked in 2014, and the ratio of working-age citizens to notionally non-working from 100 to 21 today, to 100 to 137 at the turn of the century.


One thing we know about ageing populations is they like life to be as comfortable and settled as possible. They also don’t like fighting wars, which have historically required a surplus of testosterone-fuelled young men desperate to prove themselves on the battlefield.


The turn of the century is of course still a long way off; there is easily enough time for several wars in between. The nature of warfare has also changed. It no longer requires the bravery of the young.


Even so, totalitarian dictatorships may well struggle with selling the multiple other hardships of war to an elderly population. Putin may seem to disprove this observation, but in doing so he is also demonstrating anew the futility of expansionist warfare. They make a desert, and call it peace.


A couple of other points seem worth making about our propensity to exaggerate the Chinese threat. Anyone would think that China is already a dominant force in the UK economy. It is not; in fact it is still only our fifth-largest trading partner after the US, Germany, the Netherlands and France. Even on imports alone it’s not as big as the US and Germany.


Whether because of the growing diplomatic standoff or other factors, moreover, this position is eroding. The size of trade with China fell last year. The same is true of direct investment by China in the UK economy, which was just 0.3pc of total foreign direct investment in 2021.


We worry about China’s imagined ability to close down our critical infrastructure, but should that really be allowed to influence decisions on whether the Chinese battery company EVE should be building a new gigawatt factory at Coventry Airport, or for that matter whether super-tariffs should be charged on Chinese EVs?


Should they exist at all, these risks can surely be managed. In any case, no nation that hopes to trade with others would deliberately turn the lights off, even if it could. In over-reacting to the Chinese threat, we only shoot ourselves in the foot.


China has lied, copied, stolen and cheated its way up the economic league tables, but ultimately it is a closed economy which increasingly repudiates foreign influence and thereby severely limits its own powers of innovation.


The danger is that now at the peak of its powers, it hubristically lashes out. But in the medium to long term, the demographic die is cast, and it spells a future of waning influence and economic heft.

Too late, China wakes up to the threat from within

Originally Posted by helge

So why won't they ban them ?

- They know it's a massive problem for the US
- They don't give a fuck about anyone they hurt, they just want money

Chinky bastards at it again.

Some gibbering sycophant on Youtube tells hoohoo what he wants to hear.

Film at 11.

An Asian diplomat and a western academic discuss:

The United States, China, and the Future of the Global Order

China axes hundreds of TV dramas depicting family tensions

China's internet censors have deleted hundreds of online TV dramas for portraying the negative aspects of family life amid an attempt by the ruling Communist Party to get more people to start families and rescue plummeting birth rates.


Censors at video platforms Douyin and Kuaishou deleted more than 700 videos of TV micro-dramas portraying in-fighting between in-laws because of the "extreme emotions" they evoked, the government's "Rumor-refuting platform" on Weibo reported.


"Many micro-dramas on this theme deliberately amplify and exaggerate conflicts between husband and wife, conflicts between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and intergenerational conflicts through eye-catching stereotypes and abnormal and bizarre relationships," the post said.


The move comes as President Xi Jinping tries to promote marriage and family life as a way of boosting flagging birth rates.


The number of Chinese couples tying the knot for the first time has plummeted by nearly 56% over the past nine years, with such marriages numbering less than 11 million in 2022.


A November 2023 poll on the social media platform Weibo found that while most of the 44,000 respondents said 25 to 28 are the best ages to marry, nearly 60% said they were delaying marriage due to work pressures, education or the need to buy property.

Birth rates have fallen from 17.86 million in 2016 to just 9.02 million in 2023, despite a change in policy allowing couples to have up to three children in 2021.


In October, Xi called on women to focus on raising families, and the National People's Congress this month started looking at ways to boost birth rates and kick-start the shrinking population, including flexible working policies, coverage for fertility treatment and extended maternity leave.


Changing priorities


But young women in today's China are increasingly choosing not to marry or have kids, citing huge inequalities and patriarchal attitudes that still run through family life, not to mention the sheer economic cost of raising a family.


A recent study of Mandarin pop songs aimed at a female audience focused far less on romantic love and more on personal freedom and economic independence.


It appears the authorities want to avoid having women put off taking the plunge into family life by clamping down on mother-in-law gags and other depictions of family tensions.

"Douyin and Kuaishou have recently removed from the shelves a number of illegal micro-short dramas that deliberately choreographed "mother-in-law and daughter-in-law battles" to exaggerate extreme emotions."


The deleted shows "promoted unhealthy and non-mainstream views on family, marriage and love, and deliberately amplified and exaggerated conflicts between husband and wife, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, etc," the Weibo "rumor-refuting" post said.


The censored titles included shows called "My Husband is a Mommy's Boy," "In the Doghouse with Mother-in-law," and "Rich Lady Strikes Back," and were removed to promote the "healthy development" of the online video market, it said, adding that Kuaishou had deleted more than 700 such shows.


China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has also issued new rules requiring platforms to apply for a license to distribute online TV shows, starting June 1.


‘Positive energy’


Current affairs commentator Chang Guantao said many online TV producers like to use social injustice as a talking point to get more viewers, which he said was "embarrassing" to the government, which wants anything posted on China's tightly controlled internet to exude "positive energy" for the future of the country.


"More and more micro-dramas are vying with each other to directly address society's sore points, and those marginalized by government policy," Chang said.


"This is likely something that news regulators and public opinion control agencies don't want to see, so they have to regulate and control them, and limit their development in various ways," he said.

Current affairs commentator Bi Xin said micro-dramas have been much more lightly regulated than regular TV shows -- until now.


"It doesn't cost too much to make a micro-drama, around 300,000 yuan (US$41,000), but they have a wider reach," Bi said. "The authorities need to suppress and manage them by forcing them to get licensed, because their content isn't always in line with the main theme [of government propaganda]."


The news website Caixin quoted micro-drama producers as saying that there will now be a classification and hierarchical review system for the shows, which will be divided according to their production budget.


Higher budget shows will be directly regulated by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, while lower budget productions will be managed by the same authorities at the provincial level.


The lowest-budget shows will be left to video-sharing platforms to censor, the report said.

China axes hundreds of TV dramas depicting family tensions — Radio Free Asia

Originally Posted by misskit

China's internet censors have deleted hundreds of online TV dramas for portraying the negative aspects of family life amid an attempt by the ruling Communist Party to get more people to start families and rescue plummeting birth rates.

What a brilliant idea. Because obviously that's why people aren't having kids.

China's cycle of dollar hoarding and weakening yuan gets vicious

SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Chinese businesses are hoarding dollars because they expect their own currency to weaken, and that in turn is exacerbating a slide in the yuan that has been driven by wobbly stock markets and feeble growth in the world's second largest economy.


This feedback loop has been playing out for months in mainland currency markets, spurred on by the dollar's rising yield. Foreign exchange deposits have climbed $53.7 billion since September to $832.6 billion, People's Bank of China (PBOC) data shows.


Analysts say one of two things needs to happen to end the downward spiral: the Federal Reserve needs to make deep rate cuts or the yuan needs to hit some form of a trough. Both seem distant.


China's yuan is at five-month lows and has lost 1.9% to the dollar this year as foreign investors pull more money out of its struggling markets. The currency has fallen from around 6.7 per dollar at the start of 2023 to around 7.24 currently, a 5% drop.


Regular inflows from domestic exporters have dried up, as businesses choose to park their dollars offshore in deposits that earn them 6%, compared to 1.5% on yuan deposits at home, and just wait for better exchange rates.


"The rate differential between U.S. and China is the most positive since 2007, and I think this powerful fundamental fact is enough to explain why Chinese exporters are reluctant to exchange dollars for yuan," said Alvin Tan, head of Asia FX strategy at RBC Capital Markets. "This huge positive yield spread is not evaporating anytime soon."


Even for companies that choose to bring their dollars home, while authorities have capped dollar deposit rates at major lenders at 2.8% since the middle of last year, there are other dollar-based wealth-management products that invest in overseas funds offering as much as 4.4% for 7-day investments.


Becky Liu, head of China macro strategy at Standard Chartered, says a "confirmation of the Fed rate cut including a clearer dollar softening trend" could be a catalyst for corporates to convert their foreign exchange into yuan.


However, if the recent string of robust inflation and economic data in the United States is anything to go by, Fed rate cuts are being pushed out to the end of 2024 and the dollar is on a tear.


That means it is more likely the yuan may hit 7.3, at which level exporters may bring dollars home, sensing authorities may shield it at that level. It was roughly the trough for the yuan in both October 2022 and July 2023.


Several investment banks also predict the yuan will weaken to 7.3 per dollar by the third quarter of this year, but no further. A Shanghai-based banker who deals with corporates said some of his clients are now eyeing 7.3 as the level to sell their dollars.


TERMS OF TRADE


Chinese authorities do not seem unduly perturbed by this accumulation of dollars by businesses and citizens. State banks that normally act on behalf of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) have been buying the yuan to stem its slide.


The PBOC did not respond to a Reuters request for comments.


Lemon Zhang, a strategist at Barclays, says exporters' "reluctance to convert their FX receipts will likely continue for the next two quarters".


She does not expect Chinese regulators to force exporters to settle their FX receipts, but says there could instead be smaller macro prudential or tax relief measures to encourage conversion.


Despite the decline, the yuan has not fallen as far and fast as currencies of some of its trading partners, notably Japan whose yen is down 9% this year, which has eroded China's trade competitiveness and dented its trade surplus.


China's goods trade surplus fell 11% to $593.9 billion in 2023 from a year earlier.


Analysts at China Construction Bank estimate the FX settlement ratio, which measures conversion of export receipts to yuan, was just 51% in February as corporate clients placed dollars in deposits.

China's cycle of dollar hoarding and weakening yuan gets vicious

Originally Posted by misskit

a slide in the yuan that has been driven by wobbly stock markets and feeble growth in the world's second largest economy.

I read just yesterday that they had a growth of more than 5 %.

More than expected


But might not fit the narrative in political...journalism.

Just saying

Originally Posted by helge

I read just yesterday that they had a growth of more than 5 %.

4.6 actually, and it is just one barometer of a country's health. Lots of other much more significant alarm bells regarding the health of the CCP economy.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Lots of other much more significant alarm bells regarding the health of the CCP economy.

Sure

I commented on this:

Originally Posted by misskit

feeble growth

China's GDP grew more than expected last year

OF
Nanna Nørby Hansen




China's gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 5.3 percent in the first quarter of the year compared to last year.

This is shown by figures from the Chinese statistics agency, NSB, writes Reuters.

Growth is well above expectations," Dan Wang, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank China, told Ritzau.

Analysts had expected growth of 4.8 percent. Growth is 0.1 percentage points higher than in the previous quarter.

China, the world's second-largest economy after the United States, has struggled to get its economy back on track after the coronavirus pandemic. Among other things, the country has been burdened by a decline in the property sector and rising municipal debt, writes Reuters.

"The national economy maintained momentum as part of the recovery," the NSB said in a commentary.